Boston

A few weeks ago, the chair of a committee that I am a part of messaged all of us to ask for volunteers to attend a workshop at Northeastern University in Boston. The workshop was about Scholarly Communications, and sounded deadly boring to me, but I was pretty available for the two days in question, so I reluctantly volunteered. I expected that others would WANT to go--but he only initially got two volunteers, and he needed a team of four to attend. One other stepped forward (metaphorically speaking) and our chair was planning to attend himself, so we had our team of four.

I like to go new places, and I have never been to Boston before, so that should have been tempting, but it wasn't really because I really dislike flying, and the timing was such that we were going to leave on Sunday and come back immediately at the end of the conference on Tuesday. So not much time for any sort of a Boston experience.

However, the conference ended up being much more interesting than expected; I met some really nice people from Brown University and the University of California at Sacramento, and a guy named Ammon from the University of Virginia who was seeking out the BYU group, so probably one of those people formerly known as Mormons or LDS. And the content was actually okay--we would have lecture-ish presentations followed by workshopping at our tables, so we were kept engaged, for the most part. I had some serious jet lag going on--I went to bed way too early on Sunday evening because of exhaustion, which resulted in me waking up way too early on Monday morning, then barely falling back to sleep about when I should have been getting up--so that made for me fairly prone to dozing off. But I took notes to keep me awake (sometimes falling asleep in the middle of a word) and played a bit of Sherlock on my phone occasionally to wake myself up.

View from the windows of our conference room. We were on the 17th floor of our building, and there were lots of windows. The building under construction with interesting architecture is the Mary Baker Eddy Library (Seventh Day Adventist).

On Monday night, our fearless leader decided to take us to Boston Common for our evening repast, even though historic sights were closed for the night. So at least I got a bit of a feel for Boston--and how it felt was like it would be much more interesting to visit when it was more green and less cold. I did take a few pictures.

First we walked through a mall to get to the train station:

Pop-up cards that I thought were cute.

Pop-up cards that I thought were cool.

Inside the mall--those are my co-workers with their back to the camera.

Graveyard in Boston Common - maybe we have ancestors buried there? It was locked (it and the bajillion other old graveyards. I only took a picture of one, although I took pictures of signs at other graveyards.)

Is that maybe the State Capitol Building?

Park Street Church from a distance

Park Street Church closer up

Boston Common Plaque

Where the grave of John Hancock is (Locked so we could not go inside.)

Graveyard for Governors

Another John Hancock site...

Old State House Museum (where the sign from the picture above can be found.)

My colleague Ellen playing a random piano they have sitting around for anyone to play. She played "Saturday in the Park"

The trees have lights. I do not think they are Christmas Lights. They are lights for the sake of lights.

On Tuesday, the workshop ended at noon, followed by the opportunity to tour the Northeastern library and another building that is all new and high techy.

Lobby of the high-techy building. Cool spiral staircase, but honestly, suicide risk is all I could think. Call me morbid.

Ceiling of the lobby of the high-techy building.

I did not take any pictures of their library, which has four floors. On the first floor, there is a small reading room--at least the first thing you see when you walk in the door is books! The only other place you will find books is on the third floor. They have discarded 2/3 of their books. Let me say that again. They have discarded TWO THIRDS of their books.

I don't know. I just think, honestly, that if you want to destroy human knowledge, then put everything online, because all you need to obliterate information is a really good power outage. I mean, I like the convenience of online as much as anybody, but I just think that having the actual factual pieces of paper can be a really good idea.

But if I know anything, I know that I am getting old. So.

We took a more scenic route back to our hotel, taking a few pictures along the way--well, technically, I took only one picture. But as a group, "pictures" would be accurate.

The only picture I took while walking back to the hotel--Musicians Mutual Relief Society. Because Musicians and Relief Society. That was kind of fun.

We grabbed our suitcases from the concierge, and then headed for the airport. I finished the book I was reading (The Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison) and in a few hours, home again, home again, joggity jig.

Hymn Sing 2019

I started doing a Hymn Sing program in the library a long time ago--I think I must have started it in the fall of 2012, or maybe even 2011. I am not sure. You can find a video that was made about it in 2013 here (scroll down for it)--one of Janet's students made that video for a class assignment. And that was at least a year into it.

It has been fun and/or discouraging. Both. When I first started, my students were my students (that sounds weird; but they were like my extra children back then!) and were very loyal about coming. Then they all graduated, and I changed positions so was no longer in charge of students, and it has been hard to build a following. Sometimes I have been discouraged and have thought--why keep trying? But I like to sing in a group just for fun! There is something soul-building about it. So I have kept going.

This semester, two great things happened. First, Brent Yorgason is teaching a Hymnody class (first time ever at BYU) and he is requiring his students to attend one hymn sing AND to get extra credit for attending a second hymn sing. Second, BYU Wellness contacted me about including Hymn Sing on their Wellness Monopoly game.

So this has been hymn sing attendance so far this semester: January, we sang hymns composed by BYU faculty members, and 20 people came. February, hymns that arose from classical music roots, and 50 people came (approximately--there isn't room for 50 in the room, actually, so people came and went, but that is approximately the number in total); and tonight, 18 people came for hymns with the tunes composed by women.

This is what was on the handout (which, you know, I put there):

"Although many women have contributed texts for the hymns found in the 1985 LDS Hymnal, most of the music has been composed by men. Of the 341 hymns, only 18 have music by women! That is just over 5%. That is not really great representation. Maybe that will change going forward?

The 18 hymns have music written by 16 women; two women have two hymns included: Mildred Tanner Pettit and Vanja Y. Watkins. These women are among those whose music appears more robustly in the Children’s Songbook, in which women composers are much better represented. Of hymns in the 1985 Hymnal composed by women, six of these come from the Children’s Songbook, though in different arrangements for the hymnal. Most of the women composers (14) were/are LDS church members."

A couple of days ago, I got an email from one of my irregular attendees, Peggy, to tell me that she had spoken to Janice KP and Janice would like to come to Hymn Sing, but Peggy could not bring her because she would be off traveling, which Peggy does a lot of (hence the irregular attendance). So Janet, who has been working with Janice on bringing her papers to BYU for the archives, called and offered to bring Janice tonight, which she did. This was good timing, because Janice is one of the women composers in the 1985 hymnal.

My star-struck student Goldie nabbed a picture of most of us--she and Rachel, another of the student workers, came for short bits of time when they could get away from the desk. Here are the rest of us:

There are 16 in the picture, though you can barely see the top of Connie's head. We were heavy on the ladies, but then it is Women's History Month. So our ladies were representing well. 

It was nice to have Janice there to tell about how her hymn came to be: she didn't even know a new hymnal was in the works, but Michael Moody (her friend and the chair of the hymn book committee--and he is also my friend these days, though I didn't know him then!) called her and assigned her a poem by Emily Woodmansee to set to music.  Janice wrote an article about that experience, which you can find here.

It was also nice to have Janice add some first hand knowledge about Sister Marianne Johnson Fisher who wrote text and music for "As I search the holy scriptures." That song is made new to me, knowing that Marianne was blind--hence, searching the scriptures, not reading them. Let me quote from the blurb I read: Searching = read, reread, ponder, meditate, search for related passages, underline. But she would have to recopy because you can’t underline Braille. (Braille scriptures are 32 large volumes.) “Those of us who are blind cannot always have our scriptures literally at our fingertips.” --and then my brother quipped that actually, they are the only people who actually CAN have the scriptures literally at their fingertips! They just can't carry them around with them due to their enormous size!

Sara told about her ancestor Ruth May Fox--a lyricist for several hymns, but not a composer, so we didn't sing her works tonight. This information about Sister Fox was especially interesting to Janet, Connie and I, since we invested about two years of our lives, a conference presentation, and an article that is currently out for review before publication, to the Songs and Flowers of the Wasatch, to which Ruth May Fox was a contributor--as was Emily Woodmansee.

At the end, Jessica, the secretary of Global Women's Studies, had brought a button making machine, and we made Rebecca Clarke buttons (famous for her viola concerto) but she said to come to her office, and we can make "I sang 'As Sisters In Zion' with Janice Kapp Perry" buttons. So that will be fun. 

Here is my Rebecca Clarke button. Josie has one too, but hers is purple where mine is pink.

It was actually a very awesome Hymn Sing. There was a lovely spirit of camaraderie and peace in the room. Nights like tonight make Hymn Sing so worth it! Glad I could share the experience with my daughter, my brother, and my sister-in-law.

Us Against You

I just finished reading Fredrik Backman's sequel to Beartown, Us Against You. Which is essentially about hockey but also not about hockey. And having just finished, the tears are still languishing in my eyes. Good book.

Some memorable quotes, for me:

Chapter 10, pages 84-85, when Bobo has just been told about his mother's appointment with death in the imminent future:
"All sports are silly. All games are ridiculous. Two teams, one ball, sweat and grunting, and for what? So that for a few baffling moments we can pretend that it's the only thing that matters.

That night Hog and Bobo clear the floor of the garage. They've never talked much as father and son, and perhaps they're both worried that they might take to the easiest alternative now. There are bottles of drink in that house, as in everyone else's. So they choose a different option, drive the cars out, move the tools and machinery until the garage is empty.

Then they fetch hockey sticks and a tennis ball. They play against each other all night, sweating and grunting, as if it were the only thing that mattered."

Chapter 48, page 418, after Teemu's brother Vidar has been killed in the car accident:
"The path back to normal life is indescribably long once death has swept the feet out from under those of us who are left. Grief is a wild animal that drags us so far out into the darkness that we can't imagine ever getting home again. Ever laughing again. It hurts in such a way that you can never really figure out if it actually passes or if you just get used to it."