Fair warning: this is an angry rant full of righteous indignation. I live with many inconsistencies but one thing I have never wavered on is that using AI for recreation is morally indefensible. The costs are astronomical, and usually distant from us. That cost got a lot closer to me today.

My oldest brother was the first person in my family to start reading Wendell Berry about twenty years ago. But unlike most people who read him, are compelled by his message, and then continue living roughly the same way, he changed nearly everything about his life. It began where he was, a house in town, planting out every available piece of the yard with vegetables. Soon he was gardening several lots in the neighborhood and selling at a farmer’s market.

After doing this for several years he was able to move to an actual farm that had been neglected for many years. He has spent the last ten years doing the exhausting work of reclaiming the land, building infrastructure, and restoring the health of the soil. It’s not a hobby farm, and it’s most definitely not a vanity influencer farm. It’s dirty, a work-in-progress everywhere you look, and a completely beautiful and healthful place. It has never supported him financially but he’s worked harder at this farm than most people ever work at anything. If you visit for dinner most of the things on your plate will have lived or grown within sight of the porch.

I just found out that land on two sides of the farm have been purchased at astronomical sums to house data centers. If this goes through instead of looking out the front door and bay windows on pasture and the neighboring farms, it will be a view of a disgusting gray box emitting a 60 decibel hum twenty-four hours a day and clogging the air with diesel exhaust every time they switch to backup power. Perhaps the wells that water the livestock and provide their house water will dry up or become too contaminated to drink. What will they do then?

Despite the significant urbanization and suburbanization of America in the last decades, tens of millions of Americans still prefer to live in the country. Places where they can look out over land and trees and grass. Where animals live freely or are cultivated. Where there is some quiet and you can count on the “day-blind stars waiting with their light” to come out soon. A place where the stars aren’t completed blotted out by light.

But for everyone else, there is such pressing need for data computation. Are we expected to make our memes by hand? We couldn’t live in a world that doesn’t know what Donald Trump Jesus would have looked like. We couldn’t create fake versions of loved one’s voices to scam grandmothers out of their life savings without these vital calls. Who will make all these robocalls? People? The indignity. We couldn’t surveil our citizens going about their days with flock cameras, or permanently save the footage of everyone who appears on our ring cameras. What would we do without these data centers? Do we expect corporations to employ humans (with their expectations of salary and benefits) to do their work? There would be no slop to post to Facebook, no way to adjust our faces and bodies so they look their best when we post our selfies and gym mirror shots. Someone must pay the cost for these essentials, and that someone is a family in Pennsylvania trying to live their life on a little bit of land.

On the upside, most of these data centers will be abandoned soon. Once the venture capital poker game goes south and servicing the debt becomes un-actuarial, this gray box will stop emitting its 60 decibel hum. What a relief. Then all we are left with is an abandoned building, forever rotting where there could be a family living, perhaps with a kitchen garden and some chickens. Wasting their time mucking about in the dirt when they should be indoors ”making music” with Suno and having ChatGPT do their homework. What fools.

This rotting gray box will never disappear. The people who build it won’t come dismantle it and restore the land. They will just leave, hoping their balance sheets don’t suffer too much and relieved at the depreciation they can write off. The box will not die, it will just decay creating more poison in the soil with each passing year. Because we couldn’t write our own books, paint our own paintings, think about a problem and come up with a solution. We can’t sit in the shade of a tree playing a cheap guitar to pass an afternoon. We cannot just be men and women. We must be super-people, aware of everything, informed and outraged, deceived by the fakes, laughing at the slop, and too stimulated to count the cost.

The ever-incisive Hollis Robbins* (personal story about Hollis in the footnote)—one of the great critics of higher ed in the AI age—has a recent piece about what she calls the Wordcels versus Shape Rotators debate. These terms were new to me but the debate is recognizable. In Robbins’s telling, there has been debate among literate people since Aristotle about the social standing of those who design and build. It was not settled that citizenship should be granted to the artisanal classes, and this dichotomy has created cultural divisions ever since. I’ve spent enough time around working-class folks (basically everyone I grew up around outside my family) to know that those who work physically have the same reservations about people who diddle with words and numbers for a living. But of course, they tend to voice those doubts in conversations, not writing, so they don’t get recorded in textual history. Only the things they make are left as a testament to their contribution. You know, bridges, skyscrapers, electrical grids, aqueducts, pyramids. Just stuff. It seems to be quite easy for word people (let’s stop calling everything a -cel) to ignore the contributions of stuff people, even while they enjoy the conveniences of the built environment. Every time you flush away your waste and don’t get dysentery you should remember Alexander Cummings. I don’t have the slightest idea who built my house in 1959—and probably couldn’t find out even if I tried—but they did some fine work I live in.

With some exceptions, history tends to focus on those who left behind words. The names of the designers and builders of every ancient wonder are lost to us. The kings who commissioned them are the ones preserved. Tourists though tend to focus on the world of shapes. We don’t travel the world to read documents, we go to see the things left behind.

(An aside I’ll try not get distracted by is that Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin were both adept in each of these worlds. Powerful writers and rhetoricians who were inventors and systems thinkers as well. Early America, cast largely in their mold, was both highly literate and physically industrious. The respectability of the working class citizen was something European visitors frequently commented on. It seems you need both of these things for a functioning democracy.)

You are probably thinking, like I was, of how you fit into this. I’m a professor, a reader, and hobbyist writer. My professional life is largely a verbal affair. But I’m a musician, I love to make things with my hands, and I can in fact move shapes around in my mind. I discovered this installing drywall with my dad when I was a kid. He was marking a piece to cut and I realized it was going to be backwards when flipped around to the wall. His knowing look told me I had done something impressive. (He could also do this of course, he had just made a mistake. He’s among the most highly-trained of shape rotators, a head and neck surgeon.) Geometry and trigonometry were the only math subjects I comprehended.

For many of these activities it’s obvious to me which category they go into. Reading and writing: words. Woodworking and home projects: shapes. But what about music?

Is music a word or a shape?

Of course it’s really another thing altogether. Music is sound, that most undervalued of sensory information. Other than getting a song in your head, most of us don’t think in non-linguistic sound very often. Thought is generally done in the medium of language or space. Constructing sentences, or imagining objects. Thinking in sound in a structured way is the province of musicians. Moving from sound we hear to a structured system is where this topic applies.

Classical musicians love to make music intelligible. Most of what we teach as music theory is just naming common patterns so they can be discussed and recognized. We do this with common sounds (chords and scales), rhythmic organization (meters), and patterns of change and repetition across pieces (forms). We love to know what something is. This knowledge often does very little to explain the aesthetic experience of the music itself, but at least we have some labels.

Music notation goes a step further to turn music into a symbolic system like writing. From a wash of sound rises a set of signifiers that are named and described. This is no less shocking a development than turning spoken language into writing, crossing a profound threshold from temporally organized sound to frozen representation.

Symbols are helpful, but the experience of music is really spatiality rooted. We describe the high and lowness of sounds or the “speed” of tempo. We experience music in its own space that is not physical space, but resembles it in its mechanics of movement, weight, and repose. Music lets you dance while sitting still. This explains why a set of labels for musical phenomena are not required, or even particularly important, to have a meaningful experience. The spatial and temporal elements are unavoidable, even if they are imprecise in our perception. (My thoughts on this are greatly informed by the discussion of linguistic metaphors for language in Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Music.)

Other than high and low however, we have a dearth of terminology to describe musical shapes and patterns. Outside of technical labels, we are left with very few terms for melodic shape and texture, much less things like timbre. Check the glossary of a theory textbook and you might not find a single term that describes the shape of a melody, even though these things do fall into some pretty standard patterns. Even the concept of a shape is fraught, since we can only assemble these “shapes” reflectively in the imagination. They do not appear before us in a single moment like a sculpture or painting.

Perhaps the language of dance would be a more useful set of metaphors. Gesture describes music much better. A way of moving through time in sound space, rather than physical space. Now we’re compelled to add a third category. Words, shapes, and gestures. Any medium that extends through time must have a way of describing it that includes forms of movement observed sequentially.

If building the coliseum doesn’t earn your citizenship, making gestures will do it even less so. We have only descriptive accounts of every dancer and musician until the roughly simultaneous invention of video and sound recording. Every artistic gesture made in the vast majority of human history lost to all.

II.

The words versus shapes debate has also given me a whole new way to understand one of the main things I teach: ear training. Ear training, aural skills, musicianship, or whatever you want to call it is the ability to hear music and turn it into symbolic notation. I play a melody, you write it down in notes and rhythms. This is the bane of most freshman music majors (it was mine as well, life is full of strange twists and turn). Students who are already play their instruments beautifully struggle mightily to translate simple melodies into notation.

This skill lies exactly on the threshold of musical shape and notational symbol. Words and shapes tend to be happy apart from one another. If you have ever read the legal description of a property (it’s on one of the hundreds of sheets of paper before you at a home purchase closing) you understand this. The map, with its lovely shapes, is the proper tool for defining a plot. Words appear helplessly archaic. My six year old’s proficiency following wordless LEGO instructions are a perfect illustration of this.

From the time of literacy we become proficient in translating the soundness of speech into the symbols of writing. For some of us writing becomes the main way we think about language. But learning to do this with music as a young adult makes you feel like a toddler again. Proficient music readers are able to fluently move between the symbol of notation and the world of musical sounds seamlessly. This is what’s going on with sight reading, an incredibly demanding cognitive task. Great sight-readers translate notation to sounds in real musical time, figuring out notes, fingerings, rhythms, and even expression, in real time. Most people can read text at something close to this level, but very few reach this level of musical reading.

I just might incorporate this into my opening class this year.

*When I was in grad school Hollis was still on faculty at Johns Hopkins and ran the humanities program at Peabody. Everyone was a little bit afraid of her because you knew if she was around there was someone much smarter than you in the room. Though very kind, she is a truth-teller by disposition. Anyway, I submitted a paper to her at one point and she called my analysis “very interesting,” a compliment I rode on for months at the time.

More from Lawrence Kramer’s The Hum of the World:

Music is sound framed as a source of pleasure (p. 50).

I keep a bit of a collection of definitions of music. Usually one or the other is used as a catalyst for class discussion in my theory classes, but I’m also just always interested in definitions. This is quite a good one.

First of all, it explains why people encountering music they really do not like (often at the tail-end of a music “appreciation” course when they throw in Schoenberg and all the rest into a well poisoned by the teacher) their reaction is so often “That’s not music!”

I’ve never understood that reaction because, well, obviously, this sound being made by an orchestra or whatever and recorded is most definitely music. You not liking how it sounds doesn’t change that. I’m happy to argue the point about intentionally provoking pieces like 4’ 33”, but if you don’t think Fünf Sätze is music I don’t have the time of day.

But! If the implicit framing we bring to music is that it is pleasurable, then when we experience the lack of pleasure, or even discomfort, that unstated expectation has been violated and we throw the whole thing out. “That’s not music” is an expression of an unstated expectation.

Music does not have to bring you pleasure for it to be music, though Kramer’s definition still holds up since it supposes a framing, not an actual result. If music is sound that gives you pleasure then what is and isn’t music would change person to person based on their tastes. My world of music would be larger than my mother’s, at least by a Philip Glass or so. It’s fair to say, generally, that music is definitely assumed to be for enjoyment. It is definitely not for communication or meaning like speech and writing and it is not for dramatic portrayal like film and drama. The murkier “expression” is usually present, but only from the performers point of view. When we put on a recording we are thinking primarily of ourselves, not whatever the performer is/was feeling.

But when you do spin a record or stream a song you definitely do so for enjoyment. There are many forms of this enjoyment, but the pursuit of that enjoyment through sound is what the project of listening to music is for. Point for Kramer, and this will be a useful point for a future class discussion. You are dismissed.

I’m currently reading Lawrence Kramer’s evocative The Hum of the World, in which he posits sound as the primary underlying sensation of our lives. Verdict is still out, but it’s a fun book covering a lot of ground I already give attention to (music, sound studies, design, literature). I’m likely a member of the choir to which he preaches.

It got me thinking about one of the most striking sound environment contrasts I’ve encountered:

Last summer I co-led a study abroad trip to the Baltic states and our travel itinerary took us through the Helsinki airport, one of the cleanest, calmest, and most thoughtfully designed public spaces I’ve ever encountered. No bustle, no stress, just a wonderful place to be. Somewhere I might choose to spend time even if I didn’t have a flight.

One of the most striking aspects of the space was the soundscape. Though people were moving around with their luggage and lots of things were going on, it had a calm hush. There was clearly significant thought put into the ambient sound (including a lot of sound absorption), with gentle nature sounds at a quiet level that seemed to cue everyone to how much noise was appropriate (the nature sounds were somewhat louder and busier in the restrooms; also very effective). When an announcement was made the background sounds would lower and everyone would be quiet to listen, rather than it blaring over whatever noise was already existing. Rather than covering noise with more noise, the gentleness of the ambient soundtrack nudged everyone to reduce their own sound output to match it. We found ourselves speaking in the subdued voice of a nice restaurant or public library.

We flew from Helsinki-Vantaa directly to Dallas-Fort Worth. The only things these airports have in common are airplanes and a dash in their name. What a rude awakening. If the details of Helsinki were calibrated for calm, DFW was designed by a sound sadist. The floors are 6 inch tile with large grout lines. Practical and durable perhaps (though who wants to install thousands of feet of 6” tile is beyond me), but the grooves mean that a rolling suitcase clicks on the grout lines several times per second. When a thousand people are rolling suitcases the din is hellish. Of course you still have to talk, so you speak louder. And of course they have to make announcements, so they blare them even louder. And to top it off in some areas there is muzak.

Perhaps a coincidence (perhaps not), folks at DFW seemed rather more stressed and angry than the Finns. While I’m sure it’s possible to get tetchy in Helsinki, I think it’s nearly impossible not to when assailed with the endless racket of Dallas.

I wrote this two years ago on my birthday. Since I’m back around to some of the numbers here (35), I thought it was time to repost it. Street names have been changed for privacy.

Numbers are generally not significant to me, but a few years ago I started to notice a pattern in addresses. (My very first apartment is excepted from this pattern, as it has been from most memories–like it deserves).

The first decent apartment I lived in was at 301 W 33rd St. We happened to live there for 3 years. As much as we enjoyed our time in that apartment, we started to want something with rooms. We ended up at 1313 Charles Place. This was when I first took note of a pattern of 1s and 3s.

1313 was a glorious apartment on the 3rd floor of a historic row house in the Bolton Hill neighborhood of Baltimore. With 12 foot ceilings, the 3 living room windows let in so much light you couldn’t help but be happy when you sat there. The house plants thrived and we were happy.

We lived in 1313 Charles for 1 year.

Then we had the opportunity to buy a house. What started as a casual experiment to see if we were even able to get into the housing market turned into being under contract within a week of first contacting our realtor. After a few struggles, we finally closed on 311 Gateway Ct.

311 was a gem. It literally didn’t have a road in front of it. The front door opened into a grassy courtyard shared by six other homes. Like most areas in Baltimore, it was in direct proximity to incredible wealth (we bordered a glorious historic neighborhood) as well as tragic poverty. A half mile east was a five-million dollar mansion, a half mile west were slums with boarded up homes and murder rates that boggled the mind. But it was our perfect shelter in exactly the right location.

311 was where the two of us became 3, bringing our son home to the little house we worked so hard to make our own beautiful home.

After 3 years at 311 it was time to move again. This time though, to another state. Almost ten years in Baltimore made it feel like home. We loved it for its ruggedness, unpredictability, and yes, it’s charm. People who haven’t lived there truly don’t understand, but once you’re there it gets its hooks into you very quickly.

Buying a house out of state was daunting, and we were moving to a red hot housing market. “Unfortunately, this is a very difficult place to buy a house right now,” was the first thing our realtor said when I contacted him.

A few offers didn’t go through (some with frightful Lost Cause themed addresses, which we’re thankful for). Then finally, a perfect mid-century style ranch house came on the market. We made a no regrets offer and were closing a few weeks later. The address: 1305 West Butler.

That 5 kind of bothered me at first. But, after 3 straight addresses made of 1s, 3s, and 0s, I allowed for the addition of one more digit. It didn’t fully make sense though. Why 5? The next stage for our family would be 3 + 1 = 4. A tidy sum numerically and biologically. We had discussed trying for a fourth, and after the move we decided it was time. We quickly met with success, but through an act of divine zygotic fission, we were to skip four for all but a few minutes. At the end of my 31st year, twins girls entered the family.

Now we’re not three. We’re five.

At the end of every school year I send my students this letter. I thought I would share it hear as well. It’s the closest thing I have to a personal manifesto for how I try to go about my life in music.

My dear students,

As you pack up and travel home for the summer I have one final word for you. It concerns the economy.

When I say economy you start thinking about money and budgets and inflation (and this year, tariffs!). That is the money economy. It’s important and affects us all, and music fits into it in a certain way. For those of us that make (or plan to make) a living in music this is very important. You need to know how much money a gig should pay, how may gigs a month will pay the rent, what to charge for a private lesson, and how much self-employment tax you’ll pay on that lesson and those gigs. All of these are important.

But there is another economy that is vital to understand if you are going to make a fulfilling life in music, or really anything else. The economy of gifts.

We rarely think about it, but we live constantly in an economy of giving and receiving gifts. Most of these come in the form of small services we do for one another without expectation of payment. This includes listening, helping, loaning a pencil or sheet of staff paper, sharing a snack, and many of the other ways we interact with one another. Occasionally we exchange physical goods casually and sometimes as formal gifts wrapped up in paper, but the principle is the same: people are more valuable than money.

Whatever the form of a gift, it has a profound advantage over exchanges in the money economy. Nearly everything you buy instantly becomes less valuable. A $100 pair of shoes might be worth $60 after being worn once. Wear them ten times and they’re worth $30 of $40. In the money economy this is called depreciation.

The moment something is given as a gift, however, its value increases. You probably have something you brought to school for your dorm room that is worth very little money, but it’s invaluable to you because someone gave it to you. I have a small pocketknife my grandfather gave me before he died. I could get another one on ebay for $15, but I wouldn’t sell mine for $15,000. This is the power of a gift: it multiplies value with no limit.

And finally, back to music. Though it touches the money economy, I would propose to you that the way to find joy in music is to spend it in the gift economy. This doesn’t mean you don’t take payment for playing, please do. But whether it’s a gig that pays $100 or $1000, the moment you are on stage ready to play the first note, none of that matters. What matters is the giving of the gift we have received and the multiplication of its value by sharing with all who will receive.

There is music that only you can make and you must be willing to give it to us for the world to be as full and rich and beautiful as it is meant to be. This is the power of music. You can give it away without losing anything.

I hope you have a wonderful summer.

I had a realization today: the thing that matters the absolute most in the quality of a university education is the thing that university administrators have the least control over. That thing is what happens in classrooms every day—teaching.

There were basically two things I cared about when I was a student, what classes were offered and who taught them. The what mattered because I had things I was interested in and wanted to learn about. The who was important because it was obvious to me (and still is) that the largest factor in how enjoyable a course would be and how much I would learn would be the teacher. Did I think they were interesting? Did I respect their scholarship? Could they lecture and lead class discussions effectively?

There were many things I did not think about and probably didn’t even know existed. Curriculum maps. Program learning outcome alignment charts. Accreditation reviews and degree audits. Career placement and upward mobility of graduates. I knew then, like I do now, that a great class was about content I cared about and presented by someone who knew a ton about it and could lead us through it.

Now that I’m on the teaching side I see things basically the same way. I update my program curriculum map, and file my review paperwork, try to make thoughtful and encouraging comments on peer observations, and do my learning objective alignments and course context syllabus statements. I update my portfolio for my annual review with my chair. But none of it makes my classes better every day or makes me a better teacher. There is only one thing that can help me be a better teacher: time. I just need time to read, think, make materials, plan classes, and get into the absolute weeds of the class minutiae. This is of course hard to do when you have lots of administrivia to do proving to someone who has never sat in your classroom how good your class is.

Theoretically, every piece of busy work an administration puts upon faculty reduces the quality of a daily class meeting by some factor. Now, most teachers (at least that I know, I hear stories of the other kind) take great pride in being good at what they do and having great classes every time they meet, so they make up the slack with their own time.

Because here’s the thing: everything the administration does (save paying you to improve in your field and craft) makes it harder to make every class meeting great. And a great education is made up of four or so years of great daily classes, along with meaningful assignments that make you think and work. The ratio of good class days to bad class days is probably exactly how good or bad a student regards a class and their whole educational experience. I think it’s just that simple.

Curriculum is incredibly important, but the best curriculum cannot make up for a series of uninteresting, uninspiring class meetings delivered by overworked, underprepared faculty.

But of course, the administration’s first job is to justify its own existence. Those VP salaries have to be doing something. That something is generally thinking up more busy-work that reduces the daily quality of each class. Because try as they might, the only way to make the education at your institution better is to hire better faculty or help the faculty you have be the best they can be. So leave them alone and let them do their jobs, it’s really all they want to do.

1. Paradise Metal (via @jabel) - What I’m calling Byzantine dark-wave, made by a Greek Orthodox priest on his fretless electric guitar. A perfect addition to my diet of microtonal/non-western tuned music.

2. Litanies, Alec Goldfarb - Trained in both jazz and Hindustani classical music, his newest album is realizations of traditional ragas on electric guitar. Incredibly effective.

3. Bach Artillerie (HT Robin Sloan) - I expected this to be a novelty (re-upped Wendy Carlos or Ruth White), but by the end I was listening much more closely. These are interpretive readings and the drumming (from Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier) is amazing. Canon at the 7th is particularly effective. The thing about Bach is the music is just so portable. The structure is resilient enough to endure any treatment without breaking down.

4. String Quartet No. 4, “Amazing Grace,” Ben Johnston (Via my music theory colleague Chris) - Johnston is a pretty obscure composer, mostly of music in just intonation (not to be confused with Tom Johnson, composer of the Chord Catalog). This is a mostly traditional piece, but as the top Youtube comment says, “It’s nice to hear an arrangement that doesn’t sound like it was written as background music for a civil war documentary.” Mensural canon on NEW BRITAIN is exactly what I’m interested in from a string quartet. Kronos sounding fantastic here as well.

Earlier this week I watched the Oscar-nominated 2025 film Train Dreams. I had no idea what we were in for, it’s a film I watched on the recommendation of my most cinephilic brother, but I really enjoyed it. While the choice to have a narrator driven film with little dialogue probably limits its overall impact somewhat, it accomplished a lot (and in under two hours, which I appreciate more and more these days).

Reading old books and watching films that take themselves seriously (some old and some new) is a reminder of how thoroughly irony has infected everything in our culture. One of the most remarkable things about Americans of the 50s and 60s (at least as depicted, and in my experience of elderly folks as well) is how seriously they take things. Seriously enough to get involved and do things that make communities work.

I recently played a gig at a luncheon for the local chapter of the National Federation of Music Clubs. (Basically groups of private music teachers who work together on things like competitions, scholarships, etc. organized by state and local chapter.) The amount of ceremony and ritual this involved was mind-blowing. Singing of hymns, reciting of pledges, the reading of a collect, bestowing honors and awards. Then I played about 30 minutes of music and we ate the worst salad I’ve ever had. The thing all these folks had in common was they were of my parents generation or older. It is unimaginable to me that people my age would organize in this way. There are lots of reason, but partly because we just don’t take ourselves that seriously.

I haven’t checked, but one imagines the enrollments in things like Kiwanis, Rotary, Elks, and other fraternal organizations is declining rapidly as the Greatest Generation has all but gone and the youngest Silent and oldest Boomers begin to die away in large numbers.

Robert Grainier, the subject of Trains Dreams, takes his life and his work seriously. His profession as a logger is incredibly dangerous and must be taken seriously to survive. Even the most careful must be lucky enough to avoid accidents to make it to old age. But he also has a sense that the work, something he seems to have fallen into as a young man, is important in a significant way. More specifically, it is destructive. The loggers are small crews of misfits living for weeks in the deep wilderness, but the most aware of them sense they are changing the world as they sever the interconnected threads of the forest one by one. Robert and some of the oldest members of the crews—like one of his only friends, Arne, the powder monkey—understand that the world is changing and they are foot soldiers on the wrong side of the battle.

As he gets older he more frequently encounters the brashness of the younger loggers. They believe that there are so many trees that by the time they cut them all down the next forest will have grown up to replace it. Robert’s concerns are not just about sustainability though. As the opening monologue of the film tells us, there used to be another world you could find around a corner in the forest. An older, more magical world, that could be stumbled into. Something like Terebithia or Narnia, where the deep magic still rules. Even if the trees regrow they won’t be the same as the ones they cut. Robert understands that the world he was born into is quickly fading and a new world he understands little is taking its place. The young loggers, born just a few decades later, never found themselves in the old world and don’t fear its loss.

After a break of several years (for reasons I won’t spoil for those who have not watched), Robert returns to a logging job to find that the work has changed as well. A steam-powered tractor, replacing the horse-drawn skids, rumbles through the forest. Revving chainsaws rather than rhythmic axe work now reverberate around the jobsite. He struggles to start the machine (a problem over a century of small motor innovation has not solved) until a younger sawyer grabs it from him, pulls the choke, and cranks it up. Leaving him behind for good.

Though unsaid, Robert clearly understands that this change in technology means the forest, like himself, will not be able to keep up. He leaves logging forever and, in one of the most beautiful scenes of the film, baptizes himself into a new life in the clear cold river.

The ending years of his life are spent contemplating its beginning. A life which featured alternations of violence, joy, absence, and finally a great loss. His life parallels the life of the forest, a place of beauty, danger, and exploitation. How to make sense of all this he has seen? And especially in a world he hardly recognizes outside of his one acre homestead?

His work after logging consists of odd jobs until he comes to own a pair of horses and wagon. He then makes his living as a driver. One of the people he meets driving is a woman (who looks quite similar to his wife) who works as a forest ranger. Her job is to sit in a high observation tower watching for fires and reporting on the changing landscape of the virgin forests due to logging. Though it goes unsaid, his awkwardness at being part of this change is palpable. (Despite the narrator, this film is good at showing even if it tells a lot of things).

Joining her in the observation tower one day he sees for the first time how the forest looks from above. Its beauty is affecting, and this change in perspective finally allows him to voice the loss he has endured to her, seemingly for the first time. She has likewise suffered loss and finds solace in her isolated work, but she is able to empathize with Robert.

This singular experience of perspective and sympathy directs the end of his life toward searching and considering what his life has meant, what all these events good and bad have been about. He occasionally forays into the cities where he encounters electricity, television, and circus shows whose obvious fakery does not blunt their capacity to stir something in him.

These scenes in the city are important, because they show his seeming immunity to amusement. He encounters these new developments with the same seriousness he approaches everything. He tries to understand rather than escape from his reality in them.

One of his final interactions with technology is paying for a ride in an airplane to “see the world as only the birds see it.” In a clear visual reference to the similar scene from Malick’s Tree of Life, Robert has an experience, similar to the one on the forest watch tower, of gaining perspective on the overall events of his life.

Women are conspicuous throughout Grainier’s life. Though never knowing his father and mother—he is an orphan who was put on a train to the west—he is intensely devoted to his family. Meeting his wife Gladys, or rather being met by her, gives shape to his early life. The joyful intrusion of a daughter brings him meaning as more than a worker and provider. The forest ranger helps him process his grief, and the pilot (who is somewhat surprisingly a woman) shows him the meaning of his life from the air.

These relationships, while they exist, are his life. After they are gone he spends his time earnestly trying to understand them and the world he inhabits. His work does not consume him, in fact it eventually expels him. He has no interest in social life beyond his family, and his pleasures come only in their purest versions: eating, playing with his wife and child, experiencing nature.

Robert Grainier is a man utterly devoid of irony. He does nothing in jest, though he can be playful, and does not shrug off any of the roles he finds himself in. Most of all, he doesn’t hide himself behind a false self but lives his own life with seriousness and joy.

This was striking, because it is harder and harder to take yourself or your life seriously. The performative nature of life online, and increasingly our politics, media, and all other things, means we drape ourselves in irony to hide in plain sight. Too busy costuming a role to be who we are and live our own life in quiet and contemplation—a well-examined life lived well.

When I was about fourteen my mom put a cd in my Easter basket. This wasn’t uncommon, but this particular disk would become one of the more important ones in my collection. I’ve listened to it nearly every Holy Week since.

Other than already being a fan of both Chanticleer and Tavener, I had absolutely no context for this work. I just knew that I loved how it sounded. Chanticleer is somehow the best and most versatile choir around, and this caught them at what I consider their peak (when I saw them in concert around 2010 only one member of choir—the incredible and affable bass Eric Alatorre—that recorded this was still in the group. He spent about thirty years with them but has since retired from Chanticleer and sings with whatever choirs he wants.)

As it turns out, this work is an Orthodox liturgical work. I am not Orthodox myself, but it would be fair to say my aesthetic sensibilities fit a lot better in an Orthodox context than Protestantism.

Tavener was himself a convert to Orthodoxy for most of his adult life and this work was intended as service music for Pascha. He includes somewhat detailed program notes about the movements through the space in the program notes. It appears to have only been performed a few times, mostly by Chanticleer and once by (of all things) a Presbyterian church’s choir.

The choral numbers are predictably Tavener; rich harmony, homophonous textures. Unlike many Tavener works, most of the choral numbers are lightly accompanied by strings which adds to the depth of sound for such a small choir. It’s the solo singing that really stands out though. To a man, they all inhabit the expressive world of byzantine chant (quarter tones and all) in a way that is very unlike any kind of western singing, but completely convincing.

The final movement, Resurrection in Hades, features one of the great shocks in music. After over an hour of sparsely accompanied music, we hear what sounds like a board being hit with a hammer. And indeed, it is a semantron. This is such a foreign sound to eastern protestant or catholic ears, but it carries rich significance in the Russian Orthodox tradition as a traditional accompaniment to processions and funerals.

This is the only work I know with what I consider a satisfying musical depiction of the resurrection. I’ll just leave it at that.