This is the sixth year for doing this little personal tradition. My 2019 song is called "Christmas Is" and it's in 3/4 time. The singer is the wonderful Debra Gordon. Frank Michels employs his wizardry in the studio. I send him the raw material: melody sheet with chords, a lyric sheet and a rough tape of me singing. Standard size cassettes have to be special ordered today. The studios do not work with microcassettes.
My songs are put on YouTube by Gulsvig Productions of Starbuck MN. If you have media transfer work needing to be done, contact the Gulsvigs.
So, I invite you to listen to my 2019 Christmas song, "Christmas Is," with this link:
My late father was a professional composer and he never encouraged me to do this sort of thing. Maybe he associated the pastime with the stress and rigors of being professional. No professional task is easy. My parents are remembered at UMM in a memorial fund in their names. The fund is perpetually endowed.
We have recently heard the term "quid pro quo" in the news a lot. I had a professor at St. Cloud State, J. Brent Norlem, who liked to mock the tongue twister nature of the term.
There are no conditions or quid pro quos attached to our family fund at UMM. Maybe I should apply an asterisk: There are no conditions in connection to the music department, but I might have been tempted to state a quid pro quo requiring that Kellie Meehlause be kept on the Briggs Library staff. Apparently her position got cut. I heard she ended up in Fargo. She told me her last name was "Americanized German." She and I are movie buffs. We wish her well. I was not anticipating her possible departure.
As far as the music department is concerned, I have a point of view from time to time but it's merely opinion. I recently expressed displeasure with how the institution over a long time has insisted on suggesting it had no choir prior to 1979. My first communication on this was with Jacquelyn Johnson, after Garrison Keillor had appeared here and said with total bluntness that UMM had no choir in its first 18 years.
No one on behalf of UMM has ever told me this practice will end. Maybe the party line out there really asserts that we had no choir before 1979. That is certainly their prerogative. If I dissent, that is my right too. This year's Homecoming music concert celebrated the "40th anniversary of the concert choir." Any choir that gives concerts is a concert choir. Don't choirs exist to give concerts? So, there was no such thing here before 1979?
And this is somehow an important point to make, all the time? I dealt with news releases at the Morris paper saying the choir was "founded in 1979." When communicating with Johnson, I remember saying "maybe I should have spoken up sooner about this." But maybe it wouldn't have mattered. UMM can portray its history any way it wishes. As for me, I could quote the Alex Karras character from "Blazing Saddles" who said of himself: "Mongo just pawn in game of life."
So to repeat: no quid pro quo in connection with our family's fund at UMM, although I might have crossed my fingers behind my back in connection with Ms. Meehlause. The family's fund has only Ralph and Martha's names connected to it. It's best if I stay off to the side, and perhaps I ought not set foot on the campus again. My recent comments on the choir/founding thing have not been well-received in some quarters. I have lost one long-time friend. I shall try to stay on the sidelines.
Addendum: Going through old things in the house, I came across a postcard my father sent me from Seattle WA in 1962. My father had the UMM men's chorus out there. They performed the opening for the Minnesota Day festivities. This was at the height of the human race being imperiled by nuclear weapons, as the Cuban Missile Crisis was on. The front of the postcard had a Seattle panorama with the "space needle." Here is what my father wrote. I was seven years old.
Hi! Daddy will be home Friday night. I miss seeing my boy and momma and grandma. Hope all is well. The space needle was a big thrill. Goodbye till Friday.
Daddy
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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