Neylan McBaine

My New Hero

When we decided we were going to move to Utah, one of the tasks I assigned myself was finding a good violin teacher for Esme in Salt Lake City. I had no idea it would be so difficult: Once I started networking into the best teachers, they were so full they could only teach Esme if I brought her to lessons during school hours. I ended up settling on a violinist from the Utah Symphony (who could see us after school) and I was simply relieved to have found someone decent.

That was before we met Eugene Watanabe. Then, all of a sudden, decent wasn't good enough anymore. Eugene is the only student ever to graduate from the Curtis Institute in both violin and piano, and he has studied with some of the finest teachers on both instruments. Now, he has returned to his native Utah and is dedicating himself to teaching, with the help of his wife Vera, who is herself a pianist and teaches at the University of Utah.

The first time I took Esme over to their home to see if Mr. Watanabe would teach her, I felt a familiar and yet buried feeling spring to life: That feeling of entering a home where music reigns. Where the whole life of the house revolves around not just lesson schedules and payments and competitions and repertoire choices but around the making of beauty and the exercise of supreme discipline. This was the environment in which I spent most of my childhood, partly because of my own piano studies and partly because my mom's profession created that atmosphere in our own home. Entering Mr. Watanabe's home made me feel like I was entering a factory where the product is sublimity.

Esme's been studying with Mr. Watanabe for about five months now, and she's barely put bow to strings. He's akin to a soccer coach who spends months with a new player simply on technique and muscle development. Somehow, Esme doesn't seem to mind. It's like she has this zen understanding of delayed gratification that keeps her going. That's not to say some (okay, many) of our practice sessions at home end in tears (which is probably mostly my fault. I'm definitely not teaching her to drive when she's 16!) but she's intrigued by orchestras and seems motivated by the desire to play in one.

This evening, I took Esme and Auden to the Libby Gardner Concert hall on the U. campus to hear Mr. Watanabe's Gifted Music School orchestra perform. As part of his commitment to teaching, Mr. Watanabe has started a tuition-free music school that aims for nothing short of redefining music education in America. We got to sit in the Choir Loft seats, behind the orchestra looking down on the kids ages 9 to 18 as they played Tchiakovsky, Mozart, Vivaldi and Shostakovich amazingly well and without a page of music. The encore, an orchestral arrangement of Elvis' "Can't Help Falling In Love" by Eugene's wife Vera, was the perfect confluence of beautiful melody with the sense of fun that is so often lacking in classical concerts. Even if Esme never plays in the Gifted Music School orchestra herself, Mr. Watanabe is teaching her -- and me all over again -- what it takes to be the very best.

PS From Last Night and BustedHalo.com Article

Well, I could NOT sleep last night thinking of all the books I'd left off my last list. It wasn't meant to be an all-inclusive list, but there were some egregious omissions:

Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf. I named a kid after her after all.

Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh. 

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke.

Immortality, by Milan Kundera.

I'm sure there will be more as I think of them...

Also, I have an article today on BustedHalo.com discussing Cardinal George's recent visit to BYU. BustedHalo is an online magazine for young Catholics, and it's always an honor to appear there.

There Is No Frigate Like A Book

I'm having a very peculiar experience with the book I am currently reading: I love it so much I don't want to read it. If I read it, I get closer to the end, and it will be a sad day when I finish this one.

Usually, I'm a consumed reader: Once I start a book, I find every spare moment to plow through it at the expense of mothering, cleaning and all other work. I can be very annoying. I have no ability to pace myself. Hence, for the past few years I have actually limited my reading to designated vacation times (like the time I read five books over the week Elliot and I went to Greece, childless). But this book I'm working on now has very little plot, thus the need to find out what happens isn't driving my usual insatiable consumption.

What is this book? you're probably asking by now. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery (translated from French by Alison Anderson). It is written in a way that exactly speaks to my perception of the world, and I love that, in its French philosophical tone, it grapples with the concepts of beauty and art in a completely unsentimental way.

The negative reviews on Amazon, of which there are few, call the two narrators pretentious and narcissistic which is absolutely true, but that is exactly what makes me laugh out loud while I'm reading this on the treadmill at the gym. They are so darn funny! I have rarely met more complicated, unpleasant and yet completely consuming characters whose perceptions of truth and beauty resonate all the more because of the prickly (ahem, hedgehog-like) messengers.

Reading this book got me thinking about some of the other books that will forever hold a place on my bookshelf (regardless of how many others Elliot makes me donate to the library):

Of Human Bondage, by Somerset Maugham. I read this book in sixth grade and it was the first time I felt like I'd read and understood something that was truly grown-up. I remember feeling like I understood something about the world that I would never get to learn through my own life experience.

The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton. My love affair with Wharton started not with House of Mirth, but with Summer, which I read in eighth grade. My first Wharton book, it dealt with some themes I hadn't explored in school books before: disillusion, loss of innocence, and most importantly, existentialism. I remember sitting in front of my Brother word processing machine with my mom, the World Book Encyclopedia open across our laps, reading together the explanation of existentialism and talking about how to best communicate the concept in my essay about the book. In tenth grade, I read House of Mirth and maybe it was the New York setting or the female protagonist, but it instantly became my favorite book. Mr. O'Connor, in my English class at school, pointed out a particular passage in which Wharton describes the jewels Lily wears during the "tableau scene" and assigned us to write our own passages in exactly the same grammatical structure: a noun where Wharton had a noun, a verb to a verb, exact same number of words in the sentences, commas in the same place, etc. I don't remember what I wrote about but I do remember that a whole new linguistic lilt came to my pen as I realized that putting words in the sequence Wharton had was truly an art and not something easily duplicated.

Howards End, by E.M. Forster. I make a point of reading Howards End every few years. After having first read it in high school, I read it again when my mom sold the apartment I had grown up in. The book helped me understand my dad better, to try to "only connect" with him, and when Emma Thompson, Anthony Hopkins and Helena Bohnam Carter stared in the movie, it became one of my favorite movies too. I have since read all but one of Forster's novels and I love the man deeply.

Crossing To Safety, by Wallace Stegner. This is a favorite among book clubs, and a book club is where I first read it myself. Newly married, its theme of adult couple friendships hit me so true at that point in my life and gave me a standard by which to judge future friendships. It also struck me that Stegner could write a whole compelling novel about... well, just life. No huge traumatic events or horribly dysfunctional families. Just a book about the friends we make and the jobs we have and the people we love. And yet it is still modern, meaningful and real. 

Atonement, by Ian McEwan. Ian McEwan has got a gimmick: He writes about choices. He explores how the smallest choices we make -- which direction we turn when looking out a window, who we ask to deliver a letter -- can determine our fates. Atonement was so startling to me because, in retrospect, I had the strange feeling that I could change one or two of those little choices the characters make and, like a choose-your-own-adventure novel, the story would turn out completely differently. I hated being trapped by the choices the characters make, but when we learn at the end that Briony has taken the liberty of rewriting the whole history of her sister and her lover, it's like she opens the door for each of us to rewrite it for ourselves. It was a strangely powerful feeling, and it's led me to many more of McEwan's novels. 

What are some of the books that will always have a place on your bookshelf? I would love to hear from any of you who read this so that I can start making a list for my next uninterrupted, child-free vacation!

My Latest on Patheos.com

Read it here: Quiche, Haiti and Suffering

I brought a quiche today to a friend who is suffering.

A few years ago, I would have balked at the value of such an obvious display of charity. An act like that smells so much more of the pity sort of charity than the love sort, and who wants to be pitied? Plus, I would have been disenchanted by the thought of looking like one of those posed church pictures where one white suburban woman stands smiling on the doorstep of another white suburban woman's home holding out something delicious in a casserole dish. Read more...

Reflections from a Weekend in St. George

This weekend, we enjoyed the gracious hospitality of our dear friends in St. George, Utah. A few things struck me:

1. My family needs a house. I haven't seen my girls as happy as they were this weekend, running around a gorgeous, spacious home with more than fifty square feet to play in. It helped that they had our friends' five adorable kids playing with them every second of the weekend. We barely saw Esme, which was wonderful not because we don't want to have our kid around but because it indicated that she felt empowered: she felt freed from the self-inflicted responsibilities of being the oldest child that so often beleaguer her, empowered to be a "big kid" who doesn't need to check in with mom every few minutes as she does in our apartment simply because of our proximity. There's no place to go in our apartment so there's no opportunity for her to develop her sense of personal space, something I feel is essential to children's emotional health. This little apartment has served us well for the past six months while our house is being built, but I can tell that all of us -- parents and kids -- are feeling the stress of the situation. (PS. Cabinets and appliances are going in the house this week!)

2. The southwest is in my blood. I absolutely love the red rocks and dirt of southern Utah and Arizona. Some of my earliest memories are from the back of a rented Cadillac where I would sit in the well of the backseat while my parents and I drove through the Arizona desert. My soundtrack, from my first cassette Walkman, included the Cabbage Patch Kids soundtrack, the Annie soundtrack, Grofe's Grand Canyon orchestral suite, and the Prokofiev First Piano Concerto. My father loved Arizona, especially since he had stayed at the spanking new Arizona Biltmore (a Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece) with his own parents as a child. It was still a revered resort when we went there in the 1980s, although when Elliot and I visited again a few years ago it seemed to have turned into something of a conference mega-hotel. Hmm... I'm sensing some "retrospectives from Neylan's childhood involving the Grand Canyon" posts coming in the next few days... Think red dirt in the meantime.

3. "Couple friends" are rare and dear. Ever since reading Stegner's masterpiece, Crossing To Safety, in 2000, I have marveled at how unusual it is to find married friends with whom both wife and husband feel a kinship. These friends in St. George are some of those special finds in our lives. In 1999, weeks after getting married, Elliot and I took a Southwest Airlines flight from Salt Lake City to San Francisco, moving to our first home and starting our lives together. On the old Southwest planes, there were sections of seats that faced each other, and on that flight we happened to sit across from a couple who were themselves MIT and Wellesley/Harvard grads who were also moving to the Bay Area to start married life. Since that flight marked a turning point in all of our lives, it is easy to pinpoint them as our oldest couple friends. Our time in the Bay Area together brought many happy memories and now, almost eleven years later, we have eight kids among us.

And last but not least, I was struck by how well I sleep at other people's homes. It's amazing what a full eight hours will do...

A Living Seminary

I am excited to announce that I will be featured in a weekly column on Patheos.com, the "premier online resource for those looking to learn more about different belief systems". I serve as a cultural commentator in the Mormon portal. This week's column, about teaching Gospel Doctrine in my ward, inspired me to revisit some of my experiences in Israel.

I didn't fall in love with Israel upon first meeting. I had to be convinced. But once I did fall, I was in love for good.

I was introduced to Israel by my seminary teacher, R., who taught the high schoolers in my ward in an early-morning class at our ward building. I was a freshman when we started the four year curriculum, so R. and I jumped into the Old Testament together and I stuck with her through the New Testament, Book of Mormon and Church History as well. I went to a school with pretty fabulous teachers, and, because my school was small, I had some of those teachers for two and sometimes three years of my high school experience. But there was no one who had such a life-changing and long-lasting influence on me than my seminary teacher.

It breaks my heart when I hear of youth in the Church who get stuck with seminary teachers who use class time for comedy routines rather than challenging students to "work out" their salvations. R. brought donuts plenty of times, but there was never any doubt that she meant business. My freshman year, five of us attended her class. By my senior year, there were seventeen teenagers who regularly arrived at the Lincoln Center building by 6:15am four mornings a week.

After my sophomore year, R. convinced some of our parents to let us go to Israel with her for ten days. That trip was, for me, utter magic. For one of the first times in my life, I felt empowered as a religious person. I didn't feel like I was being laughed at or scorned or even viewed skeptically. I was simply a person of faith like so many others there, and my faith was connected to the pavement of the streets and the sounds of the air in a way that it was not in New York. It was the first time I realized that my religious observance wasn't actually that weird at all; in fact, our little group was initiated on the airplane going over by a group of yeshiva boys who periodically rose together, wrapped their phylacteries around their wrists and foreheads and chanted in unison. I thought they were stunningly beautiful.

I don't believe it is necessary for a person of faith to visit the Holy Land in order to have a perfect understanding of either Jesus Christ or their own personal beliefs. I don't think my faith was crafted by my acquaintance with Israel as much as my willingness to be absorbed by a religious culture. Israel reminded me that I, as a member of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, am a part of a covenant that goes back thousands of years, to Abraham and Isaac and prophets after them to whom I am bound by the observance of ritual and the culture of a peculiar people.

Several years after my trip with R., when I returned to Israel to work on an archeological dig at Tel Megiddo with the University of Southern California, I sat at the window of a public bus on my way back to the dig from Jerusalem where I had played the piano for my church's prophet, President Gordon B. Hinckley, at the LDS Jerusalem Center campus. The bus passed through the Jezreel Valley, with the sun going down behind Nazareth at one end of the valley and casting its last rays over Megiddo -- the supposed site of the battle of Armageddon -- on the other end. That bus ride took me across centuries of history right up to my latter-day prophet. I walked along a dusty road from the bus station up to the top of the tel. The kibbutz I was living at welcomed me back with a hearty dinner of falafel, tomato and cucumber salad and Nutella sandwiches for dessert, and I felt as at home as I ever have.

Revisiting Unpunished Rapture

This recent article in The New Yorker by my favorite music writer, Alex Ross, put me in the mindset of my previous blog, Unpunished Rapture, which was a music-specific blog I abandoned to write here. I feel that this post, from June 17, 2008, merits revisiting because it reflects the last meaningful conversation I had with my father before he passed away two months later. It also reflects the esoteric music-nerd part of myself that I rarely reveal on this site.

A recent conversation with my dad prompted me to formulate some thoughts about larger philosophical issues in music. The cover of this month's Gramophone magazine features six of "Today's Great Composers", including Reich, Golijov and Adams. I'm familiar with music from all of these composers and I understand -- on the surface at least -- where they are coming from in terms of answering the musical traditions of the past. My dad, an admitted musical reactionary of extreme proportions, has trouble with all of their music, claiming that it lacks "melody", his defining factor for greatness (think Verdi). He also noticed with disdain that all of the photographed composers are dressed in jeans or black khakis. Our opposing reactions to Gramophone's cover spurred an interesting conversation.

While some of these current composers are turning away from the esoteric philosophy-composition that has dominated so much art music of the last 50 years, there is no doubt that composition -- even with melody and with audience appeal in mind -- has been permanently transformed since the last of the canonical traditionalists in the 1940s or 50s. I argue that this is an inevitable evolution responding to the fragmentation of genres and the domination of commercialized music, and that members of the "Shuffle generation" like me -- younger people who routinely listen to music of a swath of genres -- understand the influences and the relevance of the music of Adams, Ades, Glass, et al. The best of their music is complex, thoughtful, beautifully structured and contains compelling lines, even if you might not get a "Di Quella Pira"- type melody with every aria. My dad sees this transformation as an inability to hear or understand real beauty, and therefore an irredeemable fault. In our conversation, he argued that the music of "today's great composers" simply isn't beautiful.

He's right in that the main purpose of most music today is not simply to represent beauty, as it has been in ages past. Often the purpose of today's art music is to represent more negative feelings, or at least a realistic sense of the world we live in. But this rejection of romantic ideals isn't just happening in art music. It's been in progress for decades in all art forms. Music may be where disillusionment, frustration, and anger are most commercialized -- those are, after all, the primary sentiments of much rap and hip hop -- but it's not an evolution confined to Western art music. In that vein, I suggested to my dad that the next generations might not even hear beauty the way he does; that, in fact, Beethoven's Ode to Joy might not even mean triumph, joy, and beauty to listeners in 50 years, the way it does to him. This idea absolutely floored him. There has always been to him, and to many of his generation, one absolute aesthetic. But if a child of today grows up hearing only commercial music, what guarantee is there that that child will think "Oh! Joy, brotherly love, beauty!" if suddenly confronted with the Ode to Joy?

I realized during my class this past semester how much our aesthetic sense has changed as humans over the course of the past few hundred years as we discussed modes and liturgical music. In early church music, modes were beautiful, although they mostly sound a little strange to us today. Similarly, as we studied Islamic music, I was made aware of the maliable construct of our 12-tone scale. In Islamic music, their scale has 47 tones! There apparently is no absolute even in those elements of music that are mathematically constructed.

These aesthetics change over much longer periods than just one person's lifetime, which is why my dad has such a hard time imagining a world without the Ode to Joy. After all, Western art music of the past three hundred years is, essentially, all he's ever known. As a reactionary myself -- although not to the degree of my father -- I want to work to make sure the Ode to Joy always means joy, brotherly love, and beauty to those who hear it. But I also understand that there is no absolute aesthetic, that Western art music must work to find its place among the myriad of contemporary genres, and that those other genres are speaking to people with as much force as the Ode to Joy speaks to my dad.

More MWP Publicity

• Today, I'm at Dare to Dream with an article about the Mormon Women Project. I particularly like this article because it's addressed to a non-LDS crowd, and so it allowed me to reveal a little more of my own experience being a Mormon woman among others not of my faith.
• The Project received terrific publicity at the Deseret News' MormonTimes.com yesterday. 

I introduced a new category to the project yesterday: Lives of Service. As nominations have come into the site, I have been struck by how many Mormon women are engaged in truly spectacular service. I've grumbled in the past about how we talk so much in our church about Christ-like service, but all we really do is give money and bring dinner to a new mom, who probably has a cute baby we can cuddle and may be a friend we want to chat with anyway. Some sacrifice. But I have been chastened as I have been introduced to these nominees. And -- I'll say it -- I think a focus on global service is a strength of the Church here in Utah that I haven't seen in my city wards. I think part of that -- and this is at least true for me -- is that in city wards there are so many immediate needs among the members that we have no strength or perspective left for the kids in Afghanistan or whatever it might be. Also, we're so busy trying to take care of ourselves -- with the physical demands of city life, the financial pressures, the on-top-of-each-other spaces -- that we don't have as much emotional space to consider the needs of people a world away from us.

These new stories of service are immensely impacting for me. I particularly appreciate how focusing on service avoids the at-home mother vs. professional tension that I'm really trying hard to balance with the profiles I put on the site. Anybody can do service: mothers, single women, professionals. Plus, it's the perfect manifestation of our true Christianity. A win-win all around!

My History According to Frozen Yogurt

1994

In high school, it was Tasti-D-Lite. Starting around mid-March, when the winter weather retreated and spring fever brought obliviousness to any lingering chill, I would walk home from school via Columbus Avenue. After a day of writer's cramp at a little desk and catching cat naps on the floor of my school's hallway, nothing felt better than stealing an hour for myself walking past the boutiques, restaurants and apartment buildings of the Upper West Side.

Tasti-D-Lite was on about 75th Street, as I recall. In those days of severe body-consciousness, the 35 calories per serving was about all I could consume without feeling like I should throw the whole thing up afterwards. But I couldn't deny myself completely, so the chocolate and vanilla swirl became a routine. I'd nurse a cup all the way down to 62nd Street.

1997

Fortunately, Durfee's closed at midnight, but there were plenty of nights when I wished the treat shop on Yale's Old Campus was open later. Much later. Since I had lived next door to Durfee's my freshman year, their frozen yogurt with rainbow sprinkles and Oreos and a freshly baked Otis Spunkmeyer chocolate chip cookie had become my second dinner. With the dining halls opened from 5:00 to 7:00pm for dinner, a girl needed to eat seven hours later! Not being the type who eats cold pizza sitting on the make-shift coffee table in the common room, Durfee's regularly came to my rescue.

As a sophomore, I still made the quick trip from my room in Jonathan Edwards college, across High Street, and through Old Campus to the treat shop. But then I was often met there by a tall, blond boy. Durfee's was a convenient half-way meeting spot between J.E. and his college, Silliman. (Well, he chivalrously walked somewhat farther than I did!) I loved him, but I never allowed him to share my spilling over cup of frozen yogurt.

2007

Ten years later, it's another campus, another treat shop. And another girl. My daughter, Esme, joins her sister Auden at the frozen yogurt dispenser at Harvard Business School's Grille. When their cups are full, I swipe my cash card at the cashier and we move to the Grille's back room to join the rest of our communal on-campus family who have gathered there for an LDS Student Association social. A bevy of little girls work through their swirls slowly, drinking the last melted drops, sealed as friends forever by this campus experience. When asked what she misses most about living in Boston, Esme still answers, "The frozen yogurt at the Grille."

2009

Frozen yogurt technology has advanced, and now there are Pinkberrys and Red Mangos peddling their tart tastes and bubble gum styles. In our Brooklyn neighborhood, it's YogoMonster on Seventh Avenue that satisfies our after-school cravings. Day after day, I maneuver the heavy glass door to get my Phil & Teds stroller and three little girls into the mod decor, hoping I've beat the crowd letting out of the high school nearby. It's the same thing every day: Original with strawberries, chocolate chips and sprinkles for the two girls, and Original with mango, strawberries and Graham cracker crumbs for me, with a few spoonfuls going to my new baby.

YogoMonster was my salvation that year in New York. When needing to get out of our apartment, a distraction after school or a treat as a bribe, I herded us to YogoMonster. Barely ripped from the embrace of business school and depressed by the reality of a crummy apartment, new baby and new move loneliness, our whole family sat on the sidewalk outside the store watching a late August afternoon thunderstorm and eating our yogurt. A rainbow was painted on the roof of an abandoned storefront across the street, and after the rainstorm, a real rainbow appeared right above. Somehow, the memory of that rainbow when we most needed cheering up made YogoMonster feel like a retreat for the rest of that difficult year.

2010

"Can we go to Spoon Me today? Please? Please?" I've said no so many times. But today, we surprisingly have nothing to do after school. And actually it's a Monday so I can pass off a trip to our new local yogurt shop in Sandy, Utah, as the Family Home Evening treat. Spoon Me is even more mod and space-agey than any of the other "tart" yogurt shops I've come across and my girls love swiveling in the white barrel chairs and hiding under the fashion-forward bar stools.

Frozen yogurt doesn't sound as good to me these days. I'd prefer an authentic bar of chocolate or some in-season fruit. But I still order three cups of Original with strawberries, chocolate chips and sprinkles. Dalloway, no longer much of a baby, eats one all by herself.

MWP Interview on the Segullah Blog

Today, I was honored to be featured on the Segullah blog in an interview about the Mormon Women Project. Segullah is an LDS women's literary magazine that I have written for and admired for many years. In fact, I had lunch with the founder of Segullah last week and was delighted to have found a soul mate in the cause of broadening the identity of Mormon women. Thank you Segullah for allowing me to share my ideas on your esteemed site!

I feel grateful for the support and good advice I've received over the past several weeks since launching the Mormon Women Project. In particular, Michelle Linford, the founder of www.mormonwoman.org, has been remarkably supportive. This means a lot to me since I've complicated her life greatly by introducing a complementary project with such a similar name! Michelle's project is wholly devoted to an externally-focused missionary effort -- informing people outside the Church of our doctrine and culture and role as women in the organization -- while mine is intended for an LDS audience. She is truly a pioneering and admirable mentor for me.