rssMargaret Greentree June 6, 1943 - August 12, 2011
I would like to start with expressing an immense appreciation for the readers of this site, jsbchorales.net. My dear mother passed away unexpectedly in August and I [her eldest daughter Patricia] would like to take a few minutes to share something of the person who created this site.
During the last 3 years, I was living with her here in the East Bay of CA as we both needed each other for different reasons. Her health was declining and I was in a major life transition.
She would speak to me daily about the chorales she was working on for the site, she loved to talk about Bach. His life, work, the history of the church and his family life. She LOVED the chorales, I tried but they did not grab me the way much of his other works do.
She spoke to me of each of you who wrote to her for help with questions and/or queries. Sometimes she would act like this was asking SO much of her, however this was a front. She loved the connection and the appreciation. It took her forever to put a donation button up, at my suggestion and only for the hosting fees. And I do respect and agree with her desire for the site to be advertisement free and a resource for musicians and academics to use freely.
She would read me the emails from folks who sent their appreciation and every so often she would have to explain that the person was A Very Big Deal in the Bach/Baroque world.
My mother was not person who liked to interact with folks in a social setting and it was rare for her to participate in activities where people were around. The connection she had with the Bach community was, although one could say peripheral- fed her social needs. Here is a bit of the amazing, intelligent, deep, philosophical, witty, no-nonsense woman I used to tease and call a rock star. To me my mother was indeed a rock star, for throughout her life, her many interests she was able to fulfill. She also was able to translate her ideas and designs into an either physical manifestation or in the case of this website, a repository of her love, passion and fascination with Bach, History and Music.
She also had an ability to crack me up with laughter with her wry, no BS, biting insights on life and people. No one has ever made me laugh so deeply and truthfully as she could.
Of the multitude of long standing childhood memories I have, many of them are of her love for music. Classical music, I used to call it- a general catch all phrase to cover that type of music when it played in our home. I can still remember the lesson of why calling all of her music, the general name of Classical music, was incorrect. The periods and their differing names. She was always one for doing everything possible so I would not: sound ignorant when having discussions. Her exact words.
In Chicago during the Seventies we were taken to see Itzhak Perlman and Ravi Shankar. Family outings were consistently to the bookstore, Krochs and Brentanos and the record store, Rose Records. We also went to the library, the museums [the Field Museum, Museum of Science and Industry and the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum.
We accompanied our mom to her trips to Bein and Fushi for violin tuning and were dropped at the beautiful downtown library while she had her lessons nearby. And there was a tiny period when my sister and I were very small, we too had violin lessons and could play a simple song.
There was little tolerance over bickering about tv programs between my sister and I. Watched on the smallest b&w tv set one can imagine. I will never forget when her patience broke and the tv was thrown out. Literally. In the garbage and we did not have another one until I was in high school. This of course allowed more time for the radio, reading, games, crafts and record playing. Although at the time my sister and I thought we were the strangest family that existed.
My mom began taking piano lessons after we moved to Seattle. Our car, a Toyota wagon [which my mom had since my sister and I were babies] died there after years of Chicago’s ritual salting of the streets rusted its frame We were a family with a violin and a piano but no car [and no tv], bussing it everywhere throughout the city. At this time in our lives she also got involved with music theory classes and singing in a community choir.
I remember her love of Glenn Gould coming before her love [actually a passion] of J.S. Bach. I too loved Glenn Gould and would always listen to her tapes and records.
I cannot really recall when Bach pretty much took over everything. But both my sister and I had moved out and the musical contact we had was in CDs and tapes she made for me. A selection of music I not heard from any of my friends or heard on my radio stations.
I do know that the Mac [which she created jsbchorales on] came at a time in her life when she had grown bored with knitting, weaving,literature and even reading and practicing the piano/violin. 
On one of my college breaks, I noticed her using the ancient metal tank of a typewriter she had before we were born. It was being used for a writing class she was attending at the U of WA extension. I told her about the Mac I used at my college computer room. I figured there had to be one at the U of WA. There was, we went and you cannot imagine the joy and transfixion that occurred from this introduction.
She had to have her OWN computer, no using the communal room on campus. And she wanted to understand how the computer worked and how the software worked on the computer. Me, I just thought it was cool, made typing papers a breeze and a nifty tool for a college student.
She had all of the first original share ware type software made of the Mac, had the Finale software before it was called Finale and was blogging years before it was a craze.
I can remember being so confused as to what made it different from a website and her many attempts to explain- of course I only understood once I learned to do some basic HTML coding myself.
My mom was obsessed with what she called, elegant coding and spent painstaking hours to learn and then apply her knowledge with her own site, jsbchorales.net. She helped me learn, tutorials and lessons in HTML- for me I would rather pay someone else to do it. But she genuinely loved it.
She was our go-to person for all computer related issues, when I had a job that had an IT dept. I truly understood how amazing her abilities were. She was our IT person and maintained our computers/laptops, the home network and she even managed to figure out how to get her ancient Apple Laser Writer4/600PS to work all the way up to OSX snow leopard.
My sadness and heartache over missing her, losing the laughter and not being able to converse with her ever again is a grief that no words can express. It is my sincerest wish that you, her readers/followers will continue to use this site and tell anyone else who you think could benefit from her work here to please visit and peruse the site.
I apologize for the appalling coding of this entry and its length/scattered nature, I am not a writer but I wanted to express something of the person my mother was in life. She wanted no service, only to be cremated and no fuss made. However I feel such a desire for something of this person to be known.
I will continue to make sure this site stays available for its intended purpose. To contact me, my info is:
p l m l o v e s p a r i s a t g m a i l d o t c o m no spaces of course.
If anyone had any interactions with my mom regarding jsbchorales.net, I would like to put them up on the workshop site in an entry of Remembrances. You can email me the exact wording and I will copy paste it into an entry here.
Thank you for your time and your use of this site. Patricia
