The Fredösphere

I have completed the studio recording of the Psalm 46 Duet, which I first mentioned a few days ago. I'm still not completely happy with the recording; there are a few mistakes, and the overall tone production of my voice...

At this moment, a ghostly vision of a chubby, 4-foot 8-inch tall eldery woman rises out of the floor. Her face is contorted with wrath and she is screaming into a microphone. It is Miss Chisholm, my high school drama teacher.

NEVER APOLOGIZE!!! I HAVE TOLD YOU A THOUSAND TIMES, WHEN YOU PERFORM, NEVER APOLOGIZE. WHEN YOU WALK OUT ONTO THAT STAGE YOU MUST KNOW THAT YOU ARE THE BEST IN THE WORLD. NOW, GO OUT THERE AND SELL IT!!! SELL IT!!!

Miss Chisholm! How did you get in here? Sheesh, sorry -- no, no! I didn't say that.

Anyway, where was I? The duet. Yes, here are the sound files (of which I am very, very proud). You can download the 1.5meg mp3 file (if you must), or better, the 600k .wma file which is smaller and sounds better. So why are people still using that crappy mp3 format anyway?

THAT MP3 FORMAT IS CRAP. CRAP!!! NOW GO OUT THERE AND SELL IT. SELL IT!!!

Listen to Miss Chisholm, people. She knows what she is talking about.

Vox is Ann Arbor's premiere early music vocal group. If you are around Saturday night you should really go see them, at St. Thomas Catholic Church, at the slightly odd time of 7:30 p.m. I will be there and I will issue a report afterwards, including a tally of how many lutes were smashed at the frenzied close of the concert.

Auto dealership frauds. Someone just googled that and ended up here. Apparently, the Fredösphere is the answer, no matter what the question.

It was only Tuesday that I finally finished writing a duet that my friend Alan and I are to sing this Sunday.  It is a setting of Psalm 46, in honor of Reformation Sunday, which, to let the non-Lutherans know, always falls at the end of October.  (As an aside, someday I would like to hear the explanation for why every year kids dress up as ghosts and vampires to honor Martin Luther.  Really, I don't get it.) This duet is not accompanied.  It is very tonal, but it has an austerity that might be a bit strong for my congregation -- we'll see.  I was able to find a melody with lots of possibility for contrapuntal games.  I even threw in a hint of nested counterpoint.

Oh nooooooooooo, somebody shut him uuuuuup!  Shut him uuuuuup!!!!  He's starting to babble on about that crazy nested counterpoint nonsense again.  NOOOOOOOOOOO!

Today, I'm revealing the score to the wide world.  Here is the pdf file. 

I plan to put up a sound file too, but that may take a bit.  I made a home studio recording of the piece a few days ago and it was not a satisfying experience.  First, working in my home "studio" meant I had to sing the tenor part.  The top note is only an F-sharp, but at my best that note comes out at full baritonal holler.  Then there were the usual shocks when one has not been recording much and must rediscover just how implacably cruel a microphone can be.  Then, each part had to be sung against a click track and the mechanical nature of that approach sucked the life out of the performance.  Finally, the exercise exposed weaknesses in my writing which forced me to change some notes, thus rendering the finished product obsolete.  Very frustrating.

Ah well, it was a learning experience.  That which does not kill me makes me whimper.

Kyle Gann tells the story of writing music in his MIDI editor and using a Disklavier (essentially, a MIDI-driven player piano) to perform it live.  He always gets a few reactions that indicate some people find the whole thing illegitimate.  He tells it all thoroughly, but my summary is:  with MIDI, some doors close, yes, but others open.  It is its own thing, a new thing.  MIDI music can coexist with live human performance, for as long as human performers find it difficult when Gann decides to write

...lightning-fast quintuple octaves, or a whole string of six parallel sixths, I go right ahead. And the whole point is to be freed from downbeats and meters, so the first thing I’ll do is lay out a whole set of nested tempo relationships, like 7-against-9-against-11-against-13-against-17, and then fill in the notes, knowing that notes in one line will coincide with notes in another line only at downbeats, and then I try to avoid putting notes on downbeats. By doing that I get exactly what I want, which I feel is a wonderful spontaneity of notes bubbling up, not randomly, but like corks bobbing up and down on brisk waves, with patterns that are repetitive but wholly unsynchronized.

Meanwhile, Forrest Covington is looking at Kandinsky paintings and getting ideas.  He says the painter's goal was to express musical structure visually.  Covington wants to reverse the process:

Suppose you start at one edge of the painting, like the upper left hand corner, and perform a sweep motion across the canvas, using an imaginary slot or stripe, like a scanner does. Then you can create a time line of sorts, for the events happening in the painting, as different objects and colors enter into and then recede from your viewing stripe. Translate these motions to a score.

My own experiments in charting and graphing seems pretty tame compared to these guys.  After my family acquired my grandmother's player piano (during my teen years) I took a roll of wax paper and cut holes in it and mounted it on the player.  My cutting was not random; I kept in mind how I wanted the masses of sound to move around, but I didn't worry too much about choosing precise notes.  I do recall attempting one huge chord that spelled out the overtone series, but measuring and cutting the tiny holes was a hug pain in the neck and I dropped that approach.  Mostly I relied on diagonal slits which gave lightning-fast runs up and down the keyboard. 

As Gann points out, watching a scrolling graph as the music plays is very satisfying; the eye sees what will happen just before the ear hears it, and this puts you right into the music.  It's that anticipation that really helps the listener and which is otherwise only present with familiar music.

This inability of the audience to anticipate when listening to new music is one of the very biggest hurdles that contemporary composers face.  Maybe graphics like scrolling charts during performances should not be regarded as gimmicks.  Hmmm.  Must.  Think.  Harder.  About.  This.

The goodly folk of my church (St. Luke Lutheran of Ann Arbor) are all abuzz:  archaeologists have discovered the location of the third holiest site in Lutheranism.

Painted Matter reviews a reviewer on the metaphysical musings of Roger Penrose.  First we get a quote from the Martin Gardner review:

For Penrose, science is a neverending effort to penetrate the secrets of what Einstein liked to call the Old One. He has no sympathy for those who think that all underlying principles of physics have now, or soon will be, discovered. (See John Horgan’s book The End of Science.) For all we know, the universe may have infinite levels of sub-basements and infinite levels of attics in the opposite direction.

and then this reaction:

The secrets of the Old One are indeed painted with “beauty, magic, and mystery of Being”. What a great article about what appears — from the review — to be a difficult, but great book about the theater of our existence.

So we can divide the world into yet another pair of dueling camps:  those confident in man's eventual mastery of physical knowledge, and the rest of us.  I have had this belief -- that the universe's complexity is practically infinite -- from as far back as I can remember, and it is so fundamental to my world view that I can recall the shock and vertigo I felt when I discovered not all people shared it.

More depressing is the possibility that man's ability to learn new facts is limited.  Eventually, man's knowledge will be so vast, an entire lifetime of study will no longer be sufficient for one person to learn enough to make a new discovery.  This limit will certainly be approached unless radically improved methods are discovered to create grouped consiousness (hey, it could happen on some level anyway).  Shades of the -- yes, yes, yes! -- Teilhard de Chardin's Noösphere, or at least Vaneevar Bush's* Memex, which has more or less been achieved in our day (minus the goofy forehead cam).  O Great Google, hear your children's prayers!

*Check out this picture of Vannevar Bush.  I hear him saying something.  "You're not a member of the establishment, are you? ... I didn't think so."

Brace yourself for a rockabilly musical:

"The show is about the square kids versus the cool kids," Schlesinger says. "The cool kids play the rockabilly, and the square kids don't know what that is and they play really square music." The square kids are the Whistles, a collegiate a cappella vocal group, and -- in addition to the cool rockabilly stuff -- Schlesinger and Javerbaum are guilty of writing their music. "All their songs are painfully uncool," he says. "It's got to be good and bad at the same time. I'm good at the bad part . . . it's the good part that you have to work at."

Dude.  I am so with you.

The Whistles can only dream about equaling the achievements of the Five Neat Guys.

A few years ago a friend showed me an add from the 1996 Old Farmer's Almanac which I believe to be one of the most beautiful things ever put on earth.  The ad was purchased by Dr. Frank Wallace and it offers to anyone a free copy of "the valuable, 8000-word" information package on "an entire new field of knowledge" which just happens to be "the most important money / power / romantic-love discovery since the Industrial Revolution."  That means it must be pretty good, since the Industrial Revolution was certainly known for its money / power / romantic-love discoveries.

New-Tech is a new, scientific method for capturing major financial and personal advantages everywhere.  Neo-Tech is a new knowledge that has nothing to do with positive thinking, religion, or anything mystical.  Once a person is exposed to Neo-Tech, he can quietly profit from anyone -- anywhere, anytime.  He can prosper almost anywhere on earth and succeed under almost any economic or political condition.  Combined with Psychuous Sex, Neo-Tech applies to all money and power gathering techniques -- to all situations involving the transfer of money, power, or love.  No one can spot the Neo-Tech man.  The constant invisible advantages obtained by Neo-Tech appear completely natural yet are unbeatable.  Neo-Tech puts one in the ultimate catbird seat.

Okay, so let me get this straight:  Wallace has discovered a method whereby he can control other people and get all the sex and money he wants -- and then the very next thing he does is take out an ad in the Old Farmer's Almanac so he can tell everyone else about it.  This brings to mind Chesterton's formulation:  "To preach egoism is to practice altruism."

<>Who is the Neo-Tech Man? He is a man of quiet power -- a man who cannot lose.  He can extract money at will.  He can control anyone unknowledgeable about Neo-Tech -- man or woman.... The Neo-Tech man has the power to render others helpless, even wipe them out, but he wisely chooses to use just enough of his power to give himself unbeatable casino-like advantages in all endeavors for maximum long-range profits.  His Neo-Tech maneuvers are so subtle that they can be executed with casual confidence.  His hidden techniques let him win consistently and comfortably -- year after year, decade after decade.  Eventually, Neo-Tech men and women will quietly rule everywhere.
<>

What if I don't want quiet power?  What if I want loud power?  Personally, I'm not into this subtle advantage stuff.  I want my enemies stripped and beaten and paraded in front of me while I sit on a big gold throne with a crown encrusted with big fat Liz Taylor-grade diamonds.  I want people kissing my big toe.  And if you read carefully, you will see this vision is in no way inconsistent with Neo-Tech.  Once you've got the power, you can use it any way you want.  This hectoring about doing things quietly and subtly is weird and annoying and, frankly, it does not follow logically.

The Neo-Tech man can easily and safely beat any opponent.  He can quickly impoverish anyone he chooses.  He can immediately and consistently acquire large chunks of money, $2,000, $10,000, or more in a single day, repeatedly.  He has the power to make more money in a week than most people make in a full year without knowing about Neo-Tech.  He commands profits and respect.  He controls business deals and emotional situations to acquire money and power ... and to command love.  He can regain lost love.  He can subjugate a business or personal adversary.  He wins any lover at will.  He can predict stock prices -- even gold and silver prices ... He quietly rules all.

In the ad, Wallace has chosen to place a photo of himself in all his nerdy, horn-rimmed glory.  So now he intends to empower his fellow nerds such that they will finally score with all the babes.  I tremble for the future of our race.  The next generation is going to be pure-bred dorks.

Indeed, with Neo-Tech, a person not only captures unbeatable advantages over others, but commands shortcuts to profits, power, and romance.  The ordinary person can quickly become a Clark Kent -- a quiet superman -- taking command of all.  He can financially and emotionally control whomever he deals with.  He becomes the man-on-the-hill, now. He is armed with an unbeatable weapon. All will yield to the new-breed Neo-Tech man, the no-limit man ... All except the Neo-Tech man will die unfulfilled.

Bummer!

Folks, there is so much more to this story, but I have to stop for now.  Keep watching this space for more fascinating Neo-Tech news.  A smashed plaster bust of Jesus Christ and the IRS will figure prominently.  Stay tuned.

I dared to profane the sacred name of Mozart in this post.  I got a few interesting reactions and I also issued a clarification in the comments section.  If you care about that sort of thing you may want to check it out.  I wouldn't want to leave anyone with the wrong impression on such a vital topic.

Der Drubermensch scored a goal in soccer yesterday and it wasn't even one of those Brownian Motion goals where the ball ricochets off a body part into the goal.  Someone dislodged the ball from the pack and it started rolling toward the goal, and at that moment my son chased it down and administered the coup de grace.

He was promised a big reward if this ever happened, so we took him to the bookstore and (with a little guidance from us) he picked out The Great Art Scandal (a companion volume to Art Fraud Detective, a book he already has, and liked).  Both of these books set up puzzles or mysteries to solve involving clues inserted into classic paintings.  By this contrivance the kids end up staring at the paintings and studying their details.  Beyond that, older kids could learn a lot from the information given, but for even the younger ones, the exercise will result in a basic familiarity which will serve them in the future.

Meanwhile, on the music appreciation front, we've been buying the Kindermusik stuff and liking it a lot.  Unlike some other kids' albums with lame-o arrangements and singers who bring to mind cliches involving tunes and buckets, the Kindermusic is produced at a high level throughout.  The arrangements show evidence of having been created by talented people who have no intention of letting the humble source material prevent them from applying some thought, style and creativity to the end product.  Their arrangement of "This Old Man" features funky cool-jazz bitonality -- cool! -- yet they (mostly) avoid an overproduced feel.

The quality of kids music is not a trivial thing; I suspect the kids can tell the difference, but more importantly, I know we poor parents can.

James Panero at The New Criterion alerts us to the work of the deeply subversive artist Scott LoBaido.  You can read more and see examples here and here, but I feel my links may be irresponsible -- we're talking some seriously transgressive stuff.

Inside, Lobaido's painting of a mounted, armor-clad Rudolph Giuliani riding through the ruins of the Twin Towers hangs over the bar....  This painting is not ironic. Nor was another of Lobaido's giant canvases, this one hanged (yes) in October of '01 inside the uncompleted steel frame of a four-story building along the highway shopping strip of Hylan Boulevard in southern Staten Island. It depicted an angry Uncle Sam -- nearly foaming at the mouth, as it seemed -- holding the severed heads of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

See what I mean?  Definitely not safe for work.

I don't blog politics since I am above that sort of thing.  But right now, everyone is thinking about polls and this business of how do you extract from people, just by asking them, the truth of what they really want, especially what they really want that they don't even know themselves.  One consideration poll readers should keep in mind is what I would like to call The Vernors Effect.

A friend once told me how he worked in an office where the workers were occasionally polled for what types of soda pop they wanted in the vending machines.  It turned out Vernors Ginger Ale always scored pretty high in these polls.  It seems very likely that Vernors, with it's unusual taste, was most everyone's second or third choice (and the polling allowed for multiple choice).  Perhaps they thought of Vernors as being uniquely able to satisfy a certain Vernors Mood that they thought would come over them every once in a while.  For that eventuality, they definitely wanted Vernors to be there for them.

As it happens (and as you can guess), nobody ever bought the dang Vernors.  It was a constant source of vexation for all involved.  So the next time you hear someone suggesting some kind of ballot reform that allows for multiple choice, be wary.

Today I am listening to some chamber music by Peter Schickele.  This CD, to be precise.

Schickele does not appear to have a Sibeliusianalizational vision for large masses of music held together by a subtle organic relationships.  He ain't got it, and maybe he don't want it.  Anyway, he is content to present his ideas one after the other without transitional material.  Indeed, sometimes he names his movements simply by counting up their sections (e.g., "Opening Diptych" or "Four Studies").

I am temperamentally uninterested in such episodic stuff but in the last few years my aptitude for concentrated listening has improved, and I can now say I get what Schickele is doing here.  Beyond that, he gives us Coplandiologicanian Americana taken in a direction not quite like what you will find elsewhere.  You should really give him a listen.

I was going to end this post with some kind of cute/smart reference to, uh, you know, but in the end even my not very well developed sense of decorum stopped me.  Those of you who feel you need the reference should silently insert one for yourself now.  The following space is provided just for that purpose:

[                                                                      ]

There, now we all feel better.

Hoo boy, we're back with more cheesy art.  In my previous installment, I covered the religion of Star Trek.  Today we pick on the Guevarolators.  To start it off we admire this bit of sculpture (a larger view is here).  It is an adorable little graven image, suitable for worshiping.  There's nothing like a figurine to reveal the horro-comedy of a movement of mass murderers.

You've all seen the many Che tee shirts so I won't bother linking to them, but I did find some nice art in other media.  This tribute page has the requisite cheesy painting plus some kind of stone wall image that is pretty cool.  Fortunately I don't read Spanish, because that sure looks poetry along side the images -- eek!  Meanwhile, another painting shows Che bathed in the light of the setting sun as he bores a hole into eternity with his earnest glare.

The black velvet triumvirate of Lassie, Elvis and Jesus I understand.  More mysterious is this paint-on-glass grouping of Marylin Monroe, Bruce Lee, Elvis, Che, and Frankenstein.

We also learn that Che loved children.  The big-hearted guy just couldn't get enough of the little dearies.  See it all here, and don't forget to click de foto in case you want to see the groter beeld get a whole lot more krijgen.

Consider this picture of Che meeting Jean-Paul Sartre.  How many ways does Sartre express his submission?  He has the lower seat, his posture is bowed, and even his feet turn in and overlap in an infantile way.  Sycophancy directed toward the brutal and arrogant is something that crops up in all times and places, but how odd that it would be so common among a movement known for its self-righteous denunciation of the powerful.

Labels: VarietiesOfReligiousArt

Thanks to Genuflections in D Minor I now have The Muse At Sunset bookmarked.  He's another blogging composer.  His latest post analyzes the opening measures of Debussy's La Mer.  This is deeply good stuff for those who want to get inside the heads of other composers -- he's offering us a serious course in theory and composition.

Of course, if you prefer sass mouth, stay right here.

Area blogger The Bunker has a roundup of Detroit blogs and websites.  He also has harsh words for the MSM's-eye-view of blogging.  I was a little confused by that, since if you follow the link to its end, you get a Mike Wendland column from the Detroit Free Press that doesn't have the negatives The Bunker says it has.  Indeed, its only offensive part is its failure to mention The Fredösphere.

Anyway, my real point:  The Bunker gives a nice list of Detroit photobloggers, which tend toward the "ruins" theme for some strange reason.  I've admired The Ruins of Detroit webpage for a long time and have had it on my blogroll (via The Detroit Page) since the beginning.  Strange, melancholy, beautiful, barkingly-ugly, priceless garbage.

By way of ArtsJournal we learn the sad news that John Tavener's long relationship with Orthodoxy is cracking up.  Mother Thekla doesn't call anymore.

There's no indication that Tavener has changed his mind about the Enlightenment.  (That is, Enlightenment = Bad.)

Finally, let me remind everyone that John Taverner was the Renaissance guy.  R is for Renaissance.  Now you'll never get them mixed up again.

I'm back from the dentist.  Right now my mouth is so clean, you could eat off of it.

I think maybe I would have loved a career as a dental hygienist.  I have that obsessive-compulsive approach to cleaning -- it's a molecular approach.  Note well I did not say I would be a good hygienist.  I doubt patients would leave my chair with any enamel left on their teeth.

On the subject of hygiene, my friend Victor writes:

Hello, my name is Victor and I am a recovering hygiene film addict.  My addiction started by downloading a harmless Lucky Strikes dancing cigarettes commercial.  Then I started watching movies about how teenagers should not be obnoxious and they will become successful.  Now I've become a peddler and started making VCDs for my friends.

Also, don't miss The Terrible Truth, about a teen-age girl. "Starting with an occasional marijuana cigarette, she is induced to experiment with a 'fix' of heroin. In a few days, she is [a] hopeless 'hype,' ends up with a criminal record and a blighted future."  There's also The Relaxed Wife, a film so radioactive on so many levels I won't spoil it with further comment.

Alex Ross is in ecstasy over the opening measures of Mozart's Magic Flute.  I have two serious problems with Mozart.

Mozart was music's supreme genius, and I freely concede this even though we now know he achieved this status through the unfair advantage of Tourette's Syndrome.  (An unfair advantage very different from Benjamin Britten's.)   However, Mozart had the bad luck to be born in the wrong period.  Your music history teacher probably told you this period is called Viennese Classicism, but a growing number of astute observers are now calling it the Era of High Dipwadism.  Think of C.P.E. Bach, Haydn, or early Beethoven and Schubert:  it's all fruitier than a nutcake.  It's Confectioner's Gothic, without the Gothic.  Fiber-free music like this can give you colon cancer if you don't watch out.

Worse is when Mozart drops the ball.  Time and time again, when he comes to an ending, he reverts to lame-o clichés, his trademark trill being the worst.  Or consider the overture to Marriage of Figaro:  he gets the piece cranking and pretty soon you are swept up in one of the great musical perpetual motion machines.  Then -- thud!  He cuts it off with a one-three-five-three-one, one, one, an ending so mind-bogglingly banal it nullifies the brilliance that came before.

Alex Ross has many impressive credentials, and his high opinion of Mozart is shared by many distinguished authorities down through the ages.  I, however, am Lord of the Fredösphere.  Whose side will you choose?
UPDATE: See the comments for my more nuanced position. Short version: it's all Haydn's fault.

Instapundit is the place to go for all of your digital accoridion needs.

You know what this means, don't you?  A new generation can look forward to the emotional scars caused by accoridon-playing parents.  Yes, I know all about it:  when my mother yodeled country-western-style, she usually accompanied herself on the accordion.

Why do the Brits get all the good TV?

The series will conclude with a kind of real-time architectural snuff movie - the live broadcast of the demolition of the building which the judges have condemned.

Condemned because it is ugly, that is.  I have a feeling Buckingham Palace will not be nominated for this honor, although some of the peasants are calling for just that -- and I'm guessing they secretly hope HRH is still inside when it goes down.  And then there's this bit of class hatred:

There is a new housing development to the north of Bristol on Stoke Park. Previously open farmland, the remains of which is now a "feature" for the people who live on the development. i don't know what it's called, it's not on the A-Z, but it is made up of mock-Georgian mock-houses without any detail. There are identikit lawns, identikit executive cars in the drives. That's my nomination. Yes, the whole lot. It destroys your life to see it. I don't know about the residents. I guess they are lizards or something

By way of Plep, I offer you on this lazy Friday the Bad Astronomy Page.  From it you will learn:

We were not all killed on September 29 by the asteroid Toutatis.
Mars does not have a face, although aliens are clearly sending us messages from other parts of the universe.
Astronauts did not land on the surface of Nevada in 1969, which makes sense when you think about how inhospitable Nevada is to all life.
Screenplays to movies like The Mummy Returns and Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me were not written by members of the National Academy of Sciences -- at least, not by any that will admit it.

"Nil significat nisi oscillat. Du vap. Du vap. Du vap." Jaakko Mantyjarvi, choir director in Helsinki, Finland, from his email signature.

Lilek's Bleat from yesterday needs to be read by everyone who has ever spent time in the company of a small child.

His mention of Candyland reminds me of something that's been worrying me for a while.  Go to the Hasbro site and look closely at Candyland's sovereign, King Candy.  This is a mature male with some serious executive responsibility who knows simply nothing about how a person in his station should dress.  What words come to mind?  I'm thinking vulgar, shallow, over the top, and fashion victim (without the fashion).  He's sitting way at the wrong end of the sizzle-steak continuum.

I mean, if I were a citizen of Candyland, I'd be deeply worried about homeland security right now.  Is King Candy the kind of serious person you need to defend your country's borders?  Are members of the Candyland military going to respect this kind of leader -- are they going to follow his orders with efficiency and enthusiasm?  I seriously doubt it.

I write computer programs in my day job, which allows me to listen to music on headphones some of the time while I weave my tangled webs of logic.  Lately I find myself returning repeatedly to the Holst Singers' rendition of Schnittke's Choir Concerto.

I consider myself a fan of Schnittke but I've come to realize his reputation does not jive with the kind of music in the Concerto.  Really, I know almost nothing about the rest of his work.  I've listened to a recording (it must have been this by Kronos) of some of his string quartets, but the only memorable part was something lifted from ... the Choir Concerto!

The piece is quite long and calls for extensive divisi in order to achieve occasional thick tone clusters.  Beyond that, I wonder if choirs allow themselves to be intimidated by the work.  In both recordings  I've heard, the sound seems a little too tightly wound than is called for.  This results in soprano sections with a suicidal urge to sing the high notes sharp.  Madness.  (But I don't remember that problem in the one live performance I've heard, by the Swedish Radio Choir under Eric Ericson.)

Big pieces like the Choir Concerto, or the monolithic Miserere by Gorecki, don't get performed much.  What groups exist that can?  Take a city like Ann Arbor, with a rich choral culture.  The one choir big enough for these pieces, the Choral Union, sticks to works for choir and orchestra.  I don't recall ever hearing of any a cappella work they have ever sung.  It's certainly not the case they shy away from difficult music (and their director, Jerry Blackstone, is world class).  They just don't sing pieces without orchestra.  Occasionally a university choir might take the work on, but they don't have the mature voices you need for an optimal performance.  My guess is, the entire state of Michigan has not one choir that both can and should sing the Choir Concerto.

Wagnerian sopranos on bungee cords.  "These waterbabes were swimming through the air!"  Ionarts has der schkoop.

No doubt you have seen this famous photograph of Benjamin Britten, wearing his trademark fur hat:

Many people have wondered why he was never seen in public without the hat.  I believe I have found the definitive answer.  Recently I had an opportunity to spend a week browsing the stacks at the Brittish Library of Composer Portraiture.  (It's the place with the famous 50-foot marble statue of Havergal Brian in the atrium.)  I was exploring one of the dark corners of the vast, warehouse-sized room in the back which they use as archival space, when I came across the following photograph.  Obviously, it was taken by the same photographer, probably on the same day:

I believe we now know a lot more about Mr. Britten and his amazing musical "talent."  I have contacted officials in the Brittish government and I believe we will be hearing soon an announcement from the Crown regarding certain honors and titles of which Mr. Britten will be posthumously stripped.  A sad story, really.

The Little Womanösphere found a promising cake recipe for the Maharincess' birthday and the job of making it fell to me.  It was a hit.  You might want to take a look at it.  Today, I would like to draw your attention to the frosting.

First, let me stipulate that I am a frosting hater.  I loathe the stuff.  If Michael Moore made a documentary exposing frosting in all its perfidy, I would be there opening night, front and center.

Look again at the ingredients for the frosting.  Cream.  Chocolate.  That's it, people.  We're talking about an incredibly easy frosting to make.  Heat the cream.  Chop the chocolate.  Throw it in.  Stir.  Give it a condescending smirk (optional).  You're done.

This frosting was splendiferously transcendental.  It was the apotheosis of frostingness.  That Than Which None More Smooth & Creamy Can Be Conceived.

Men call it ganache.  I've noticed ganache sneaking into the middle-class food consciousness gradually over the last three or four years.  It's wonderful stuff.  So easy.  So obvious.  So my question is:  where has it been all my life?

Why were we for years, decades, fed a frosting made of fossilized blocks of sugar crystals?  A frosting so sweet, just the sight of a cake would give you a headache? 

My parents generation achieved many great things, but on the frosting question, they perpetrated an act of malpractice.  I'm angry.  Where's my lawyer?

I research exhaustively each and every topic I write about on this here blog.  (Translation:  sometimes I take the trouble of spending the ten seconds it takes to Google stuff.)  As part of my efforts to find The Secret of the Martian Moons, I searched Amazon.com to see what they had.  Oh, my.  Those words "secret" and "martian" seem to work a kind of magical evocation of some of the odder spirits on the internet.

What makes this search even more intriging is the teasing excerpts they are giving you now, right out of the text of the books.  They are fragmentary and serve to render the books even more unhinged in appearance (if that were possible).  They make for a kind of wacky poetry.

Let's start with a mouthfull:  Nothing in This Book Is True, but It's Exactly How Things Are: The Esoteric Meaning of the Monuments on Mars.  By using the more respectable term "monuments" the author avoids letting you know that he's another "face on Mars" kook.  Read the reviews, which include heartbreaking pleas from the disillusioned.  Here's the excerpt from my search:

"... had with each other. There are also complexes on the moon, ancient Egyptian as well as present-day secret government complexes. We have three ... carry it out. When the Martian atmosphere was on the brink of destruction, the Martians (the ..."

Ooooo, such a tease.  Our second text of the day is The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life: Volume 2.  The official book description seems tame:

The sacred Flower of Life pattern, the primary geometric generator of all physical form, is explored in even more depth in this volume, the second half of the Flower of Life workshop. The proportions of the human body, the nuances of human consciousness, the sizes and distances of the stars, planets and moons, even the creations of humankind, are all shown to reflect their origins in this beautiful and divine image. Through an intricate and detailed geometrical mapping, Drunvalo Melchizedek shows how the seemingly simple design of the Flower of Life contains the genesis of our entire third-dimensional existence.

but by employing the esoteric wisdom of Amazon Search Results, we attain to a higher understanding of the author's beliefs:

"... probably as impossible as the idea of going to the Moon would have been to people ... of Mer-Ka-Ba knowledge by the Martians [page 98ffj, the dimensional worlds ... right- 422 * THE ANCIENT SECRET OF THE FLOWER OF LIFE ..."

Finally, what more urgent task have we in this election year than to unravel The Secret Architecture of Our Nation's Capital:  The Masons and the Building of Washington, D.C.  The excerpt adds little to what we can guess this book is going to tell us, yet it has a certain poetry to it.  I may just set it to music some day:

"... year) that Mars had two satellites. The inner of these moons moved around its parent body almost three times in a Martian day. The satellites were named ... with reference to a The Secret Architecture o/' Our Nation's Capital 27 passage in Homer's Iliad ..."

I blogged about this book Secret of the Martian Moons by Donald Wollheim a while ago and it stuck in my mind. It is something I read as a kid. I looked it up at abebooks.com and found a paperback copy for only two bucks. I really wanted to own the original cover art. I knew the paperback version probably didn't have it, but I just couldn't justify spending more on something that was probably going to be yet another nostalgia trip that disappoints.

It didn't disappoint. That's not to say it wasn't cheesy. And here at this point I feel the need to lay out the plot for you. I don't want to neglect any of the salient points, so it might go on a bit long, but please bear with me as I cover all the relevant information contained in the story (SPOILER ALERT):

Synopsis: Boy astronaut saves the world.

But here's the thing: I remembered all kinds of stuff from this silly book. I'm astounded how deep it worked its way into my mind.

I really should perform an experiment: I should reread one of those Asimov orificial discharges he called "novels" and see if the memories return with the same force. Right now, I'm thinking (and hoping) the answer is "no." Of course, the problem with conducting this experiment is that I will, you know, have to read one of those orifical discharges, so I'm not going to do it. I'm quite comfortable with my opinion on the matter as it is, thank you very much, and I don't want it disturbed by anything empirical.

About that cover art: look at the image here, from the hardcover version. (Click it for a bigger view.) The moment chosen is perfect, just before the hammer falls. Notice the creepy saggy gray suit of the attacker, whose face is masked. The arc that extends from his foot to his arm contains a force about to be released with savage violence. See how the tubular structure on the end of the spacecraft's wing in aligned so we see it as a perfect circle, and see how it repeats the pattern of the round planet Mars in the sky. It is midway in size between Mars and its tiny moon above. This is not hack work. The artist put some thought into it. On behalf of all the citizens of planet Earth, let me express our thanks.

The cover from the paperback version is dreadful. (And why couldn't they reuse the original, I wonder.) We get the scene a few minutes later, with the victim lying dead with a smashed helmet. (His face is not a bloody pulp; does that show the artist's restraint in depicting violence, or 1950s-era ignorance about what a vacuum can do to you?) Our Hero is awkwardly hunched over the body and and is giving us a frozen glare. Hey buddy, don't blame us. He looks middle-aged but if you read the book you know he's only sixteen. As Garrison Keillor would say, he looks like a sixteen-year-old who has had a hard life.

I've wondered about aworks for a while.  Who is this guy?  He blogs with a lot of authority about his favorite 20th century composers, yet he appears not to be a professional musician or critic.  (Or if he is, why isn't he shouting about it somewhere on his site?)  An additional mystery (from my point of view) is his enthusiasm about people I've never been able to generate much interest in (Antheil, Ives) or those whose music I regard as having been spewed from the black ravenous maw of hades* (Cage).  He doesn't necessarily blog each day, and he never blogs about his personal life -- no self-indulgent blathering.  When he posts something, it's about a piece of music he loves, usually with information about a recording.  These are thoughtful, disciplined, information-packed reviews and mini-essays.

Who is he?  Ah, here's the answer.

*Oh please.  What would you know about it?  Have you ever seen the maw of Hades?  Instead of black, charcoal-gray might be a more reasonable, nuanced description.  And ravenous?  Well, maybe it gets a little hungry now and then -- hey, who doesn't?  But this "black, ravenous" stuff seems so over the top, so ... inflexible.

I had a lot of fun at the Paul Taylor dance concert today, and Der Drubermensch paid attention, so all in all, a success.  This was a one-hour family performance.  I was glad to see lots of quite young kids there, even pre-schoolers.

(And here let me state that I would of course never, ever criticize someone else's parenting decisions, but I saw a boy there about my son's height -- and therefore probably five years old -- who had a pacifier in his mouth.  Unless there's something much more to that story, something very improbable, his parents are lunatics.)

I was surprised and disappointed that the music was not live.  Showing Der 'Mensch the musicians in the pit was an important part of the experience.  Bummer.  Maybe I should have known.

It's odd dance is so unpopular.  Adding a visual element to the music makes for a more diverting performance, even for someone like me who knows next to nothing about dance.  And yet, somehow more people would prefer going to an orchestra concert where the only non-static visual is some middle-aged guy with his back turned to the audience and who has a few too many Hostess cupcakes taped to his thighs. 

Paul Taylor's sense of humor is a saving grace.  Der 'Mensch chuckled all through one solo dance -- and he was supposed to.  I was reminded what Terry Teachout has to say about the humorlessness of an earlier generation of choreographers.  And whaddaya know:  he offers, as a contrast, the lightness of ... Paul Taylor.  I had honestly forgotten that part until I reread it just now.

We saw Sky Captain in a matinee.  It has been a long time that I have seen a movie that was so completely fake in all the ways that a movie should be.  This movie put me in an alternate world -- a gorgeous alternate world -- in a way reminiscent of, obviously, the first Batman movie, and in quite a different way, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

The opening sequence set the tone.  An airship called the Hindenburg III sails majestically into New York.  They give you a glimpse of the Empire State Building.  At that moment I said to myself, "by golly, they're going to use the mooring mast at the top!"  And they did, with the whole wonderful, goofily impossible business of getting passengers to disembark over a narrow, wind-shaken catwalk 1400 feet above the ground.  Beautiful.  I got my money's worth right there.

When I saw the trailer, I fell in love with the look, but I expected the screen play to be dreadful.  It was merely occasionally bad.  That would be unfortunate if you happen to be that particularly pathetic type of person who cares about character development and, you know, "motivation" and dialog and all that other effete crap.

Like Batman I, this movie's Gotham was more Gotham than the real New York.  In the 30s they had a good thing going, what with the Empire State and the Chrysler and all that.  Then Mies van der Rohe had to come over, and they felt sorry for him because of the Nazis and that whole big sob story that he and Gropius and all those guys gave, and everything just went to pot.  Heartbreaking.

Of the three movies I've mentioned, of course Crouching Tiger is in another league, since it has emotional depth (see also crap, effete).  And I can't quite resist thinking now of the several plot quibbles I have that bother me (as opposed the the tens of thousands which were also there but which I forgave instantly.)  Said quibbles include the whole ending sequence which was not thought through as much as it should have. Also, Sky Captain runs a huge military base on an island, and when it is attacked, his plane is the only one they send up.  Apparently the whole base is nothing but one big support system for Our Hero.  I guess Sky Captain is Tom Swift Jr. for adults.  (Did someone mention Tom Swift Jr.?)  Adults with the emotional maturity of 16-year-olds.

My previous post featured the Rose Ensemble and the nice-sounding concerts of early music they are giving in this area (S.E. Michigan) this weekend.  Now suddenly I'm hearing some reports about a concert they gave a few days ago in Peoria that make me wonder if their coming is such a great idea:

The Port Authority of Peoria has shut down St. Mary's Baptist Church after a raucous performance on Tuesday that left broken glass on the floor, graffiti on the walls and further destruction in its wake, the agency said yesterday.

Pasquale DiFuclo, a spokesman for the Port Authority, which operates the church, said the conductor of the concert, Jordan Sramek, had "failed to control the unlawful behavior of his audience" at the event. "We pulled the permit because the director violated his agreement," he said.

Besides smoking in the building and defacing the walls with graffiti, some concert-goers broke a door leading to a prayer grotto, Mr. DiFulco said. Liquor was being sold in the church without a permit, he added, and Ms. Ward failed to maintain the space to "an acceptable level of cleanliness." Vomit and broken glass were on the lobby's floor, he said.

The ensemble performed wearing only Afro wigs, black body paint and silver shackles on their ankles.

Hmmm.  I typed that up awfully fast -- better proofread a bit before I post it.  Hey, waaaait a minute, a lot of these details do not appear to be true.  Now I'm confused; I'm not sure what's real and what's not.  Maybe I better just post a link or two and let each reader reconstruct the truth as best he or she can.

If you live near Ann Arbor, you should really hear the Rose Ensemble this weekend.  They will sing at Christ Church in Cranbrook (a suburb of Detroit) Friday night, and at St. Andrews Episcopal Church in Ann Arbor Saturday night.

Chris Wolverton is the director of the local early music ensemble Vox.  He knows the Rose Ensemble well, as they have planned a joint concert, and indeed Rose director Jordan Sramek is one of Vox's, uh, voices.  (Vox means voice.  There's a joke there.  It's funny.)  Chris told me that Rose "kicks some serious major-league Renaissance-era butt."  Well, I'm writing from memory here, so maybe those were not his exact words.  Anyway, I definitely got the idea this is a group not to be missed.

I'm going to miss it.  Aargh!  Parents are visiting Friday, and Saturday is busy with taking Der Drubermensch to his first ballet.  That's a "family performance" of the Paul Taylor dance company.  I hope they take time thoroughly to explain what is going on with the dances.  So I will understand it.

(Both Rose and Vox have sound files you can download from their websites.  Dang!  How did they get so good?  They must have used whips.)

Evan Chambers records his melancholy memory of University of Michigan composer William Albright.

I believe I have heard Albright's music performed only twice.  And I see the Ann Arbor District Library has only about two CDs with his music on it.  I wonder if this town is neglecting him.  That would mesh with what Chambers is saying.

I found an Albright choral score at the U-M music library once and toyed with the idea of performing it at my church. It consisted of about 20 short melodic fragments, sung by various singers according to a complicated formula. Indeed, the set of instructions took up more space in the score than the notes themselves. The effect in performance would have been a gradual addition of melodies until a cloud of sound was acheived. My (artistically) (reasonably) open-minded congregation would have given it a fair hearing, but I'm sure I would have had resistance from a few of my singers. Oh well, what really restrained me was the practical problem of finding enough people and rehearsal time to pull it off properly.

I met Evan Chambers once and he was generous with his time and knowledge, giving me advice about where to get some composing instruction.  He has a homepage, naturally.

Both my kids love to improvise songs -- words and tunes.  Monday night I was walking with both in hand, and they were simultaneously riffing.

I don't remember ever doing that.  The Maharincess of Fredistan especially is in love with the sound of her own voice.  She specializes in pure fluency, unencumbered by any pedantic commitment to things like syntax or semantics.  That is not my style.  I prefer to hold off from doing anything until I understand everything.  Naturally, this is a recipe for paralysis.

This morning, she sang another original composition.  She is just shy of her third birthday and still in a state of noble savagery; soon civilization will crush the beautiful expressive freedom she has.  The words seemed to come from a place deep within the core of her being.  She sang this cri de coeur:

Poopy, Poopy,
Poopy poopy poopy.
Poopy, Poopy,
Poopy poopy poopy.

Whoa!  Was that a crystal Star Trek commemorative limited-edition "City On The Edge Of Forever" diorama that just whizzed past my head and shattered against the wall?

Lynn has a blog called Reflections in De Rigeur.  Or something.  Anyway, she's organizing a lynch mob over there in reaction to my Star Trek art = bad religious art post.  I left a comment at Lynn's place, and rather than repeat myself I'll just give you a link to the whole thing.

I hoped my slightly sarcastic attitude would come through in my writing.  After all, if you use the term "Q.E.D." and you don't mean it as a bit of a joke, you would have to be an insufferable twit.

Uh, Mr. Fredosphere sir?  They think you are an insufferable twit.

About once a month I check in on Andrew Cusack's blog.  I first discovered it during my first foray into antipopery research.

I am leaning toward the theory that this is not an elaborate parody.  This is a guy who, within the last week of posting, used the words luncheon and splendiferous (twice!) with no apparent irony.  His club-joining prowess is of impossibly Rushmore proportions (I mean that especially in this sense of the word) and his prose style has a quality way beyond his (alleged) years. 

Here's a typical post featuring the world's most dapper Catholic.  Have you ever seen one of Fulton Sheen's broadcasts?  "Amiable control freak" are the words that come to mind.  I once had a vision of a "Fulton the Vampire Slayer" scenario: 

Sheen battles a demon in hand-to-claw combat, his cassock shredded and his hair matted with blood and bile, he defeats his enemy, then rushes to the TV studio, and in a matter of moments he washes up and slips into his bishop suit (one of a special design with a single huge zipper all down the back), then strolls onto the set, not a hair out of place, and as the camera rolls he begins speaking in perfectly modulated tones....

Notice on September 30 Cusack announces the sad news that his godson is excommunicate.  Believe me, I'm not making fun.  And again, I'm going with the theory that Cusack is not making fun either.  But of all the Gen-Zers on earth, what kind of coincidence is it that it would be Cusack's godson who would join the Masons?  I mean, I've only met a very few Masons in my life and none of them were less than 40 years older than I.  Kids these days just don't do Masonry.  They've got about 17,000 other apostasies they would more likely choose -- I mean, am I right?

This latest installment of The Varieties Of Religious Art takes a stroll down Star Trek Lane.  Previous VORAs may be read here, here, here and here. We have shown that religion produces bad art, and that bad art is an indicator for the presence of religion.  This is not an argument against religion (you know me better than that); it is simply an observation that religion serves as an motivator for creating and consuming art, for people who would not otherwise have much to do with art, and who are not prepared to interact with art on purely artistic terms.  They are interested in its didactic function, and that can be deadly.

Thus, I give you exhibit A:  The Star Trek 25th Anniversary Plate.  There are lots more where that came from.  Thus is proved by geometric logic the thesis that Star Trek is a religion.  Ipso facto.  Q.E.D.  Additional proof would be redundant, but a lot of fun, so check out this and this, and then go watch this documentary.

In comparison to these platefuls of last night's dinner vomited back up, Sallman's creations seem models of technical mastery and tasteful restraint.

By demographics and personality, I should be a Trekkie, but I am not.  I do not remember with fondness those who have embarrassed me, and Star Trek routinely left me hot, hot with vicarious embarrassment.  Who could forget the episode where an alien race independently developed the U.S. system of government (with the same flag even!) or the one with Nazis, complete with swastikas and Darth Vader helmets?   I will never forgive them for the the episode where Kirk marvels that a seemingly sophisticated people would worship the "sun," and Lt. Uhura replies, her face radiant with beatific joy, "they're not worshiping the sun, Captain; they're worshiping the Son of God!"

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Finally, let me end on a tangent.  This is something that's been bugging me for decades.  In the transporter room, the controls seem to consist of a set of three faders, like something you would see on a small mixer in a recording studio.  Study the picture here carefully, and you will see them.  The fader concept makes a certain sense, because the transporter action is gradual; there's a period of time where the transported person is half here and half there.  But why three?  Is that for red-green-blue?  The faders are always moved in tandem, but I would love to see what would happen if you moved only one.  Would that transport a red Kirk onto the planet, leaving a cyan Kirk behind on the ship?  I'm just asking.

Labels: VarietiesOfReligiousArt

Last night Der Drübermensch was showing great interest in my Sitemeter stats.  (His powers of attention become awe-inspiring when bedtime is being avoided.)  I showed him how many people had visited the Fredösphere this week.  His reaction:  "well, I didn't know that many people loved you."  It's not enough, kid.  It will never be enough.

So, how can I get my traffic numbers up?  How do you succeed in the arts blögôsphère?  The 800 lb. gorillas:  what's their secret?  I went to Steve Sailer for answers and found this article.  I'm not interested in debating his thesis, that  the doping scandals of athletics in the 1980s raised false expectations that women could eventually equal or surpass men in sports like sprinting.  But check this out: 

The East German bioengineers were stumped at producing male sprint champions, however, because the benefits of a given amount of steroids are much greater for women than men. Since men average 10 times more natural testosterone than women, they need dangerously large, Ben Johnson-sized doses to make huge improvements, while women can speed-up significantly on smaller, less-easily detected amounts. Thus, the reduction in steroid use due to improved drug testing has hurt women's times more.

The other major reason for the widening of the gender gap after 1998 is that the scandal of Ben Johnson, who was injecting so many steroids his eyes had turned yellow, winning the men's 100m in a subsequently disqualified world record was so great that more effective steroid tests were subsequently implemented.

Could "Ben Johnson-sized doses" of testosterone improve one's blogging ability?  It seems fantastic, and yet, I'm comparing The Fredösphere to other blogs, and I'm asking, what's wrong?  I've been blogging for literally weeks, I've paid my dues dangit, and where are the hordes of adoring, commenting fans?  What's Reflections in D Minor got that I haven't got?  What's Greg Sandow or Kyle Gann injecting that I'm not?

So,  'fess up, Terry:  how did you get so freaky?  How about it, Michael:  what's your secret to beating the drug tests?  Look in the mirror, Alex:  what color are your eyes?

Paul Graham has a provocative essay on hackers and how they write software.  (Tip o' the hat to Beautiful Stuff.)  His POV is that of the extreme hacker type, a familiar character in the programmer world:

All the time I was in graduate school I had an uncomfortable feeling in the back of my mind that I ought to know more theory....  Now I realize I was mistaken. Hackers need to understand the theory of computation about as much as painters need to understand paint chemistry.

Painters can do a lot without theory, but a knowledge of chemistry would in fact not be useless, as Graham seems to admit:

You need to know how to calculate time and space complexity and about Turing completeness. You might also want to remember at least the concept of a state machine, in case you have to write a parser or a regular expression library.  Painters in fact have to remember a good deal more about paint chemistry than that.

Now, here he adds architects to the mix:

If I had only looked over at the other makers, the painters or the architects, I would have realized that there was a name for what I was doing: sketching. As far as I can tell, the way they taught me to program in college was all wrong. You should figure out programs as you're writing them, just as writers and painters and architects do.

Well, some painters and architects.  I believe the ideal is to organize in your head, then transcribe.  Mozart never revised or rewrote, and Frank Lloyd Wright famously prepared no preliminary sketches before he drew up the plans for Fallingwater.  David W. Galenson has written a whole book trying to separate artists into experimental innovators (i.e, sketchers) and conceptual innovators (i.e, uh, non-sketchers).

Anyway, what really caught my eye was the word maker.  I latched onto that word a while back as a good self-description, in an attempt to escape from the thinker-doer continuum that I felt I didn't really fit into.  I know I'm not a doer, yet thinker didn't seem right either -- the creation of theories does not interest me.  I love to design things, with production of a tangible artifact as the end result.

Oddly, as a composer, I count the score as a tangible artifact, not the performance.  Obviously, this is a grave disadvantage.  I do not take the kind of interest in my music that I ought, once I'm done writing it.  I really need a team of admirers, groupies, and sycophants to take on the job of getting my music performed.

Any volunteers?

Country music may drive you to suicide.  Hat tip to Arts & Letters Daily.

Oh, and your underwear can kill you.

I have long suspected my one enduring contribution to western civilization will be a little parlor game I invented called Name Dropping.  Your group sits in a circle and you keep going around, naming famous people you have a "relationship" with.

Oh, but no one cares if it's something close and obvious.  If your are the illegitimate child of Sidney Poitier, that might impress a party of high-toned Manhattan art dealers, but it won't win you any points if they are playing Name Dropping.  On the other hand, if your mailman is the illegitimate child of Sidney Poitier, that's something.  After all, who the heck knows stuff about their mailman?

The thing is, you must be connected to the famous person by a chain of relationships.  The more links, the better, because those long chains, while more common, are less known.  So the game is all about your ability to notice and keep track of the chains.  There's no formal point scoring or even voting, but everyone gets a sense of who the winners and losers are.  (I should probably be ashamed to admit I usually win.)

This all came up today in an multi-party email discussion.  Someone mentioned Ted Neugent and my friend Victor said his wife Marion knew Ted as a teenager.  Ted was playing in a band and Marion told him to try singing:  "its so loud people won't hear you anyway."  If Marion played the game and said,  "I'm the one who told Ted Neugent to sing" -- boooooooring.  If Victor said "my wife..." -- that would be better.  If I said "my co-worker's wife..." -- well, that would be worth a few points.

The ultimate name drop would be something like this: 

The neighbor of my mailman's cousin was beaten up in kindergarten by a co-worker of the ex-wife of a guy who was hired once to shampoo Teresa Heinz Kerry's dog. 

If you could pull that one off, you would win by a landslide!