The Fredösphere

My friend Dave the harpsichord hobbyist sent this photo of his near-completed masterpiece.  But is a harpsichord ever really "complete?" Each little quill needs infinite amounts of hand-sanding so the voicing of the instrument is perfectly, perfectly uniform at each key.  (Click on the photo for a bigger view of that beautiful mahogany veneer.)

My friend writes:  "there is still a bit of work to do in terms of voicing, but the main 8' choir sounds pretty decent." I like that:  "pretty decent."  No doubt the main 8' choir will be upgraded to "quite decent" after another two years of delicate adjustment.

I can't wait to try out the Shostakovich A-minor fugue on it. But will that be allowed? Dave is a confirmed baroque fanatic; he may have added one of those dissonance low-pass filters that shut the instrument down after too many minor ninths are played.

Labels: Design

Bradley Bloom, A local choir director, tried an adventurous program this weekend with his Flint (Michigan) Festival Chorus involving a pastiche concert mass of music by seven different composers. Not content with this innovation, he continued with a second half consisting of some experimental works that called for buzzing, slapping and other sound effects. The reviewer was less than thrilled, but the audience apparently loved it. Here's the review.

We saw the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and its merry troupe of players perform A Midsummer's Night's Dream on Friday night, so I'm obligated to tell you how it was.  I never learned the discipline of a proper reviewer, but I'll give you my scattered thoughts.

I wonder how often Mendelssohn's music is performed as originally intended?  I suspect the experience is rare, in which case it is a rare treat.  It is a bit of an odd treat also, since the terribly familiar wedding march has been ripped from its context and replaced in the original context, thus making it fresh and exciting.  The price of admission was justified simply for the chance to hear that music fresh; something I would have thought was impossible.

The orchestra featured period instruments, and frankly, I was surprised how much trouble they had staying in tune, at least in the beginning.  I won't say more, since I don't have much experience with such ensembles in live performance, although I recall Trevor Pinnock's band didn't have that much difficulty when they brought the six Brandenburgs to town two years ago.

I think the acting was brilliant, in spite of the cheesy gags (in a reference to our local tycoon Tom Monahan, they used a Domino's Pizza as a prop -- it was cheesy, get it???) but honestly, the whole performance must be judged a resounding failure, simply because much of it was inaudible.  Here the inconsistency of Hill Auditorium's acoustics was exposed most severely.  When a player stood center stage, and especially when he or she faced the side wall or spoke to the floor (i.e, when the voice was directed at the reflective surfaces) they were loud.  When placed at the side or in the back, it was nothing but mumble, mumble.  Sigh.  This is simply an irredeemable flaw.

One final fly in the ointment appeared in the form of a 70ish woman seated behind us.  She didn't like the acting, she thought the gorgeous music was merely an annoyance, and she complained about the lack of volume.  Maybe, in spite her years, she had never learned the first lesson of polite behavior, but I felt as though she was someone who observed the various flaws of the performance (real or imagined), noticed there were benighted souls around her who might erroneously be enjoying themselves, and so chose to perform a public service by letting us know how bad it was.  Gee, thanks lady.

A Midsummer's Night's Dream:  it's on tonight, and we will be there!  With incidental music by some young, up-'n'-coming composer named Felix Mendelssohn.  It's not clear whether this performance will feature sock puppets.

Speaking of young composers, many choral directors are talking about Joshua Shank, a 20-something kid who already has several pieces published.  He was mentored by the magisterial Weston Noble of Luther College.  Word in the choir loft is that Joshua is not only talented, but humble and likable too -- how disgusting.  He admits to being one of The Artists Formerly Known As The Dale Warland Singers.  Follow the links from here for scores and sound files, or just listen to "Musica animam tangens."

Other contemporary choral composers I should mention include Frank La Rocca and Ian Moss.  Both have sound files available from their websites.  Both are moody neo-tonalists who have been compared to Arvo Pärt and Eric Whitacre (the last being the winner of the composer's slick webpage award).  Start your listening with La Rocca's Exaudi and Moss' We Kindle This Fire This Day.

Alex Ross restarts the key character discussion.  I love this stuff.  As one who has the ear for key personalities, its jarring to discover perfectly good musicians who poo-poo the whole thing, or give inadequate explanations for the phenomenon.  I feel strongly that the various physical designs of instruments do not fully explain key personalities, however important they may be.  It is true I hate F major when a choir is singing that key, yet happily choose it when composing something for brass ensemble.  Nevertheless, F major sung and F major tooted retain a fundamental common ... whatsamathingy we call character or personality or mood.

Alex identified E-flat minor as the key of death, so I rushed to my own key classification table to find out what I think about it.  Some keys I can describe clearly:  I know E minor is the key of loss, remoteness, loneliness, and nobody is ever going to talk me out of that opinion.  Other keys I find harder to express concisely, and E-flat minor is one of them.  Sure enough, on my list I chickened out and made a lame joke instead of describing it (where I referred to it enharmonically as D-sharp minor).  Looking at the related keys, I see I called C-sharp minor is "desperate" and G-sharp minor is "really desperate."  I suppose I could extrapolate from my own list and align my opinion with Alex's at the same time by calling E flat minor "suicidally desperate."

Christian Schubart is the guy who seems to own the franchise on key personalities, so let's see what he has to say about a few keys:

B minor. This is as it were the key of patience, of calm awaiting one's fate and of submission to divine dispensation.

My key table describes B minor as simply "serious."  Okay, I sorta kinda was right.  In fact, I think Schubart is too specific. 

What does the master say about D flat major:

Db Major.  A leering key, degenerating into grief and rapture. It cannot laugh, but it can smile; it cannot howl, but it can at least grimace its crying.--Consequently only unusual characters and feelings can be brought out in this key.

Forgive me, but this is nuts.  My key table says ... what?  I called it "complex?"  I agreed with Schubart?  Sorry, D flat major is too classy, too sumptuous.  It deserves better.

Let's return to E-flat/D-sharp minor:

D# minor. Feelings of anxiety of the soul's deepest distress, of brooding despair, of blackest depression, of the most gloomy condition of the soul. Every fear, every hesitation of the shuddering heart, breathes out of horrible [D#] minor. If ghosts could speak, their speech would approximate this key.

The sound of ghosts speaking?  Bingo, Alex!  You nailed it.

P.S.  Alex, let me publicly thank you for the link a few days back.  You are a one-man Algonquin Round Table of the blogösphere, except that you're not round, you're not a table, and you're (probably) not Algonquin!

I really enjoyed NPR's piece on the soundtrack to Forbidden (bidden, bidden) Planet (planet, planet).  The all-electronic music was composed by Louis and Bebe Barron, who were rewarded for their pioneering work in true Hollywood fashion by being shut out of movie scoring for the rest of their lives.  I imagine "You'll never bloop or fnnrt in this town again!" is what they heard as they were booted from the studio boss' office.  (Hat tip to The Standing Room for that cool "bloop and fnnrt" link.)

Watch the accompanying video clips from Forbidden Planet.  The movie had everything I love and hate:  grandiloquent dialog, retro-futurism, and pure distilled 50s-era Freudianisms:

"You sent your secret id out to murder them! ...your subconscious sent its id monster out again!

Or was it the id that sent its subconscious monster out again?  And should the superego be held as an accessory?  This is all so complicated.

I am furious to learn someone thought up the 12 Angry Mennonites joke before I did.  Nevertheless, I must admit Top5.com's list of Amish Horror Movies is pretty darn funny.  My favorites are The Pennsylvania Two-Man Saw Attempted Massacre and I Quilt On Your Grave. I got email from the library today:

Borrower ID:  XXXXXXXXXX1197                                          
Please pick up at location under AGENCY by date listed under HOLD TIL.
You MUST use library card listed above.  For questions, call 327-4219.
       CALL NUMBER        TITLE             REQ DATE  AGENCY  HOLD TIL
DVD Fiction Alias 2n Alias.                 01/31/05 MAIN     03/03/05

Hosanna!  My buddy Mitch informs me things get very interesting in the second season.

Why doesn't my choir at St. Luke Lutheran ever get the cool video game sound track gigs?

Chanticleer is premiering a new music theater work.  Music and theater?  Can they do that? Constantine is a religious movie, right?  So that means the soundtrack must have a choir, right? Wilber-Clatonia High School in Nebraska is haunted:

It's said that a student once fell and died while working on a latter [sic] in the auditorium.. People have seen things move and fall on there own in the 'storage room' (located next to the auditorium). And the auditorium itself is the coldest place in the building with feelings of someone watching you. Music can be heard coming from the band room and choir room and voices can be heard also when in the school after dark.

Music?  Coming from the band and choir room, of all places???  That is disturbing. Residents of Cumbernauld, Scottland are begging the BBC to destroy their town (hat tip to ArtsJournal):

It was a groundbreaker in its day, with its concrete town centre on stilts designed by the architect Geoffrey Copcutt containing Britain's first indoor shopping mall. It even won architectural awards in the 1970s when brutalism was the flavour of the decade and provided the rose-tinted backdrop to the 1981 film about puppy love, Gregory's Girl. Things have taken a downturn since. In 2001 it won the Carbuncle Award for the most dismal place in Scotland, described by the judges as "a rabbit warren on stilts" and "soulless and inaccessible, something like Eastern Europe before the Wall came down".

Soon I will join the teeming ranks of scanner owners.  I had no idea scanners were so cheap (I'm paying $40, including shipping) and I'm embarrassed it took me so long to get one.  As my buddy Victor said, no doubt we'll soon see a Gallery of Regrettable Choral Music showing up at the Fredösphere. Take 6.  So, they're still at it, eh?  I remember hearing their debut album back in the ... late 80s, was it?  I was stunned that an a cappella group could sound like a jazz band.  The countertenors sang like trumpets and the bass sounded like a, um, bass.  (But you know what I mean:  a bass.)  Much later, I saw them live, warming up for the Neville Brothers, and they sang a very long improvisation over a human beat-box rhythm, and I'm sad to say the whole experiment failed to move me.  Have they since un-jumped the shark?  That their official web site lists two, count 'em, two Christmas albums augurs not well, but this track from their 2002 album Beautiful World sounds like the good old days.  (Here's a complete downloadable version that didn't make the album.) More from the first article:

Take 6's tuneful trail leads to Ruby Diamond Auditorium on Saturday for a concert presented by Seven Days of Opening Nights. McKnight, the older brother of popular R&B performer Brian McKnight, said the program will feature a mix of new material and hits from the group's two-decade, award-studded career.

That "Seven Days" is a joke or some amazing coincidence.  Although their vibe is mainstream evangelical Christian, all the members of Take 6 are Seventh Day Adventists.  I don't know about you, but according to my upbringing, the Adventists were definitely not in the fold. They were sheep of another pasture, in fact, sheep of another, very weird, pasture. Nowadays, I would characterize the Adventists as orthodox-plus, where the plus is a few cultural distinctives like worship on Saturday, and set of founding documents which prophesied the return of Christ on a particular date in history.  (Oh dear.)  Once that date came and went, the group suffered a crisis, and when the dust settled, they finessed the whole thing in a pretty unconvincing way.  More recently the movement appears to have split into various factions and has become hard to pin down (from an outsider's point of view).  Eschatological enthusiasms:  will people ever learn?  No.

I'm all for whimsy, but somebody made an error in judgment with this album's title and cover art.  The one reviewer agrees with me, using harsher words. Speaking of harsh reviews, David Edelstein at Slate has problems with Keanu Reeves' new movie Constantine:

Constantine, directed by MTV auteur Francis Lawrence from a screenplay (based on the Hellblazer comics) by Kevin Brodbin and Frank A. Cappello, is borderline incoherent, theologically unsatisfying, and short to the point of dwarfism on suspense. The central problem—our selfish hero must do one unselfish act to get into heaven—is not exactly Miltonic, either. But it's all just bloody and loopy and epic-scaled enough to be bearable. I liked Constantine's bowling-alley headquarters and the metaphysical nightclub where the bouncer holds up a card and you only get in if you can say what's on the other side. Tilda Swinton, as the angel Gabriel, seems to be doing a send-up of Emma Thompson in Angels in America. (At least, I hope she is.) And it's worth sticking around for the appearance of the certifiably strange Swede Peter Stormare as someone referred to as "Lou." He's like an Ingmar Bergman devil by way of Joel and Ethan Coen, a genuine hipster from hell.

Edelstein makes the whole thing sound to me like cultural imperialism, a sifting through two millenia of Christian thought for the purpose of extracting just enough material to make some spooky visuals.

Der Drübermensch had graduated from improviser to composer.  He's been making up melodies on the piano for a while, but now he has done something special:  he played this tune one day, then played it again the next day, exactly the same way.  (Did I mention he's only six?)

Having finished with the exposition, he has now moved on to the development section:  he's playing it in Dorian and Aeolian modes.  I can't wait to find out how he works his way back to the recapitulation.

Ah, the power of the notational tradition in western classical music:  find some beautiful, living object -- and embed it in Lucite for all eternity!  I love it!  These exclamation points signal my irony and ambivalence!  Causing you to wonder what my real point is!

Labels: Composer, CuteKid

I found this video via Musica Transatlantica.  As soon as it started, I says to myself, "I know that place!  It's the University of Friggin' Michigan School of Friggin' Music!"  (I knew it about two seconds into it.  Those yellow bricks gave it away.)  A quick glance at the url confirmed it.  I'm proud to play a part in spreading this video-bourne meme.  My favorite part is the bust of Beethoven among the unquenchable flames of Gehenna.  I'm still trying to figure out the microwave oven. Helen Radice admits with extreme reluctance that she dislikes Brahms:

Obviously Brahms is a great composer, and I am loath to fall prey to that sort of unseeing arrogance that says things like "King Lear's quite a good play", so I do listen to him in the hope I will finally get it.  There is something neurotic in his endless development and variation, and an overwhelming sense of personal misery or disquiet.  I have nothing against sad music - on the contrary, it's terribly important - but in Brahms I find little hope or resolution.  Even the waltzes are nervous.  It does my head in.

Helen, some would respond that it "says more about you than it says about Brahms."  Yes, exactly, and what it says about you is that you've got at least half a brain and you've got your own individually developed taste and you're not afraid to be different.  Now, if you took the next step and concluded that the rest of the world must be crazy, you would have a problem.  Until then, let us know what you don't like.  If you have your reasons, let's hear those too. Anyway, it's not as thought disliking Brahms is all that extreme.  It's not like you profaned the name of Mozart or something.

Via Ionarts, I present to you The Suspicious Cheese Lords.  Follow the links from their website to their CD vendor and you'll find the sound files for this all-male a cappella choir devoted to early music.  M'lords, here's a bit of advice:  get your own, better-quality sound files and link to them directly from your home page.  I'm fairly certain you sound great, but the sound files at CD Baby are compressed, yea unto death.  You need some sound snippets that do you more justice.

So, about this wacky name business, this "Suspicious Cheese Lords:"  I'm guessing there's an obscure historical reference in there, but it's over my head.  If it's a non sequitur, they missed their chance to maximize the all-important whimsy metric with a name like, oh, say the Doctrinaire Beeswax Enthusiasts or maybe the Supernal Interns of Ululation.  (Don't google those; I just now made them up.)

[Accessing....Accessing....]

Ah, so that's where they got their name. Obscure reference, indeed.

Meanwhile, our eagle-eyed linkeratrix Lynn has classified a category of bad web page design.  Close readers of this blog will not be shocked to learn that Lynn has found a connection to religion (among other things).  We know such a webpage is not evidence that a given religion is bad (although religions can be bad; ooooh yes, they can), it may simply be an example of:  When Bad Design Happens to Good Religion.

Two paintings from the famous series of dogs playing poker sold for nearly $600 grand.  Unbelieveable.  Beautiful.  (The original story says they "fetched" $600K.  Fetched. Oh, that's cute.)

That reminds me:  I have an idea for a short story that will never get written, so I'll tell it to you now.  An innovative chef battling a mid-life crisis visits a dog show.  While there, he notices among the vendors of dog-themed nick nacks an artist who sells sentimental, gauzy paintings of women breast-feeding their dogs.  (Ooookay, let's pause here for a moment.  Believe me, if you hang around dog people for any length of time, you will learn that such paintings would not seem so terribly out of place.  I'm exaggerating a lot less than you might think.)  The whole dog-show experience inspires him and gives him new enthusiasm for his work.  He prepares a big catered meal for a high-profile client that includes some unnamed experimental ingredient.  The narrative will somehow lead you to suspect the ingredient is dog meat, but in the end you will learn it is -- surprise! -- human breast milk.  I mean, why not?  Why should that be disgusting?  (Although it is; oh yes, it is.)

So now you know more about how my mind works.

Add The Territory Ahead to the long list of retailers that no longer sell stuff qua stuff but now sell stuff qua fantasy delivery vehicles.  Take this page, which only the naive would suppose exists to convince you to buy a sport coat:

You never actually told her that you teach at the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, that you’ve lived in seven countries, that you've received (and gone through) a MacArthur grant. All this she simply assumed, naturally enough, from your sport coat — from its carefree drape; its soft, garment-washed cotton denim in a ripstop weave; its deep, burr-riveted hip pockets; its pigment piece-dyed twill trim. Now you may eventually confess that you're a radiologist from Poughkeepsie, but the coat will never tell. Cotton plaid-lined, with two inside pockets (one button-flap, one welted); corozo-nut buttons; adjustable, button-through sleeves; and self-elbow patches. Machine washable. Imported in Teal; Khaki.

I just placed my order, so it's barely possible my darling wifeösphere will come to assume I teach at the Instituto and have lived in seven countries.  However, she's not going to be fooled about the MacArthur grant; she knows I've burned that bridge.

Sometimes I worry that my humor is too oblique for you people.  Today, I offer a hint that I hope will clear up at least some of the confusion.  It involves my use of exclamation points.  If you see me using an exclamation point for, you know, exclamations, you can bet my intention is relatively sincere and straightforward:

Gadzooks!  Zounds!

However, if the exclamation point comes at the end of a sentence far too long to be an exclamation, and especially if the sentence lacks a certain compactness and rhythmic discipline characteristic of good, punchy prose, then you are free to suspect that my intent is ironical:

Terry Teachout and Alex Ross are the Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin of the blogösphere, except without the genocide!

Finally, you can be sure that pretty much anything Umie the Umlaut says is a lie:

Umie says, "Fred is right; everything I say is a lie."

There.  All clear? Via Instapundit, we learn of a book that claims Americans got all the goofball genes:

America has an extraordinarily high number of hypomanics -- grandiose types who leap on every wacky idea that occurs to them, utterly convinced it will change the world.

Did an American come up with this idea? Finally, in the news, an early music group has resurrected an opera by John Blow that features three dogs, which brings to mind Peter Schickele's joke about "Fido and Anaeas."  Meanwhile, VocalEssence of Minneapolis got a discouraging review (registration required) from the Pioneer Press for a tribute concert to composer/renaissance man Gordon Parks:

But then the VocalEssence Chorus took over and the sense of swing evaporated quickly. Granted, "Take the 'A' Train" and "Stompin' at the Savoy" don't lend themselves well to arrangements for a large chorus, but the soul seemed sapped from them. The disconnect between the choir's classical training and the street smarts that inform jazz and R&B was never more glaring than on a cringe-inducing excerpt from Isaac Hayes' "Theme from 'Shaft'." (Parks directed the film.)

Yikes.  Maybe swapping the sopranos and altos would have loosened them up.

It's a harmonic convergence dovetailing among a confluence!  Earlier today I blogged Thomas Kinkade; now I see James Panero at the New Criterion's blog has come up with a provocative thesis: Christo is Kinkade on a grander scale.

So the point of the Gates is not about the gates but about you--about your good feelings, about communing with nature, about going for a walk with your fellow man and feeling good about the city so nice they named it twice! Easy! Who can't get that? And indeed, therein lies the subtle fraud that is Christo. His is an art for everyone and for no one. The Gates may be art, but art of the most debased design. The Gates is ultimate kitsch offered up as high art. One criterion separating the two is the ability to criticize the latter but not the former on aesthetic grounds, and on aesthetic grounds (like the spectacles of old Bulgaria, one imagines) 'The Gates' go beyond critique.

Can you tell the difference between the Christo and Kinkade? Are you sure?  Panero asks you to take the quiz!

Via Colby Cosh, this important lesson:  friends don't let friends play chess drunk. His Coshness also meditates on a major attraction of live entertainment, what he calls IWT, the I-Was-There factor:

For another example, consider the lucrative mini-theatres that superannuated musicians and comedians have colonized in Branson, Mo. Yakov Smirnoff and the Gatlin Brothers are still down there slugging away, god love 'em. I figure Branson is the future of entertainment, though it's disguised convincingly as the past. Without the IWT Factor, it's impossible to imagine why people would fill a theatre to see Bobby Vinton. Someday, every star may have his own personal theatre.

I'm certainly getting my own very soon. I hope you're checking PartiallyClips regularly. Wait!  Stop whatever part of the blogösphere that more or less corresponds to the presses!  Sensors indicate a religious art discussion is happening at The Evangelical Outpost.  Thomas Kinkade is being criticized!  Nicely!  C'mon, people, we want a sarcastic edge -- show some steel.  This is the way we like bad religious art handled around here. UPDATE: Don't miss more bloggy goodness on the Kinkade Kwestion in the following post.

Alex Ross fears a new trend: the use of classical music as a bug spray substitute.  I agree, this is terrible.  It's only a matter of time until they realize music causes cancer.

And while we're responding to Alex Ross, let me add my two cents to the great musical literacy debate.  One reason score-based music is disliked by many is that so many performers never escape the score.  If the music doesn't have a score, you can't bury your nose in it.  If you do use a score, you must learn it to the point you don't need it anymore.  Choral singers:  I'm talking to you!  Look up from your music once in a while.  (Here's the secret: use the muscles in your neck.)  This is all a continuation of the point I made yesterday.

Sadly, the Soviet Star Trek is a hoax, and I'm pretty sure there's something phony about this too.

Lynn spotted another Cool Band Name:  it's a string ensemble called The Rare Fruits Council.

There's a bit of interesting local news I noticed:  composer Ricky Ian Gordon will be at the Kerrytown Concert House in Ann Arbor this Friday.  Three local divas will sing his songs.  The details are here.

I heard the Saline Fiddlers perform Friday night.  It's a group of high school-aged kids playing fiddles, violas, cellos, backed by rhythm instuments like banjos, mandolins and a bass guitar.  They play american folk classics and folk-inspired tunes, like those written by Mark O'Connor.  They are one of the most compelling groups of preformers I've ever seen.  What's their secret?

It's not technical perfection, although I want to be very clear that they are performing at a very high level for their age.  The fact is, although you can notice mistakes if you're listening for them, they perform in such a way as to make you not care.  Partly the structure of the music prevents "clams" from disrupting the flow -- the rhythm section keeps things moving.  They keep your attention by alternating between a big chorus of strings (a dozen or more) and soloists.

Okay, so the music is arranged intellegently, but that's not what puts them over the top.  Their secret lies in their performing sense.  Most every player wears a big goofy grin while playing.  They are having fun, or at least making an effort to fake it.  Throw in a few more cornball touchs -- they introduce one another as "Mr." or "Miss" -- and it becomes very hard not to enjoy the show.

This is where so many high-brow music groups fall down.  The task of getting the notes perfect consumes all the performer's brain power. They perform with expressionless masks on their faces. The performance never engages the listener's emotions.  Not surprisingly, I notice this problem with choirs especially.

I can't overlook one disappointment:  their reliance on a sound system.  The music is loud, too loud really.  Are we never allowed to hear folk music played in true old tyme fashion?  The size the room on Friday night didn't require amplification.

I'm done complaining.  The Saline Fiddlers host camps for up-and-coming fiddlers and I hear they have a host of younger kids working their respective butts off in the hope of joining the group.  They seem to be fostering a fiddle culture in the area.  This is so good.

I wish I could do the same for choral music.  Why aren't people lining up for the chance to perform with me?  Perhaps it's because I look like this.

There's little time for blogging right now because my lunch time was devoured by a company function at Pacific Rim Restaurant. The food there is fantastic, and the general classiness of the whole operation is summed up by the way the prices are expressed on the menu: as integers, not floating-point numbers. It's my favorite place to eat, so naturally I'm stunned it has survived for lo these several years.

Mixolydian Mode is a force of bloggish nature right now. Check out the links in posts about the Soviet knock-off of Star Trek (really!) and classical Greek culture cut into bite-sized pieces for we immature folk. (I especially recommend the Iliad as a graphic novel. No joke.)

Condoleezza Rice is settling into her new role as a choir music clinician: "They say Beethoven is the most difficult composer for the voice." I'm sure this group is not intimidated. Neither is the Hungarian Radio Choir, which braved an invasion of robotech, which is unfamiliar to me but sure sounds scary. But not as scary as Neotech.

This blog's mission statement compels me to monitor closely all cases of choral music-science fiction convergence.  Thus I blogged the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performing on the soundtrack of Advent Rising, a new computer game.  Well, I noticed the press release announcing the game's release says something funny:

Composition and sound design was created by award-winning composer and video game sound designer Tommy Tallarico, who enlisted the talents of a world famous operatic choir and their complimenting children's choir united to perform the music's extraordinary chorus.

So now the MTC is called an "operatic choir?"  What's up with that?  Is the MTC brand unknown to the younger generation?  (Then "world-famous" must refer to a world very alien to the one gamers live in.)  Or are they thinking that little word "Mormon" would frighten the horses?  (And they thought "operatic" wouldn't?  Very confusing.) So, what operas do you think the MTC performs? I suppose Falstaff would be their signature work (with all those merry wives of Windsor).  Other than that, I can't imagine.

If I won't endure a drive to Detroit for opera, you can be sure I wasn't willing to fly out to Washington D.C. for a sci-fi production of Boris Godunov in January:

The Kirov production team opted for antiquity garnished with sci-fi: Medieval boyars and monks acting out their ceremonies and prophetic visions amid scenic elements that might have been borrowed from "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still." As Boris' coronation reaches its climax, a stylized crown descends. It would be a majestic descent, except that the crown looks like a Hershey's kiss that has turned neon-red and sprouted horns and ground lights. A fleet of the things later descend on Boris and his boyars. The Muscovite nobles confront their suspect czar after emerging from form-fitting boyar boxes. They come in boxes, apparently, for the same reason that Boris is crowned while encased in a cage -- fated to play out their roles inflexibly (although outfitted with wheels for easier mobility).

For an alternate take, read Jens Laurson at ionarts, who liked all aspects of the show, finding the sets "poignant, not gimmicky," and he provides photos of the Hershey's kiss and even the mechanical spider (!) that unfolds in Boris' death scene. Two different critics, two different opinions.  We can't allow this to continue.  We need all critics to agree on a common set of metrics, a set of objectively measurable criteria for evaluating a performance.  This will solve the problem of conflicting opinions.  Yes, that's what we need.  Science.

This article about soprano Denyce Graves turned up.  This spring she will be in Detroit singing in the world premiere of Richard Danielpour's opera Margaret Garner.  (The libretto is by Toni Morrison.)  This is a must-be-there event for anyone in S.E. Michigan who wants to be considered a serious musician -- right?

Sigh.  I thought about going, but the idea of spending maybe 150 bucks for tickets, dinner and a sitter, plus 1.5+ hours of driving time, for an event that the wifeösphere might not enjoy at all, and I might not enjoy either, just didn't seem worth it.

My dirty little secret is that I have seen only a few operas in my life (less than ten) and I didn't enjoy many of them.  Some were student productions and the singers were technically overwhelmed, even though they were from Michigan and Indiana -- top music schools.  I saw one opera at the Met, but by my luck happened to be the Mozart singspiel Abduction from the Seraglio-- zzzzzzzzzz.  The most pleasurable experience occurred in Florence:  I was with a student group traveling through Italy, and we decided to get rush tickets for what ever happened to be playing, which turned out to be Porgy and Bess.

In retrospect, the only opera experience that really held my attention (and the wifeösphere's) beginning to end was a workshop performance of Act I of Bright Sheng's Madame Mao.  The singers were not uniformly good, and the accompaniment was piano alone, but the lead soprano was dynamite, we sat very, very close to the action, and it was sung in comprehensible English.  It worked for us as drama, and that is essential.

Are there any operas I do wish I could see?  Yes, it's a short and maybe slightly quirky list.  It contains only one of the Italian standards, and a little Wagner; otherwise, I want compelling stories sung in English.

Jackie O  Daugherty tops my list.  This would be fun for anyone, wouldn't it? La Boheme  I loved my old vinyl recording.  The music seems treacly now, but I would still enjoy it. Dido and Anaeus  It's more than 22.5 minutes but I think I could squeeze it into my attention span.
The Flying Dutchman  I'd see this one if the production were lavish.  I want to see ships at sail, driving rain, donner und bitzen:  the works!
Rheingold  Definitely, although I've grown increasingly disillusioned with The Ring's story. 
Peter Grimes  But if Peter Pears were to rise from the dead to sing the title role, count me out.  I just don't like his voice.
Nixon in China  I love the opening scene, with Air Force One, the soldier's chorus, and Nixon exulting, "It's prime time in the USA!  It's prime time in the USA!  It's yesterday night!  Yesterday night!"
Ron on the Rock  It's difficult to get tickets to see this one, since it doesn't exist yet.  I would like to make a contribution to the genre started by Jackie O and Nixon in China.  In this opera, an old, feeble Ronald Regan struggles to recall his life while a bumptious congressman arranges for Regan's likeness to be added to Mt. Rushmore.  Act I will end with Regan singing "tear down this wall" while his coat billows in the wind and he holds up a microphone stand in a pose straight out of The Ten Commandments. The final act will end when Nancy Regan and Mikhail Gorbachev meet high atop Regan's stone head and begin arguing.  They wrestle, Nancy falls, Gorbachev rescues her, they reconcile, and the wheelchair-bound Regan mutters some non sequitur that I haven't thought up yet but will shock everyone with its brilliantly ironic significance, and the curtain will fall to a tumultuous ovation.

I don't feel an urgent need to see any Verdi opera, not to mention Donizetti et al.  So shoot me.

Have some fun with the Camiata Illusion. I hear the pattern as shown in the last graphic. This pattern is more typically heard by left-handers, but I'm (mostly) right handed. More proof that I'm special.

Software engineers know the feeling you get at a certain point in a project.  You're getting to the end of the to-do list, you have another seemingly short list of things that are "done" but need to be tweaked or fixed -- you're ninety percent done!  At this point, in the biz we say you have completed the first ninety percent.  The second ninety percent is yet to come.

I was feeling that way with my big composition project.  I slacked off on the work these last two weeks as I neared the end.  It was pretty much in the bag.  Yesterday my quartet brought out one of the choruses, performing it at a church service.  It was dreadful.  Listening to the recording was a painful experience -- the work is deeply flawed.  It simply does not work well for voices:  too many jumps, too many lords and ladies a-leapin'.  The chords fly past without time to coagulate.  Each singer would need the precision of a keyboard instrument to get it right.  I'm appalled to find myself making such a mistake.

To be sure, I did get some sincere complements, but I detected in them a bit of the "wow, that sounded complicated" response, which itself has more than a bit of Johnson's infamous preaching woman in it.  I impressed them, but I'm done with impressing people.  They have no idea what a simple thing it is to make it complicated.  I have a message to communicate, and it is not "Fred can write complicated music."

With my confidence wilting, I took a look at the rest of the score.  I now see a need for revision in several other places.  The second ninety percent has begun with a vengeance -- with a wrath, with an apocalyptic implacability -- and who shall abide its coming, when its terrible swift sword divides the true composers from the weenie wanna-bes?

More disturbingly, some people speak of a third ninety percent:

We were making great progress, but we couldn't get it done alone. Creating sophisticated software requires a team effort. One person can use smoke and mirrors to make a demo that dazzles an audience. But shipping that to a million customers will expose its flaws and leave everyone looking bad. It is a cliche in our business that the first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent - the attention to detail - makes a good product.

You people didn't warn me.  You never told me this would be hard.

The New York Philharmonic is in town this week, giving a few performances. Today (Saturday), some of the musicians lead master classes for University of Michigan music students. The classes were open to the public. I caught part of a Q&A lead by bassist and composer Jon Deak. (U-M composer Susan Botti moderated.) Deak focused on his educational work rather than his composing or performing.

Deak's 70s-style emphasis on releasing the expressive artist trapped inside each child, "I'm not a teacher, I'm a facilitator," a preference for dialog over lecturing, his suspicion of hierarchy and structure -- this is not my style. (One man in the audience even recited a poem about a poor self-loathing leopard who paints his spots purple and ties his tail into knots. Oh my.) Deak wasn't true to the type himself, since he caveatted to death nearly every assertion he made. Certainly you don't get to play with the New York Phil without a very healthy appreciation for technique and discipline. And I agree that a pedagogy of technique alone is one with its heart ripped out of it.

In any event, what he's doing in the public schools is really cool. He gets musically illiterate kids to make up all kinds of music. Then he notates it (or, in at least one case, he translates it from notation the child has made up) and arranges professional-level performances of it. He's opening a door for kids to start thinking about music making. Dang.

Yes, I missed Ayn Rand's 100th birthday. I am a bad person. My only excuse is the distraction of all the usual preperations for the Groundhog Day holiday season. Please forgive me. As a token of my contrition, I offer you (via Things) a cautionary example of what can happen when we don't protect our children from designers. Oh my. I just noticed Things also linked to a deeeee-licious collection of retro-future design. Oh my. I'm loosing my higher brain functions right now. This is going to be soooo good.

Yes, I'm hidebound.  I admit a certain hipness deficit -- I'm prone to reactionary denunciations of the new.  Chances are, if I disapprove of something, it means it needed to be done.  Nevertheless, I assert that priests should not conduct masses where mardi gras beads are tossed by ushers to members of the congregation.

Waz happnin?  On February 15, Theodore Morrison will conduct Brahms' German Requiem in his last major performance as a University of Michigan professor.  On February 19, the DSO and a choir of 200 will perform the world premiere of "Dear Mrs. Parks" by Hannibal Lokumbe, as part of a Black History Month celebration.

Lynn is exasperated by a googler who arrived at her website, then left whiney comments:  "this is a rubbish website because it doesn't have the information i need."  So far, I've dodged that bullet.  Something neat happened just yesterday, however.  If the referers log can be believed, someone in Japan translated The Fredösphere into Spanish, which is odd; I would have expected Ali G. speak.

I don't need Google myself, since I have a memex:

Slanting translucent viewing screens magnifying supermicrofilm filed by code numbers. At left is a mechanism which automatically photographs longhand notes, pictures and letters, then files them in the desk for future reference.

Scott Spiegelberg, who is the spawn of Satan, thinks Morten Lauridsen's O Magnum Mysterium is fabulous music.  Sorry, Scott, but I'm the choral music authority around here.  O Magnum Mysterium ain't fabulous music until I say it's fabulous music.

[Beat.]

O Magnum Mysterium is fabulous music.

O Magnum Mysterium is fabulous music, and it's a favorite programming choice of middle-to-high level choirs all over, but many performances are a little less than completely satisfying.  It's interesting that Scott encountered the piece in an arrangement for winds.  Wind instruments, especially woodwinds (and very especially pipe organs) can maintain their volume all the way to the bottoms of their ranges.  Thus, when O Magnum arrives at its climax, the deep sustained Ds in the low bass can ring out and anchor the whole ensemble properly.  (Or so I assume was the case in the performance he mentioned.)  With choirs, the only groups that can pull off  solid low Ds are those -- usually professional groups -- that can recruit lots of true bass IIs, those guys whose larynxes jut out from their throats like the prow of the Titanic.  (Oh, they are sooooo arrogant, those bases with their bulging larynxes and their deep voices.  We hates them!  Hates them all!)  In an community chorus setting, that climax sounds weak and top-heavy -- etiolated, exsanguinated, and enervated.

I'm tempted to think Lauridsen wrote this piece at the keyboard and let its sound influence him too much, but naw, he's to smart for that.  Probably what happened is that he knew he'd get a great performance of this work from the Los Angeles Master Chorale, even with the low Ds, and that satisfied him.

Before I finish, I would also like to point out that it aint' quittin' time until I say its quittin' time.

[Beat.]

Quittin' time!

Monday's edition of The Ann Arbor News covered the arrival of an exhibit of pinball machines opening today at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti.  You can see 29 machines selected from a collection of 400.

The idea of pinball design is to integrate the pinball machine's theme with everything that goes on during a game, [collector David Silverman] says.  That includes the lights, bells, whistles, music, text and features such as extra points.

Oh really?  I thought the idea of pinball was to create an excuse to display ultra-soft, ultra-low-quality p0rn.  I can't help but associate the machines and the subculture around them with sleaze of the most off-putting kind.  (I'm not saying this is a fair generalization; I'm just reporting an impression.)  I would love to claim my avoidance as evidence of a superior virtue, but really it was mostly just snobbishness.  Therefore, although I like video games, the high-tech offspring of pinball, I never played pinball much.  I owe it to my parents, who simply chose not to raise me in a bar environment.  I should also mention that my childhood was consumed by various jobs I was required to work.  (I played piano in whorehouses.)

Do not attempt to find some kind of theme that ties all parts of this post together.  You may injure yourself if you do.

Steve Hicken explains (to those rare creatures who don't understand) why recordings will never replace live performance.  I think we all knew this, but he makes it fascinating anyway.

I uge you to peruse an adorable collection of Hieronymus Bosch figurines.  Via Things Magazine.

William Bolcom's "Songs of Innocence and of Expeience" gets more attention from the NYT, and this time the Naxos recording is praised -- even the student performers, supplied by li'l ol' University of Michigan.