The Fredösphere

I neglected my weekly updates of the Psalm Chant page for the last two months as I focused on getting the Maundy Thursday music ready.  Now the Psalms are back with a new one for this Sunday, April 3.  I expect weekly updates will be more regular for the foreseeable future.

Someone named Luke at James Madison University has sent out this cri de choeur:

I am in the inaugural semester of an auditioned treble chorus.  We are attempting to come up with a name to separate it from the University Chorus that it was taken out of. Currently 'University Chorale' and 'Madison Singers' are taken. I am at James Madison University in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. We perform a wide range of styles, but the main emphasis is classical.  Our final
concert is in 3 weeks, and I'd love to have our new name for the program. Any ideas are greatly appreciated.

Ooooooh, this could be fun.  I still entertain the vain hope that this favorite of mine will someday be picked up by some group:

Tragicomic Flatulence

but somehow I feel it just wouldn't be worth sending it in.  So how about it, team?  Who else is more qualified than us for this job?  Send serious suggestions to Luke, but please, let's keep the more, uh, creative ideas confined to the comments section of this post.  If you feel you can't resist troubling Luke with your silliness, then at a minimum, you didn't hear about this from me, 'kay?  'Kay.

Finally, I noticed in the news a list of music selected for Prince Charles' upcoming wedding.  I see it included choral selections, some obvious, some not.  (Choral music at a Brittish royal wedding -- who woulda thunk!)  They didn't choose Tavener's Song For Athene, which surprised me, since it seemed to be so popular the last time they had it sung.

Having watched two making-of trailers for the first Narnia movie (coming December 2005) I started thinking about the awesome influence of these two old English dorks -- Lewis and Tolkien -- on the fantasy literature world.  Then I thought up a cool idea for a movie.  Here's my pitch in 50 words:

By night, Buffyesque Oxbridge dons Lewis and Tolkien travel to other dimensions and employ supernatural powers to protect our world from evil, so-called mythological creatures.  By day, they use these experiences to create slightly fictionalized literary masterpieces.  When asked by admirers where they get their ideas, they merely shrug.

If you happen to have 100 million bucks and are looking for a good cause to spend it on, I'd be happy to produce this movie for you.  Just let me know.

It's loopy and jarring all at the same time, it has salty language, and it's definitely a film not by Ken Burns.  (Thanks for the link, Rick.)

On An Overgrown Path is by an Englishman with an eye on the choral music scene (among other things).  One post discusses the phenomenon (new to me) of what you might call the performance pilgrimage.  He mentions The Sixteen, a top chamber choir lead by Harry Christopher, who will tour the U.S. this spring (an itinerary is listed in the post).  An album by The Sixteen has been top on my to-buy list for a while now.

Somehow, this type of juxtaposition is starting to seem routine...

The scene was the people--the tiny shot girl with the pink, wool bunny ear cap and an unsettling, vampiric smile; the cocktail waitress with the exaggerated, cat's eye granny glasses; the cocktail waitress with what looked to be tatts covering her entire torso and arms. Scattered throughout was a smattering of people like me: jeans and sweaters type people who looked more out of place than the guy with plugs in his earlobes.

Again, let me stress, that they had all come for a Christian concert on Good Friday.

...but I do get nervous when I see people worshiping a spaceship.

One more new blog:  Bryant Bates Manning authors Mysteries Abysmal from up the road in Lansing, Michigan.  Hey Bryant, skip this whole bewildering internet stuff; just shout, and I'll hear ya!

I really, really like The New Criterion, but sometimes they just drive me nuts.  First it was their embarrassing Toga 2004 campaign, by which they accomplished nothing but the undermining of their own credibility.  Now I hear they have started a movement to get Roger Kimball elected the next pope.

Considering the suffering experienced by the current pope (who is still very much alive), this seems like an exercise in bad taste.  "Let's Send Roger to Rome!" is their slogan.  Besides the considerable theological hurdles (Kimball is a married lay person), I think he'd accomplish more by staying put as editor of TNC.  Can someone please talk some sense into these people?

Labels: fun

Let me think about this.   Hmmmmm.  Yes ... yes!  I do believe this does meet my stringent criteria for inclusion. 

Sadly, some doubt.

Der Drübermensch is starting to pay attention.  As I drove him home from the Good Friday service at our church, he asked, "if I lived when Jesus was alive, should I have stole those thirty pieces of silver?"  I asked a few questions to uncover the idea behind the question:  would such an act have been justified if it would have prevented Jesus' crucifixion?  The boy has been stuck in a Law mentality -- wanting to categorize everyone as either a Bad Person or a Good Person -- and up until now, his mind has been impervious to Gospel, that fundamentally we are all Bad Persons until God forgives us.  I hope this year he will begin to understand why "we call this Friday Good."

Don't miss these Easter wishes from Charles T. Downey of Ionarts -- but save them for later if you were so foolish as to choose ancestors who came from some place east of the Danube.

[Update:  a glance at a map indicates the Danube River is a particularly poor indicator of the division between East and West, particularly since it mainly flows east and empties into the Black Sea, not the Adriatic as I assumed.  I thought of it because I remembered it to be one of the boundaries of the Roman Empire.  I'm not sure where the Catholic-Orthodox division lies, but I expect it runs north and south and is called the Masoni-Dixonopoulos Line.]

Kyle Gann has an edgy description of the limits imposed on those who write music for existing, high-profile ensembles.  His post makes me feel a bit better about my lack of experience with -- and interest in -- orchestral-scale instrumental compositions.  Quoth he:

Of course you can express some individuality within these molds - but ultimately, the medium is the message, and unless you have a strong talent for subliminal subversion, your orchestra music, or string quartet music, is still going to sound “classical,” with a European tinge. What’s more, when you write for orchestra, you are going to hand over your music to a powerful organization that cares little about your needs or artistic vision, and you are going to give up considerable control over your own art.

It never ceases to amaze me how many young composers follow this path anyway, for it’s not an easy one to follow. But there are some young composers who look up the road and can’t bring themselves to take the first steps, who imagine their own wild, proliferating music and blanche at the thought of seeing it pruned with institutional shears. Like novelists and sculptors, they want to make art from their own personal experiences, from materials in their environment, and they want control over the results. They become Downtowners. For, quite simply, Downtown music is that which cannot be accommodated by the musical ensembles and organizations that are created and maintained to play 19th-century European music.

The uptown path is hard to follow, but isn't the downtown path hard too?  Doesn't it require an enormous amount of non- or extra-musical skills -- like self-promotion and leadership and, and ... oh, let's call it visionaryism.  Building an audience from scratch is a bear.  I'm not even a downtowner, I'm an out-of-towner, but for those for whom an orchestral composition is an attainable goal, I can understand the temptation.

Whew.  Last night's world premiere went well.  I sang "thy will be done" at the very end while my mates sang (correctly) "your will be done," and the annoyance of that mistake lingers.  Nevertheless, if that's my biggest problem with how we did, I guess I'm happy.

You may wonder how the audience reacted to this bit of high falutin' new music.  The bassoon solo near the beginning drew catcalls and whistles.  Soon after, the noises escalated to outright shouting, then fistfights broke out in the aisles, and we performers were pelted with rotten vegetables.

In other words, it went better than I would have dared to hope.

During the melee, I picked up a few skills in hand-to-hand combat (mostly involving eye gouging) that I intend to pass on to Hizzoner, Terry Teachout.  He may find them handy in his new job of defending the Constitution from its enemies, foreign and domestic.

Der Drübermensch told me he thought some of the music sounded scary.  When he heard "ding-a-lings" (a hand bell) he drew clocks; when he heard "thunder" (a bass drum roll) he drew "cracks," which I took to mean lightening bolts; when he heard singing, he drew musical notes.  Hey -- at least one person was paying attention.

Aworks notices that, just because a piece was written in the year 1700, it isn't automatically non-crap.

You may have noticed I tend to complain about choirs that mumble, choirs that sing with their noses in their music, choirs that sometimes fail to notice that there's a whole big crowd of people sitting there listening to them when they perform.  The word on Choraltalk is that Robert Shaw spent a lot of time complaining about the same thing.  (Read this and this and this, or go to the list of posts and read all with the subject "Shaw on enunciation.")  If Shaw's approach seems extreme, remember that very large choirs need to work their consonants more than small ones, especially when singing with an orchestra.

I'm trippin' out to the news that the local flagship choir, the Choral Union, will join with the University of Michigan orchestra and choirs to perform Vaughn Williams' Sea Symphony this fall.  Do you know it?  It's a thrilling -- if a bit uneven -- and sprawling work, with an opening passage that socks you in the gut.  The text is by some guy named Walt Whitman.

Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead is spending more of his time with high-brow musicians:

"I had that schoolboy thing of being either passionately into things or against them." Bach he found epic and grand; Mozart, by contrast, was merely "impressive, not moving". Greenwood strikingly compares this to the way he "loved the Pixies but never got into AC/DC".

I know the feeling.  In another article, he surprises me again:

"I get these enthusiasms which can drive the band crazy," he explains, "but I just say: listen, French horns are amazing, we've got to find a way of using them. Or I'll say, it would be great if this song sounded like Penderecki, or Alice Coltrane. And it's childish because none of us can play jazz like Alice Coltrane, and none of us can write the kind of music that Penderecki does.

And:

The new piece, Piano for Children, is scored for strings and John Constable, the Sinfonietta's star pianist. "He has played the part through with me," Greenwood says, "and made some great suggestions. There's something about classical musicians - they tend to be totally without ego, and so enthusiastic, but also just so talented."

"Without ego."  Huh?  I did not see that coming.

The Shiavo predicament reminds me of an episode from the life of Olivier Messiaen.  His first wife suffered brain damage after an operation and needed to be placed in an institution.  After a time, he fell in love with one of his students.  As a devout Catholic, a divorce or an affair would have been impossible for him without compromising his beliefs.  It seems Messiaen remained chaste through the years until his wife died, at which point he remarried.

Messiaen's gentle piety drew me to him and made it easy for me to get to know his music, much of which is stylistically alien to my preferences.  Even now, hard-core pointillistic works like Des canyons aux étoiles remain repellent to me, but I have grown to love works like Et Expecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum and especially his organ works, preeminently Apparition de l'Église eternelle.

Extra-musical information, particularly biographical and historical, really helps me pay attention to a work and appreciate a composer's intent.  The exhortion to "just let the notes speak for themselves" has never worked for me.  Partly that's my weakness as a listener, and partly that's a philosophical position -- I have never really believed that even music itself should aspire to the so-called "condition of music."*  If you can't chant to it or dance to it, it's lost.

(Insert approximately 400 nuances and caveats here.)

(And if anyone tries to treat this post as an argument over the politics of the Shiavo case, I'll turn comments off faster than you can say Trois Petites Liturgies de la Présence Divine.)

*I suggest you google this quote yourself for more information.  I dare not choose among the many links; they can't even agree who first said it.  I've stopped counting at a half-dozen attributions:  Alexander Danner, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Santayana, Walter Pater, the German composer Chopenhaver (huh?), etc. ad infinitum.

Ian Moss is a composer and singer who promotes his music through the Music with a capital M website.  Since graduating from Yale, he has found a day job at the American Music Center.  After I blogged his choral music, we met via email, and I'm very glad he has agreed to guest blog here at the Fredösphere.  The following essay gives us a peek at the new music scene at Yale, and suggests one answer to the big  whither new music? question that is so much on our minds these days.  Perhaps I'll share my reaction to this question in a day or two.  As for y'all, the comments are always open.  Take it away, Ian!

Who says there's no new music in the schools? When I was in eighth grade or so, I was treated to a brilliant school recital "performance" of John Cage's 4'33" scored (in this instance) for saxophone and piano. I hated it. "What the hell is this?" I asked, along with 99% of the other kids who were my cellmates in this prison of offensive silence created by Mr. Genius 20th-Century Composer. The lasting educational value imparted to me as a result of this close encounter with modern music was that John Cage was full of crap.
 
Fast-forward to my senior year in college, when I participated in a performance of Cage's breakout "aleatoric" piece, Imaginary Landscape No. 4 for 12 radios (and 24 players). Contrary to my expectations after having read about it in my trusty 20th-century music textbook, the piece was meticulously notated with a separate "part" for each radio; one player was assigned to the tuning knob with the other in charge of manipulating the volume. We gathered a bunch of classmates to perform the piece, placed it on the program of the first Yale College Composers' Group concert of the season, and told all our friends. One hundred and fifty people showed up for this thing, at least five times the audience at most other new music events I had attended. The piece? Well, it sounded pretty terrible, to be honest with you. But that wasn't the point--and this time, I understood. There was something thoroughly magical in the combination of (a) engaging in a musical fashion with everyday objects that we don't normally think of musically; (b) the odd collision of 24 players who are all accomplished musicians but completely untrained on the "instruments" at hand; (c) the collaborative nature of having two performers for each instrument; (d) the "what?" effect engendered by bringing such an unusual work to life and having the temerity to present it in a concert hall. It helped that this was a piece that was mentioned prominently in the required reading for a class that every music major had to complete in order to graduate--a piece that many had heard about but almost no one had actually heard.
 
Similar experiences abounded in the time I was at Yale--there was the "piece that's also a sporting event" written by a faculty member which involved two percussionists, a graphical score, a referee, and lots of shouting (by performers and audience alike); a student piece entitled Ritual that alternated between stereotypically jazz and classical material, played respectively in a stereotypically classical and jazz manner; performances of Frederic Rzweski's Les Moutons de Panurge for any combination of musicians and non-musicians, Terry Riley's In C, and Fluxus pieces; and a rendition of Steve Reich's Clapping Music for confused passersby in the rotunda outside our dining hall. I'm told that the year after I graduated there was even a gargantuan production of György Ligeti's Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes. Yale has a tradition of this kind of postmodern concertizing; the venerable Bang on a Can festival partially grew out of the activities of an earlier student group called Sheep's Clothing, which put on all-night marathon concerts in the '70s that were veritable orgies of conceptual art. After lying dormant for some time, the all-night marathon tradition was revived the year before I arrived on campus as a freshman, and I had the privilege of participating in two of them. These were among the most wildly enjoyable experiences of any kind I had at school. Audience members were encouraged to come and go as they pleased; pizza and drinks were provided; people stretched out on the floor as they prepared for yet another hour of music. How many would make it to the end? we would all wonder. My senior year, 13 people performed In C as the sun came up; we constituted what was left of the crowd, which had reached nearly 100 at peak. About an hour and a half earlier, I had run across the courtyard to wake up my best friend, a saxophonist, who gamely dragged his horn over to the concert and played a duo of mine that was a literal transcription of my sophomore-year roomate typing to his friends on AOL Instant Messenger.
 
I've been out in the "real world" for nearly three years now, working in arts administration, and I have to be honest, something's missing. Going to classical concerts these days more often feels like that eighth-grade student recital to me than it does that evening when we performed Imaginary Landscape. When I was living in Philadelphia, there was a group of jazz composers who put on a concert series entitled Risk-Taking Type Music that could reliably be counted on to provide some good times. Nevertheless, too many performers and concert presenters seem to have forgotten that there are many reasons besides music why people attend and enjoy concerts. Certainly the social element is important, but the very best concerts reach even beyond that to create a sense of EVENT, either through programming, venue, structure, or some combination thereof. It's not just a matter of tying pieces together with some cute "theme" or haphazardly throwing cash at an elaborate production. What I enjoyed most about the Yale concerts was their utter fearlessness, and the exhiliration that goes along with the process of giving tangible definition to a crazy flight of imagination. We felt like we could do anything, and in our best moments I think our audience felt that way too.
 
So what of it, New York? Can't you do better than a ragtag group of college students? I'm all ears...

Since you brought it up, Alex, I'm a Gene Chandler born in the year of the Four Seasons.  The year determined my predilection for tight harmonies and brilliant tone production; forced to choose, I'll take the exciting over the tasteful most of the time.  Chandler's Duke of Earl may be the only pop song ever to use the word "dukedom" in its minimal lyrics; consequently, I'm a sucker for pedantic displays and I struggle to affect the common touch.  This popstrology stuff really works, people!

Here's a story with a twist:  an Israeli garbage man takes a couple weeks off from work every year to perform on the great organs of Europe.

Petra Haden's cover of The Who Sells Out is now sold on amazon:

Fans of both Petra Haden and classic Who will want to hear this CD. It's a chance to hear Pete Townshend's songs stripped down to their essence (although Petra does an excellent job of re-creating the full band sound through vocal tricks). The songs hold up to the a cappella treatment very well. The most fascinating aspect of this new Sells Out is all the changes Ms. Haden takes her voice through -- (for ex.) sounding siren-like on "Odorono" (a bit like Kate Bush!) and then like a teenage boy on the very next song ("Tattoo").

However:

For all you people who don't get out much, this album may seem chic and "concept' to you but lemme tell you something... collegiate A cappella groups have been doing what she just did for decades and have been doing it BETTER... I was in a couple groups during my collegiate years and we could've blown the pants off her. If you want some REAL a cappella music I suggest you check out the BOCA series from the mainely a cappella catalog (unless amazon has it). Boca stands for Best of College A Cappella and let me tell you IT IS. This petra girl needs to get her head on straight cause he vocals are mediocre and the mix is terrible. This CD isn't worth the plastic its pressed on.

I guess that's what you call "mixed reviews."  What's my opinion, based only on Amazon's crude sound file excerpts?  Some a cappella music that covers -- or is inspired by -- instrumental music dazzles me.  This happens if the singers achieve the same level of precision as instrumentalists.  (I hate to admit it, but it's true; very few singers sing pitch precisely.  Leading a cappella singers is like conducting an ensemble of slide-whistlers.)  Take 6, the Swingle Singers, and The Nylons are just three examples of high-precision a cappella groups.  That kind of precision is not present in Hayden's album.  This is an amateurish job.  Having found that the concept has caught the public's attention, she should really go back and re-record the whole thing.

Last night we had our big put-it-all-together rehearsal for the Maundy Thursday drama.  It went disturbingly well.  As a "pit" musician, I really couldn't see much of what's happening on stage, so that helps keep my confidence high, but the reality is our director, Karen, has made it clear to me she knows how to put a show together.  Between Karen and Jeff, our church's worship minister, I can count on all the various needs of a dramatic production to be met.

Karen worked with the actors for a couple of hours before we musicians were added.  I had prepared a CD of the music for her use during that time.  The CD was made from a MIDI keyboard realization of the score, plus a couple of tracks with my singing for the purpose of providing the words that the actors would use as cues.  We didn't have time to call the other singers to a recording session, but I wanted the CD to be close approximation of the music they would hear for the performance, so I sang some of women's parts in falsetto.

When I arrived for the rehearsal, my friend Phil filled me in on what happened:  as the actors heard my strained, squeaky voice on the CD, and the room got very quiet.  Karen stopped the music and explained how and why the CD was created.  The tension in the room dissolved into hilarity.  What a relief!  This ridiculous piece of crap isn't the real music!

When I joined the actors in their rehearsal, the torture began.  It wasn't exactly Orwell's Two Minutes of Hate from 1984;  call it Ninety Seconds of Good-Natured Ribbing from 2005.  I got a lot of "oh, no, Mister Bill!" shouted at me.

The musicians did a great job of putting it all together, including the organist (Jeff) and percussionist (David) who were joining us for only the second time.  We figured out how to use the freaka effectively, which is exciting, and in general I feel like the ensemble is adequately prepared.  Unfortunately, I've felt that way far too infrequently in my life as a performer.

Everything appears to be falling into place.  That makes me very, very nervous.

Thanks to Alan for sending me a link that leaves be utterly disoriented.  Really, it defies description -- although I am sure "innocent" is one thing it ain't.

Years ago read about a cool contraption in a WSJ center column article.  Many times I have tried to google it, to no avail.  Yesterday my all-knowing buddy Paul gave me the key words:  "unpowered exoskeleton."  Could one of you rich people please buy me this thing?

Those aliens from Planet Japan sure are strange:

Aquarion takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where two-thirds of the human population has perished from a catastrophic incident that took place 11 years before the game's story. Mankind is now facing a new challenge, as mysterious winged beings called the Datenshi-zoku (the Fallen Angels) have appeared out of the melting ice in the South Pole. The Datenshi-zoku capture people and feed on their life energy, but civilization counters with three fighter jets called the Vector Machines, which supposedly defeated the Datenshi-zoku in a battle 12,000 years ago. The Vector Machines can transform into robots named Aquarion, but they require youths with innocent souls and extraordinary senses as their pilots. Aquarion's story rotates around the youngsters that have been recruited to fly the machines in order to save mankind.

Whoooooa ... you had me until you got to the save mankind bit.  Now that's stretching my credulity too far!

Lansing, Michigan, an hour north of here, is not typically thought of as a cultural powerhouse, but its orchestra and children's chorus will get to host a very interesting premiere by Canadian composer John Burge this weekend.  I wish I could go.

Mixolydian Mode has thrown down the gauntlet.  Well, it's not a real gauntlet, it's a MIDI realization of a gauntlet.  Anyway, he wants me to play one of those blogömeme games I usually avoid.  Here are my answers to his questions, provided in the form of Freudian free association, i.e., without deliberation or editing:

You're stuck inside Fahrenheit 451. Which book do you want to be?
Ayn Rand's Anthem.  I would be short and I would have fanatical devotees, which would improve my chances for survival.

Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?
I really don't remember that ever happening.  I do recall hero-worshiping those cool, omni-competent Hardy boys.  I remember examining closely maps of east-coast states in the hope (which I knew was vain) that Bayport would prove to exist and I could go there and help them solve crimes.

The last book you bought was...?
Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style, Donald Norman's Emotional Design, and John Summerson's The Classical Language of Architecture, all in one amazon.com purchase.

The last book you read was...?
Victor Davis Hanson's Who Killed Homer?  Coming soon, on the topic of classical education, I'll have a big thoughtful blog.  [Noooooo!  Not another big, thoughtful blog!!!!!!!  Sssssttttttooooooop!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]

What are you currently reading?
John Scalzi's Old Man's War, because Instapundit said I should.

Five books you would take to a desert island...
Frank D. K. Ching's Architecture: Form, Space, and Order
The three books I just bought but haven't read yet.
A big ol' NIV study Bible (for reading, and repelling drivers who run through red lights)

What three people are you passing this stick on to and why?
No one.  I prefer cults with religious content.

This was supposed to be a short blog today.  I don't know what came over me.

More than a year ago, I discovered John Tavener's setting of The Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete on a CD borrowed from the public library.  Follow the link for the rendition by the Tallis Scholars, featuring the hypnotic, compelling chanting of baritone Jeremy White (which sadly is not heard on the sound file excerpt).  If you want to Google for more information, I must warn you this piece is sometimes called an "Ode" instead of a Canon, particularly by the publisher.

Perhaps that word needs scare quotes:  "publisher."  I ordered a copy of the score, having fallen in love with the idea of performing the work during a Holy Week service at my church.  I found it to be a boar's nest.  It was nothing but a faint photocopy of Tavener's manuscript.  We're talking here about something that came out of the pre-desktop publishing era.  Quotes of ancient Greek and Russian texts appear in the score in the composer's el crapito handwriting spelled in Greek or Russian alphabet without any transliteration to Latin script.

How could I possibly get this ... this ... near-random scattering of toner blotches on paper into shape?  I would have had to transcribe the whole 15-minute work into Finale, then research the foreign text and provide phonetic help in the score to my singers.  But what singers?  Seeing the score made me realize how difficult the thing would be to perform.  I always underestimate the difficulty, so if I say it is difficult, it is difficult.  I could hire eight professional singers, but most of them would have come from outside the congregation, which a lot of people would view as a waste.

So I gave up the idea of performing The Canon.  Then, a funny thing happened.  My boss at St. Luke asked me to write music for the Maundy Thursday service.  The Canon was reborn through its influence on my piece.

Still, I can't get the power of The Canon out of my head.  The cantor sings the gut-churning words of repentance, pausing only to allow the full chorus to sing "Lord have mercy" in multiple languages.  There's no effete fussing over anyone's precious self-esteem here.  One's self-esteem is about to get its backside tanned:

1.  Where shall I begin to lament the deeds of my wretched life?  What first-fruit shall I offer, O Christ, for my present lamentation?  But in Thy compassion grant me release from my falls.
 
2.  Come, wretched soul, with your flesh, confess to the Creator of all.  In future refrain from your former brutishness, and offer to God tears in repentance.
 
3.  Having rivalled the first-created Adam by my transgression, I realize that I am stripped naked of God and of the everlasting kingdom and bliss through my sins. (Genesis 3)
 
4.  Alas, wretched soul!  Why are you like the first Eve?  For you have wickedly looked and been bitterly wounded, and you have touched the tree and rashly tasted the forbidden food.[...]
 
7.  I have willfully incurred the guilt of Cain's murder, since by invigorating my flesh I am the murderer of my soul's awareness, and
have warred against it by my evil deeds. (Genesis 4:8) [...]

20.  From my youth, O Christ, I have rejected Thy commandments.  I have passed my whole life without caring or thinking as a slave of my passions.  Therefore, O Saviour, I cry to Thee: At least in the end save me.
 
21.  I have squandered in profligacy my substance, O Saviour, and I am barren of virtues and piety; but famished I cry: O Father of mercies, forestall and have compassion on me. (Luke 15:13,17)
 
22.  I fall prostrate before Thee, O Jesus.  I have sinned against Thee, be merciful to me.  Take from me the heavy yoke of sin, and in Thy compassion grant me tears of compunction.[...]

To those without the right temperament or training, it may seem strange that anyone could read these words with a sense of liberating joy.  Yet I can confirm it.  The surrender of all pretense, the confession of one's utter spiritual poverty, is something I dread, and something I cherish as precious.

Ooookay, I scared you all away, didn't I.  Come back please.  Forgive me -- for I have rivalled the first-created Adam by my transgression -- oops!  Sorry.  Oh well, here's a peace offering:  a David Hasselhoff video.  (Hat tip to The Corner.)  Kinda embarrassing for the old guy, what with that dead fish in his mouth and everything, but the tune sure is catchy.  I wonder if he wrote it himself.

Did you catch Lileks yesterday?  He lileksized a trailer for The Fountainhead!  I couldn't believe it.  What could be a more perfect confluence?  Maybe if a zeppelin named after an antipope (and piloted by an absinthe-swilling John Tavener, with the Kings Singers aboard, entertaining a sci-fi convention) flew over my house.  Which is unlikely.  He's right about the skyscraper turning into a book, which you see at the beginning of the movie itself:  it's a cheesy gesture, not appropriate for a story that takes itself seriously.  And I get the feeling (I'm going way out on a limb here) that Ayn Rand took herself seriously.

Today, Lileks explains very neatly why Star Wars can't be dismissed.  (Although it can be criticised; O yes, it can be criticized.) Here's how I would describe that feeling we got when the movie first came out: somewhere, somebody (the Man) had put forth a decree that henceforth, movies like Star Wars just couldn't be made anymore.  They were forbidden!  "Movies like Star Wars" means having the optimism that Lileks mentioned, plus a simple devotion to story telling, not preaching some kind of... something.  When Star Wars came out, it was like a lid was blown off.  The oppressive paradigm got its heinie shifted, big time.  It was, what? -- still only 1976?  Yet that movie seemed to announce: Fear Not! The 70s Are Ending!

That quality of optimism and pure story-telling is present in most of the retro-futurism revival, and that's why I like it.  Yes, Star Trek was optimistic too, so my dislike of it is inconsistent, but that show was just embarrassing, and anyway, its optimism was somehow godless and off-putting.

Meanwhile, in another dimension....

The A Cappella News has introduced me to The Real Group.  What are they, exactly?  Laid back Swedish vocal jazz, I guess.  Follow the link and listen to the sound files for the only true answer to the question.  Not exactly my thing, but their precision is astounding and, in small doses, mesmerizing.

Alex Ross no longer allows the photographing of the lower half of his face.  I can only suppose some terrible accident has left him disfigured.  Perhaps he got his head caught in a mechanical rice picker.

Speaking of disfiguring modifications, Petra Haden has remade the album The Who Sells Out in an unusual way:

[T]his is a homemade one-woman a capella re-creation of the Who's 1967 album. Haden, the daughter of jazz bassist Charlie Haden, sings every word, every drum roll, every guitar solo, and every mock commercial, note for note, front to back.

I'm intrigued.  Is there any way I could hear this thing without, you know, having to pay money for it?

These are the details for the Maundy Thursday musical drama I've written, entitled I Have Finished The Work.  It will be performed at St. Luke Lutheran Church in Ann Arbor (see the directions to the church) during the Maundy Thursday service which starts at 6:45pm on March 24.  The drama consists of actors in pantomime backed by singers, mostly a cappella, performing in two sections that will take place at the beginning and end of the service.

I feel a strong sense of responsibility, given the context for this premiere performance is a worship service instead of a concert.  From my point of view, I'm glad to get a captive audience of 600 people or more.  Yet I'm aware many of those present will not come with any personal commitment to hearing new music, and a few will probably be put off by the whole thing.  I didn't compromise the piece artistically, but I'm also aware that artistic integrity is not central to the purpose of the evening.

Some people may leave the service feeling unsettled, but that could be a good thing.  I selected the text (all drawn from the gospels) with an eye to examining the choices made by each of the twelve disciples (all bad, to varying degrees) and Jesus (who chose obedience to God's will).  This ought to lead each person present to reflect on his or her own standing before God, and lead into the dramatic presentation planned for the service on the following evening,  Good Friday.

In short, I didn't write a lot of feel-good music.  Much of the score contains chanting sounds from the voices, sometimes with odd echoing or overlapping parts.  There is minimal organ accompaniment, and at dramatic moments percussion will provide some spooky sound effects.  I can see influence from Tavener very clearly, but for most people present the music will be like nothing they've ever heard in a church.

I won't have any excerpts in sound files ready until after the performance.  Expect to see them show up here in a few weeks.

Paul Bailey has a blog and a string ensemble -- whoops! Make that an alternative-classical garage band.  He doesn't blog every day but he should.  He dug up a wacky Stokowski quote to add to the great concert etiquette debate:

It has been the dream of my life to have a Temple of Music. This very minute I have the plans for such a temple completed at my House. Each of the audience would sit alone in a stall-like seat. No one would see his neighbor … Just before the music begins the light will be slowly dimmed so that the entire temple will be in darkness and the audience will be literally drenched in beautiful music.”

Plus he generously hyped Ethel, a string quartet -- whoops!  There I go again.  Paul Bailey quotes Kyle Gann, who explains:

Yes, Ethel is the quartet's name (we'll get into that later), and don't dare call them "the Ethel String Quartet." They're just Ethel, and they represent perhaps the most radical redefinition of the medium yet.

Read it all.  Now.

Weird.  As of Wednesday, my traffic has been running at two-thirds of normal.  Analysis of my Sitemeter stats reveals no obvious explanation.  My ratio of regulars to Googlers remains steady.  I'm not coming down from any link-induced spike.  My only guess is that Sitemeter's server is nodding off at regular intervals.  Or it could be you all are tired of me and have moved on to the next big thing ... no, no, it can't be that, can it?  The Fredösphere has become the Nehru jacket of the blogösphere?  It can't be.

Over at the Composers Forum at Sequenza21, Galen Brown posted something that mentioned the Phrygian Inflection as a common expression of death.  You can read my full comment there (well, no you can't, since I exceeded the word limit, but you can get the gist).  The short version is, anyone interested in artistic expression should read up on the research of Manfred Clynes.  He invented a device called the Sentograph as a means of capturing expressions of fundamental emotions (joy, grief, anger, etc.) in the most elemental way possible.  The Sentograph is a simple lever you push with your finger when you hear a signal.  The motion you generate is recorded and can be graphed.  Clynes found these graphs were consistent and did not vary, even according to widely divergent cultural sources.

Clynes found that Sentograph data collected while subjects were listening to music revealed that each composer had a unique Sentograph "fingerprint."  There's much more I could describe, but I'll stop here.  This is the place to go for more.  Also try googling "Sentics," the name Clynes gave to this area of study.

Meanwhile....

The cartoon quartet Gorillaz' sophomore album Demon Days, said to be darker than the debut album, features the London Gospel Choir, rock legend Ike Turner, and actor Dennis Hopper who provides spoken-word "intonations" on the track "Fire Coming Out of a Monkey's Head." 

Does that sentence make anyone else besides me feel disoriented and deeply out of touch?  No word on if Hopper dies during the last track.

Also....

A low-budget film used a formulaic plot but featured a bunch of endearing kids; it exceeded all box office expectations and enjoyed phenomenal international success, including an Oscar nomination.  Let the lawsuits begin!

Today I'm listening to an album from the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, directed by Stephen Cleobury.  It's a wonderful sampler of the music of Górecki, Tavener and Pärt, with plainsong sung in between each main track.  Plainsong sandwich ... mmmmm.  The singing is superb, although when it comes to the Górecki Amen (Opus 35), I happen to be partial to John Nelson's more percussive approach.

What?  You've never heard the Amen?  It's a great piece.  Don't just sit there -- continue sitting there while you follow the links above to listen to the excerpts.  Both of them.  Do it now.

This had to be an influence.  The stylistic similarities are too obvious.

Does a journalist betray a bit of ignorance when she describes a church's organ as "custom-built?"  I suppose most people buy their pipe organs right out of the Neiman-Marcus catalog.  Along with their luxury submarines.  (Next question:  where do I go to buy a submarine that comes equipped with a  pipe organ?)

Well, sheeee-oot!  It only gets better:  now the Neiman-Marcus catalog sells zeppelins!

And in other news:  I have a feeling this webpage and the concert tour it is promoting deserve each other.

Three ensembles -- Soundstreams Canada, the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir and the Hilliard Ensemble -- teamed up to present a concert of Arvo Pärt's Miserere and Omar Daniel's The Passion of Lavinia Andronicus, prompting another addition to the long-running debate we could call Unified Simplicity v. Fractured Complexity.  Journalist John Terauds sides with Pärt, and the ... oh, just for fun, let's call them the Simpletons.  Hey, usually I side with the Simpletons too.  Certainly I distrust that part of me that wants to show off by writing complex music.  Still, I can't help but wishing Terauds had nuanced his conclusion a bit.  Maybe I'm just a contrarian.  Maybe I'll still recovering from a performance of all 80 minutes of Pärt's Kanon Pokajanen, where a very few musical gestures are cycled relentlessly without variation.  It is possible to pursue simplicity too far.

Speaking of debates, here's another:  the Great Copyright Conundrum.  An editor of some early music manuscripts has successfully sued Hyperion.  This sums up my reaction nicely:

I have sympathy with both sides. Much old music would be unperformable without the expertise and hard labour of scholars. Too many notes are missing; too many vital instructions left ambiguous or unstated by the composer. Scholars are paid to fill in the gaps. But they are often paid little, and the gaps are often large (Sawkins said he spent 1,200 hours on the Lalande editions). So they have a good case for being better rewarded. And Hyperion’s treatment of Sawkins was, at the very least, tactless.

Finally, everyone should read Donald Pittenger as he guest blogs at 2 Blowhards.  He recalls his less-than-satisfying experience as an art student.  He does a great job of exposing the failures of his teachers while -- and this is key -- not blaming them for the problems caused by his own fecklessness and uncertainty.  That was certainly my experience:  "too soon old, too late smart," indeed!

As an aside, let me explain that one of the character defects I had in those days was the implicit assumption that my instructors would instruct me in what I would need to become an artist, and that I didn't need to learn things on the side. Naive, yes; foolish, certainly; but that was the way I was. I recently took up painting again and most of my book-buying and internet off-loading deals with techniques and examples. Better late than never, I suppose.

Give in to the dark side, you knob:  read the whole thing.

I can't vouch for all of it, but the first few paragraphs of an article from the Columbia Journalism Review pack a lot of fascinating information, while telling an improbable tale of starlet Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil inventing a new form of radio communication.  Also mentioned:  glandular endocrinology, fascists, a lonely hearts advice column, torpedoes, remote-control pianos, and body part augmentation.

My friend Rick sent me a link to a new form of aircraft call vertical airships.  Great!  Where do I go to see one in flight?

Vertical Airship Research and Developent Organization (VARADO) was formed in 1987 and is a private research and development organization dedicated the construction of a vertical takeoff and landing airship.

Good, but how big is your fleet?  Can I see one?

2005 is the year of the powerful vertical airship. Our new ships are engineered for power, capable of handling 500,000 lbs of thrust on 2.5M cubic foot airframe. With this much reserve power this vertical airship is capable of fast cruise to far away destinations where it can keep station under the worst atmospheric conditions for long periods. It's all here: Performance better than airplanes without harmful emissions!

I'm excited.  Can I ride in one?  Just tell me where to buy a ticket.

Unique Features
Vertical Airship
Cycloidal Propulsion System
No/low emissions
Low vibration
Low noise vehicle
Vertical takeoff and landing
Unsurpassed station keeping

I'm glad, but, um, do these airships actually, you know, exist?

Passenger Configuration Features
No cabin pressure
50, fully reclining, extra wide seats
Extra-wide corridors for fast & easy loading & unloading
Full luggage storage at each seat eliminates baggage check and overhead compartments
Panoramic windows offer spectacular views
Separate dining/lounge seating for 20
High-speed internet and digital cable to all seats

Oooookay, let's move on.  Isaac Watras' blog follows a unique format:  he's writing a review of each piece of music in the Norton Recorded Anthology of Western Music.  For some reason, Hedy Lamarr shows up less frequently there than at the Fredösphere, but Isaac has a nice post on Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words that mentions Forbidden Planet.  Go there for extra goodies I didn't mention in my post on the topic, namely:

There is a scene where the not-so-good Doctor explains how smart the Krell were in their heyday. To impress his guests he plays a short tape of electronic music and says something to the effect that the Krell were so smart the music they enjoyed sounds incomprehensible to us.

Yet another example of the Wrong Note School viewed as the end of music history.  How ... endearing.  Finally, this morsel spotted at Instapundit:  a promotional video from some of the finest Flash animators in North Korea.  The description is here; a working link to the video is here.  Dig that groovy pop-choral soundtrack.

I know I'm a stick in the mud.  My knowledge of what's permissible is often behind the times.  Yet, I assert:  performing Bach's St. Matthew Passion in a thong is just wrong, wrong, wrong!

It wasn't simply the magnificent line-up of singers (including the sublime German tenor Gerd Turk) that made this a festival highlight, but Hume's inspired stage-directing. Performers were dressed casually in everyday clothes (in one chorister's case, T-shirt and thongs).

Oh, wait, that's "thongs" -- plural.  Is that Australian for sandals, what Americans call flip-flops?  Something else equally innocuous?  How do I find out?  Via Google?  Uh, no thanks.  I guess I don't need to know.

Another word Google is no good at finding is "freaka."  If you're looking for hip-hop lyrics or bad poems about a certain Central American country, then yes, Google will help you, but if you are looking for a certain musical toy that looks like a hose from a vacuum cleaner, forget it.

I want a few freakas for the musical drama I'm writing for Maundy Thursday.  A freaka makes an odd, unearthly moaning and whistling sound when you spin it around.  As you spin it faster, it ascends the notes of the harmonic series.  A few of them together make a wonderful sound effect, which I learned once when I was musical director for a production of the musical Quilters.  Well, no toy store in the area seems to know about them, and making my own was a failure.  A lot of googling turned up just one mention of the toy, a maddening claim that making a freaka is easy.  Fortunately, one of my singers suddenly announced her kids have two freakas.  Whew.

After long neglect of my Blogger template, I finally updated my blogroll.  I removed a few blogs I don't visit much anymore, but mainly I added some new things:

Mixolydian Mode  What?! This wasn't present from the beginning?? This is one of my favorites.
The Standing Room  A great voice, both as singer and blogger.
Gravity Lens  Sci-fi links, from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Sequenza21 Forum  A group blog of composers.
Music With a Capital M  Young composer Ian Moss' webpage.
Saline Fiddlers  A local high school group with charm to spare.
Musica Transatlantica  Two composers.  One ocean.
Soundbites  A very new blog about music that linked me in its very first post -- now that's class.
Opus 1 Classical  A world-wide listing of concerts.
Plus, a long-standing typo on A. C. Douglas' link is fixed.  It's now Sounds and Fury as it should be.  Sorry, A. C.

Bella Voce is a professional chamber choir in Chicago.  They are calling it quits:

In the light of the previously-announced retirement of Anne Heider, one of Bella Voce's founding singers and artistic director of the internationally acclaimed a cappella choral ensemble, the Bella Voce Board of Directors has determined that this will be the last concert season for the ensemble and that the search for a new artistic director will be cancelled. This will draw to a close a 22-year journey for Bella Voce, one of Chicago's finest performing ensembles.

The Board's action comes at a time when many arts organizations are struggling to survive.  All classical arts organizations (including the well-established institutions) are being affected by dwindling audiences caused by economic hardships and/or competition from other media for entertainment time and dollars.  Bella Voce came to the painful realization that it didn't have the resources to effectively counteract these pressures.

Could there be more to this story?  Are they really crying "uncle" without finding out if a new director could make a go of it?  I find this hard to understand.  Are there conflicts among the board?  Is there a competing choir that they expect will siphon off all their talent?  Is a virus of extraterrestrial origin somehow to blame?  Google isn't dishing the dirt. 

Nor is the A Cappella News (which only repeats what we already know).  On the other hand, they do have another article on an a cappella group that covers a classic rock album.  Before, it was Dark Side of the Moon; this time it's The Who Sell Out.

This morning I lead the worship at the monthly men's breakfast at my church.  I used guitar, an instrument I haven't touched in years.  I used to have callouses when I played regularly, but they are long gone.  That unpleasant sensation I feel in my fingertips on my left hand -- could that be the thing you mortals call pain? 

My one innovation was to insist on no amplification.  We had about 55 guys packed in a room not terribly large, and the situation did not require a microphone.  I think amplification creates a barrier.  That's bad enough for a performance setting, but its doubly bad for a worship setting.

Consider two churches.  One is the stereotypical traditional congregation, with an organ and small, bad choir.  You notice the congregation doesn't sing the hymns.  Now you go to a congregation with contemporary worship:  the guitars, keyboards, and vocalists are all mic'ed.  The music pounds in your ears.  You say, "Great!  -- a little vulgar maybe, but at least people are participating!"  I say, look around.  Maybe a lot of people will be singing, but often, it will be just a few.  If you have a congregation that won't sing, turning up the volume and adding a drum set won't necessarily fix things -- but it will make the problem easier to overlook.

What's this?  I'm trying to make a serious point?  On a Friday?  How dare I?  I should have gone straight to the good stuff.

This phenomenon leaves me with an extremely divided mind.  I would be much happier with it if I knew the music was composed in impeccable taste. And yet ... and yet .... eerrrrraaaaargh!

[Sound of a blogger's head exploding.]

The Vox Early Music Ensemble will be singing up a polyphonic storm In Grosse Point and Ann Arbor this Saturday and Sunday.  Get the details here.

Other bloggers are doing it, so I will too, where "it" is defined as urging my readers to fill out the Blogad survey.  Please consider listing The Fredösphere as one of your favorite blogs.  Consider yourself urged.  Here's your Blogad reward.

It's past time to turn over the February page on my Frank Lloyd Wright calendar, which reminds me to mention this FLW quote I saw there:

What the people of our country need most is beauty of environment.  What we need most is some correlation in these things we, by habit, call Art.  There must be some cooperation of effort between them all because the idea informing all is the same.
-Frank Lloyd Wright, 1939

Well, I dunno, Frank.  Do you suppose maybe in 1939 a slightly higher priority might just have been preventing the fascists from taking over the world?  I'm just asking.

So, we need some way to force the cooperation of all artistic effort.  I guess that means a new government agency.  We already have a Secretary of Amusement; now we must have a National Style Adviser.  The nominee must be her.  Or, if no constitutional issues arise, her.

Okay, Wright's quote was slightly over the top, but every public figure says something dumb once in a while.  My real complaint is with the calendar makers.  Was that really among the best of all the thousands of quotes they gathered in the thousands of man-hours of research that must have gone into making this calendar?  What's that?  You say their research consisted of ten minutes with Google?  Ah -- now I understand.

My trusty friend Rick has sent me urgent information about the work of Cornell student Levy Lorenzo. It seems Mr. Lorenzo has created a MIDI-based device that generates three-voice polyphonic music using beat and note computations based on Markov chains, algorithms implemented with embedded C programs, an Atmel Mega32 microcontroller, distance sensors, and six hamsters.

The supreme court says we must stop executing juveniles, but fortunately they said nothing about halting mercy killing of those creepy weirdos called synaesthetes.

From the You Scratch My Back file:  Paul Bailey has a blog called Because They Are Dead where he promotes his "alternative classical garage band," the Paul Bailey Ensemble, and he's got me on his blogroll:  thanks.  Thanks also to A. C. Douglas who has interesting comments on my friend Dave's harpsichord, and to Aworks who enjoyed yesterday's confessional called The Three Bs.

Someone googled Pierre Boulez apes and ended up at The Fredösphere.  I thought I must be the only person in the world to associate Pierre Boulez with apes (see my magnum opus on the choral music in Beneath the Planet of the Apes), but no!  In an inspired mistake that reveals even as it obfuscates, it seems that the name of the author of the original Planet of the Apes novel -- Pierre Boulle -- has been transmogrified into Pierre Boulez.  (For just a few examples, see Rotten Tomatoes and barterbee.com and Yahoo and MSN groups and bestprices.com and mojosounds.com.)  This is beautiful.  If I could become convinced that I somehow ever had any small part in keeping alive this bright, shining lie -- well, I think I could die content.  Pierre Boulez, author of Planet of the Apes!  Dang!

How appropriate that the first image out of my new scanner was a portrait of J. S. Bach.  The father of modern music!

It was my first piano teacher that turned me into a musician, a woman who also happened to be my mother.  She probably doesn't realize it, but one used book she picked up at at library sale somewhere provided the starting point for all my musical efforts, such as they have been.  The book was titled A Child's Book of Famous Composers, and it contained brief biographies of about a dozen composers.  Only the very greatest musical geniuses made the cut:  J. S. Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Stephen Foster, you know, guys like that.

The Three Bs:  Bach, Beethoven and, uh, Bfoster.

Each composer got his own chapter, with a full-page portrait and a unique tag line that encapsulated his place in music history.  Mozart was "The Wonder Child."  J. S. Bach was "The Father of Modern Music," which to my mature judgment seems remarkably off-mark.  Bach's influence was subtle and slow to develop, and stylistically he was retrograde, so he never had a Rite of Spring moment and never formed the vanguard of any movement, which is what "father of" seems to imply.  Oh well, I'm paying way too much attention to an obscure, unimportant kid's book that went out of print decades ago.

Except it is not unimportant to me, because as soon as I read that book, the mantle of my destiny settled upon my shoulders:  I knew it was my life's mission to make future editions of that book include a chapter about me.  For a moment, let's overlook that I don't have a chance of making the cut.  Let's overlook the problems we cause when we label a handful of composers as "great" and forget the rest.  Let's especially overlook that this obscure book never had a snowball's chance in Albuquerque of getting a second edition.  The main thing is that I received a life mission that day, all those years ago.  Because of it, sometimes I have made foolish choices and dreamed foolish dreams, but for the most part it has been a blessing, a charism.  Thanks, God.  Thanks, mom.

Labels: Composer

I found a news report that has nothing to say about zeppelins, anti-popes, underpants, retro-futurism, or harpsichords, but does have a dying composer, a kidney stone the size of an egg, organ transplants, a fatal car accident, and the Shah of Iran (naturally), so I thought, what the heck, why not link to it.

And I hope I don't have to keep nagging you to check Partially Clips regularly.