The Fredösphere

If you hang around dog shows much you will notice that women breeders predominate until you get to the highest, most competitive levels, after which the men come out of the woodwork and clean up.  Women breed dogs for lots of reasons, many of which have to do with -- of all things -- a love for dogs.  Men mostly just want to gain status and see their competitors crushed.  If one finds he can't, he'll likely get bored and move on to something else.

It is in that spirit that I present the manly approach to rose gardening.


Look at this white Moonstone rose I grew, for example.  Yes, Chan, I'm talking to you!  Note the perfection of its form.  Know that it possesses more delicate pink "stenciled" coloration around the edge of the petals than my lousy digital camera can show (a camera obviously designed by low-status males).  It proves I waft gracefully and charmingly (abeit in a manly way) through rows of perfect pampered specimens.  Truly, Chan, can you claim any rose of yours is superior to this one?  I!  Doubt!  It!


Next, consider my slime mold.  Chan, do you have a slime mold as magnificent as this?   I!  Think!  Not!

Ian Moss, or the Artist Formerly Known As A Celebrity Guest Blogger At The Fredösphere, has written an essay for the New Music Box on the very important topic of fund raising for composers.  Did you hear me?  He's telling us how to get money.

Why is Benjamin Britten's opera Gloriana not performed more often?  Charles T. Downey has nice things to say about it, as performed in St. Louis.  The title role was sung by Christine Brewer, who also sang on the Naxos recording of Bolcom's Songs of Innocence and Experience I mentioned yesterday.

Lynn spotted a link to a clue as to the true identity of the Loch Ness Monster.  To answer your question, Lynn:  heck yes, knowing is friggin' better than any friggin' "mystery."

William Bolcom's sprawling oratorio Songs of Innocence and Experience was recorded at the University of Michigan last year and released by Naxos.  I've got a copy of it from the library and I've started to wade in.  These are (ooh, watch me work this metaphor!) deep waters, and I'm lousy at the review business, so you'll get no such thing here -- but I'll mention that Michael Daugherty (now the chair of the composition department at the U-M School of Music) was thanked in the liner notes for playing a key role in making the recording happen.  Meanwhile, I see Bolcom's got a new CD out, again from Naxos:  he provides piano accompaniment for soprano Carole Farley in a recital of his songs.  Bolcom asks a good question:  "who but a courageous soprano would start a recording with a scream?"

Next, with a grace that appears effortlessly clever, I pivot the subject of this post on the mention of "piano" near the end of the previous paragraph as a means of introducing The Well-Tempered Blog, which has lots of great links for pianists and all musicians.  I noticed there a link to another person (besides me) who cannot approach the music of Messiaen as a mere pile of notes.

Finally, here's a link on the mainstreaming of homeschoolers, which I offer as a follow up to my post on the subject.  I daresay within a few years, the subculture of my church (and thousands of others like it) will tip, after which those parents not homeschooling will be the minority feeling the pressure to conform.  As parents who are not really committed to homeschooling make it their choice, the whole movement will jump the shark, horror stories will multiply, and pressure to regulate will grow.  I'm not looking forward to it.

It turns out Thomas Edison found a way to travel through the ether, resulting in space travel during the Victorian era.  I did not know that.  Space 1889 tells the story in the form of an audio drama, reviewed here.  This sentence does not sum up the generally positive review, but it caught my attention:

In hard sf terms, this is several mathematical symbols short of the full equation.

The reviewer calls it Gaslight SF, but I don't think that works as a general descriptor of the genre.  This is not retro-futurism; I suppose you could argue it is its opposite.  Thus, I propose we dub it futro-retroism. 

I can think of other examples of the genre (Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow; The Wild, Wild West) -- can you?  In my opinion, anachronisms and contrafactuals introduced to the past via time machines (e.g., The Guns of the South) belong in yet another category.

We have an antipope!  Hoo boy, this is good.  Church history, cheesy demon pop music, mullets:  this video has it all.  It is for links like this my parents brought me into the world.  Now let me die, content.

Thanks to my buddy Victor, who constantly monitors the Jet Lag Travel Guides for updates.  Yes, this is all part of a viral marketing campaign, and I am a cog in some monstrous capitalist tool.  Which is fun.  Don't miss Phaic Tan's most popular soap opera.

Mentioning Scott Spiegelberg's comments on the Texas Countertenor Controversy will likely give me dropsy, rheumatism, apoplexy, various poxes great and small, softening of the brain, trench mouth, St. Vitus dance, and consumption, not to mention gout, grippe, grocer's itch, ague, dengue, palsy, phthisis, hoof and mouth disease, biliousness, hemiplegy, cachexy, catelepsy, croup, impetigo, necrosis, nephrosis, nephritis, neuralgia, nostalgia, euphoria, flux of humor, and (ironically) aphonia -- but no, Scott, it probably won't kill me.

It's the curious case of Mikhael Rawls, who has been banned from participating in the Texas Music Educators Association choral competition as a soprano.  I don't think we should call him a "boy soprano" as A Cappella News did (which has the whole story); he's a mature 17-year-old best described as either a countertenor or falsettist, if I read the reports correctly.

I subscribe to the email list Choraltalk, and I don't recall an issue that has exercised this community more.  Follow the link and search for the subject "The truth about countertenors" and brace yourself for the deluge -- or just read a few selected comments.

I have mixed reactions.  It's important to understand that the ban on cross-singing (if I may coin a phrase) was created (just a few years ago) to encourage male participation and to protect altos from damaging their voices by singing tenor parts.  The ban on countertenors was included out of a sense of fairness.  It's worth noting that even this idea -- that it's hard on a woman's voice to sing low continuously -- is controversial, although I think it is correct in most situations.  Thus, I can easily appreciate the motive behind the ban, and I tire easily of those who detect sinister forces at work.  That many view Texas as a hotbed of bigotry adds fuel to the fire.  Some people want to turn this into an argument over gender politics to a degree that seems forced.

On the other hand, just one month ago, I was singing a baritone part at my church that included a section in falsetto.  I picked the piece -- heck, I wrote the piece -- so obviously I don't mind pushing the limits of what a male voice can get away with.  My church is theologically quite conservative, but stylistically open-minded in the extreme, so if anyone disliked the music, at least they didn't think a complaint was worth it.  I suppose I would feel differently if I lead music in an environment where my musical decisions were second-guessed.  (I've heard rumors that one or two churches like that exist in the world.)

It's easy for me to say, but if I were this kid, I hope I would have the sense to say to the competition (in a high, girlish pitch, naturally), "hasta la vista, baby" and use the publicity to go perform somewhere else, hopefully to enjoy the sweet, sweet pleasures of the Last Laugh.

I caught this meme from Alex Ross.

Total number of books I've owned: Thanks to a flooded basement, I'm down to several hundred.
The last book I bought:  I ... don't ... remember.  I get all my books from the library these days.
The last book I read:  Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver.  I'm working on the next book in the cycle now:  The Confusion.
Five books that mean a lot to me (in no particular order): Anne Fremantle, ed., The Protestant Mystics; C. S. Forrester, Beat to Quarters (or any Hornblower story); LOTR (how I wished it would never end); Humphrey Carpenter's biography of Benjamin Britten; C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image (lots of surprising facts about the classical model of the universe:  every educated person in the mediaeval world "knew" the earth was round, for example).
Total number of films I own on DVD and video: Half a dozen or less, and they were all gifts.  The ones I recall:  Chicken Run, which was more for the kids, really; The Passion of the Christ which I haven't seen, since the Wifeösphere's illness last year meant watching torture would have been ... torture;  and LOTR:TTT.  I'm not counting kids' programs, or various television shows we taped, the latter which include the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment of Catalina Caper, the A&E series Pride and Prejudice, and all 18 episodes of My So-Called Life.
Last film I bought:  I've never done it.  The two DVDs that would tempt me are The Incredibles and The Fountainhead.
Last film I watched:  The badly-named Nothing So Strange, a mockumentary about the assassination of Bill Gates.  Good idea; uneven execution (no pun intended).
Five films that I watch a lot or that mean a lot to me (in no particular order):  The Fountainhead (I love it but can't respect it), Memento, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Jacob's Ladder, The Sixth Sense.
If you could be any character portrayed in a movie, who would it be? If I said Phineas Fogg, would you still love me?
Total volume of music on your computer: A mere 7.78 GB
Last CD you bought: Masterworks of the New Era, featuring Anagoge by Forrest Covington (that's Fo-Co to those of us who were with him through the siege of Leningrad).
Song currently playing:  An entire CD of sound effects from the original Star Trek series isn't exactly a song, but I suppose it's music to some people's ears.  Boy, the submarine warfare theme is really reinforced by those quiet chugga-chugga and ping-ping noises.
Five songs I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me: Easter from the Five Mystical Songs by RVW; The Field of the Dead from Alexander Nevsky by Prokofiev; "Moon River" by Henry Mancini; "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You" by Gene Autry and Scott Wiseman; "There is a Fountain Filled with Blood" by William Cowper (text).
Five people to whom I'm passing the baton: Monsieur C- and Chan (oh, they did it already) and Don and Overgrown Path and (heh) Michael Daugherty.

UPDATE: I fixed the link to Don's blog Mixolydian Mode.

Don't miss the fledgling Carnival of Music at TexasBestGrok.  Host John Lanius was kind enough to include me this week without me even asking.  Thanks, John.

It's the Salvation of Classical Music, Part MCXX!  Howard Hanson's Concerto for Organ, Strings and Harp finds utility as a aid to dentistry:

Welch's playing was precise and expressive, never overbearing. But when we arrived at the thunderous climax of Hanson's tone poem, he drew upon all the organ's might, including a newly installed antiphonal tuba stop in the balcony. Those of us seated there could feel our dental fillings coming loose.

Meanwhile, yet another writer joins Kyle Gann in forgetting the sins of great artists and focusing on their art.

UPDATE:  Stop the presses!  Colby Cosh has found proof that Wagner's music is inherently racist!  I'll never listen to Die Meistersinger again -- or at least I won't let my dog listen to it!  Nazis:  I hate those guys.

I usually skip Kyle Gann's tangential political opinions, so I couldn't help noticing his latest post, which is a sensible, humble request not to judge composers by their political views, their private lives, or their personalities:

Judge me by my music - but the idea that my music might someday be judged by my amateur political thought is repellent. Might as well judge Nixon’s performance as president based on his piano playing.

Wagner's antisemitism or David Diamond's rudeness do not justify the rejection of their music.

But I have committed the complimentary sin, and I'm not sorry:  I started listening to Olivier Messiaen's music long before I liked it, simply because I found his simple piety immensely attractive.  I learned to like a lot of it -- all but the most forbidding -- even while I continued to reject impatiently a lot of other similarly difficult music.

What shall we make of this confession?  Let's face it:  the rejection of the trite and facile, and the embracing of the sublime, the inspired, and the challenging, happens too rarely among us.  If some of us get a little shove in the right direction by extra-musical prods, that's a good thing, right?

Meanwhile:  you can listen to the new, improved recording of my duet Psalm 46, and you can read the score in pdf.  I'm also wondering if I mentioned my new trio "I waited patiently for the Lord" for TBB -- if not, the score, also in pdf, is available for your perusal.  As always, please email me if you want to perform any of my works.  I will gladly grant you permission, unless you catch me in one of my frequent bad moods -- although my rudeness is no reason not to perform my music, right?  So now I'm confused.

My aunt's 90th birthday compelled us to visit Goshen, Indiana.  I was delighted to be reminded what a magnificent (and magnificently maintained) courthouse Goshen has.  You'd almost think you were in the capitol city of a small state.  Feast your eyes.

I was just telling my friend John a story I read a loooooong ago about Benny Goodman rehearsing Igor Stravinsky's jazz-influenced Ebony Concerto.  At one point Stravinsky was struggling at length to describe the expression he wanted on a particular note.  Finally, the light came on for Goodman, who turned around to his band and said, "bend it, boys!"

Did that really happen?  This anecdote is resisting my attempts to google it.  It's been so long since I read it, my confidence in the accuracy of any particular detail is about nil.  If you can confirm, deny, or correct my memory, please comment.

Sofia Gubaidulina has been on my list for years.  Today finally I listened to The Canticle of the Sun, composed only 8 years ago.  I don't exactly like it yet, but I know it's going to grow on me.  The London Voices provide the singers, and Mstislav Rostropovich leads the list of instrumentalists ... but what's this?  Simon Carrington plays percussion?  The King's Singers guy?  Can he do that?

Meanwhile, "Zondervan Releases ‘The Revealing,’ the Final Book in the “Nephilim Trilogy” by Christian UFO Cult Expert Dr. L.A. Marzulli" which features...

a secret hospital wing for alien abductees in Los Angeles, to demonic possession, shape shifting, Area 51, the Merovingians, the 1917 Fatima Apparition, Machu Pichu, crop circles, Nazi death camps, and the death of the Pope, the trilogy has mesmerizing ideas, a dynamic, fast-paced plot, and enough government conspiracy theories to please the most demanding sci-fi, paranormal and Bible prophecy fan alike.

Hoo boy!  The press release wants you to know the books have Nephilim.  Also, Nephilim.  And it mentions the Nephilim, which include Nephilim, plus Nephilim.  But where are the Masons?  You gotta have Masons.  Some number-mysticism and beanophobia would be nice, too.

I'm working on improving my singing this summer.  To that end, I'm re-recording my setting of Psalm 46 for tenor and baritone, which Alan and I sang last Fall for Reformation Sunday.

My, what discipline the microphone imposes!  I'm pleased by how it helps me improve my voice.  I'm fixing subtle problems that no voice teacher could ever adequately describe, and which I don't notice while I am singing.  Why didn't I start using the mic years ago?

Here is my advice to all aspiring singers:  find the best voice teacher you possibly can, clap him in irons, sell him into slavery, and use the proceeds to buy yourself some decent recording equipment.

Speaking of the Reformation, don't miss Scenes From the Life of Martin Luther In Legos.

He's a home-grown Ann Arbor boy, and he wrote "the most influential music / theater / literary work of the 1980s," but only now am I noticing Robert Ashley.  (Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.)  His meandering monologue throughout the opera Perfect Lives would get old fast, I think, but it just might have influenced Speech, who currently resides in the Where Are They Now And How Could So Much Talent Have Disappeared So Completely? file.  Oh, wait, no he doesn't.

Amazon has more excerpts of Robert Ashley:  check out eL/Aficionado and Improvement.  The music not my cup of tea;  Ashley's emotions are detached to the point of coldness, but what he's doing cannot be ignored.

Here's a provocative thesis:  authors tend to burn out after early success, but composers just keep getting better.  Anyone care to defend this idea?  Anyone got a list of counter-examples?

The music seems to drag on and on, confusing us and testing the limits of our attention span:  pop songs are boring.

I can get Mixolydian Mode to link to me just by linking thus!  He is in my power!  Bwa-ha-ha-ha!

My co-conspirator in singing, Alan, is a furniture maker by night.  These days he's influenced by the second empire stylings of some old homes I've pointed out to him.  In the woodworkers' subculture, he's starting to become slightly famous.

Attention, music theory geeks:  George Pepper has a blog for you.  Lots of examples sprinkled among the text; but I'm shocked to see no mention of nested counterpoint anywhere.  George, dude -- haven't you heard?  It's the latest thing.

As the Fredösphere enters its second year of operation, I feel a need to take stock, to summarize, and to remind.  I.e., I'm feeling lazy today, so what you get is a compilation episode.

The Fredösphere's first year was characterized by an unhealthy interest in bad religious art, a category that overlaps (only partially) with religious-themed sci-fi, which contains a subset of one element called bad sci-fi movies prominently featuring atonal sacred choral music and Charlton Heston.  And now is a good time to mention Neotech.

I should own up to the antipopes, and dominant males performing scary rituals in darkened caverns, killer kangaroos and dominant females making scary noises in darkened clothing.

I blogged my exposure to sensitivity training, musical instruments of delicacy and rare sensitivity, the Three Bs, secret cardinals, dreams about domestic architecture, and other things too diverse to classify.

I somehow missed a MacArthur Genius Grant in 2004; my gracious concession speech may help me next time around.  That year also saw the birth of my third-born, Umie the Umlaut.

My celebrity guest-bloggers included "Wobegon Boy," Ian Moss, and Joshua Shank.  Charles Finney did not guest-blog here, since he died in 1875.

I did not spare you exposure to extreme experimental counterpoint geekiness, my Maundy Thursday magnum opus, or the Dance-Chant Continuum.

I admit to my shame that my two lame attempts to attract attention from The New Criterion crowd (via photoshop slander) pretty much failed.  Benjamin Britten and Henry Fonda and a certain famous exploding zeppelin also got the photoshop treatment.  This photoshop lie fooled some people, however.

In the category of Well, That Got Their Attention, we find Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah sung in church and yodeling about film noir and the Four Freedoms and the plainchant of Twisted Sister and the band names list, and my West Michigan travelogue and exposing corruption among the Jedi and most of all:  the character of musical keys.  For the category of This Deserved More Attention Than It Got, I humbly nominate Impressionism for Gearheads.

I remembered fondly certain sci-fi classics involving a teenaged twerp who bosses around the whole country, space opera, and squirting air through your meat, plus vintage sci-fi art, the music of Forbidden Planet.  I was less fond of the Holy Church of the Order of the Red Painted Breast and the Temple of Bad European Pop Music.

Finally, I deserve a medal for my efforts to promote unknown composers like Havergal Brian, Johan Joseph Fux, and Fred Himebaugh.

Soda Constructor has been on my blogroll since the beginning.  You'll find it in that bottom category called Wackösphere.  Nevertheless, until last night I never really tried it out.  I showed it to the other household member who exhibits Extreme Nerdiness, i.e., Der Drübermensch, and he loved it.  It's a 2D animator of "weights" connected by "springs" and "muscles", all of which are user-placeable.  Ain't the web amazin'?

Speaking of  nerds:  of course.  And don't forget to find yourself in the nerd hierarchy.  Oh, don't deny it; you're in it.  Several different places.

Who stood to benefit?  My buddy Victor loaned me his copy of an odd, unknown mockumentary on the events surrounding the assassination of Bill Gates:  Nothing So Strange.  I will give a full report.

Right now, however, I'm listening to White Moon:  Songs to Orpheus, a song recital by Dawn Upshaw.  This is the first time I've heard her sing for a chamber setting, and her technique is startling.  Her diction is so clear, and so transparently American in its accent (in the English songs, of course) that at first I couldn't believe she was pulling it off.  That's vulgar, isn't it?  It must be -- right??  She's chewing her vowels -- no??  Well, no.  For too long we've put up with diction (from sopranos, anyway) that is, by turns, garbled and affected.  Blame it on opera.

[G]o as far away as possible from home to build your first buildings.  The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.
    -Frank Lloyd Wright

Do not let Greg Sandow find out about this headline:  Orchestra piece inspired by Cardinal John Newman poem to be performed.  Zzzzzzzzz.  And come to think of it, Elgar really blew it when he came up with the name The Dream of Gerontius.  He should have called it Gerontius' Final Fantasy or something.

Mezzo-soprano Victoria Livengood has no illusions about her operatic career:

''Let's face it," Livengood says, ''mezzos either sing boys in pants, or hags . . . or sluts." She is speaking over the telephone, but you can just imagine the smile spreading across her face.

''With my Miss North Carolina hair, I wasn't going to do the hags, at least not yet, so it was mostly the sluts. Some of my Southern Baptist friends and relatives ask me why I can't ever play a nice part," she says.

It's summer festival time:  Toronto will host choral groups including the wacky Shouting Men.  Meanwhile, locally, we have chamber music via MiniFest, and Marilyn Mason's organ-centric Ann Arbor Summer Festival.  Marilyn Mason is a wonderfully kind and engaging organist at U-M, whom I met when I took organ lessons from one of her students.  Please, please, do not confuse her with this person.

"Composer" ... "campy sci-fi" ... "Destroy All Humans" ... these guys really know how to push my buttons.

They wanted to get our attention as we drove Interstate 75 through southern Ohio.  They succeeded.  With his head thrown back, this jumbo Jesus may be drawing inspiration from the regrettable laughing Jesus that showed up everywhere back in the 80s.  These people really need to ask themselves a couple of questions before they begin depicting such a touchy subject:  What message am I trying to send here?  What message will I actually end up sending?  With the 10X Jesus in Monroe, Ohio, the unintended message is, "my followers will have more money than taste, and their neighbors will be the losers."  With the laughing Jesus, the message is, "I just saw the Apostle Peter fall right on his butt -- haw, haw, haw!"  Or in the case of the church sign my wife spotted in a more rural part of southern Ohio (it read, "make your eternal reservations today:  smoking or non-smoking") the real message is, "some of my followers will say anything to get attention."

Don't miss the previous installments of The Varieties of Religious Art:  Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, and Part VI.

Labels: VarietiesOfReligiousArt

A kind friend with a better memory than mine has fulfilled a months-old promise to loan me his copy of Goodbye, Babylon, a glorious 6-CD collection of old-tyme gospel music.  To understand just how wonderful this collection is, take the time to read Matt Labash's glorious review of the same.  Just do it.  It's so good, it makes me wish for a new religious order, one devoted to memorizing the words of this review.  They could rise every morning at 4:00 a.m. and chant Labash's words.  It's just a suggestion.

This all fits neatly, of course, in the context of the way recording technology has influenced performance style in the 20th century, as described by Alex Ross, with more comments from Colby Cosh.

The American South was the source of a mighty glacier, and I, a child church singer in Michigan, circa 1970, constituted a pebble in its terminal moraine.  It was a glacier of fire baptism, Hellfire and brimstone, tongues of fire, and (to complete this increasingly conflicted, not to say mixed, metaphor) the burning, purifying light of God's unapproachable throne.  Thus, although I am far removed in time and space from these recordings, I nevertheless recognize them as the source of the music of My People.

From Labash's description, you might think all the musicians were wild-eyed fanatics...

As musicians and vocal stylists, they took a backseat to no secular artists of the day--and often, they doubled as the secular artists of the day. Legendary blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson, of Primitive Baptist stock, went so far as to record religious material under the pseudonym "Deacon L.J. Bates" to conceal his secular identity. They were singers like Brother Claude Ely, who in the Kentucky Holiness tradition, sings and plays the perennial Church of God in Christ shout, "There Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down," with a ferocity that suggests he was getting sawed in half while performing.

...not to mention the preachers:

They were stiff-necked dogmatists like Sister O.M. Terrell--a street minister from the Fire Baptized Holiness Church of God--who, with a wink, put everyone from adulterers to "snuff dippers" on notice, singing: You know the Bible right / Somebody wrong / God knows / You're wrong. They are people whose God often seems to have failed them, but who believe anyway--whose songs and wails and murmurs are often defiant affirmations. Death does not make them blanch or prevent them from tending the pressing business of "getting right," which explains sermons like Rev. J.M. Gates's 1926 Christmas pick-me-up, "Death Might Be Your Santa Claus," followed by "Will the Coffin be Your Santa Claus?" and the capper, "Will Hell Be Your Santa Claus?"

I'll end with a few scattered thoughts:

1. There's a consistent driven quality to the singing, a holdover from the pre-microphone days, where the voice needed to fill a room on its own energy.  This doesn't mean everyone sings with consistent focus or intensity.  You can tell the difference between those who are present emotionally in their performance, and those who are telegraphing it in.  Loud and bored can coexist quite easily.  Furthermore, the level of technical proficiency is all over the map, but every performer is very comfortable.  These people have all been doing this for years.  How unlike the typical under-rehearsed classical musician who scowls at the printed page while giving what is often the lone performance of a particular work.

2. It's nice that, just as a famous name pops out among the unknowns in the track listing, the performance associated with that name also pops.  Mahalia Jackson really deserved to be famous.

3. The Sacred Harp singing style sounds more like barking -- you'd think it was a movement of musically and religiously inclined hounds who are treeing the devil.

4. Authenticity fetishists need to explain how a clarinet that honks like a bass kazoo found its way into a song called "Crying holy unto the Lord."  Almighty God, if that is authentic, help us to achieve ever-greater levels of artifice, amen!

It rhymes with vogue.

Is nothing sacred?

In this Broadway style musical, Tolkien fans will see all their favorite characters from the movies with one big change – they’re funny. This hilarious send-up features twelve original songs, from the over-the-top opening number with barefooted tap-dancing Hobbits, to an elf-on-human 80’s power ballad (with a live guitar solo performed by the rightful heir of Gondor). In another song, the Balrog (a terrifying creature of shadow and flame) performs a sequin-studded New York style cabaret number.

Greg Sandow has been blogging the art of art marketing, and has harsh words to say.  I'd guess this article, with its clunky, confusing lede, would not please him.  My own efforts of self-promotion via this blog are the envy of the composing world, naturally, since I have an unbeatable asset:  Umie the Umlaut, the lovable, wise-cracking, double-dotted It Mascot of the blögôsphère.  But if you want a composer with, you know, talent and skill, check out Donald McCullough's fancy schmancy new website.

The score to my latest is available for your perusal.  It's a men's a cappella trio called I Waited Patiently For the Lord.

I can't help but react to Alex Ross' piece on how recording technology changes live music performance.  Brace yourselves -- I'm going to extrapolate wildly from a single experience.  Years ago I attended a concert by a pop group whose name was "Feet of Clay" or some such.  I enjoyed it well enough, since they stuck mostly to reproducing their CD work with which I was familiar.  Nevertheless, because I get overstimulated and exhausted by noisy, crowded environments, I found myself in need of a break.  Wandering the lobby, I was stunned by how many concert goers were already there.  I realized that these kids attend concerts with an expectation that it will hold their continuous attention no more than a baseball game.  Maybe less.

Then it hit me.  For lots of people -- maybe most people -- music is what it has been for many since at least the time of Haydn:  incidental.  For these people, all music aspires to the condition of incidentalness.  It is background music for a drama; the drama of daily life.  They never expect to have what I always believed was the ordinary music experience:  you sit quietly, you give your full, uninterrupted attention to the music performance, you are moved emotionally, you give the performance your white-gloved applause, and you leave.  For these people, music does for their ears what a Glade air freshener does for their noses.

My goal is not to indulge in snobbery so much as to remark what a rare accomplishment it is to get an entire crowd really, really with you when you perform for it.  Indeed, I can't help but wonder how many classical concert goers are faking it in the standing ovations they give out so promiscuously.  Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised when Ian Moss asks why it's so hard for new music to move people.