The Fredösphere

I'll be away from the computer today, so I'll toss you a few treats, then go:

Have a look at About the Composer and his friend DogBlog.  The latter is a composer and poet who blogs monster movies -- which is just wrong.

Plep has lots of yummy stuff as per usual, including this extinct dinosaur-sized mammal and these Michigan architectural curiosities and more on the curious hollow earth theorists.  However, Advice Bunny is absolutely not up to Plep's usual standards.  Don't follow that link.  I'm begging you.

My review (lileksization, really) of Frau im Mond caught the eye of Michael Blowhard.  Thanks for the link, Michael.  I mention it here because the post prompted a few interesting comments on the movie and its director, Fritz Lang.  Those of you wanting to know more, including some good stuff in the film I noticed but forgot to mention, should check it out.  Lang's influence on the culture of space exploration is astonishing.

Now, why don't those bright, engaging people come over here and leave a few comments?  What are they afraid of?

Meanwhile:  Lost in Space is the 33rd-best sci-fi TV show of all time?  The Jetsons was better than Futurama?  This list is a travesty.  I guess we should just be thankful they gave "Star Trek with fish" a higher ranking than LIS.  And we're extra-double-plus lucky Space Muntiny was never on TV, and thus they were prevented by their own rules from voting it #1.  (Hat tips to Victor and Gravity Lens.)

I stirred up a mini-controversy by the ancient method of quoting out of context.  See my post, and subsequent comments, about composition teachers who impose style (typically, atonal style) on their students.  My link quoted Kyle Gann's sentence, "Earth to composers:  the 20th century is over!"  That prompted a few comments from Steve Hicken and Alex Ross (who took time out from making Super Grover paintings).  The quote sounds like Gann is imposing his own tonal style on others, but if you read the links, you'll see he's merely calling for an open market.

Some of us are still reacting to an attitude prevalant 20-40 years ago.  According to Gann, there's evidence that attitude is still around in some surprising places.  It's the attitude that atonality is just like impressionism:  widely rejected at first, then destined to be accepted, and finally embraced.  Therefore, any who reject it will be viewed by the future as embarrassing mossbacks.

I don't think atonality will ever be embraced because I (mostly) buy into the argument that tonality is founded on relationships within physics that people can intuit.  More to the point, however, I suspect the above scenario misreads the history of impressionism by locating the hostility in the general public, instead of in the art establishment.  If I'm right (and I admit I'm too lazy to research it) then those atonalist teachers correspond not to the brave impressionists, but rather to the grumpy old guys who ran the Salon de Paris.

Anyway, I think I just dived in over my head.  Mostly, I'm bored by pissing contests over musical style -- especially now that my maturing (or more bluntly, ossifying) brain can pay attention to weird stuff it used to find bewildering.  If Kyle Gann had not suggested otherwise, I would have thought this argument was long over.  Let a thousand flowers bloom.

Oh, and by the way: pop music is dead.

We watched Tess of the D'Urbervilles over the weekend, this Tess produced by A&E.  We've never read the book, and we gave up on one previous film version when we saw the story was quickly going to turn grim.  We pressed on to the end of this version, and I must say I was impressed with the whole production.  All three principles are complex characters making sometimes surprising decisions, and the actors (Justine Waddell, Jason Flemyng, and Oliver Milburn) made it as believable as possible.

Now to the plot, provided by our novelist friend, Mr. Thomas Hardy.  Did I mention the story turns grim early on?  Well, from there it only gets worse.  This story is horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible, horrible. Hardy seems to have calibrated the events of Tess' life for the purpose of maximizing our pain.  Tess is an exquisite instrument of torture, nothing else.

As the story raced to a climactic scene featuring the wielding of an unlikely murder weapon, the wifeösphere reacted with a grunt as though it were her own gut getting the butter knife treatment.  It was then we knew Tess would give us no satisfaction; that the resolution would be infuriating, and Tess would find for herself a death that would leave us bitter and exhausted: 

‘Justice’ was done, and Tess, in the Aeschylean phrase, had ended her sport with us.

Kyle Gann has a message for teachers of music composition who try to dictate musical style to their students.  "Earth to composers: the 20th century is over!"  And that goes for you, too, Elliott Carter!

Even the ever-tolerant Mr. Gann has his limits, however.

UPDATE: In the comments, Steve Hicken pointed out I was one T short of an Elliott, and I've fixed that now.

Ten years after making Metropolis, near the end of the silent era, Fritz Lang directed a sci-fi film called Frau im Mond.  To the modern eye, its a salad of astonishing prescience, laughable retro-futuristic anacronisms, compelling achievements in special effects, compelling (because amusing) crudities in special effects, some great action sequences, and long stretches of boooooring dramatic developement -- just as you would expect.

The first plot points Lang wants to establish is that a certain Professor Manfeldt has determined the mountains of the moon are loaded with gold; he now lives alone, impovershed and bitter because his ideas were mocked by his peers.  That's it.  It takes Lang eleven minutes to lay that out.  Shoot, in a modern sci-fi action movie, we would have seen all that in the first eleven minuts plus seen the professor build a rocket, fly it to the moon and back, invent a new weapon system, use it to blow up some aliens, travel back in time so he could become his own father and mother, then have the only-mostly-dead alien come back to get its butt kicked one more time.

This film is nearly three hours long, so it is not like the thing needed padding.  Honestly, I almost gave up on it about three different times.  For the first two whole hours Lang laboriously introduces Manfeldt's disciple, Wolf Helius, who decides to vindicate the professor by attempting a moon landing.  Eventually it becomes clear the movie is all about Helius and the love triangle he shares with his assistant, Hans Windegger, and Windegger's fiancée; why the irrelevant Manfeldt wasn't cut from the story, I'll never understand.  We also meet the evil Mr. Turner, who works for five of the richest industrialists in the world.  They use threats of violence to take over the project, in order to maintain their control of the world gold market.

Note the extrordinarily repulsive Mr. Turner's English name.  Could that be a bit of continental hostility to Anglo-Saxon capitalist savvy?  It turns out, however, membership in the club of five big shots shows almost James Wattian-levels of sensitivity to diversity:  the group includes one Asian, and one of the white guys is in a wheel chair.  There's one important demographic group that remains shut out, however.

Non-smokers not welcome.

New music was composed for this DVD release of Woman in the Moon.  It's a disappointment -- it's just some guy and a synthesizer.  During the stirring scenes, the music seems to rise to the occasion, but during the dull parts, the music becomes unfocused and only serves to make things duller.  Honestly, I've been to silent film screenings with music improvised live by organists that demonstrated more immagination and sympathy for the flow of the action.

Lang seems to have an aspergery love of diagrams.  I didn't expect a movie from 1929 to have such a geeky engineering thing going.

An animated diagram of planetary gravity fields.

This flawless beauty mesmerizes me -- and that broad on the right ain't half bad either.

If you watch this movie, consider skipping to the last hour.  Once they start rolling out the rocket, things become, dare I say it, exciting.  Lang loves his toy models.  They don't fool the modern eye, but generally they don't embarass, and they're fun to watch.

A fly-over of the outdoor model.

A peek inside a demonstration model of the rocket.

The least convincing model:  cheesy bread, anyone?

Lang makes a stab at hard sci-fi, and the result is only sometimes wildly wrong:  that's quite an achievement for a 1929 film.  For example:  the rocket is emmersed in water just before takeoff, because it is so lightweight, it can't support its own weight otherwise.  Compare this genuinely inspiring scene with a real-live NASA rollout:  not bad!

Just before takeoff, all the men in the audience doff their hats.  It's quite moving, and it seems like a million years removed from today's sensibilities.


Half way to the moon, they find a boy stowed away.  Of course.  To our eyes, the boy's outfit seems vaguely military, and his hair is flipped to the side in a way that stirs some uneasy associations.  Our mind wanders a bit, and we start to think ... no, no, this was 1929.  Those people came along a few years later.  There couldn't possibly be any connection to ... uh oh.

Hail ladder!  I mean, leader!

The boy insists he knows all about rockets.  To prove it, he pulls out a sci-fi pulp magazine from his napsack.

A woman at the mercy of an alien insect.	30 years later:  some things never change.

I'm listening to Billings right now.  His tune AFRICA is one of the great works of rustic craftsmanship -- crudity without ugliness.  The name is appropriately inappropriate, as the song invokes the naive, optimistic dreams of early Americans, busy founding the New Jerusalem.  You know:  William Penn and his pet lion hard at work, immanentizing the eschaton. Yum, yum. 

I suppose I really need to limit my listenings per hour.  If I stop at one dozen, that would be a sufficient gesture to the spirit of self-restraint, don't you agree?

Here's that album, by His Majestie's Clerkes, directed by Paul Hillier.  If you don't know Billings, spend a couple of minutes with the sound excerpts.

From A Cappella News we learn that humans are not the only species to develop choral music.  Our polyester choir robes are still unequaled, however.

It is astonishing that the student body president of any Ivy League would have both the wit and the desire to give the kind of talk that Noah Riner gave while welcoming the class of '09 to Dartmouth.  Jesus:  isn't he passé?

(If you want to read a review of the book in that last link -- that should have been titled Twilight of the Godless -- check the June issue of the New Criterion.  If you want to read the story of Christianity's astonishing spread in all kinds of improbable places in the non-Western world, read The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity.  Its spread is quick, quiet, and all very disturbingly unsupervised.)

I started to read February House because Terry Teachout said I had to, but I confess I put it aside after one chapter due to reading list bloat.  (The book tells the history of the NY boarding house shared briefly by Auden, Britten & Pears, Carson McCullers, Paul & Jane Bowles, George Davis of Harper's Bazaar, and Gypsy Rose Lee.)  Now I'm slowly catching up as I work through the June (June!  And here it is, almost October) New Criterion, only to receive confirmatory orders from Brooke Allen.  I liked this part of his review:

Relatively anonymous in America, he [W. H. Auden] was working out a bizarre scheme for his personal salvation which included a “spiritual marriage” to Kallman. As Tippins points out, a more unlikely partner for a spiritual marriage than this mercurial, fickle, ambitious boy could hardly be found: in fact, the Middagh Street era saw a crisis in their relationship, and though they continued to be more or less a couple for the rest of their lives, Kallman refused to have sexual relations with Auden ever again, amusing himself elsewhere. Auden was also sneaking off to...

Here,  the reader's titillation antennae become fully erect -- particularly if he is sophisticated, yet somewhat ignorant of key parts of Auden's biography.  Oh, what juicy bit of gossip could possibly finish that sentence?  I bet it's outrageous.  I bet its transgressive!

...sneaking off to take communion at a nearby Episcopal church. It was the beginning, in fact, of his famous return to the Anglican fold.

Cue the muted trumpets:  whaaa, whaaa, whaaaaaaaaaa!

Perhaps you remember the SNL sketch of an alternate version of Superman.  As a child, he crash-lands in Germany instead of the U.S. and winds up serving Hitler.  His costume features a big Ü on his chest, natürlich.  Fun stuff.

In that spirit, I offer you a series of links on the terribly topical topic of:  Nazi UFOs!  This one and this one and this one, and oh, here's a great lede:

It’s much easier to dismiss an absurd claim that is fresh and new than one which has been around for a while and taken root. It is, for example, simple enough to assess the credibility of David Icke’s assertion that Dr Josef Mengele – seemingly after he died – used mind-control to make a young American woman go to Balmoral Castle and officiate at rituals where the Queen and Queen Mother turned into reptiles and devoured small children; or to judge whether, as ‘Sir’ Laurence Gardner tells us in an explanation on which his whole ‘grail bloodline’ theory depends, the otherwise unmentioned daughter of Joseph of Arimathea (in this version, the brother of Jesus Christ) popped over to Wales to marry and settle down with Bran the Blessed, a mythical god-figure who spent much of his life as a detached head (and who, even if we take the original myths as a guide, would have been well over 100 years old at the time of the marriage).

Oh, shoot, finding these links is like stealing candy from fish in a barrel.  Here, just go to the Google page.

BTW, there's also Superman as a Red.

(This should be my most popular post ever!  It's got Nazis -- and UFOs!  It's almost as good as Golfing for Cats.)

Last night I thought of a few more names to add to the hurricane list, to fill out the non-Zoë years.  Here they are:  Hurricane Zeke, Hurricane Zha Zha (of course!) and Hurricane Zaphod.

Please note the exquisite gender balance I have achieved.  Unfortunately, I don't have the knowledge of Spanish necessary to fill the quota of Latin American names -- unless you will allow me a Hurricane Zorro.

If you have suggestions, by all means, send them in.

Mixolydian Mode has a nice post on some semi-serious attempts to "recreate" "authentic" elven or færie music.  You can't make this stuff up -- because someone else already has!

Gravity Lens links to an article that (indirectly) discusses my dream of living to see Hurricane Zoë.  (The bad news:  it will never happen.)  Beyond that, forgive me for seeing a bit of grim humor in this FEMA for Kids webpage.

There's something poetically just in the inept webpage design of this deeply wrongheaded website.  (Warning:  Star Trek content.  Hat tip to Lynn.)

That Mark Morris dance we saw on Saturday was only one component of a nearly perfect weekend.  One the one hand, I had several conversations with people eager to tell me all the things they like in my music.  Well, it would be rude of me to disagree, wouldn't it!  My ad hoc brass players did a fine job Sunday morning playing an offertory I arranged on the hymn tune Nun Freut Euch.  It even got applause, which is, in the context of a Lutheran church service, a gesture so extreme as to equal a Rite of Spring-level crowd reaction.  I guess that bluesy bass line I wrote for the tuba set a few hairnets on fire.  I've learned one of the important lessons my religion teaches:  give the people what they want!  Meanwhile, somebody wants to perform my tenor-bass duet, and is urging me to write more.  Well, hey; I can't deny my public, can I?  Finally:  I get a link from Alex Ross.  Now let thy servant depart in peace.

On Saturday we saw Mark Morris' dancers perform because Terry Teachout said we had to.  When V, the last dance on the program, was about to start, I turned to the wifeösphere and said, "this is the dance that Terry Teachout says will save civilization."

People say Mark Morris is a classicist.  What struck me about his dances is how musical they are.  Indeed, dance is aligned with music in ways that go beyond the mere fact that music usually accompanies it.  The forms, gestures, and idioms of music typically find close analogs with those in dance.  Think of homophony and polyphony, solo, melody and accompaniment, call and response, strict canon.  (One of Morris' dances included a double fugue of bodily movement.)  Consider forms:  you could watch a dance that had no musical accompaniment at all, yet you could clearly recognize its forma as a rondo, or theme and variations, or even a sonata.

During the final applause, the master himself came out to bow and goof around.  He had an odd scarf over his shoulders which reminded me of the time the Ann Arbor Cantata Singers were hired to sing Vivaldi for his dancers.  During the rehearsal he had -- well, I'll be charitable and call it a shawl, although "ratty old kitchen curtain" might be more accurate -- a shawl draped around his shoulders.  Since it was frigid inside the theater, I assumed Morris was improvising to avoid catching a cold.  Now I see it was an affectation, or an ironic comment on affectations.  (Or on choreographers, or maybe on people who make fun of choreographers.  Or on the garment industry.  Or on Man's Inhumanity to Man.  Or something.)  Obviously we are talking here about someone who counts public opinion for nothing.

Anyway, Terry was right about V, and we had a blast.  Oh, and that one ending, where the four dancers swept past each other like planetary bodies -- was that Rock of Ages?  (Yes.) -- knocked me on my butt.  Great stuff.

Did I mention this week is American Women Writers of Fiction Week here at the Fredösphere?  I just learned of a prolific sci-fi author that somehow escaped my attention until now:  Andre Norton.

(Other than Anne McCaffrey, what other women were/are writing sci-fi to a significant audience?  I'm not including Ursula LeGuin or others from the fantasy genre.)

Andre Norton died this year after a long career as the "Grand Dame of Science Fiction and Fantasy."  She was born Alice Mary Norton, but chose Andre as a pen name, thinking it would be more accepted by young male readers.  Of her 70-odd novels, the best known are of the Witch World series.  To the end, she kept busy; her last completed novel, Three Hands for Scorpio, was published posthumously.

So, is she any good?  I'm reading Storm Over Warlock right now, and the scenario is compelling, but the narration is a bit tedious; it tends to pedagogical repetition.  ("Yes, Andre, we get it.")  But hey, the novel was written in 1962; try watching some TV from that era and you'll learn audiences' attentive powers were not held in high esteem by writers of that time.

Here's the synopsis of Storm Over Warlock:

Fleeing from Throg invaders, Shann Lantee and Ragnar Thorvald enter the world of beautiful women.  Immensely powerful as they are lovely, these witches control men by thought domination.  Shann's victory over the beetle-like Throg and his civilized alliance with the women is told here with that sweep of imagination and brilliance of detail which render Andre Norton a primary talent among writers of science fiction.

Beautiful women ... powerful ... witches ... control men ... thought domination....  Hey, I made a mistake!  Andre Norton is an American woman writer of non-fiction.

They're flipping out at The Corner.  Richard Brookhiser has interrupted the steady flow of right-wing pontificating to share some gossip about the wacky love triangle that might have been:  Ned Rorem, Francis Poulenc, and ... Tom Dewey???

Oooookay, that Willa Cather week that ended after just two days has started up again with a lurch. Via 2 Blowhards, here's a beeeyootiful post that has some of what mine didn't -- you know, content.  It turns out there was a PBS special on Willa I missed.

Overtone singing.  Throat singing.  What the heck do they mean?

Throat singing comes from diverse remote cultures, namely the Inuits, Xhosas, Sardinians, and especially the Tuvans (on the Mongolian border) who give the technique the very cool name of "Höömeï" (Dig those umlauts!) which is sometimes boringly rendered "Khoomei."  Typically, it consists of a low drone produced by the vocal chords in the normal way; then, the throat and mouth are manipulated to emphasize one or more overtones.  When done well, the volume of the overtones is startling, and melodies can by sung ("played" seems like the more correct verb here) with changing overtone pitches even while the drone stays constant.

Okay, what's the downside?  Singing a low drone for a long time can wear out the voice.  Beyond that, a technique that relies on overtones results in music that is fairly limited in pitch choice and range, just like it is when brass players use period instruments without valves.

Still, the effect is unearthly, not to say spooky.  It's been compared to a theremin; to me, it brings to mind a ring modulator, a classic filter from the early days of synthesized music, which has been used millions of times in movies to make voices sound robotic or demonic.  (E.g., the Cylons of Battlestar Galactica.)  Listen to the second track of this album.  If you dare.

I've never heard a throat singing performance, but I'm familiar with Tan Dun's use of it in his Water Passion.  The singers in that recording don't seem to be phenomenal practitioners of the art; heck, I can do what they're doing with little practice.  I suppose I have an advantage as a survivor of many voice teachers who obsessed over singing with a lowered larynx.  The idea was that a high larynx signals throat tension; what they didn't understand is that artificially holding the larynx down can generate even worse tension.  It also constricts the throat, creating a thin sound that can be misdiagnosed as a low, lazy soft palette.  Thus, the singer can get yelled at for "not working hard enough" even while he's tying the muscles in his neck into knots.

Yes, I'm bitter.

The Connection interviewed throat singer Yat Kha.  The Next Big Thing had a very nice piece on a throat singing seminar/jam session/happening in New York.  (It turns out throat singing is something of a cliché in NPR circles.)  You should also follow this thread in the Choraltalk email list archive, where they discuss throat singing and the related phenomenon of overtone singing.  Chanticleer, not wanting to leave any throat unturned, uses overtone singing techniques on its latest album.

Somebody once claimed to have invented the eight-day work week.  The only problem with it was that there were only six nights in it.  In that spirit, I'm announcing the Willa Cather week is two days long.  I've run out of things to say about her for now.  Meanwhile, there's too much good stuff to post, to wit:

My good friend Alan alerted me to Garrison Keillor's take on the Khoir Kultur of Minnesota.  If you can, skip the transcript and go straight to the sound file.

[T]here ought to be a law against the singing of "Shenandoah" by any choir, and the penalty ought to be prison time. No probation. The singing of "Shenandoah" is a main cause of the unpopularity of choral singing today. Somewhere in America about once every four minutes, a choir commits "Shenandoah"....

Meanwhile, Garrison Keillor's wounded inner old fart is exposed in this threat of legal action against a blogger with a few T-shirts to sell.  (Hat tip Instapundit.)

Meanwhile, in the non-Willa Cather part of the blogösphere, interesting things get posted.  Michael Blowhard, are you reading Things Magazine?  This post is just begging for you to respond with one of your essays on The Actor's Temperament:

One day, the class is limbering up, all leotards, sixties haircuts and minds full of The Method, when a teacher bursts in and breathlessly declares that the president has been shot, then exits rapidly. The students look at one another, confused, until someone realizes that this must be a cue for an improv. Various levels of dismay, outrage and despair are then exhibited, drawn from the very depths of their freshly scraped psyches. Yet after a few pained minutes of emotional intensity, someone else comes by and confirms that, yes, the president really has been shot. All at once, the facade crumbles, and the acting students are torn between two states - real emotion, or fake yet somehow more authentic emotion.

Over to you, Michael.

Willa Cather week continues here at the Fredösphere!  A brilliant new insight into the author and her work, every day!   Or until I run out of  brilliant insights!

Today I give you one of my favorite horror stories:  from My Antonia, it's Pavel and Peter and the Wolves.  Enjoy.  So to speak.

We watched O Pioneers last night, a TV movie made in 1992.  (This one, not this one.)  It was nominated for a golden globe and won other awards, including Outstanding Individual Achievement in Hairstyling for a Miniseries or a Special (no joke).  In spite off all that, the wifeösphere and I liked it hugely, although it is hard to say how good it would be for someone unfamiliar with the Willa Cather novel.

Willa, Willa, Willa.  What are we to do with you?  Your deeply conservative nature and your gender elasticity seem hard to reconcile to us modern folk.  Somehow, you channeled your contradictions into a creative energy that gave us fascinating novels.

[And here, let me say I'm glad to rediscover the essay I just linked to, which I first read a couple of years ago.  But what's this?

Well into her career as an internationally celebrated Isolde, the book's heroine, Thea Kronborg, marries her loyal suitor-manager - the somewhat bathetically named Fred.

Hey!  That's not nice!]

We've read three Cather novels, including My Antonia and Death Comes for the Archbishop, and of them, O Pioneers was the least distinct.  I found, while watching the movie, I had forgotten the plot completely.  It was individual scenes that I remembered:  the plow on the horizon, the horsemen who escort the visiting bishop, the kiss stolen in the darkened room, and Alexandra's dream of the mysterious masculine figure.

Just as we did when we read the book, we got a jolt from the line in the movie where one character is described as going off to law school "in Ann Arbor."  Notice, they don't bother to say "in Ann Arbor, Michigan, that out of the way state in the north-central U.S. that's shaped like a mitten." -- thus, confirmation that truly Ann Arbor is the world navel.  The only thing more jolting would be to read Death Comes for the Archbishop and find out his eminence's last words involved ordering a reuben from Zingerman's Deli.

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.

Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

It's a movie that celebrates faith in God and explores the fascinating implications of the spiritual realm.  Who could possibly find fault with that?

The Religion News Blog has more, uh, religious news:

I can empathize with her completely:  she's too sexy to teach religion in Italy
A man's daughter is dead:  he blames the Jehovah's Witnesses
Winning the prize for least probable juxtaposition:  French fast food for Muslims

The A Cappella News reprints an analysis of perfect pitch.  Don't you think the opening metaphor is a little strong, a bit deceptive?

Imagine a classroom full of children. All are colorblind, save one, and they all get palettes and paint. "Just imagine what that [one] child will experience with the color in comparison to the other kids," Dr. David A. Ross said. "It's the same way with people with absolute perfect pitch."

That's a better description of the synaesthete's experience, I would guess.  Anyway, both perfect pitch and synaesthesia give your brain more ways to experience music; thus they draw you to music and motivate you to get good at it.

(Have I told you lately that synaesthetes are horrible, horrible people?  A bunch of SOBs that are sooooo proud of their "special" "abilities."  So intolerant of others.  And that's in spite of all the things we do for them.  We even sing cool songs about them [scroll down].)

Can perfect pitch be taught?  As one who can claim occasional pitch memory (I call it "imperfect pitch") I've always wondered if I was hindered by the perennially (but slightly) out of tune piano I grew up with.  Beyond that, researchers have noticed the advantage possessed by speakers of tonal languages (e.g., Chinese) in identifying pitches.

(That cool songs link is a must visit site.  Go there and scroll down!  Now!)

While sorting through old email I came across a number of people I've contacted in the last couple of years regarding music recommendations, requests for scores of new compositions, etc.  I was surprised by how many times someone promised to get back to me and never did.  People, listen to me:  if it's you doing me a favor and you don't do it, it's rude.  If it's you doing yourself a favor because you are a composer and I'm giving you a chance to promote yourself and you don't do it, it's rude and it is also suicidal stupidity.  It's Suicide Grasshoppers Brainwashed by Parasite Worms levels of stupidity.  (Hat tip to Volokh.)

This is an illustration of the old saying that hard working people are lucky.  Among all these promises unkept is scattered a few cases of somebody missing a chance for me to program their work or at least mention it on my blog.

September is here, and that means it's time to audition for your local choral group.  I'll give you a list of those choruses that have made enough noise about their auditions to get my attention, but of course there may be a few more more across this great land gearing up for the fall season.  In many cases, they pay double for male singers.  (That's a joke, people.  Well, in most cases it is.)

In the Ann Arbor area we have The Cantata Singers, the Choral Union, and (for men only) Measure For Measure.

Coro Stella Maris sings music, early and late, in Gloucester, MA.  River City Chorale is on the other side of the country, in Sacramento, CA, as is the Peninsula Women's Chorus of Palo Alto (who I hear is looking for women) and also Harmonia, in L.A., with two choirs to choose from, big and small. The Fairfax Choral Society, of the D.C. area, has several choirs, but it's getting late, so contact them soon.  The New York Catholic Chorale is, well, Catholic, but open to all kinds of singers.  Meanwhile, up the Hudson River we find The New Choral Society.  (So what was wrong with the old one?)  Over east of there we find The Concord Chorus, a big choir performing major works.  (What, another choir in the Boston area?  I was told Boston had no choirs.  They also said it's not a big college town.)

UPDATE: Gotta add the San Francisco Lyric Chorus to the list.  Also the Mendelssohn Choir of Connecticut; they're performing RVW's Sea Symphony just four days after the Choral Union of Ann Arbor.  The tide is coming in for one of my favorite choral blockbusters!

We caught a few things on the ol' tube de la boobe lately.

Longitude was good until its abrupt ending.  Most remarkable archaicism:  the word was pronounced not like lawn-jee-tude, but long-ee-tude.  All clock geeks and would-be inventors should like it.

A rare round of channel surfing (I held the remote, in accordance to the ancient tradition) resulted in us watching the latter part of The Faculty.  It's about a special high school for 30-year-olds and space aliens.  I had heard of it before, and formed an impression; the reality was both better and worse than I expected -- viz., the stupidity was stupider but more entertaining than I imagined.  The state of the art of stupid entertainment has advanced since the last time I checked.  I can't recommend this movie, especially not for your kids.  As you can see, it is extreme in Disrespectful/Bad Attitude and heavy in Music (Scary/Tense).  On the other hand, it is moderate in Jump Scenes, so that's good.

We all really liked A Program About Unusual Buildings and Other Roadside Stuff, where "we" includes the sister-in-lawösphere, who by luck had recently completed a vacation that included stops at some of these kitschy roadside architectural icons.  We're talking about hot dog stands that look like hot dogs -- that kind of thing.  I recommend you watch the DVD if you can find it.  The best part is not the buildings themselves (the amateurish shaping of stucco fascinates for only so long) but the stories of the half-whacked, half-inspired "geniuses" who built the dang thangs.  All are described as big commercial successes, and maybe that's typical -- but what if we all pulled this kind of stunt?  There's really room for only one giant Aunt Jemima pancake house per locality.  Correction:  there's really room for only none.  A word about that title:  is that an ironic statement?  Were they deliberately giving it faux-nerdy generic labeling?  I expected the DVD cover to be done in pain black and white.  "Serving size:  57 minutes; number of servings:  approx. 1."

Wome is your Fwiend!  Tonight, don't miss Rome:  Engineering an Empire on the History Channel.  I don't intend to.  I expect it will be a riot of Latin, togas, and infrastructure -- something for everyone!

So, you own everyone of the King's College Choir albums, but you want more.  You wonder if there are other groups out there making similar music.  How do you find out?  You use LivePlasma, of course.  (Thanks to my buddy John for the tip.)

The graphical presentation makes this tool superlatively nifty, but not all is well.  A common use of this tool is finding a micro-genre and exploring all the small, unknown musicians that inhabit it.  LivePlasma won't give you much help doing that.  Notice a search for early vocal music specialists The Sixteen shows Chanticleer nearby, yet a search for Chanticleer never shows The Sixteen.  I suppose it's because The Sixteen are too obscure, but I hoped by zooming in they would eventually emerge.  As it is, searching for Chanticleer is more likely to lead me to Perry Como than The Sixteen.  People, that is a horrifying outcome.

I've been told that LivePlasma taps into Amazon's existing database of recommendations.  I suppose this was thought to be needed to get the site up and running immediately.  However, it would have been better if they had relied on wiki-style user input to a more pure collaborative filtering algorithm.  As it is, Amazon's system tends to steer you toward the more popular choices.  Hey, they want to sell stuff, and that's the way to do it.  I only wish LivePlasma could focus on helping people find the stuff that is, you know, hard to find.

Googlers have questions and I got answers!  Sometimes!  1. No, I don't think Mr. Charles Darwin was ever at Gormenghast.  2. All corgi tuba books (assuming any exist) can be found at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.  3. I explained "Phase one collect underpants" in this post.  4. John Adams' eye's are pink, for all I know.  5. If you find out who is abducting the singspiels, let me know -- I want to shake that guy's hand.  6. Stop it!  I've already warned you that self-exorcism is dangerous.  7. Bri7ney $pears knows more about semiconductor physics than I do about "cycloidal propulsion."