The Fredösphere

First of all:  my duet setting of Psalm 46 was performed in two different places yesterday.  That's cool.  Thanks to Alan and Brian for making it happen.

Anyway, we got a copy of My Architect from the library and liked it a lot.  Or rather, we liked it as much as one can like a story that is depressing and true.  Nathaniel Kahn made this documentary as a tribute to his father, the towering architectural genius Louis I. Kahn -- and as an exposé of his double life (triple life, really) and the shameful way he treated his wife, three children and two mistresses.

Lot's of people have admired this documentary -- or, at least found it provocative enough to write at length about it.  (I'm with Michael on one point:  I don't get the Sauk Institute.)  Rather than write a redundant review, I'll just say "me too" to the admirers and mention one scene:  An architect from Bangladesh becomes teary-eyed as he attributes the founding of his nation's government to the beneficent influence of the capitol building, a huge complex designed by Kahn.  He understands Nathaniel's loss to be his country's gain, and tries to assuage the son's pain by assuring him of the building's greatness, and of the necessity of the payoff -- all great men (so he asserts) treat badly those closest to them.  Sorry, buddy; the intention is generous, but the logic is rotten.  It amounts to this:  "you had to suffer that this building could exist, but that's okay, because this building is more important than you."

If you are inclined to believe all great artists must be jerks, you may add that architect's testimony to your collection of supporting evidence.  As for me, I'm not buying it.

The Wifeösphere was looking at a book about El Greco last night, and while looking over her shoulder I was struck once again by how modern his paintings look.  Perhaps the effect is exaggerated by pigment deterioration; the odd flesh tones add to the surreal look, but may not have been as the artist intended.  Nevertheless, the bodily distortions look like nothing from the old masters, as far as I am aware.

In poetry, I have spotted a similar weird prescience in the poem Blaise Pascal kept sewn into his coat (which was found after his death).  I don't see how reading the poem in translation can completely explain the poem's modernist discontinuities.  Perhaps Pascal did not intend the writing -- a description of a vision of God -- to be read as poetry, but it looks like poetry to the modern eye:

Fire God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob...
Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
God of Jesus Christ...
Greatness of the Human Soul.
"Righteous Father, the world hath not known Thee,
but I have known Thee."
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy...
Renunciation, total and sweet...

This begs a few questions, namely:  can anyone think of other examples of pre-modern modernists?  Better yet, can anyone think of examples of pre-modern modernist composers?  I confess I am stumped.  The best I can think of is a certain odd liturgical tradition from the Eastern Orthodoxy.  There, you find "cross-eyed" chord progressions that are wrong according to common practice in the West.  I don't consider that a good example, however, because to my ear the "wrong" chords don't sound modern, they just sound ... wrong.  However, I admit to little knowledge of that music, so I'm open to other opinions.

Anyone got suggestions?  A Renaissance architect who really loved glass and steel?  A Gregorian chanter who wondered why the Devil had all the good tritones?  We'll take them from any art form.

Among the classicist or neo-traditionalist architectural projects, the Solar House by Robert Adam is unusual because of its "progressive design."  Although its look is traditional, effort was made to employ the most advanced technologies so the building might be heated and cooled passively.  Thus, triple glazing is employed over 60 percent of the south elevation, while the north face has minimal glazing.  The low-angled sunlight of winter warms black slate floors, but in summer the portico provide shade, and the vertically open plan allows warm air to exhaust through wind towers in the roof.

I would love to live in this house.  The stucco exterior is classically cool, yet inviting at the same time.  I do wonder about the columns -- are they a bit too thin for their height?  Perhaps the architect wanted to minimize their shadows.  In any event, the overall effect is one of serene rationality, of order imposed wisely.  All is well. 

Of course, we can't allow that, can we.

By the way, don't confuse the current Robert Adam with the previous one.

Finally, we learn via Gravity Lens that the home of the future has been demolished due to obsolescence.

You have to read all the way to the last page of the print version, but this month's New Criterion contains a morbidly fascinating tidbit from the life of Gabriel Fauré.  (The article requires registration if you want to read it all, including the relevant passage.)

[B]y this stage he had begun to find music a torment: not through simple deafness, nor yet through tinnitus, but through a frightful auditory distortion. Apparently concealing this from Saint-Saëns, he confessed it to his wife in 1919, having attended Verdi’s Falstaff:

All I could hear were such discordantly intermingled sounds that I really thought I was going mad … low-sounding intervals get changed as they go lower, and the high-sounding intervals get changed as they get higher. Can you imagine the result of this dichotomy? It is sheer hell.

Unable to carry out any executant or administrative duties, Fauré lost his Conservatoire directorship, two years too early to qualify for a pension. Somehow the gift of composing stayed with him, even as all other musical activity became insupportable.

Horrible.  He had entered The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat territory. 

Some maladies are rare, imposing on their victims the added insult of a dearth of empathizers.  Beyond that, there are some maladies like Fauré's that are so bizarre, in addition to being rare, that even potential sympathizers are lost to incomprehension.

Last night's concert was a blast.  The U of M kids did well on Beethoven's 9th, but I was mesmerized by Bright Sheng's Nanking!  Nanking!  Yang Wei, the soloist, was a revelation.  His instrument is the pipa, a Chinese stringed instrument adapted over centuries from the western lute.  The composer (who also conducted) explained he was drawn to the pipa because of its flexibility and great tradition of virtuosity.  Yes, Sheng's music is severe, especially when it describes a horrible event.  Still, I think this one will stay in my memory for a long time.

Beethoven's 9th:  that old warhorse!  I was so pleased by the way juxtaposing "Beethoven's 9th" and "free concert" excited people, even those not terribly interested in classical music.  Last night's crowd contained at least eight people more than it would have it I didn't spread the word.  From the wifeösphere and I, to ten people:  that's a fivefold increase!  If this trend continues, a typical concert of classical music in 2019 will attract an audience larger than the entire population of planet earth.  We'll have to start importing aliens for our audiences.  Classical music is saved!  Somebody tell Greg Sandow!

There's little time for blogging today; I must leave early tonight so we (and tout le monde, I'm afraid) can attend the Choral Union's free performance of Beethoven's 9th.  (No, that's not the one that goes da da da DAAAAAA; it's the one that goes da da da da, da da da da, da da da da daaa DA DA -- got it?)

I do have one more thing to say about that New Music Box article on the neo-romantics, regarding this bit:

It's usually after a composer becomes established that anecdotes are of any interest and begin to appear. I'm afraid I have to say, after many decades in this business, that composers tend not to be the most wonderful people—they're not the type who win "humanitarian" awards, but no one cares about that if their music turns out to be great.

So, is there really a correlation between having a self-centered personality and having a successful composing career?  Could there be a causal link?  Are nice guys doomed?  Anyone out there want to share some anecdotal evidence?

The bit I just quoted has made me spend a lot of my time worrying that I'm not self-absorbed enough.

Nicolae Ceausescu's palace had a footprint bigger than any other building on earth, except the Pentagon.  Saddam Hussein's throne room featured one of the world's few (let's hope there are few!) large-scale paintings of scud missiles.  Few topics elicit such a strong combination of mirth and horror as totalitarian kitsch.  (Hat tip Arts & Letters Daily.)

It's the La Brea Tar Pits of composing:  the masterpiece syndrome.  Lawrence Dillon knows it well and wants to rescue his students from it.

Meanwhile...New Music Box has an interview with Walter Simmons, who has written Voices in the Wilderness:  Six American Neo-Romantic Composers.  Having never quite recovered from the oppressive environment of my youth, wherein only atonal music was respected in academic circles, I tend to react to any promotion of neo-romanticism with a sense of relief.  But then, as I look further, something shocking and shameful happens:

I notice that music labeled as "neo-romantic" tends to disappoint.

Of course that's not fair.  For starters, even in mid-century tonalists were thriving -- ever heard of Copland or Barber, fer heaven's sake?  So the big atonalist conspiracy was never so powerful; plus, there's nothing disappointing about Copland or Barber.  But the fact is, I don't think of the really good guys as belonging to the neo-romantic movement.  They just wrote good music.  Why is that?  What's wrong with me?

Maybe the neo-romantic label is assumed by people with a taste for very low levels of dissonance.  Keep in mind, "dissonance" doesn't really apply in the atonal world; dissonance can only occur in the context of some kind of consonance.  My preference is for lots and lots of dissonance -- which means, it must be tonal, but it must also be edgy.  Both neo-romantics and atonalists minimize dissonance, albeit by completely different means.  Schoenberg announced the emancipation of dissonance; who the heck asked him to emancipate it?  I want my dissonance contained, confined, bound, chained, whipped

Where was I?  Oh yes, neo-romanticism.  I seemed to have blacked out there for a minute.  Anyway, I'd like to live in a world where the neo-romantic label is not a stigma in any way.  I'm afraid I'm not quite ready to help make that world a reality.  I'm a bad person.

Who is this enigmatic Russian bass, this riddle wrapped in a mystery inside a Santa Claus suit?  It's Ivan Rebroff, whom I mentioned at the end of my last post.  Somehow I acquired one of his LPs years ago.  Like all my vinyl records, it was destroyed in a basement flood; it's the one I miss the most.  Particularly, I would like to listen one more time to Mit der Troika in die Grosse Stadt*, wherein Ivan ascends in one breath from a bass low F to a soprano high B-flat.**

Look at this list of Ivan Rebroff albums at amazon.com.  Sadly, the best (i.e., most fully over the top) album covers are not represented.  The typical cover pictures the gemütlich bass sitting in a tavern, wearing big fur and a hat that looks as if a thawed woolly mammoth has been draped over his head.  He's holding a beer stein you could hide your golf clubs in, and he stares deeply into your eyes with a haughty expression that communicates three distinct messages:

1. If you are a woman, I am seducing you now.  If you are a man, do you know where your wife, sisters and daughters are?
   
2. My voice spans 18 octaves.
   
3. I'm drunk as a skunk.

Maybe there's more to Ivan than meets the eye.  After all, he won a Fullbright scholarship, as this website states.  I suspect his role as the incarnation of every absurd White Russian stereotype was an assumed one.  It certainly sold records; the guy has 49 freakin' gold LPs to his name.  Yow.

*My German is rusty, but I'm pretty sure that translates to "With the Threesome in the Big Stadium."  Sounds like the title of a Leni Riefenstahl film.

**Dang.  That doesn't seem possible.  I hope the years haven't "improved" my memory of the song.

For solo work, the demand for high voices always exceeds supply.  Is the same true for choirs?

Vocal ranges are distributed according to our old friend, the bell curve.  Most singers are mezzos or baritones, so we'll always have plenty of those.  Women's voices are more flexible than men's, so a mezzo can sing almost all first soprano parts that choral composers dare to write.  The occasional very high written note need only be sung by a few of the highest voices -- don't worry, it will be heard!  True alto voices are rare, but again, teach a flexible mezzo how to use the chest voice discretely, and that part is also covered.

What about tenors?  They are famously in short supply, right?  That is true for many small church choirs; however, if your choir is large enough, and can attract singers of ability, I've found you can count on a few tenors showing up.  Furthermore, the life of  a tenor is a refining fire:  your tenor section may be half the size of the others, but they'll take care of themselves.  The high range, the training, and the egos will guarantee they'll be heard.

Last, and least (in volume) are the low basses.  This is it, people:  this is where the perennial shortage is found, in all choirs but for the few will truly broad, regional recruiting reach.  Once you've heard a professional choir that can thunder away on the low end, you realize the low-end weakness of even very good amateur choirs.

Which begs the question:  what can we do to fake it?  Is there some kind of anti-helium which, when inhaled, with thicken the chords and deepen their sound?  We've all discovered that a virus can do the trick; alas, that's not a practical solution.  I want a pill, or an injection, or something to snort that will do the trick like magic.  I want a doping scandal!

Hey, here's a solution:  build an artificial singer!  In a related direction, I've tried adding a string bass to an otherwise unaccompanied choir, with good results.

Lots of googling has turned up none of what I'm looking for.  Anybody out there know the secret?  I did find a quixotic campaign to return pre-20th century music to its original, lower tuning (that's reasonable) since "the natural C=256 tuning is grounded in the physical laws of our universe" (that's nuts).  I also knew a German guy from graduate school who said you could buy yourself an extra half step on the bottom by turning your head slightly to the left while singing.  It's only a half step, but it works.  Of course it did -- he was German!

How do the Russians produce their contra basses?  I suspect that's the culture doing an excellent job of recruiting, but I don't know enough to rule out genetics absolutely.  To borrow (and mangle) a term from the recording engineers, Russia is one big bass trap.

Finally, this bears re-linking:  the lowest of the low -- the profunder wonder -- the reach-up-to-touch-bottom Russian ultrabass Viktor Wichniakov (hat tip Alex Ross).  As a bonus, I offer you the Russian bass world's unintentional self-parody, the hard-drinkin', low-singin', large-livin' Ivan Rebroff!

His is the scariest beard in choral music.  Read up on Estonian choral composer Veljo Tormis, at Andante.com.  Catch some excerpts of The Bishop and the Pagan and Kullervo's Message.

All four of us attended a family performance of Tall Horse last night.  The Maharincess, just turned four, didn't make it all the way through, but she did okay.  Der Drübermensch seemed to like it.  The puppet work was spectacular; way beyond anything I've ever seen.  The centerpiece was a full-sized giraffe manipulated from within by two men.  The guy in front worked the front legs via stilts, plus swung the neck and head around.  I'd hate to be his chiropractor.

No great effort is made to hide the puppet masters, yet the mind relentlessly anthropomorphizes (and zoömorphizes -- is that a word? Google answers ... "yeah, why not!") these objects of wood and cloth.  Thus, I amused myself for quite some time by slipping on and off my suspension of disbelief like a well-worn pair of sneakers.

Tall Horse continues a certain trend in the theater:  a puppet is manipulated and voiced by persons not necessarily of the same race or gender.  (See Mark Steyn's review of the musical Lennon, wherein John Lennon is played by nine actors, including four women.)  Partly this is just a fad, partly it is the kind of slightly racy experimentation you would expect from theater people, but (I am guessing) it is mostly a P.C. dodge:  when a stupid, selfish, ugly, brutal character is portrayed with ambiguous race or gender, it cannot be viewed as an attack on an entire demographic group.

We sat on the extreme right side of the house, and could not hear some of the dialog.  The wifeösphere complained of that more than I, and she was also confused by the African mask look in the faces of all the puppets, so she was slow to understand that some of the characters were French.  I found the puppets so good, I forgave the weaknesses of the overall theatrical experience.

It was funny to see Ken Fischer working the crowd before the performance.  He's the director of the University Musical Society, the host of the performance.  He reminds me of Howard Dean, but with a phenomenal work ethic and, frankly, better political skills.

Here is the official website of the Handspring Puppet Company.

Charles Downey of Ionarts deserves a link on a topic similar to my Leni Riefenstahl post:  it's about a Nazi-commissioned photographic record of wall murals throughout Eastern Europe, many damaged or destroyed by the war.

Way back in my undergraduate days, I wrote a fugue whose subject remains the most fugue-ready music I've ever written.  Lately I've been thinking about rewriting the fugue, believing I could do its subject more justice.  Here's the subject as I originally wrote it.



Oh, but those bumptious repetitions!  They don't quite stand the test of time, do they.



In the last few days, I've made a few changes.



I think the new version has promise.  However, it gets rather chromatic there toward the end.  In a future post I'll show you more voices and we'll see if I keep the chromatic material under control.  (Hint:  no.)  Meanwhile, let me take up a suggestion from a respected authority and see if this fugue is compatible with a certain text in the news lately.



Hmmm.  I can't exactly express why, but I feel with my finely calibrated composer's intuition that this isn't the right direction.  Don't despair, Alex, someone else may catch the inspiration.

My friends like to tease me about being "in love" with Leni Riefenstahl.  I've wondered about this fascinating, repelling woman for a long time, she who remains the only woman in the very top rank of movie directors.  I watched a bit of Triumph of the Will a few years ago, and I expect soon to see Olympia, with its athletes filmed against the sky like Greek gods slipping the surly bonds of earth.

This woman's life is a mess.  Other Nazi art is dismissed as kitsch (indeed, that's the very word Riefenstahl used) but Riefenstahl alone of all the Nazis deserves respect as an artist.  Is her art hopelessly entangled with the Nazis?  Can any of it be rescued from its creator?  I turned to The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl in the hope finally of sorting it out.

For each filming location, she had the wit to see what was needed and the will to make it happen.  She demanded and (usually) got access, whether it was turning a flag pole into a camera mount during the Nuremberg rally, or digging a trench next to the pole vaulters.  She spent months training a large crew of cameramen, then months more editing the miles of film they shot.  I don't recall any other description of an artist's effort that impressed on me the effort involved in breaking artistic ground.

Hard working people are usually "lucky," but not in this case.  I was prepared to cut Riefenstahl some slack on the charge of unfairness -- she asks what difference there is between herself and Sergei Eisenstein, for example.  I do not doubt Hollywood is perennially populated by amoral little Riefenstahls who will never make Nazi films only because they will never be asked.  (Does she ever wonder what her life would have been like if she had been born in the U. S.?)  However, over the course of the film, her tendency to lie about her past is exposed, and one gives up on her.  Perhaps the only trait that saves her from complete condemnation is a failure to exhibit full repentance.  She's ultimately not quite dishonest enough, or simply too lacking in political skills, to fake it.

Eventually, she attempted something of a comeback by publishing photos of muscular Nuba wrestlers of Sudan.  Finally, Riefenstahl on a subject that has nothing to do with Nazis!  Or does it?  Susan Sontag wrote a famous analysis.  Here's more on the Great German Art Exhibitions, the now notorious exhibition of Entartete Kunst ("Degenerate Art"), and another documentary on Nazi art (not just architecture) called Architecture of Doom.

Why open yourself to exhausting semantic arguments over whether Riefenstahl's aesthetic is fascist?  This gives her an opportunity to argue she was never a party member, and then we're off on a long discussion of disputed historical records.  Why not focus on the specifics of what makes her art problematic:  a pervy fascination with male forms characterized by what the French call schlongeur (or would if they spoke a language a lot like French, only even weirder).  Entartete Kunst, indeed.

Lynn found the Independent Catholic News asking the obvious, but too often ignored, questions about extra-terrestrials:  whatever would one wear to its first communion?  No, really, I don't understand why the theology of alien life isn't discussed more -- except that those otherwise with the means, motive and opportunity assume aliens don't exist.

I may be repeating myself now, but I've always admired the sci-fi novel The Mote in God's Eye because it boldly posits a galactic empire with a state religion consisting of what looks like Orthodox Christianity.  In this universe, they have bishops, but no pope; heretical sects are tolerated, but marginalized, and come off looking like pathetic cranks.  That is, this universe closely conforms to my biases -- cool! -- which is an experience I don't get often from sci-fi.  But Moslems probably won't like the book, since their guys mainly just make coffee and betray the good guys.

In Mote, aliens are discovered for the first time.  The party selected for first contact includes the bishop from the nearest planet.  His job is to ask the kinds of questions asked in the ICN article:

Do the aliens have souls, as we understand the term?
If so, are they infected by original sin?
If so, has God provided the means of redeeming them?
If so, is Christ's blood efficacious in their case?
Beyond that, do they possess revelation relevant for us?
the appearance of the aliens will be accompanied by an eat-the-pig moment.

One possibility is that the appearance of the aliens will be accompanied by an eat-the-pig moment.

Meanwhile, in an alternate universe known as Great Britain, the last cathedral of the church of England is finally finished.  They used traditional building methods to build the tower, which means lime mortar instead of concrete, and no steel anywhere.  Gorgeous.  Sadly, one of the pictures of the Cathedral is marred by the presence of a dowdy, middle-aged couple standing in the foreground.  Also, see this discussion of Christianity by a very alienated Michael Blowhard.

Last night, my friend Alan and I rehearsed my latest creation, a setting of Psalm 96 for two unaccompanied voices.  Thanks to some nice complements for a previous setting of Psalm 46, I decided to make more Psalm duets.

This piece relies on the effect of certain gestures hitting you at times slightly off of what you might expect.  Getting those gestures placed correctly requires careful timing -- almost like comedic timing.  In addition, hearing the gestures beats imagining them when it comes to making final timing decisions.  Thus, we found ourselves making lots of changes during the rehearsal.  This is a unique situation for me; one that by nature I tend to avoid.  Nevertheless, making adjustments within a rehearsal is apparently far from unheard of.  That Alan could work in such a fluid environment, not to mention make smart suggestions, was a big help. 

All that is lacking now is some buzz words to describe the experience properly:  I facilitated a team approach to creative problem solving; or maybe I leveraged inputs from diverse communities of stakeholders by implementing a collaborative paradigm that transformed the process of innovation; or maybe I just played well with others.

As I mentioned yesterday, I am enjoying a return trip through Robert Heinlein's space opera Have Spacesuit, Will Travel.  It's almost redundant for me to mention that its plot follows the "boy astronaut saves the world" algorithm.  (Is there any other?)  This implementation has a bit of a twist:  it's the "boy astronaut, and his plucky little girl sidekick and an alien called the Mother Thing who communicates via music that sounds like bird songs that anyone instantly can comprehend intuitively save the world."  Ah, yes, you say; one of those.

I have remembered little of the book from the time I first read it.  The one plot element that stayed with me through the years was the use of scraps of music notation, dropped into the midst of the text, to express the Mother Thing's speech.  Heinlein doesn't bother notating everything she says; he gives you just an occasional passage to help you remember that she's really singing, not speaking in English (or for that matter, communicating telepathically).

I'm tempted to say Have Spacesuit is the rare sci-fi novel where music sight-reading ability is an advantage.  That is not really true, because ignorance of these melodies allows one to fill in the details according to the needs of one's own imagination -- as happens with so many details when one reads.  This time through the book, I have been unable to resist working out the sound of Mother Thing's melodies, and they have proved to be rather prosaic.  When it comes to expressing speech through birdlike song, Heinlein's Mother Thing is no match for Wagner's wood bird.  And it gets worse:



Horrible!  It's the Mother Thing, singing in the key of F -- the most alien key of all!  Aaaaaaargh!

I'm rereading Have Space Suit, Will Travel by the incomparable Robert Heinlein.  It was particularly instructive to revisit him just after finishing one of Andre Norton's plodding novels.  Heinlein must contrive a way to get his starry-eyed teenager into space.  He describes a contest, the winner of which gets a trip to the moon.  Then Our Hero proceeds to loose the contest -- but somehow ends up on the moon anyway. 

Heinlein's plot and characters are so strong, you don't really care that he throws in one fat, ugly coincidence to keep things moving.  In other words, Norton's opening chapters are a pain you must endure to arrive at the reward at the end of the book, but Heinlein gives you pleasure from the first page.

The typical Heinlein book features a sharp, cynical libertarian outmaneuvering clumsy authority.  Is it a Mary Sue?  (Or, as some would have it, a Gary Stu?)  Some people say so -- read this post, then search the comments for "Heinlein."  (See also Mixolydian Mode.)

Like many, I was saddened to hear of the death of Franklin W. Dixon, but I was downright infuriated by the media blackout that accompanied his death.  True, it had been a couple years since his once-ubiquitous face had appeared on TV and in newspapers (he last made news in 2003 when he testified before congress on the woeful state of disaster preparedness in New Orleans).  But considering the scores of best-selling titles to his name, not to mention his astonishingly large footprint on our culture generally, this lack of notice (in tandem with the unending stream of outrageous lies) seems terribly disgraceful.

I was lucky to interview the author back in 2000.  I submitted it for publication to all the likely periodicals (Biblical Archaeology Review, Tiger beat, etc.) but to my surprise, it was rejected by all.  Now seems an excellent time to give the world a look at some excerpts from this rare document.

The Fredösphere:  You were living the life of an American expat in France after World War I.  Why did you come home?

Franklin W. Dixon:  I finally got bored with the whole scene, proving to Hemingway I could out-drink him in the absinthe bars by night and out-write him by day.  And then, I started feeling guilt over the way his envy of me just consumed him.  His envy lead to his suicide, you know.  Besides, the literature the Lost Generation produced was too conservative, too timid.

I knew I had in me a genuinely revolutionary voice, and I needed time alone to find it.  I finally realized the ultimate subversive message could be communicated via the medium of mystery stories featuring a pair of super smart, well-funded brothers without adequate parental supervision.  The result, in 1927, was The Hardy Boys:  The Tower Treasure.  The rest is history, if you will allow me a cliché.

TF:  No one could have predicted the Hardy Boys would be so popular among prepubescent males.

FWD:  No one did predict it -- and yet, who else but the young are ever ready for revolution?  Still, your point is well taken.  I never expected the Hardy Boys to be a big commercial hit.  I never dreamed The Tower Treasure would see sequels.

TF:  Through the years you've remained reticent in response to questions about your personal life.  Are you ready now to open up?  You've done so many amazing things.  There's your failed marriage to Marilyn Monroe....

FWD:  Failed?  Failed?  Let me remind you I was married to Marilyn 18 days more than most people.

TF:  Well then, we'll stick to the public record.  You served as an informal "advisor" to the Manhattan Project; you were on Henry Wallace's short list of running mates in 1948; you smoked dope with John Lennon...

FWD:  Allegedly.

TF:  ...allegedly; you were Eric Severeid's ghostwriter; you introduced Carl Sagan to the concept of Nuclear Winter; you were predicting as far back as 1960 that microwave ovens would be big.  Yours is a long and astonishingly varied career.

FWD:  Yes.  Thanks.  Please also note it was a strange vision I had of the death of Stalin that prompted my good friend Bishop Fulton Sheen to predict the dictator's death on his TV show.

TF:  I did not know that.  Your perfectionism is legendary.

FWD:  Well, that's been a source of pain for my editors, but I take pride in it.  Certainly, no other author can claim so many revisions.  Many of my books have been completely rewritten, some more than once.

Take volume number 20, The Mystery of the Flying Express.  I wrote the first version in 1941, while I was living at 7 Middagh St. in Brooklyn, and the underlying message was all about that lying S.O.B. Roosevelt and what he was doing to railroad us into an illegal war.  I might add, it amuses me that so many supposedly sophisticated adult readers think the story is a straightforward account of a train -- but the kids, my true fans, they must have got it.  Anyway, by 1970, WWII was ancient history, and I felt it would be more relevant to critique the Vietnam War -- thus, the train morphed into a hydrofoil, and I added a Zodiac subplot to mock Nixon's foreign policy.

There's so much more to this wonderful interview, and it saddens me it will never see the light of day.  One final bit of good news:  Dixon's output was so vast, he created a backlog of Hardy Boys novels, so his death will not prevent his publishers from introducing new titles for many years to come.

A melody is truly great when it can grab you with only the simplest accompaniment.  Indeed, a great melody makes you want only the simplest accompaniment.  We could make a list of the great melodies of all time, but the list would be filled with clichés -- those melodies sunk so deep into the popular awareness, we can hardly hear them anymore.  Here's a better list:  simple melodies that are great, but have escaped so far the attention they deserve.

My nominee is An den Mond, D. 259 by Franz Schubert.  Lieder aficionados know it, but not the wider public.  If you are a chord progression geek like me, listen for the mid-song transition from the candence-ending dominant chord to a sub-dominant. to start the next phrase.  Am I nuts, or is that mind-blowing?  Or both?

Matthias Goerne renders An den Mond well, in the optimal key.  My only regret is his failure to savor the notes by means of a slower tempo -- that's a common problem with this song.  Still, it's a delicious performance.  Taste and see.

Let's have your nominations.

Firefly came up in yesterday's post.  The use of Mandarin for cussing makes sense on its own, if Daniel Wolf is correct in asserting pidgins develop first for swearing and trading.  That's serendipitous, since Mandarin cuss words also solve a major problem for anyone trying to portray a military (or para-military) subculture convincingly on television:  getting the foul language past the censors.

Battlestar Galactica has the same problem.  The original series wimped out with incongruously clean dialog (although it is quite congruous with other aspects of the show's prettified style -- heck, even the guys had Farrah Facett hairdos).  The new series solves the problem with a bold, risky decision to use the word "frak" for the universal expletive.  Does it work?  I'd say pretty well, although the ol' fourth wall crumbles a bit every time the word is spat out.  By some amaaaaaazing coincidence, a human culture separated from earth by millenia just happens to have developed modern English in parallel with us, and theirs is exactly like ours except for one little word, "frak."  Oh, and they say "aboot" instead of "about."  But that's it.

Which brings me to my next point:  I'd like to recommend you try a little game I play while watching BG:  when you hear the word "Cylon," mentally substitute the word "Canadian."  It's fun!  What adds interest is the fact that the show is filmed in Vancouver and thus has more than its fair share of Canadian actors.  Listen to those accents -- hey, I'll bet that one is a secret Canadian (i.e., Cylon) fifth-columnist!  Heck, the fleet is crawling with them.  What horror!

You'll want to see Colby Cosh's typically atypical take on the Firefly phenomenon.  Also, see the official site for the new BG.  The mini-bios they crank out for the characters crack me up.  I love the description of Dr. Gaius Baltar, the despicable turncoat from the first season:  "Stylish, handsome and idiosyncratic, he offers the affected humility of the truly arrogant."  Wow!  He's just like me!

UPDATE:  The online liturature on invented expletives is vast.  Start by consulting the Wikipedia entry for satisfying your frakkin' faux foul language needs.

Lynn found a link by Daniel Wolf at Renewable Music on composing with crayons, the Complexity Complex, and Mandarin cuss words in the Firefly sci-fi series.  What kind of perversion or lunacy brings all those things together into one post?

Okay, I'll stop jokin' you (as my son might say) and confess my sin:  Renewable Music is one of my favorite blogs, filled with lots of stunning observations on my favorite topics (yes, I'm talking especially about composing and sci-fi) and somehow I utterly forgot that it existed.  Oh, the shame!

Without excusing my behavior too much, I would like to point out that the bloggers of Renewable Music do not post daily; indeed, except for Daniel Wolf, they hardly ever post at all.  Without that discipline of daily posting, you do not give your fans reason to visit your blog regularly, and then the habit dies, and those of us of feeble mind simply forget.  Hey, you, Renewable Musicians:  are you listening?  Caveat blogtor!

Alan is back as a guest of the Fredösphere with a CD review.  Those of you with long memories recall him in a guest-post as Wobegon Boy at WUOM.  At the time, we hoped he would return with more on that topic.  It wasn't meant to be, but the following review does contain some Wobegon Boyish content.  Take it away, Alan.


Harvest Home: The Dale Warland Singers
GOTHIC G49243
Recorded November 2003 and May 2004 at the Chapel of Saint Thomas Aquinas
The University of Saint Thomas, St.Paul Minnesota

Executive Producer-Roger Sherman
Producer and digital editing: Steve Barnett Music Productions
Recording and mastering engineer: Preston Smith, Perfect Record

 On September 21, 2005 I received an e-mail from Gothic Records announcing a new  release of the Dale Warland Singers.  “Interesting” thought I, “It must be a  collection of previously unreleased recordings from the ensembles 30 + year existence.“  The choir disbanded in May of 2004 when Warland retired. But as I  read through the release notes this appeared to be a final project of the ensemble before being scattered to the choral winds.  I then started looking at the specific titles on the release. Half way down was an arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Gentle Annie” by Edwin Fissinger. I sang with Fissinger for 5 years and that particular arrangement was written for his choir and sung by the best tenor section I have ever heard. PERIOD. That clinched it; I had to get this CD. I did and I was not disappointed-just depressed.

I’ll explain. After graduating from college in 1982 I drifted aimlessly across Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois and landed in Michigan where I went to work for a fledgling Public Radio Station. My plan was to work a couple of years getting experience in the business then move to Minnesota where I would go to work for Minnesota Public Radio and join the Dale Warland Singers.  I’m not sure what happened….O yeah, I got married, had a family, left the radio business and 23 years later received an e-mail for a CD…But every 5 years or so in that time span I revisited my dream of someday relocating to Minnesota and finding my way into the DWS. 

The ensemble disbanded so that dream will remain only a dream. Hence, for me the depressing aspect.  But this CD will let me sing along with Dale and the gang as it contains well known melodies such as Shall we gather at the River, Simple Gifts, Deep River and The Water is Wide. It also contains what, for me at least, are some less familiar tunes in well-crafted arrangements.  Several arrangements are enlivened by tasteful guitar and flute accompaniment. Jeffrey Van’s guitar playing has been a regular feature of many DWS releases and flautist Linda Chatterton joins him.  The liner notes were written by Brian Newhouse, a music producer at Minnesota Public Radio-Brian sang with the ensemble for several years and his familiarity breeds contentment and insight. For example although I was very familiar with the Fissinger arrangement of Gentle Annie, I did not know the sad circumstances that lead Stephen Foster to pen this beautiful but mournful air.  Newhouse gives us other appropriate factual and descriptive background  information for these arrangements.

I wish I could SEE the ensemble as this music was being performed. These arrangements are sung with an effortless sound, which can be a great contradiction. Many choir members know how physical the job of singing is.  Yet as these beautiful melodies and harmonies come flowing from my speakers, I am fooled by the aural images of ease and balance fully expressed by the last edition of the DWS.  They make it sound so easy.

My personal favorites are the Fissinger arrangement mentioned earlier-mostly because of the personal memories it revives, but I also was drawn to “McKay” a piece by Carl Barnett from a larger work called “ An American Thanksgiving.” The piece opens with rich lyrical writing for men’s voices, and then slowly builds to the ending text of  “the river’s of Delight";a rugged and majestic arrangement that reveals the marvels of the voice. The concluding piece-"The Road Home" by Stephen Paulus is if sentimental, certainly striking in it’s simplicity but captivating in spirit and sound. A fitting piece to conclude this collection of  music designed to connect heart to home.

All the skill and effort put forth by the choir would be void without the brilliant technical efforts displayed in this recording.  Too often choirs are placed in some large space and a couple of microphones are stuck a few meters away to gather in “the sound”. This method can work for some pieces but most often the text disappears and the message gets lost in the sound. This can be a detriment to communicating the message behind the music.

This recording reveals texts and interior harmonies that have been beautifully balanced by the DWS and are no less expertly displayed by the engineering team of Preston Smith, Roger Sherman,and Steve Barnett. They have given us a splendid balance of the acoustics of The Chapel of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the vocal presence of the DWS.

-Alan Young.

Saw Donnie Darko.  Was freaked out by the demonic rabbit.  Liked the mellotron.  Read the explanation.

The sister-in-lawösphere joined the Peace Corps and they just sent her to Macedonia.  She's living in a city called Sveti Nikole -- that would be Santa Claus to you, bub.

The saint has a webpage, of course.  No sign of his blog, although given the good man's record of astounding miracles, I half expected to find one.

My friend Brian, a college choir director, loaned me the score and recording of Benjamin Britten's cantata Saint Nicholas.  (Here's a summary.)  It is Brian's dream to perform the piece, but it would be impossible at his school.  They put on a boar's head festival each December, and as the event is regionally famous and serves as a major marketing effort for the school, all the Christmas music he picks must be boar's head-compliant.  I suspect Brian wishes I would be able to mount a production of Saint Nicholas somehow.  (This is a problem I experience very commonly:  people wanting to live vicariously through me.  I don't understand why that is.  It just is.)

Tomorrow, a special treat:  after an extremely long hiatus, Wobegon Boy makes his triumphant return to the Fredösphere.  Don't miss it!