The Fredösphere

Steve Hickens stopped by to comment, "get any desired college degree!"  Oops, that was the other comment.  Steve asked, "that's all M. Messiaen deserves?"  Well, no, probably not.  In fact, I think I'll listen right now to Apparition de l'Église Éternelle, just about my favorite solo piece for my favorite instrument (not counting the human voice) -- i.e., the organ.  I happen to love La Nativité du Seigneur, or most of it anyway.  One of the most memorable choral performances I've witnessed featured the underperformed Cinq rechants, a piece I would dearly love to hear again.  Clearly, "turning against" Messiaen is not what I'm doing, and I shouldn't have said so.  Unfortunately, there is a whole pile of honk - splat - tweeet! orchestral works -- that whole Oiseaux Exotiques-ish part of his oeuvre -- a mountain I still cannot climb.

(And now, let me pause to add one more classical musician's whine about the way music is organized on the iPod.  I couldn't remember the exact name of the album or performer of my Messiaen organ album.  I checked "Songs" for the piece under both A and L' and didn't find it -- and that's a long list to scroll around in.  I looked for Messiaen in "Artists" which is a joke since that category is not used consistently on classical albums; you might get the composer, or any one of the performers, or the name of an ensemble, or even any other information that someone thought would be nice to toss in there.  Finally, I thought to look for Le Banquet Celeste, one of the "songs", and found my way to the album from there.  I could have found it under Composers also, although I see he's listed in the Os, under three different spellings!  I've been gradually working my way through iTunes, putting the composer's name in the Composers field [What a brilliant idea!  Last name first!  Sheesh, why do it any other way?] but I think I'm only up to the Gs so far.  If I had looked for the Messiaen album in my CD collection, I would have gone to the Ms and found it in about 5 seconds.  Yes, my albums are sorted alphabetically by composer; could any other way be possible?)

Furthermore, if present trends continue, 300 million Americans will be killed by alligators in 2013.