The Fredösphere

I'm pleased to announce my music can now be heard thanks to the shiny new XSPF player I have added to this site, which you no doubt noticed above.  Select one of the tunes, then work the start/stop/pause controls to your heart's content.

At the same time, I am unveiling the recording of Poor Richard's Almanac, premiered by the Vocal Arts Ensemble of Ann Arbor, directed by Ben Cohen.  They did an excellent job performing the piece, and I am grateful to them for comissioning it.  I hope you enjoy it.

Labels: Composition, SoundClip

It's got "Bible" and "Space Opera" in the opening lines, so it caught my eye.  Turns out it has little to do with vocal music, sacred or secular, but it's still cool:  "Habitable Planets for Man," the "ultimate guide to creating plausible fictional worlds."  Also at Futurismic, have a serving of hardware cheesecake:  personal luxury submarines.

As a bonus, I'll give you a link to a review of the modern premiere of Alessandro Striggio's 60-part Missa "Ecco si beato giorno" performed by the BBC Singers, the Tallis Scholars and His Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts, found at A Cappella News.  Rediscovering this monster piece took some detective work on the part of musicologist Davitt Moroney.  For a few more days, the BBC will let you listen to the concert.  The announcer gives the historical context for each piece in beautiful BBC-ese. I know lots of technologies useful for halting the spread of Protestantism, but 60-voice polyphony it not one I would have thought of.

It's art!  Do yourself a favor and do not watch the video of the robotic cow tongue.  Really.  Don't watch it.

We got the music angle, the sci-fi angle, and the local angle covered, right here:  Tom Smith is an Ann Arbor "filk" singer who performs at sci-fi conventions.  SciFi.com reviews his comic opera, The Last Hero On Earth.  It is, apparently, funny.  Smith has another project in the works:  Lovecraft:  The Musical Comedy.  Hoo-boy.

Labels: Composer, fun, sci-fi

Via Futurismic, a question:  When Will Science Fiction End?  It's a relative of the question:  will we ever know everything?  Specifically, everything related to science.  As a youth, I held a belief so essential, it was a long time before I realized anyone could hold the opposite point of view, namely, that there will always be more in physics to learn.  (I say physics because it is fundamental; all science is ultimately about the particles.)  In fact, I believed physics was inherently unknowable in its fullness; that any system cannot be fully grokked from the inside (although I would not have been able to put it into those words when I was young).  I still tend toward that belief, but I'm more open to the other point of view, and the possibilities for human mind augmentation (for now, still science fiction) make me wonder how far we can go.

More futurism:  Terry Teachout foretells the death of the last regional critic.

Labels: Culture, Futurism

Via Instapundit, Ann Althouse reviews a reivew of the boomlet (or pseudo-boomlet) of Neo-Victorians.  Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age gets quoted at length in the comments, which is thrilling because the book is my favorite sci-fi novel.

Am I confident Vickys exist, and live right now in New York?  Not exactly.  Nevertheless, I badly want it to be true.  Am I a neo-Victorian?  Not exactly, and I don't even exactly aspire to the ideal.  My research informs me the Victorian age was a desert as far as striped tee shirts were concerned.  A world without striped tee shirts is a world in which I cannot permit myself to live.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to go organize my top hat* drawer.


*Speaking of which, check out this description of the first time a top hat was worn in public:

According to a contemporary newspaper account, passersby panicked at the sight. Several women fainted, children screamed, dogs yelped, and an errand boy's arm was broken when he was trampled by the mob. Hetherington was hauled into court for wearing "a tall structure having a shining luster calculated to frighten timid people."

Labels: Culture

My friend Alan reports The sixteen have cut a new album of early music with guitarist Kaori Muraji.  You can here excerpts on the MPR broadcast.  Oddly, this time director Harry Christophers leads an ensemble with... sixteen singers, not the eighteen you would expect.

Labels: SoundClip, vocal

It's the improbable, creepy world of sensation known as the Schmidt Sting Pain Index! My friend John discovered the Wikipedia entry on the subject of insect stings, which includes descriptions so bizarro, so voluptuous, they would shame a wine snob. Sample the complexities of the sting of a yellowjacket:

Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine WC Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.

Then decide to move on to something stronger.  Savor the sting of the red harvester ant:

Bold and unrelenting. Somebody is using a drill to excavate your ingrown toenail.

I'm not making this up, but this is Wikipedia, so maybe someone else is.

Labels: Culture, fun

Cincinnati Opera is hyping their production of Nixon in China with a cheesy video called Nixon in Cincinnati.

We badly wanted to head down there and see the show, and we had made tentative plans to do so months ago, but the Wifeösphere's bump in the road last winter (in the form of recurrent cancer) made us reevaluate lots of things.  The opera road trip was cancelled.  Meanwhile, Julie's doing much better now and continues to regain her strength, thanks be to God, but we still need to play things conservatively for the forseeable future.

Labels: VideoClip, vocal

Don't miss Design Observer's take on the amusing but less-than-perfectly-settling world of faux-ethnic fonts.  Am I the first person in the world to notice that Circumcision is most appropriately used in its sans-serif version?

Another font available at myfonts.com is MCapitals, which Ian Moss should use the next time he redesigns his band's website. The font handles the umlaut-O with the unusual expedient of an E floating inside the O, rather than with double dots.  Give it extra points for creativity, but if you want those dots to act as a diacritic rather than an umlaut, I guess you're out of luck. Or, as the New Yorker's house style would have it:

Labels: Design

A young man known only as wzauscher sings Bach as a one-man quartet.



If you like, follow the links to his other transcriptions, although the ones I found had intonation problems.

Okay.  More intonation problems.

Now, finish it off with the master:  Bobby McFerrin singing Bach/Gounod.

Labels: VideoClip, vocal

I enjoyed Hayek's classic The Road to Serfdom, here in graphic-novelization form.  (I have not yet tackled the original.)  I especially like the way page 17 elegantly expresses its idea with a simple -- dare I say, economical -- line drawing of a jack-booted officer breaking golf clubs over his knee.

Labels: Culture

The Fredösphere is moving to http://fredosphere.com.  Finally!  The name of Comcast will never appear in my URL again!  Let the name of Comcast be removed from every bookmark, every RSS reader, every obelisk, etc. etc.