The Fredösphere

No Halloween is complete until you've taken three minutes to listen to The Superstitious Ghost.  Use the mp3 player above, or the one below, or use this link.  Listen, especially if your name is Brett Luginbill.  (Brett is a young conductor I just had the privilege to meet today.  He wants to start a classical music concert series at the University Lutheran Chapel, and, as Homer Simpson would say, I wanna let him!)



Enjoy the fine performance by my friends Lorna Young Hildebrandt, Kara Alfano, Karl Schmidt, Paul Max Tipton, and on piano, Tom Strode.  Then go see the extreme pumpkins.  (Hat tip to Transterrestrial Musings.)

Labels: Composition, SoundClip

I'll lay out my new plan to completely reëngineer the modern approach to colloquial English in a moment, but first:

Women are evil.  Especially mothers.  (Hat tips to 2Blowhards and Sequenza 21.)

So ... I was filing the role of cantor at church yesterday, and, as sometimes happens, I was struck by the austere beauty of an anachronistic wording of a hymn text, in this case, "My Faith Looks Up to Thee":

When ends life’s transient dream,
When death’s cold sullen stream
Over me roll....

For now, let's overlook the theological flakiness in the description of life as a "dream."  What caught my attention was the word "transient."  How often is that word used in casual conversation?  Almost never, right?  If you are a sound engineer or a social worker, you might use the word as a noun in professional situations (assuming, in the case of the social worker, it's still politically correct to refer to the homeless as transients) but I'll bet the adjective is used essentially never by anyone.

Worship theorists have fretted for decades now over the increasing disconnect between the diction of classic hymns and everyday speech.  Their solution has been an attempt to modify the diction of hymns:

• the traditional texts are mangled, causing embarrassment as half the congregation, running on autopilot, sings the old lyrics anyway;
• new texts are created in crude imitation of modern slang that don't really work at the time of creation, and suffer from very short shelf lives (call it the God-Is-For-Real-Manification of worship--where the King James Version is run through the Jive Filter--or maybe call it the Singing Nunnery); or
• New vocabularies are invented that attempt to avoid both archaicisms and fads (but that's hard to do; witness the bathetic "God of Concrete, God of Steel").

Thirty years of failed experiments tell you what you could have found out easier just by asking me:  we suffer from Mohamed-Mountain Prioritization Confusion in this case.  We who care about this problem simply need to organize and exert our collective will to recreate the current vernacular.

Yes, it's that easy.  I'm going to start a weekly theme here at this blog.  Every Monday I'll report on a old-fashioned word I noticed in the previous day's hymns.  All of us will commit to using that word at least one a day for a week in casual conversations.  The force of all of us, working in concert, will cause the word to capture the zeitgeist's attention.  If we keep this up, over the course of just a few years, the vulgar tongue will be realigned with the glorious language of the old hymns, and traditional worship will be vital and relevant again.

Glory.

So the word for this week is:

TRANSIENT

Let's get to work, people!

Labels: ArchaicWord

What a combination!  Terry Teachout discussing Alex Ross' book The Rest Is Noise.  Terry's take:  Alex is the first historian to understand the non-inevitability of any particular avant garde innovation in 20th century music.  (Terry throws in a nice anecdote from his recent wedding as well.)

Now, if only we could get a video of Alex Ross discussing Terry Teachout discussing Alex Ross--that would be better!  And then, best of all:  Alex Ross and Terry Teachout together discussing the inevitability of the internet producing the Fredöshpere!

Labels: Culture, VideoClip

Today the Fredösphere is tired of libeling a heroic pioneer of American music.  Let's change the subject.  Since CNN is noticing airships, we should too.  This monstrous flying machine inspires me!  Let's build the dirigible fleet in Lenin's name!

Labels: Airship

Let's get all geeky!  Soho the Dog, slated to be added to my blog kennel the next time I update my Blogger template (tentatively scheduled for December, 2025) riffs at length on the influence of R&B, soul, and gospel on white pop music.  Soho's specific illustration of this influence is a single chord progression.

My mouth is watering.  Did someone just mention chord progressions?

Read the whole thing.  I'm interested in a somewhat tangential point made near the end.  He's talking about the plagal cadence, also called the "amen cadence" or IV-I or subdominant-tonic cadence, particularly when it acts as a foundation for an entire harmonic language.  In other words, when the plagal determines what chords and chord progressions get emphasized and form the defining harmonic boundaries that help give a piece of music its distinctive feel (as opposed to the plagal's main competitor, the authentic cadence, AKA V-I or dominant-tonic):

You know who else used to stack his harmonies heavily towards the plagal, the flat side of the circle of fifths? Edward Elgar. And for precisely the same reason that Brian Wilson does—to give the music a sense of melancholy grandeur, a sense that bright, sturdy perfect [sic; more precisely, he means "authentic"] cadences would flood with too much sonic light. Now I know that Brian Wilson wasn't consciously trying to imitate Sir Edward. But they both heard the bittersweet longing within the plagal cadence, and chose their vocabularies accordingly. Tracing influences is fascinating, but for me, just as fulfilling is the realization that even total musical strangers are sometimes, in the same way, chasing the same star.

This relates to an opinion I've been forming for a long time:  whole eras of western musical progress can be characterized by either plagal or authentic cadences.  In fact, I'll suggest this hypothesis:  the plagal is the default sensibility, since it was operative throughout music up to the end of the renaissance, and vied with the authentic cadence in the Baroque, and became truly operative only during the period of Viennese classicism.  It's inherent instability (artistically speaking; harmonically it's too stable) caused it to be abandoned gradually throughout the romantic period, after which the natural order of plagal supremacy was restored.

As you can infer, I'm biased toward the plagal.  Indeed, I blame Haydn for following the authentic cadence to its illogical conclusion, and it is this belief that makes me hate his music far beyond any other.  But here's the problem that lurks within the plagal:  the flat side of the circle of fifths may produce melancholy and warmth, but it is also a region of safety.  There, harmonies blend more easily.  It is the rightful place of cowards, among whom I would name Elgar (and Ives and many others).

The worst examples of this cowardice is found in the (very) mediocre choral music I sometimes receive in the mail for free from publishers.  They are composed for unsophisticated performers, and tend to be harmonically tame in the extreme.  The one flamboyance allowed is an occasional lowered seventh in the melody in phrases where it ascends to the tonic.  This eliminates the dominant chord as a possibility, and give the piece a faux-modal vibe.  I see this compositional tic in these pieces over and over and over and over.  Or more honestly, I don't see it anymore, because I stopped wasting my time on the junk publishers send me for free.

I hate the cloying candy of Haydn-influenced music, but I despise cowardly composing.  One of my compositional aims has been to find ways to bring the brightness of sharp accidentals to plagal-based music.  It's not easy; many combinations of these two traits are unnatural.  One very successful example comes from the late romantic period:  Wagner (who, in the context of this discussion, must be regarded as a hero) worked a IV chord with a suspended sharp 4th resolving downward to the 3rd over and over in Tristan.  This suspension deserves all the attention that has been wasted on the so-called Tristan chord down through the years.  When, as a teenager, I discovered this suspension, I used it like a lab monkey hitting the pellet release in a cocaine-addiction study.

Dang, this post is long.

What's sad is that this idea of mine is still only half-baked, and geeky ne plus ultraissimo.  Yet I spend a fair amount of my life thinking about it, and stuff like it.  The great steel cage match between the plagal and the authentic is important to me. Blogging is supposed to be the great enabler of esoteric discussion, but I'm not kidding myself:  at this point in this post, I have about one reader left.  Hi, mom.

Labels: MusicTheory

The poet ... like the lover ... is a person unable to reconcile what he knows with what he feels. His peculiarity is that he is under a certain compulsion to do so."

-Babette Deutsch

Labels: Poetry

Jill was late for work.  As always, she blamed her parents.

"Mom, did you make sure Joey is wearing his boots?  It looks like rain."

"Mm-hm."

Mom was looking out the window of the van when she answered.  Jill risked a quick glance to the back seat.  Miracles of miracles, Joey's boots were on his feet.  Jill faced forward.

"Aw, shit!"

Jill awkwardly slammed on the brakes, barely avoiding a collision.  Someone Jill's height really had no business driving a van, but she didn't trust mom to do it anymore, and dad was long past being good for anything.  And Joey?  Joey wasn't talking yet, which at eighteen months was pretty bad, even for an unaccelerated. 

It all came down to Jill.  Only she could cook, pay the bills, find a handyman (a rare commodity these days!) when something broke, and hold down a job.  That she was late for.  Thanks to her parents.  Stupid, selfish, reckless, stupid, parents.

She pulled into the parking lot of the day care center.  It was a big institution, and its intimidating scale was disguised by a series of cutesy facades, one for each homeroom.  The intent had been that each child would recognize, and identify with, "his" or "her" facade, with its unique color and decor.  That the facades were cartoonish representations of homes (and yes, one of them was a gingerbread house) seemed a kind of mocking irony in light of the new reality.  Jill felt the incongruity afresh each time she lead her demented parents to their homeroom.

Of course, the seedy, grimy appearance of the facades added yet another layer of ironic meaning, one even a genius like Jill could hardly begin to sort out.

This was the new reality:  a few normal people, mostly dumb toddlers like Joey; a huge number of accelerated adults at various stages of mental decline, like Jill's parents; and a bunch of accelerated kids with vast intellectual powers, like Jill.

Jill and her cohort ruled the world.  A world that was falling apart.

Labels: FictionOpeners

Dr. Chekhov showed the girl the ancient handblaster displayed on the mantelpiece.

"2145.  From the start of the era of exploration.  In perfect working condition."

Chekhov hoped that didn't sound too smug.  This girl was special.  Smart enough that his invitation for individual tutoring was plausible; beautiful enough that his real interest could be guessed.  Or so he hoped.

As she looked at the handblaster, Chekhov looked over his student.  He had never seen her in person before.  The imagery did not deceive; she was beautiful, and beautifully dressed.  He delighted in the way her modest wrap simultaneously concealed, and drew attention to, her body.  He gave her high marks for her good taste.  And himself, for his.

The girl (so young!  Only 200!) turned around.  Chekhov hoped she didn't think he was ogling her.  There is a difference between an art gallery and a peep show, after all.

She was frowning.  Uh-oh.

"Is it loaded?"

"Blasters continually recharge themselves, drawing energy from whichever sun is nearby.  So, yes.  By definition."

"It gives me the creeps.  I can't help but think it's going to go off before this day is over."

Labels: FictionOpeners

Sam heard the music before he reached the cavern.

His guide was a bearded old man the other natives called MusicLover.  As they descended the gently sloping tunnel, Sam wondered if he could have found the place on his own, lead by the sound of the ever-shifting harmonies.

"A guy could go crazy, listening to this stuff," Sam said, and then regretted breaking the silence.  If the guide was irritated, however, he made no sign.  Perhaps the guide's job was to rescue tourists from madness caused by the music.  Sam amused himself with a head movie:  the music lulling him into a trance, the guide binding him and dragging him back to the surface, and Sam begging to return, like Odysseus by the island of the Sirens.

They entered the cavern of music.  Colored lights played about the ceiling.  Reflections from rippling water of the pool below, along with glints from bejeweled surfaces of stalactites, completed the symphony of light.  I'll bet the visuals are manufactured for the sake of the tourists, Same told himself.

The two men quieted themselves and let the music take hold.  Sam knew something of music theory, enough to know the chords were founded in the overtone series.  Except when they weren't; the "wrong" notes seemed just frequent enough to create a pleasing amount of tension.  They have a sense of dissonance and resolution like we do, Sam thought.  And yet there was something in the timing... or was it the use of competing bass lines?  Or maybe the cadences that always deceived?  ...that marked the music as utterly alien.  Whatever it was, the evidence was unmistakable:  these chords were willful.

"Do you understand them?" asked Sam.

MusicLover didn't seem to mind the interruption.  A hint of vanity tainted the solemn expression on his face.

"A bit.  The life of a chord is so transient, and so commingled with that of other chords, that even I can't tell precisely what they mean.  But I think they're having an argument."

"About what?"

"About you.  They're trying to decide if you're sentient."

"How can I prove myself?  Hum a few bars of something?"

Sam laughed.  His guide did not.

"Try 'My Country 'Tis of Thee.'  They always like that one."

Sam heard the music before he reached the cavern.

His guide was a bearded old man the other natives called MusicLover.  As they descended the gently sloping tunnel, Sam wondered if he could have found the place on his own, lead by the sound of the ever-shifting harmonies.

"A guy could go crazy, listening to this stuff," Sam said, and then regretted breaking the silence.  If the guide was irritated, however, he made no sign.  Perhaps the guide's job was to rescue tourists from madness caused by the music.  Sam amused himself with a head movie:  the music lulling him into a trance, the guide binding him and dragging him back to the surface, and Sam begging to return, like Odysseus by the island of the Sirens.

They entered the cavern of music.  Colored lights played about the ceiling.  Reflections from rippling water of the pool below, along with glints from bejeweled surfaces of stalactites, completed the symphony of light.  I'll bet the visuals are manufactured for the sake of the tourists, Same told himself.

The two men quieted themselves and let the music take hold.  Sam knew something of music theory, enough to know the chords were founded in the overtone series.  Except when they weren't; the "wrong" notes seemed just frequent enough to create a pleasing amount of tension.  They have a sense of dissonance and resolution like we do, Sam thought.  And yet there was something in the timing... or was it the use of competing bass lines?  Or maybe the cadences that always deceived?  ...that marked the music as utterly alien.  Whatever it was, the evidence was unmistakable:  these chords were willful.

"Do you understand them?" asked Sam.

MusicLover didn't seem to mind the interruption.  A hint of vanity tainted the solemn expression on his face.

"A bit.  The life of a chord is so transient, and so commingled with that of other chords, that even I can't tell precisely what they mean.  But I think they're having an argument."

"About what?"

"About you.  They're trying to decide if you're sentient."

"How can I prove myself?  Hum a few bars of something?"

Sam laughed.  His guide did not.

"Try 'My Country 'Tis of Thee.'  They always like that one."

Labels: FictionOpeners

George thought this one was unusually arrogant, even for a crow.

"You can't do it forever, you know," he said.  "Keeping us tied up.  And helpless.  Every human being in the world.  It's gotta end sometime."

"Why not?" the bird chirped back at him.  "We've done it for the past thirteen years."

"Twelve years, ten months, and twenty-nine days!" George cried, with relish.  "You can't count!  Your kind never could!"

Labels: FictionOpeners

John faced his enemy.  The enemy was huge, insect-like, and armed with a blaster.  John was an Earth man, armed with his wits and naught beside. 

The big bug fired his blaster.  The beam of energy approached John at light speed.  Fear can make time stop, they say, but John knew no fear.  Because he wore a space-time continuum adapter field, he was able to step through time in it's fundamental units at the Planck scale.  To John, time slowed nearly to a halt.

John, conqueror of worlds, hero of the Second Galactic War, and now the last hope of the princess whose shapely form lay unconscious at his feet, observed the beam of energy that was surely destined to kill him.  He observed it creep forward by two of the 100 inches that separated him from his enemy.  He had time.

He had time to remember.

He remembered a day thirty years prior, the day of his first piano lesson.

He remembered Miss Thornton, his piano teacher.  He remembered Miss Thornton's imposing height, her huge black eyes and her spindly, insect-like limbs.  He remembered Miss Thornton's angry cries of "no!" each time he tried to play a melody.  John remembered Miss Thornton's rage as he fled her piano studio that day, and the puddle of urine he left behind on her piano bench.

Three inches.  He had plenty of time to remember it all.

Labels: FictionOpeners

Every inhabited planet in the galaxy wanted Zladimir Zlamikof.  He was the greatest conductor of his time, but his time was 4000 years ago, in the frame of reference of planet HD 3843245 d.  He was one of an elite group of performers, politicians, scientists, and soldiers whose jobs required them to travel repeatedly among the stars. Frequent trips at relativistic speeds meant time passed more slowly for Zladimir than for planet-bound persons.

As he stepped off the gangplank and onto the surface of the rocket pad, a young woman from the orchestra appeared to shake his right hand and stuff sheets of music into his left.  He scanned the music for the composer's name (unrecognized, and unpronounceable, of course) and the dates following it.  He tried to perform the calculation in his head.

The woman anticipated his question.  "It was written 3000 years after you graduated from the conservatory, and 40 years after your flight departed HD 870684 Ac.  And since your starship arrived late, you've missed your one chance to rehearse it with the orchestra."

"I can't seem to make sense of this notation."

"Notation has...has evolved while you were in transit.  Your flight lasted 85 years, in local time.

"Ah, well.  It won't be the first time I've conducted by the seat of my pants."

"You won't be wearing pants.  You won't be wearing any clothes at all.  The chocolate pudding would ruin them."

"Chocolate...?"

"You and the musicians will be submerged in a huge vat of chocolate pudding.  It's how we do classical music now."

The great conductor's eyes were looking at the woman, but seeing nothing.

"Isn't chocolate pudding... bad ... for the violins?"

Labels: FictionOpeners

Who would want to live on a planet terraformed into the shape of a perfect icosahedron?  Who would dare carve each planet of an entire star system into the shape of one of the platonic solids?  What kind of mind is driven to reshape every natural object it finds, even objects of planetary scale -- even living objects! -- into simple geometric forms?  What kind of mind?  A very, very alien mind, indeed.

Upon these thoughts, Lieutenant Harold "Hank" Mortensen of the United States Space Force meditated, as he lay strapped to a square table in an octahedral castle amidst a topiary of cubes, tetrahedra and rhombicosidodecahedra at the north pole of the icosahedral planet of HD 98618 c, and observed that the carving tool poised directly over his head was flawlessly fashioned in the shape of a great stellated dodecahedron.

Labels: FictionOpeners

I found him sitting on the park bench at one o'clock, just like he said.

"So, what's this all about?"

He stood and faced me.

"Thank you for coming, detective. I have something important to tell you."

He paused while he brushed invisible dust from his impeccably clean tuxedo coat.

"Tonight at midnight, I will murder my wife.  I will leave no evidence that points to me.  I will construct an alibi that you will be unable to refute.  If you attempt to use this conversation as evidence against me, I will prove it never happened, and you will be dismissed from the force in disgrace.  I will commit this crime and walk, and you will go to your grave raging against your helplessness.  I tell you this now because I expect to derive much satisfaction in watching you rage."

I examined his face for clues he was joking.  His kind are notoriously hard to read; on the other hand, they are notoriously lame when it comes to humor.

"In that case, why don't we head down to the station?  I can find an excuse to keep you locked up overnight."

His two mouths contorted in what I suspected was an alien's equivalent of a smile.

"Just as I planned. Thank you, detective, for being so predictable."

Labels: FictionOpeners

This begins series of posts devoted to exercises in writing fiction openers. 

Generally I find endings easy, both in my fiction writing and in my music composition.  The beginnings are usually torture, however, and consume most of my rewriting time.  In the hope of remedying this, I'm going to spend a week or so creating openers. 

I promise to avoid getting too weird--women marrying giraffes will be strictly off limits--but the nature of the exercise will no doubt bias me toward the eye-catching.  So, we'll see what we get.  Also, I'll be interested to find out how many of these beginnings work as stand-alone pieces.  Will this be an exercise in openers, or flash fiction?

To see all the openers in one page, follow the FictionOpeners label below.

Labels: FictionOpeners

What do you read for pleasure?  There's a genre of non-fiction that's new to me, that few people know about, but is a source of endless delights:  Advice To Would-Be Fiction Writers.  Typically, an ATW-BFW author is an editor haunted by years of reading bad manuscripts.  There's a build-up of exasperation that comes out in the advice.  To our everlasting benefit.  And entertainment. 

Consider E. E. Knight's restrained complaint about extravagant emotions:

Marcia! Marcia! Marcia! - characters who always have their emotions dialed up to "11." They laugh "uproariously" at stuff that's worth a mild snigger, fight to keep from screaming when they're third in line at the ATM, agonize over whether to have the vinegarette or ranch. Can we save the "I'll never be hungry again!" fist-shaking for something more important that a checkout line, please?

The name "Fred" turns up sometimes.  It's more proof that "Fred" is the ultimate old-shoe name, rendered odd by the extremity of its familiarity:

For example, "Jane's dog" means the dog belongs to Jane. "Fred's house" means the house belongs to Fred (or at least that he lives in it). Apostrophe-S is used to indicate possession.

Another Fred, this one doing that ol' who-whom thang that Lenin talked about:

The nameless character would be a harmless trifle were it not for the fact that this conceit requires the writer to perform all sorts of elaborate literary gymnastics to avoid revealing the name. I once read what was otherwise a fine piece of work wherein the lead character's name (and gender!) were hidden through the first 57 pages, including a fairly graphic scene of the character having sex. Neat trick, no? Neat trick, no. See: Show-Off Experiments.) This bit of legerdemain was accomplished by arranging that every person in the book just happened to talk to and about this person without using a name, and by the writer referring to the protagonist as The Ranger, the Leader, the captain of the band, etc., etc., etc.

It did not take long for it to turn stilted and awkward. Nor did the eventual revelation of the character's name and gender have any particular effect on the story, or have any dramatic purpose. The sex scene was especially baffling, as the writer, of necessity, could not reveal the sex of the character's partner in bed. While the writer made it clear what was being done, the writer, trapped by her own cleverness, was unable to make it clear who was doing what to whom. Oy. If your character has no name, or if you keep his or her name hidden with a series of allegedly clever artifices, you will spend 23 pages stuck with damn fool locutions such as "the boy in the shirt." Knock it off. If his name is Fred, say so.

Another great (manufactured) example from the same link is the weird opener.  This is considered bad:

"Sarah walked down the aisle, still unclear why she had agreed to marry a giraffe. The groom, waiting patiently at the altar, resplendent in black tie, spats and spots, swung his long neck around to watch her approach, all the time placidly chewing his cud."

The spats are a nice, and nicely decadent, detail.  Frankly, I would be proud to be the author of such an opener.

C.J. Cherryh has her own pet annoyances:

Mirrors … avoid mirrors, as a basic rule of your life. You get to use them once during your writing career. Save them for more experience. [...]  If you haven't read enough unpublished fiction to have met the infamous mirror scenes in which Our Hero admires his steely blue eyes and manly chin, you can scarcely imagine how bad they can get.

Limpid pools and farm ponds: I don't care what it is, if it reflects your hero and occasions a description of his manly dimple, it's a mirror.

I recently listened to the classic Princess of Mars in an audio book from Libravox.  The faux-horses and faux-dogs made me roll my eyes, because I knew about the dreaded Smeerp:

[W]atch out for what Damon Knight calls “calling a rabbit a smeerp.” Just because you call a long-eared short-tailed lagomorphic mammal with long hind legs a “smeerp” doesn’t make it alien. We all write sf in standard English, unless we are Anthony Burgess (who did made-up dialect well), or some other people who do it not so well. There’s no particular reason to translate words for time, distance, and food into gibberish. (I don’t know why time, distance, and food are so susceptible to this in science fiction, but they are.) If your characters are drinking coffee, have them drink coffee, not “klaa” or “jav.” Coffee’s been around for more than a millennium. It’s probably going to last.

And, from the previous link, here's one of my faves, which reminds me of the time a white woman described her black adopted daughter as "literally an oreo."

"His Head Literally Exploded!"

"Figuratively" means that you are speaking metaphorically or symbolically. "Literally" means that you are speaking with precision and realism, that you are saying what exactly happened. "Literally" is not a generic intensifier. If you are talking about someone's headache, "figuratively exploded" is the phrase you're looking for -- at least in comparison to "literally exploded."

Ouch.

Labels: Fiction

Leonard Slatkin is coming to Detroit? That's good news.

Labels: Culture, local

A recent visitor mentioned two barbershop quartets:

Realtime.  I love those black velvet jackets, but I bet it's a nightmare getting the hair clippings off them after a long day's work behind the barber's chair.  The group sneaks in a few quasi-legitimate sixth chords, and the baritone displays fine control of the all-important single-eyebrow waggle during his closeup.  This performance shows why they crush the competition, and the velvet.



Nightlife.  Here they sing "One Moment in Time," a oddly beautiful meditation on the metaphysics of temporal existence, the  persistence of subjective perception, and the politics of meaning.  I think.  I do know it ain't "Coney Island Baby."

Labels: BarbershopHarmony, VideoClip

Wow.  Just what I needed.  Go see barbershop quartet arranger David Wright's presentation on the topic of barbershop style.  It's packed with tantalizing snippets of great vocal harmonizing, with great examples from old-tyme groups such as the Flat Foot Four.  It also offers a peek at the internal debate raging within the Barbershop Harmony organization on what music may be "contestable," i.e., allowed to be sung in official barbershop singing contests.

Don't read the text first; go straight to the video, so as to hear the musical examples referenced.  The photos in sepia tones of quartets from decades past are priceless.  Consult this barbershop dictionary if you don't know the lingo.

Wright is a liberal (ahem!) who argues for the use of tight sixths and other influences from jazz and blues.  His examples show these chords' presence in barbershop harmony for decades.  Apparently, "reforms" during the 1970s severely limited what embellishments and polyphonic effects could be used in official competitions, resulting in many classic barbershop arrangements being marginalized in the movement they helped define.

Best line:  "Note the long sequence of chords, exaggerated even more by the performance, clearly sung for the pure enjoyment of barbershop harmony. Is it indulgent? Some might say so.  Is it a part of the barbershop style? Most definitely."

Labels: BarbershopHarmony

Set aside a few minutes today and read about Clive Wearing, the "real-life Memento."  A man whose brain damage robbed him of both short- and long-term memory, Clive can nevertheless read, conduct, and perform music.  (He is a musicologist specializing in Orlande de Lassus.)  He also recognizes his wife, Deborah, whose life teaches us just about everything we need to know about the self-sacrificial fulfillment of one's commitments.  This is a story of the redemptive power of sixteenth-century polyphony.  And love.

Labels: Culture