The Fredösphere

It was too true to be good.  Or something.

Meanwhile...

Roll over, Edison:  some French guy made a vocal recording that predated yours by 17 years.  What is odd, from our modern point of view, is that, although the recording device was invented in 1860, no playback method was attempted (or even contemplated, apparently) until recently.  (Title on the A side?  It's "Au Clair de la Lune.")

Also...

Der Drübermensch and his fellow members of the Boychoir of Ann Arbor were joined in concert by the hoary heads of the University of Michigan Men's Glee Club.  It was a great chance for the boys to hear what kind of sound a 100+ member ensemble can make in a medium-sized church (in this case, St. Paul's Lutheran of Ann Arbor).  Also on display were the ancient customs that give the club it's appealing Gemütlichkeit:  the concert-ending school songs, the use of finger snaps for applause, and especially the elaborate body piercings, especially the wearing of elephant tusks in the nasal septums, which look terribly painful and are probably illegal, but which are worn with panache even when they cause awkward situations in doorways.

Okay, so I made up that last part.  Hey, I gotta give the guys some reason to complain each time I blog them, don't I?

Finally, let me praise the conducting of Paul Rardin, who combines control with enthusiasm (were those his fists I saw flying around?) in a perfect combination.  He offered a miniature seminar on vocal leadership in this one concert.

Labels: Choral, Culture

This week at the Starship Sofa podcast you'll find me in my occasional role as celebrity co-host.  Tony Smith and I discuss the five British Science Fiction Association nominees for best short story.  In 40 minutes we discuss slasher novels written by Mormons, the advantages and disadvantages of fax machines for souls, and two-headed bug-eyed aliens, as well as the topic at hand.  You can download the audio file directly from the Starship Sofa homepage, or better yet you can subscribe via iTunes.

Labels: sci-fi

Well, smack my gob.  Who knew the world-wide Christian conspiracy was so insidious?

"Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Russian Orthodox church?"

I could go on.  The irony--the sheer symmetry--boggles the mind.

Labels: Culture

Build time machine, travel back to 1936, assassinate Hitler:  what could be more simple?

Labels: sci-fi

Frequently wrong; never boring:  Camille strikes again, and this time, her topic is Presidential politics (hat tip to 2Blowhards):

Obama has seemed tentative in countering the Clintons' trademark mudslinging, but perhaps coolness and poise are what the nation needs after eight years of George W. Bush's lurching braggadocio. Obama hasn't figured out how to stay classy while delivering wicked stiletto thrusts -- a talent mastered in spades by British politicians produced by the Oxbridge debate culture.

I wonder if she had this particular example in mind:  the cool brutality of William Hague as he mocks Tony Blair and Gordon Brown while even the Labor MPs laugh along ruefully and admiringly.  My fellow Americans, can you imagine--can you dream in your wildest fantasies--our political culture producing this kind of wit and intelligence?  I can't.

Labels: Culture

Two makes a trend?  Composer James MacMillan and writer David Mamet find they no longer fit comfortably inside the box labeled "left-wing."  These epiphanies are not headlong rushes to some other well-defined opposing ideology (thankfully).  Instead they seem to be, like Michael Blowhard's earlier experience, an adoption of skepticism toward all -isms.

But enough of this boring unimportant stuff.  I want to know how I can turn my TV into a 3D VR display using a head-mounted Wii remote.  Take it away, Jonny Lee!

Labels: Culture

It's the Wiki of Obsolete Skills!  (Via SF Signal.)  It's, you know, all that stuff we know how to do, but our kids couldn't do if their lives depended on it, like dialing a rotary phone or putting a needle on a vinyl record. 

It's a wiki, so think up your favorite and add it to the list.  Mine might be the hand-engraving of musical scores.  A friend of mine from the UM School of Music, was famous for her scoring by hand that truly could not be distinguished from plate engraving.  (A tragic waste of time really; she did it because she loved the precision of the work, but she spent hours per page on it.  Not a good example of setting proper priorities.)

Another interesting case file from the History of Hand-Engraved Music is that of Imogen Holst (daughter of Gustav), whose own compositional career was arguably stunted by her slavish work as an underpaid assistant to Benjamin Britten.  Some of her friends grew to resent the time she spent copying Britten's instrumental parts, but she seemed content, and he was happy to take advantage of that.

I'm glad to see that the Copying Assistance Program of the American Music Center has been renamed the Composer Assistance Program.  I was always sad whenever I thought about that pile of grant money sitting around, dedicated to the cause of helping composers do something that can be achieved these days by selecting the proper item from a pulldown menu in Finale or Sibelius.

I suggest a new fund be created, one dedicated to helping struggling composers remove Vista from their computers and upgrade to XP.  Now there's something that would really stimulate the productivity of composers.

Labels: Culture

Notice how our culture can be desensitized to anything, given enough time.  Even really scary words like "opera":

Imagine the horror of a future in which organs are for sale - and can be repossessed for non-payment. Now imagine that tale told with rock music, singing and dancing. That would give you REPO! The Genetic Opera, touted as "Rocky Horror meets Blade Runner", which is coming soon to the big screen.

Don't watch the accompanying trailer, it's nasty.  Looks like Sweeney Todd with the gentle, lyrical parts cut out.  (And I do mean cut out.)

Labels: Opera

Everyone's linking to the amusing BBC interview of a couple of European critics attempting to take down a notch Alex Ross' beautiful book The Rest Is Noise.  Kyle Gann has an elegant and gracious (gracious to Alex, anyway) rebuttal, and he quotes Alex's cool line about the German music tradition now resembling a crime scene.  Sequenza21, where I first saw the link, has a more varied discussion in the comments section.  It's all fascinating; it is a crime scene itself.

Have I commented on the book yet?  If I haven't, well, I liked it so much, I even recommended it to the Wifeösphere, who has only so much time and interest for classical music (beyond my own, of course).  Nuts to detailed descriptions of the music; we don't need more of that whole Dancing About Architecture stuff; inspire us to curiosity, then let us go directly to the music itself.  This, Alex has done.  He's even made me want to give Messiaen's thorny Canyons another try.

Labels: Composer, Culture

My previous post described a visit to an indoor soccer match.  Today I'd like to look more closely at some of the extra-soccer activities.

Before the players are introduced, the crowd is warmed up with an announcer, a woman with a screechy voice designed to prevent you from ignoring it.  (That it, like every other sonic event of the night, is pumped out at 110 decibels only adds to its inexorableness.)  The troupe of dancers/cheerleaders/actresses/models/whatevers run out and hop around.  Let's not linger by examining the psychology that permits a young woman to adopt that role; nor let us think too hard about the self-esteem of the gentlemen who dons the habit of the team mascot, in this case a anthropomorphized spark plug called Scorch.  Instead, consider merely the team owner's belief that such things, as well as the clouds of mist and the exaggerated hype surrounding the announcement of the players' names, are all a net economic positive, contributing to the organization's bottom line.

Yes, the cheer leaders, the mascot, the throbbing rock music, the announcer that seems to think he is describing the lineup for the battle of Armageddon:  all these are necessary accouterments for a modern pro sporting event.  And pray tell, why?  Because, for the average spectator, there is not sufficient interest in the sport qua sport to attract a crowd.

That's right, people.  Sport in its pure form cannot survive as a commercial venture.  It must be gussied up.  It must include appeals to the average person's vulgarity.  This is a sign of desperation, pure and simple.  It is clear to me, based on this one Friday night experience, that the long-term prospects for pro sports is bleak.  Bluntly, it ain't gonna survive.

Oh, there will always be the reliable core, those faithful fans of the pure game, who will turn out no matter what.  You see them at games, sitting there in the front row at the 50 yard line or at mid-court.  They can be identified by their formal evening wear, and by the way they shush those around them who chant "we will, we will ROCK YOU!" because they want to savor the subtle nuance in every sound of the ball striking human flesh, or racket, or wooden bat.  They can divine from such sounds, to a degree that we vulgar people cannot, important information about the players and their skill.

Such hard core fans will never be enough to justify financially a pro team, however.  They are, at best, only 2 or 3 percent of the population.  The other, ordinary fans are notoriously fickle, and will soon wander off to other diversions.  For now, the dancing girls and the comic relief of the goofy mascots will slow the hemorrhaging, but already the temptations mount; there are symphonic concerts to attend and mp3s of choral music to download.

Alas, Babylon.

Labels: Culture

I took Der Drübermensch (now 9 years old) to a pro indoor soccer match on Friday, and was very pleasantly surprised by how much we both enjoyed it.  The home team is the Detroit Ignition, and it helped that they are doing well this year.  Indoor soccer is played on an Astroturfed hockey rink, and the small size and enclosing Plexiglas make for a fast-paced, high-scoring game.  (Really, can someone explain to me why anyone would tolerate a conventional soccer game, once they've seen indoor soccer?  Zzzzzzzzzz!)  The spectators skewed quite young; there were very many kids of Der Drübermensch's age in the crowd, which bodes well for the future of the sport.

We had relatively lousy seats, but we were so close to the action, it didn't matter.  A capacity crowd in that arena would be fewer than 4,000, I think.  This experience confirms my long-held bias in favor of the semi-pro, the minor league and the small-time.  Quite simply, I regard the paying of enormous sums for the privilege of sitting somewhere about a mile from the action as completely, utterly bogus.  The thought of my one visit to a football game at U-M stadium still enrages me to this day; I was led to believe that, by buying that ticket, I would, you know, get to actually see a football game.  I and my "friends," the ones who talked me into going, sat there for three hours, speculating among ourselves vital issues such as:

Why is nothing happening now?  Was a penalty called?  Or maybe an officials time out?
Which team has possession of the ball?
When will they pass so we can at least see something besides the backs of the heads of the people in front of us?
Do people actually pay money to sit in this stadium on a regular basis?
Whose fault, ultimately, is it that this is happening to me, and what novel legal theory could justify my killing that person?

No doubt some of the seats in that 100,000-seat stadium allow one to see the game, but I doubt the proportion is even half of the total.  There's something deeply disaffecting about spending three hours telling yourself you are in the presence of at least 60,000 fools.  What a hateful, hateful experience.

Tomorrow, I'll dig a bit deeper and explain how the Detroit Ignition match portends very good things for the survival of classical music.

Labels: Culture