The Fredösphere

The wifeösphere spotted an essay on the Baroque Era in music history.  She detected a bit of overreliance on spellcheckers (with lines like "Italian opera composers expressed emotions from there tragedies" and "two final characteristics are the opera was too complex and improbable plots").  Yes, the syntax is mangled, but I challenge you to find a single misspelled word.

Anyway, read the 4th paragraph and you'll find out how homophobic musical styles were invented.  Somehow it all has to do with recapturing the spirit of Greek drama, which is very confusing to me.  I guess this is a topic that wasn't properly covered in my music history classes.

This CD, A Hilliard Songbook, had been on my wish list for a while.  I vetted it carefully, listening to the bits that Amazon offers.  It's a small, elite ensemble singing all new music.  This should have been a slam dunk for me.  A harmonic convergence.  A perfect storm of ensemble, style, and time period.  It proved to be a perfect snore.

Okay, austere stuff like this needs some time to settle into the ear, but right now I'm struggling to find one track I can like.  Consider Kullervo's Message by Veljo Tormis.  This piece is similar to Piispa ja pakana (The Bishop and the Pagan) by the same composer, performed by the King's Singers on this album (check out the sound file).  The sound, the subject matter, the ensemble are all similar--but the King's Singers' performance has a edge and an energy that I just don't hear in the Hilliard Ensemble.  The Piispa ought to be more off-putting; it includes more whispering/stammering/spitting effects, but there it seems like dramatic flourishes rather than weird-for-the-sake-of-weird modernist tics.  If I must be spat at, let it be the King's Singers doing the spitting!

Like I said, sometimes this kind of music needs time settle into the ear.  If I change my mind, I'll let you know.  Right now, however, the verdict is:  dull, dull, dull.

When I was a voice student at the University of Michigan, I took a composition class taught by the big boys.  It was a nice opportunity for anyone (even non-music-majors) to rub shoulders with composers like William Bolcom or Leslie Basset.  I took the class twice, and in the semester taught by Bolcom, all my projects were sacred music for voices (with some instruments thrown in).  In the end he told me I should try writing something secular and instrumental, which would goose up my approach to sacred work.  (Those may not have been his exact words.)  It's taken me years, but now I think I understand what good advice that was.  I wonder if the Hilliard ensemble have spent too much time in a very serious environment, breathing the rarefied air of the high-brow, the accademic, and the tastefully refined.  Maybe someone should inject some N₂O in there.

Howard Shore has turned his film score from Lord of the Rings into a symphony.  The choir will be singing in Elvish and Dwarvish.  Shore admits to some influence from Wagner.  Of all people.  Debussy seems a better fit to me.

A new flick called Les Choristes is making boychoirs popular in France again.  Judging from the trailer, the plot involves a cranky old teacher who assembles a crew of misfits and losers and gradually transforms them into disciplined fighting unit, no, sports team, no, vocal ensemble.  In any event, I believe the plot has been used once or maybe twice before in cinematic history but I'll probably watch the thing if it makes it to this side of the Atlantic.

Cinema Choral Classics is the first in a series of CDs and is a lot of fun.  It's got the spooky Omen music, which to my tender ears to was a breakthrough in using choirs in film scores.

I first saw The Omen with a friend in high school, and in the scene where they opened the tomb of Damien's mother, it was hard for me to see on the small TV exactly what was going on.  My friend explained, "his mother was, um, of the canine persuasion."  He did have a way with words.

All of us here at Team Fredösphere are committed to bringing you more antipopes than any other blog today.  Yes, it's Antipope Thursday!

Thanks to religionnewsblog.com, you can read all about some guy in Spain who says he's the real pope.  Idiot.  He says he's the pope and he's not even living in Avignon.

Andrew Cusack's blog was a revelation to me.  Warning:  there's some catholic content here.  Deep, deep catholic content.  This guy seems to be living in an alternate universe where everyone spends their days reinacting 400-year-old events from church history or attending banquets for exclusive 300-year-old catholic prep school clubs.  (Yes, I don't get it either:  "everyone" belongs to "exclusive" clubs.  Hey, it isn't my alternate universe.)  The whole thing is very charming but a little suffocating.  And bewildering--Andrew attends ceremonies the way Max Fischer produces amateur theatricals, cramming infinite activity into finite amounts of time.  I.e.:  impossibly.

Anyway, scroll down and you'll see Andrew possesses what just may be the only japanese antipope in captivity.

And then there's the amazing antipope of Montana.  Now this is getting depressing--they've even got a picture of a barn belching white smoke to announce this pope's election.  Talk about having a serious form-content discontinuity.  The more-catholic-than-the-pope game is for losers.

You've heard of John Paul II, haven't you?  Lives in the Vatican, wears a big white hat, travels a lot?  Turns out he's not the pope, according to this webpage.  The author also slams people who "claim to be Lutheran."  I guess he's talking about me.

Okay, I've reached my saturation point.  I'm afraid I'm going to regret this little research project.

The Fredösphere has passed another milestone: it has received its first hat tip. Whoo-hoo! So naturally I will give a link back to my good buddy at Mixolydian Mode. The Blogösphere: making itself ever more self-referential ... one link at a time.

Der Drübermench continues to manifest his fascination with musical instruments.  His favorite place to visit now is the music store, and he spends much of his time drawing pictures of orchestras.


This orchestra must be the Guernica Philharmonic.

Labels: Creativity

It is night and the vacant cavern is dim, chilly, still.  A few animals have arrived before the others, bustling about the immense expanse beneath the cavern roof sixty feet above.  From time to time a cry echoes throughout he chamber and the flurry of activity increases.  And then, all at once, a herd of two thousand shuffles in. It is a highly territorial species and each animal seeks out its rightful station in the cavern.  Those of highest status roost farthest in; others withdraw to murky corners near the entrance.  Outside, they had cooed and preened, dominated and submitted, but all that is finished now.  It is time to nest.  Deep in the brain, structures as ancient as a brontosaurus announce, "It is safe here.  You can relax.  But do not sleep, for something is about to happen."  Pulse rates drop, blood pressure slackens, breathing lightens. The cavern visitors are a species of tool users, and when a group of a hundred more enter--individuals with distinctive black and white coloration--they carry oddly shaped wooden boxes and metal tubes to the front of the chamber, where they sit together.  Abruptly, the dominant male struts in, climbs to a position above all others, and performs a triumph display.  His arrival is greeted by much hooting and clatter. Then silence.  In two thousand brains the frontal lobes take command:  there is to be no coughing, no spitting, no loud yawning, and for that matter no vocalizing or fighting or mating.  The cavern darkens, muscles relax, touch receptors quiet, and much of the brain dozes off.  But in the auditory cortex of these two thousand brains, spontaneous neural activity has increased--a sing of heightened expectation.  When the dominant male suddenly commences an elaborate display, swinging his forelimbs to and fro, nerve cells fire in cascades.  It has begun.

From Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy by Robert Jourdain.

I'm late with this, but NPR has noticed the Summer Sing phenomenon.  Choristers from Washington, D.C. take a bite out of the Verdi Requiem. "The Verdi Requiem is the Mount Everest of great choral works."  Yes, just like all the rest of them. "Washington is considered one of the choral capitals of the world ." Weird, I didn't realize Washington is a Lutheran town.  You learn something new every day. I know it's a bourgeois town, but still....

Symphony X is a bunch of composers with a group blog.  (No, I am not talking about a certain prog metal band from NJ whose music tends to be epic and powerful with touches of opera choirs and classical music but whose lead singer is not a parrot.) 

Symphony X blog member Stirling Newberry is not happy about Kyle Gann's prickliness v. normalcy continuum:

Will you guys please grow up? This is just embarassing twaddle to read. Look, you are the establishment, they kind of guy that people shouldn't offend, but should kiss up to. Subversions impossible because, duh, you're what needs subverting.

Personally, I liked Gann's post because that kind of big-picture theorizing stimulates my own thinking, even when I disagree with it.

Along the same lines, Mr. Newberry gives us an essay about "modal music based on phase."  Here, let him explain it.  He illustrates it with a sound file--just what we need to get the sense that we're getting a peek into a composer's mind.  Yes, some of us actually find that an appealing prospect.

The Philadelphia School District has just figured out that the paintings it has had hanging on its walls for years is worth tens of millions  of dollars.  Wow.

I know how they feel.  I recently noticed in my basement a fairly large (15' x 25') portrait of some fat lady.  It turns out its a long-lost Rubens.  The appraiser guy told me the title is The Catholic Church Triumphant Giving Protestantism A Well-Deserved Kick In The Rear.  This could be my big break.  I may be able to quit blogging, which, let's face it, I've only been doing for the money.

They had me at "an Anglican vicar, onetime roadie for the Sex Pistols and former all-around sinner, was roaring across the Yorkshire moors on his Yamaha XV1100 in a lightning storm when the idea for his hit Christian children's book, "Shadowmancer," came to him."

We got a late start. We took the shuttle from the Briarwood mall to the South University bus stop. First order of business was getting a meal, so we headed to Madras Masala, and newish Indian place. We got in quickly even though it was already 7:00 p.m. This confirmed our earlier experience: it's surprisingly easy to procure a sit-down meal at a downtown restaurant in Ann Arbor during the art fair. The regular clientele has been scared off, and the tourist crowd is content to be served by any of the outdoor food vendors that come with the art.

Did someone say art? We saw some. We only covered the State St. and South University fairs (although there are four in all). Here's what caught my eye (and in most cases, the wifeösphere's eye also):

Faux-distressed ancient bas-reliefs by Mauro Possobon. I can especially recommend the Egyptian and Roman carvings. Possobon blends modern realism with classical themes. I suppose I'm supposed to see this as phony, but it grabbed me more than anything else at the fair.

I've seen Motawi Tileworks at the Ann Arbor Art Center and liked it a lot. What I saw at their booth confirmed my high opinion. My favorite subject is the landscape series in the craftsman frames.

John Krieger's abstract expressionist paintings were on display in his booth -- is that all he's doing these days, or are those the ones that didn't sell? Maybe I fell for these paintings because of the strong, saturated colors. The representational paintings on the website are more of a mixed bag IMHO but I like the way he plays spin the color wheel.

Supposedly I'm against post-modernism. Maybe I'm not--maybe I like what they do when they stop yakking about art theory and actually produce some, you know, art. Here's Anthony Pack having fun with found objects and pop culture icons.

Celestial Ironworks brought some clocks to the fair. These images don't really don't communicate how the rusty metal looks.

I also want to mention Thomas Yano. He doesn't seem to have his own website, but you can look him up at this one. A couple of years ago we made a Major Purchace to fill that blank space above the Wright-styled settee (no, we do not own a couch! It's a settee, thank you). We covered the whole Main St. fair and were about to go with a watercolor that wasn't particularly inspired but would have worked with our color scheme. Suddenly the wifeösphere spotted Thomas Yano's sculpture. It was exactly what I was hoping for. The right colors, and the right level of unconventionality. Here it is: water lilies in metal.

Today I give you fluff with 0.3% added content.  I give you the palindrome page.  (Hat tip to Otpittah!)

Plep also likes these rocket paintings.  As do I, but I suspect all those saturated colors would not be as pleasant in the originals, in a larger scale and up on a wall.  This aggressive species is best kept confined to the small cage of a website.

Tonight my Greater East Michigan Cö-Prosperity Sphere (a.k.a. the wifeösphere) and I go Art Fairing.  I Will Report.

You've all seen that Far Side cartoon.  Some cows are in a pasture.  One has a disgusted look on its face as it spits something out of its mouth.  "Grass!", it says.  "We're eating grass!"

Fix that image clearly in your mind.  Now try substituting rabbis for cows and cheese made of pigs' milk instead of grass.  No, don't ask why, just try it.

You couldn't do it, could you.  Here's why:  pigs' cheese is an oxymoron.

Thus endeth the lesson.  You may now resume your regularly scheduled life.

My Flonase prescription has run out (aaah, sweet, sweet Flonase) so this morning I awoke with my nose stuffed up and my open mouth pastey-dry.  My sleep was sufficiently disrupted for me to remember my dream.  Which is basically the equivalent of saying that the rock that normally hides all the pale, blind, squrimy disgusting things that inhabit my subconsious got turned over.

In my dream, some gangsters threatened to kill me and my family if I didn't help them with an assassination.  So I found myself running around a maze of rooms inside some San Francisco row houses with a syringe filled with poison.  I thought, yikes, all these people here have seen me with the syringe, so they'll know I was involved in the plot.  Then it hit me:  the mafia guys will kill me when it's all over anyway.

At that point I woke up.  I tore out of the house on my morning run, furious at those creeps, and managed to sprain my back.   Memo to self:  it is a waste of time to hate people who don't exist.

At least my dreaming isn't half as twisted as Belle's.  I like to keep my dreams nicely non-lucid, thanks very much.

The Spiral:  "Our trustees will now review the situation in the autumn. However, this decision seriously jeopardises the future of the Spiral."  Well, boo, hoo, hoo!

The Bean:  "I hope what I have done is make a serious work, which deals with serious questions about form, public space and an object in space."  You failed.  It's a good thing too; otherwise, your art work would not have turned out so cool.

The Battleship:  "The Pet Shop Boys will record a ground-breaking musical score to Sergei Eisenstein's epic silent film Battleship Potemkin on a Berlin sound stage next week."  What is it about this film that lends itself to getting the loud treatment from rock bands?

The Ugly:  "After a decade of ferreting in dusty op shops, she has nailed the criteria: a complete lack of technical skill; unusual, poor or tasteless subject matter; and an asking price of $2 or less."  You knew it just a matter of time until this art niche was filled, didn't you?

(Some links courtesy of  http://www.artsjournal.com/.)

Kyle Gann blogs about a musical continuum:  Prickliness v. Normalcy.  (Sounds like yet another 5-4 supreme court decision.)  Finding the right mix is a tough call.  I suspect this may be a false choice.  The very best new music sounds very original, yet inevitable.  Now, how does a composer pull that off?  Those who know are invited to email the secret to the Fredösphere.  (Privately, please -- after which I will have to kill you.)

Right now I'm composing a setting of an old Irish poem.  So naturally, the music must sound Irish.  What does that mean?  Harmonically, I think there's an emphasis on shifting between a major tonic and the minor built on the sixth.  Melodically, from listening to tunes like Be Thou My Vision and the improbably named London Derrière, I've decided the secret is a pseudo-pentatonic sound that is disrupted by the occasional addition of a leading tone.  This addition adds a surprising sweetness and refinement to the pentatonic scale's rustic rigor.

So now, not only is my music not chromatic, it's not even using all seven notes of the diatonic scale.  Sheesh.  I'm caught in a downward spiral of caution and traditionalism.  It's taking all my effort to find a way to make this piece more "prickly" without loosing the "normal" Irish sound.  I fear this fetishization of the pentatonic...

[Sometimes you write something because you think it is, you know, true.  And sometimes you write something because you hope it will prove to be Googlewhackable.  Let's try Googling fetishization pentatonic right now!  It will be fun!]

...is all part of a mistaken attempt on my part to write bogus Irish music.  I may be committing an act of cultural insensitivity.  I who have never conversed with a leprechaun or played a harp or killed someone over religion or bathed with any green-colored deodorant soap or eaten any breakfast cereal consisting of dessicated marshmallows or staggered out of a Dublin pub at 2 a.m. and puked my guts out on the sidewalk -- what right do I have to compose Irish music, I ask you?

Thus we begin a series on religious art, very broadly defined.

This painting hung in my family's home for most of my growing-up years. It's not a bad painting in many ways. Click on the image to see a larger version. Look closely at how the forground objects (what there are of them) are depicted, with the paint laid on to create almost jagged edges. The whole thing certainly beats The Painter Of Light in style points. It puts me in an otherworldly mood and makes me ask: who's more real here, Jesus or those spectral shapes on the street going heedlessly about their business?

Even as a child I was amused by the artist's ideas. First, why does Jesus fade away in the lower extremities? I know the artist wanted to avoid showing him interacting with any part of the physical environment -- but in that case, does his knuckle make a noise when he knocks on the wall?

Enough with the childish nitpicking -- but what's with the knocking, anyway? That's where my confusion really originates. I could never avoid the irreverent thought that, by knocking on the U.N., Jesus is saying "hey! I'm still relevant! HEY!" Pathetic, but fortunately not what must have been intended. Still, the whole scene gives the U.N. waaaaay too much credibility. Even as a youngster I understood that the institution housed in Le Courbusier's bastard child was worthy of nothing but contempt. (I fully believe they plan to screw up the whole planet.)

The artist is Harry Anderson. A more popular work of his is called Divine Conselor. Here he seems to have slipped a bit into a more conventional look. I'm afraid his Jesus here owes way more than we would like to Jesus' Graduation Picture. What's that, you say?

Stay tuned.

Labels: VarietiesOfReligiousArt

The internet is a wonderful thing.  I see the notice that Roger Kimball has put down his toga and taken up the quill.  His new book Rape of the Masters is out, and two minutes later I've visited the web page of my local library and requested they get a copy.  The very soul of convenience.

Here's a juicy bit from the sneak preview.  (Warning:  we're talking about post-modern art here, so of course we have to talk dirty.)

One of the most insidious expressions of this process of de bas en haut involves a travesty of traditional aesthetic judgment. One thinks, for example, of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of the sadomasochistic demimonde and those cheerleaders who pretended to admire them for their formal excellence: the exquisite triangulation of the bullwhip being reminiscent of the composition of certain classical nudes, etc., etc. Or consider the London-based artists Gilbert and George. When they exhibited The Naked Shit Pictures—huge photo-montages of themselves naked with bits of excrement floating about—one critic invoked the Isenheim altarpiece as a precedent, while another spoke of the artists’ “self-sacrifice for a higher cause, which is purposely moral and indeed Christian.” You can almost hear these critics sneer: “You want aesthetic appreciation? We’ll give you aesthetic appreciation—of garbage.” In part, this is a strategy of what I have elsewhere called “the trivialization of outrage.” The vocabulary of aesthetic delectation is reforged into a demonic parody of itself. The moral is that art is no more immune to perversion than any other realm of human endeavor.

This is Kimball's great theme and he's playing it especially well.  I can't wait to read the whole thing.

In the preview Kimball refers approvingly to The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe's attack on the small group -- the "mere hamlet" -- of people world wide who serve as the gate keepers into the world of the visual arts.  It's a great book but, as Kimball mentions, it is marred by Wolfe's distrust of all modern art.  For him, the paint dried up forever sometime around 1880.  This is a terrible blind spot and makes it easy to dismiss Wolfe's entire argument.  Sadly, Kimball and other New Criterion writers must continually correct the assumption that they too are stuck in the 19th century.

There's more to the story of Wolfe and the New Criterion.  Years ago, in The Painted Word, Wolfe quotes a review from the New York Times:

Realism does not lack its partisans, but it does rather conspicuously lack a persuasive theory.  And  given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial--the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.

and then he reacts:

All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well - how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along.  Not `seeing is believing', you ninny, but `believing is seeing', for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.

Wolfe attacking a art critic who wants Theory instead of art:  typical Wolfe, and typical Kimball also (but Kimball the more refined and informed of the two, of course.)  But let's see, just who was that author of the NYT article?  Some guy by the name of ... give me a minute while I look it up ... by the name of:  Hilton Kramer.  Saaaaaaay, didn't he go on to co-found The New Criterion?  Whaaaaaaats goooooooing oooooooon????

Well, Google just isn't giving me a direct answer.  As best as I can tell, Kramer is a complex figure.  He calls himself a liberal but most others call him conservative.  I suppose you could call him a neo-con, except without all the implied political views that goes with that word nowdays.  He's one of those from the older generation that found themselves left behind as their own fellow liberals drifted away.  No doubt there's more to the story; I wish someone would tell it.  Anyway, it's unfortunate Wolfe picked on Kramer, of all people.

(And for a recent installment of PoMo attention-getting stunts, read this hilarious self-parody.)

Today I find out there's another blog devoted to choirs.

Their focus is really quite a bit different than mine, so I don't regard them as a competitor and I will graciously link to them.  I hope they are ready:  I think the vast horde of my humongous readership will crush their puny server.

They give you a roundup of the day's choir news.  I, on the other hand, give you, uh, fascinating and insightful, um, paragraphs of ... well, anyway, thanks to them I now know that the Vienna Boy Choir has some fancy new Star Trek uniforms and that Will Ferrell et al. sing an a cappella version of "Afternoon Delight" in the movie Anchorman.  You know:  News You Can Use.

(Noooo, not this Afternoon Delight.)

My old friend who goes by the name "Roy Cohn" asks in a comment if I really saw Michael Daugherty at the Hands-On Museum on Saturday.  I'm going to be charitable and assume Roy can spot irony even when it's not slipped into a burlap bag and smacked across his face several times.  But this is as good an excuse as any to tell of a true Daugherty sighting.

A few months back, the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra premiered Daugherty's new organ concerto called Once Upon a Castle.  A week before the concert he gave a talk about it at the library downtown.  I went.  Naturally my main interest was to hear what he would say, but naturally I also fantasized about getting noticed somehow by the master.  Something like this:  I walk by him, a sheet of music manuscript falls out of a folder I just happen to have in my hand, he glances at it, he says something like "F sharp?  F sharp!!  That's brilliant!!" and my career as the Kitty Carlyle of the Ann Arbor music scene takes off from there.  Or whatever.

Knowing how pipe dreams can lead me to make a real fool of myself, I resolved to maintain a restrained, taciturn attitude and avoid all sycophancy.  At least that rather modest goal was attained.

The crowd was smallish, certainly less than 50 people.  Most seemed to be retired folks, with a smattering of students, probably high-schoolers.  I said nothing during the Q and A, and was pleased not to play the role of the dork who can't stop asking dumb questions.  (An elderly lady filled that niche.)  I was amused by the crowd's shock when Daugherty admitted he used synthesizers and computers as compositional aids.  What Would Beethoven Do, indeed.

Daugherty gave his talk, focusing on the annoying corporate copyright controls which prevent him from referencing directly the subjects of his compositions.  I.e., his Superman symphony is called "Metropolis" and the castle of the organ concerto is the Hearst mansion.  He played not a single note of the concerto which disappointed me, but then I realized that the AASO had paid good money for the premiere and probably stipulated  that Daugherty give no sneak previews.

He gave a slide show that I've seen before, a potpourri of pop culture icons that inspire him:  Cadillac Ranch, Elvis, and that wonderful tabloid headline "Liberace's Sexiest Girlfriend!" which, in three words, tells you so much about that alien planet which is Hollywood.

Daugherty was selling CDs afterwards and I went up to buy one.  He looked at me and said, "so, are you a composer?"  I was stunned.  Flabbergasted.  Befuddled and flummoxed.  I did not expect such a question and I didn't have a response prepared.  I mumbled something about not wanting to claim that title, and the golden moment passed forever.  How did he know?  I suppose it had something to do with my uniqueness among that crowd, and maybe I had a knowing grin on my face at key points in the talk.  Who knows.

The concerto's premiere was to be performed on the Michigan Theater's classic theater organ, so I asked Daugherty if he was familiar with Virgil Fox's recording of theater organ pieces on the Kansas City Wurlitzer.  He said, "yes, wasn't that on the Columbia label?  It may be available now on CD."   Hmmm, yeah, I guess that's right.  Wow.  His memory is encyclopedic.

I guess that's how you get to be Michael Daugherty.  By knowing everything.

I took the kids to the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum today -- a typical Saturday morning destination for us. We spent most of our time in the room with the bubbles and the music instruments.

The pipes of pan are big plastic tubes. When you whack a tube's end with the sole of a sandal that's provided, the tube gives you a short honk. There's a bit of technique to it. The sandal needs to fall perfectly flat on the end with sufficient force if you want the note to form loud and clear.

I always start at a middle note and work my way down to the low C. That would be the 16' pipe for you organists. The pipes of pan, along with organ and like most woodwinds, gain in power and intensity as you go down. This is as opposed to brass, strings, and the human voice, where the money notes are at the top (except for a Russian bass -- but that's more freak show than real music anyway).

Today's Hand's-On Museum experience was surreal. I glance over and ... whaaaaa? Isn't that Leslie Basset??? He's playing some angular tune on the rock xylophone. And look! Over there on the walk-on piano: it's William Bolcom and Bright Sheng, improvising some kind of jazzy duet as they dance across the keyboard. (They were so graceful, I suspect that by pursuing careers as composers, they have missed their calling.) And there on the pipes of pan, it's Michael Daugherty! I hear him play a medley of themes from his opera Jackie O,and then a bit of The Victors.

As I stumbled out of the museum, I was in a confused daze. I knew what I had seen, but I couldn't believe it. Were four University of Michigan composers all at the hand-on museum at the same time by some bizarre coincidence? Or is the museum a favorite meeting place for them?

At this point, I can't believe it really happened. I wouldn't blame you if you didn't either.

I check in regularly with the Religion News Blog and I recommend it for everyone.  Here's some of the best stories from the last few days:

How do you combat the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation scammers?  Why, you invite them to join the Holy Church of the Order of the Red Painted Breast, of course.

The lead roles have been cast for the movie version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  It's being filmed in  -- where else? -- New Zealand.  It's based on a popular children's novel by some guy who's name slips my mind, but may have been Philip Pullman.  Something like that, anyway.  The article says Nicole Kidman will not be involved; I guess she couldn't fit into the lion suit.  Yes, I'm talking about the lion suit left over from the dreadful BBC version -- the one where Aslan suffered from Parkinson's disease.  "Hey!  We spent 20 pounds on that outfit.  Darned right we're gonna reuse it!"

UPN is considering putting some Amish teenagers in a reality show.  The kids will be set loose in an urban environment and we'll watch while they ... well, what are we supposed to expect?  They'll eat bamboo and scratch themselves?  The network says its foremost concern is to treat them "with the highest respect."  Ah.

Now both kids are playing conductor.  They get a stool out, because you can't conduct unless you are standing on a podium.  They lay out some music and pick up a baton chosen from among the tinker toys.  They wave the baton around and sing to provide the orchestral sound effects.  At the end they bow in several directions.  (For my daughter, the two year old  maharincess, bowing is performed with extra flair.)  After exposure to Tom & Jerry's and Buggs Bunny's take on orchestra conducting, they understand what it is perfectly.  It's the conductor shtick.  The director as High Priest.  The Maestro Complex.

As I mentioned before, Leopold Stokowski taught the masses how  it was supposed to be done in Fantasia.  Not the conducting technique -- his gestures are from the elbows on down, without prep breath -- a nightmare to follow.  No, were talking the shadowy silhouette, the pose, the solemnity.  What I called the Count Dracula school of directing.  As Leonard Bernstein's biographer tells us, Serge Koussevitzky consciously participated in the shtick with his cape and dramatic pauses before beginning a concert.  (In his footsteps, Bernstein tried the cape later in life himself, but couldn't pull it off.  He was flamboyant and American -- not a real conductor, you know.)

By creating this priesthood and enforcing its rituals, conductors of our grandparent's generation gave us an archetype so compelling that even my little daughter can fall in love with it after seeing it only in parodied form.  But it proved to be the kind of two-edged sword that boomerangs on you and bites you in the tails.  For every one it attracts, there are several it repels.  I think there are people, especially in our informal age, that can't relate to the mysterious maestro on his podium and so never give the music a chance.  And that sucks.

I knew it. Our friend the Albanian space rocker is a hoax.  He's really "Molvanian" and part of wider, very elaborate, hoax to promote a certain book by certain Australian comedians.  Wow.  It's lacuna.com all over again.  And I feel betrayed and violated.

Betrayed and violated in a good way.

My reason for believing it could be real has to do with my expertise in a subject that has not received much notice (yet) in the U S of A. Let me give you the background.  Once upon a time, Europe was the holder of a rich tradition and the US immaturely played copycat.  This situation no longer exists.  Now it is Europe that desperately wishes to be like the US.  You don't believe me?  I can prove it with just three words:

Eurovision. Song. Contest.

Note especially how many songs are sung in English, proving it is the native tongue of pop music. Lookie there! The 1989 winner was a Yugoslavian entry singing "Rock Me, Baby."  Really, the spoof differs only in quantity (a small quantity), not quality, to this guy:

Or this couple:

I rest my case.

UPDATE: I forgot to credit my buddy Victor Volkman for uncovering the spoof. He's the principal investigator of the Fredösphere Office of Opposition Research. Here's his website.

I'm back from the first Summer Sing of the season.  These events are hosted by the Choral Union, the big choir in Ann Arbor.  You show up, pay your five bucks, rehearse a major choral work for about an hour, then read through it with piano accompaniment.

The bang to buck ratio at these events is pretty high.  They typically get a crowd of maybe 100 voices, so there's always a number of people present who know the music and can carry you along through the tough patches.

This time we sang Carmina Burana.  Memo to Carl Orff:  What?  Were?  You?  Thinking?  I guess I always knew Carmina  was rangey, but heavens to murgatroid, that thing is a larynx shredder.  Yeow.  No part is spared the stratosphere, whether choral or solo.  (I guess that should be stratösphere.)

Jerry Blackstone conducted.  Is there a better choral conductor working at a college or university in the country right now?  I doubt it.  He has a phenomenal ear, plus the rare gift for demanding perfection with grace and patience.  That kind of conductor makes you badly want to do your best.

I talked briefly to my friend George who likes to organize ad hoc choir concerts, but is taking a break right now.  (He says he wants to do the Haydn Seasons.  In October of 2005.  Wow.  Will any of us even be alive then.)  Otherwise, I was suprised to see so few people I knew.

If you live in the area, check out this schedule.  There will be two more Summer Sings this year.

I'm having trouble believing this Albanian space rocker is no more and no less than what he seems to be.  Yet, John & Belle say he's for real.  Warning:  may contain nuts, as well as extremely obvious and un-titillating innuendo.  In fact, unless you are wearing asbestos ear plugs and eye patches, you really shouldn't follow the link.

The whole family -- the Wifeösphere, Der Drübermensch, and the Maharincess, and I -- watched The Lion King last night.  The musical numbers seem unmotivated and pasted in, but that's my only complaint against it.  Otherwise, I gotta ask how it was able to affect me so much. 

There's one word that expresses the movie's attitude:  piety.  I don't get that very often from a movie, and when I do, I'm very grateful.

Let's do a bit of marketing analysis.  You've got a niche; call it the Pious Plebes in Peoria niche.  It's underserved.  What do you do when you find an underserved niche?  You serve it, and rake in the bucks, just like The Lion King did.

Hmmm.  Why don't more pious movies get made?  Hmmmm.  Why can't the people in Hollywood seem to make pious movies?  Hmmmm.  I'm stumped.

So, this morning, Der Drübermensch asked me, "will I be king some day?"

My son, look at this website.  Everything you see in it, the blog, the lame-o parodies, the weirdly paranoid anti-UN screed:  someday, the whole domain will be yours.  Yes, my son.  You will be a king.

Is this picture...
A. The lineup of speakers for the United Nations Celebrate Diversity Conference?
B. The spokesmodels for the Fredösphere Foundation For World Peace? or
C. Black! It's the new, uh, black! or
D. A production of Wagner opera staged in rural England?

If you answered A, B or C, you would be correct in spirit only. For more on this story, go here and here. (Really, you should read all about it.) Dare I say? I approve.

I honestly can't imagine sitting through the entire Ring in its original form. For my favorite packaging of the music, see this. The only Wagner opera I would pay money to see staged (or better, filmed) is The Dutchman which was maybe the second classical LP I ever bought, with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. After that one, the old boy's head began to swell even as his self-editing abilities shrank. Don't get me wrong -- tons of great music came after. Tons. But each subsequent opera sounds to me like two hours of music stuffed into five. Sad really. But Hanslitt said it all first, and best. (And Mark Twain said it funniest.)

This is the first in a series of posts that look at the history of WUOM, Ann Arbor's public radio station.  It's from the point of view of Alan Young, who worked at the station for 12 years and was a casualty of the Great Massacre of '96, when the focus of the station was changed from classical music to talk.  In those years, WUOM was part of a trend that Garrison Keillor described in his novel Wobegon Boy, about public radio station manager who's devotion to classical music programming (and off-color jokes told to female staffers) gets him fired.  Which isn't exactly Alan's story ... but here, let him tell you.

I was hired in late August or early September 1984. I started work on September 17,1984.  I was hired by Ray Klatt who was the Operations Director at the time and served in other capacities as well including a brief handcuffed stint as Program Director in the lat 80's or early nineties.  Ray met me earlier in 1983 when I worked at Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. I was the Classical Music Director at WBLV-FM, -what an exalted title! for such little authority or influence. Ray was interviewing there for the job of Station Manager.  He didn't get the job and went back to Ann Arbor.  I apparently impressed him enough though that when George Cacciopo died Ray hired me for George's shift- W-Sun  5:30pm-1:00am   ugh! ugh! The beginning of never ending graveyard and weekend shifts. 12 long years of working the fringes. I suppose I should mention more about George Cacciopo- Ann Arbor composer who had a show on WUOM called "New Music" He died in 1984 and I was hired to replace him.

When I arrived at WUOM Stephen Skelley was the Acting Station Manager and "Afternoon Musicale" host, Ray Klatt was operations director. Frind Hindley was News Director and Noon Show Host, Tom Hemmingway was Sports Director, Bob Whitman was News reporter and host of  the evening news program "News Final". Peter Greenequist was host of "the Morning Show" and Marian Stolar hosted the evening music shift- "Music of the Masters".  Over the course of the first year I filled in for everyone of the those hosts on their respective programs except for Tom Hemmingway-I did how ever over the years attend a number of hockey tournaments at Joe Louis Arena and filed reports from there. Mostly however I was miserable-working a board shift from 5 in the evening till 1 in the morning Wednesday through Sunday Nights.

Coming up:  The early years.

Follow these links for Nesting Instinct, Parts the Ith and IIth.

I kept my promise; don't keep your distance. I have completed the 2-part, quadruply nested counterpoint example. You can listen to a sound file in mp3, and you can see the score in pdf.

Remember that, in the score, there are 4 treble staffs, but they are all for the one soprano part. That's why the measures are all identical vertically. Likewise for the bass. The redundant parts simply represent new layers of canonic relationships. I drew diagonal lines to help you better see each of the four canons in their various entrances.

The result of all these nested canons is that, by measure 34, the soprano part is echoing measures spread throughout the piece: ms. 33 in the bass, which in turn echoes ms. 31 in the soprano, etc. etc. As I guessed (and proved empiracally in one frustrating evening), I had to begin at the end and work backwards. I had to start with the measure with the most canonic freight; otherwise it would need to agree contrapuntally with several contradictory measures.

But that's not quite true. I wanted the first four measures of the piece to be, well, let's just say I wanted it to have a certain distinctive sound. (Listen for yourself to find out what I mean.) It turned out I could write those ahead of time without creating an impossible puzzle.

After measure 34, a kind of shearing occurs and the various canonic relationships become contradictory. Yet that measure doesn't work as an ending. I had made sure measure 34 contained candential material, so I simply added mearsures 35 and 36 and put a tonic chord there as an abrupt close to the piece.

Okay, I solved the puzzle, but does it work musically? I see failure and success here. The canonic relationships don't really grab the ear like I hoped. My original, doubly nested example was much more successful in that regard. The problem is, since measures are reused so much, they don't sound distinctive enough at the canons' entrances. Nevertheless, the mathmatical system gives the whole peice a rigor and form which (to my ear) is detectable on a subjective level. If I may dare make this judgment, I think it's the most tasteful 36 beats of music I've ever written.

Oh, but that brings us to the First Law Of The Fredösphere: Good taste is not enough!

Labels: NestedCounterpoint

Ezra Pound once said "Music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance."  He said a lot of other ignorant things, but most of those had to do with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

As a chant man, I spotted the error right away.  Dance is not the ideal condition to which all music aspires.  Dance is one end of a continuum; on the other end is chant.  The good/bad (or as Pound would specify, vigor/atrophy) continuum lies on an orthogonal axis.  So let's not get our continua* confused, people.

Here's another quote that shows how a dance man's bias leads to misunderstanding: 

Why should the Devil have all the good music?"

As the following chart illustrates, he has only half.

Chant	Dance
Vocal	Instrumental
Cerebral	Visceral
God	The Devil
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon	Anything Staring Jackie Chan
Joyful	Happy
Harmony	Rhythm
John Tavener	Michael Daugherty
Greek	Roman
Hammer Dulcimer	Banjo
The Listeners	God's Judgment on a Wicked Bishop
Blues	Jazz
Nordic	Mediterranean
Drum & Bugle Corps	Marching Band
Abbott	Costello
Inspiring	Exciting
Boring	Embarrassing
Apollo	Dionysus
"Oh well. Here's my talisman, you change your mind, give me a chant." -D'Hoffryn, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1997	"Never trust spiritual leader who cannot dance."  -Mr. Miyagi, The Next Karate Kid, 1994
Terry Teachout	Michael Blowhard

Where are you on the Dance-Chant Continuum?  What other pairs illustrate the extremes?

*Yes!  Another one!  He shoots, he scores!

Here we are, wasting an entire election season debating stupid things like terrorism, jobs, gay marriage, Iraq, health care, the federal budget and the Kyoto Treaty, while the real threat goes unmentioned.  Kangaroos are killing with impunity.  How will you protect us, Mr. Bush?  What's your plan, Mr. Kerry?  Why are you such a pathetic jerk, Mr. Nader?

(Hat tip goes to the Captain's Quarters.)

This is infuriating.  Infuriating.

I've subscribed to The New Criterion magazine for some time now.  I'm a big admirer of what they are trying to do -- or at least I was. But now I hear they have begun a campaign to bring back togas.  Yeah, you read that right.  Those wacky bathrobe things they used to wear in Roman times.  Apparently they've got a fund of several million dollars and they're going to spend it all on a big splashy publicity campaign to try to convince people that wearing a toga is cool.

I understand their argument.  Really, I do.  Symbols matter, what you wear can profoundly influence how you behave, bring back the virtues of the Roman Republic, classical education, yah, yah, yah.  Okay, but guys, you need to think about the old saying:  Pick.  Your.  Battles.

Heavens to Betsy, they've got all that money at their disposal; think of the good that could be accomplished.  But they throw it away on this crazy scheme that is doomed to fail.  Listen to me, people:  no one is going to wear your stupid togas.  Give it up.  You'll only destroy your credibility.  There are better ways to preserve Western Civilization than this.  You were fighting the good fight.  Please don't go loco on us now.

Labels: fun, New Criterion

Congressman Roscoe Bartlett can't understand why he is being criticized for "handing a robe to an old person."

It's stories like this one that give Satanism a bad name.

I left my pancreas in Arizona,
I left my liver in Peru,
I left my lung and my kidney,
For summer, in Sidney,
But I'm leaving my heart with you.

There was five-year-old der Drübermensch in church this morning, waving a pencil around to the music.  He's conducting.  So do you think he'll be one someday?  An ambition I've never had, myself.  I've done it naturally, a few church choirs, some small vocal groups I've lead.  Once I was lucky enough to stand in front of 95 singers and a 10-piece brass choir and conduct Joseph Jongen's Mass, but I was never really captivated by the fantasy of making the music happen just by waving a stick around.  You think that's power?  Try being the guy who puts some black dots on the page, then watches everyone struggle mightily to interpret their meaning.  That's power.

Der Drübermensch got the idea that conducting is cool from all the high-brow, educational media he gets, right?  No, it comes from watching a certain Tom and Jerry episode compulsively.  I wonder, is that a rip-off of my beloved Baton Bunny?  T&J is from 1950, but BB is from 1959.  No, give T&J credit for doing it first.  Although Bugs has conducted orchestras in several episodes, including a couple of the most famous:  What's Opera Doc, Rabbit of Seville, and Long Haired Hare.  Hey, that last was in 1949.  And by Chuck Jones.  (Of course.)  But let's face it:  the real influence -- the 800 lb. dancing hippo of animated orchestras -- is Fantasia, from 1940.

So we watched Fantasia tonight, all of us:  me, the wifeösphere, der Drübermensch, and the maharincess (who is two and a half).  James Lileks already bleated (here and especially here) about Fantasia months ago.  A blogger with even half a brain would not attempt to add anything.

I am not that blogger.

Lileks mentioned the middle-brow earnestness, and it really comes out in the worshipful attitude to classical music.  We call this third type of music:  absolute music.  Oh dear.  It must always be performed with every muscle of the head and neck at maximum constriction.  In some ways Stokowski is one of the worst offenders.  He's one of the masters of the Count Dracula school of conducting.  But give him credit for doing the movie and losing some of his snob appeal.  He shook Mickey Mouse's hand, and he didn't even wipe it off afterwards.

During the dullest segment, the Bach D-minor T&F, my son asked, "is this real music?"  It don't get any realer, kid.  "What are those squiggles on the screen?"  Good question.  Later:  "Were the flowers trying to fall down the waterfall?  They didn't think they would die, but would they?"  Sorry, I'm not an expert on the physics, let alone metaphysics, of the world we're observing.  "Are faeries real?"  Ah, an easy one:  no.

Finally, the monologue was not written up to modern standards.  It bogged down in information we really don't need.  Some scholars have noted the twelfth measure of the final theme of Beethoven's 9th Symphony spells out the letters D-E-A-F, which is remarkable because the composer was deaf when he wrote it.  Others discount this as a coincidence and point out that his native language was German.  However, the German word for deaf is taub.  No notes are represented by the letters t and u, so this proves that....  Shut up and play yer orchestra!

You might enjoy reading this email exchange I had with my buddy Victor Volkman.  Well, enjoy might not be the right word.  You might find it morbidly fascinating.  Or maybe you will find it simply morbid.

This was on my mind today...  -Victor 

Melancholy is the word that comes to mind.
Did you hear that electro-convulsive therapy was supposedly making a comeback a few years ago?  The claim was they used far lower power and were avoiding the problems of the past.  I never heard if it gained wide acceptance.
-Fred

We have a bed waiting for you right now! It has become the default treatment for people who have depression that doesn't "respond" to drugs.
-Victor

I love that line:  "Is ETC for you?"  Call it the boutiquification of medicine.
-Fred

Blog it, blog it, blog it, blog it, blog it, blog it, blog it, blog it!!!!!
-Victor

(There's more you can read about Victor's point of view on the world of mental health.)

This article is long and redundant, so I'm going to ask you to read only the first third of it.  However, there's this wonderful anecdote near the end I don't want you to miss:

In my high school French class we were supposed to read Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.

As a schoolkid I must have been viewed as unpopular by a lot of people, but as the article puts it, I was too busy balancing a glass of water on my head to notice that I was in the middle of a soccer game.  I would like to claim that the social hierarchy game was something I rejected as the result of a mature and thoughtful decision, but the reality was, I never noticed it.  Maybe the fact that I score 31 on this test has something to do with it.

(Hat tip goes to Instapundit, and also see this blog post.)

Today was a good day for goofing around so I skipped work.  The wifeösphere and I did lunch at Noodle & Co. which just opened at Arborland.  Very nice.  High class fast food.  We also sampled Cold Stone's ice cream and she liked it a lot, but I was not overwhelmed.  Then we shopped for birdbaths at that hoity-toity hardware store downtown (yes, Ann Arbor's hoity-toitiosity extends even to its hardware stores) but fell in love with a sundial instead.  The wifeösphere said "it will be more practical" meaning our pre-school kids will learn something from it, but it cracked me up that she said called a sundial practical.

Speaking of Rendezvous, I finished this Arthur C. Clark classic today.  (The movie version is coming out this year?  Somebody better tell imdb.)  Compared with Cryptonomicon it seemed light, almost thin, but the action of the second half redeemed it.  Having read Greg Baer's Eon first was also a mistake.  Eon clearly drew a lot of inspiration from Rendezvous but far surpassed it in ideas.  And guess what, people:  if a sci-fi novel lives and dies on the strength of its ideas.