The Fredösphere

This plea for help, sent to a choir directors' email list, caught my eye even before I noticed it came from my wife's aunt.  Good luck with those pentecostal bagpipes, Karla!

You already knew, didn't you? -- P.D.Q. Bach has a Pervertimento for Bagpipes, Bicycle and Balloons.  Or is that Ballons?

So I'm listening to some Corigliano for the first time in my life, mainly because I'm terrified my Aworks buddy will discover my ignorance and berate me for it.

Corigliano's Etude Fantasy contains a surprise.  The third movement quotes a few bits from the middle movement of a Bartok piano concerto (#2 or #3 or maybe some of both).  The quotes are short, but they sound like note-for-note copies.  Surely this observation has been made before; a quick visit to Google turned up nothing, but I got the idea that more generally, quoting other composers seems to be a Corigliano device.  I think he should stick to quotes of motives that are a bit more iconic, don't you?  He should make it clear it's a tribute, not an act of theft:

Di di di daaaaa!  Di di di daaaaa!

That kind of thing.

I've always liked Bartok, which is to say, I've liked him since I first met him, in high school, via a recording of his last two piano concertos.  Such weirdness was not my usual thing at that age.  Maybe two things helped me fall in love with those pieces:  the piano-orchestra combo has always been very easy on my ears, and that recording helped me survive a weird attack of hives that lasted four days.  I found if I lay completely still, the hives would go away.  If I moved at all, they would return with a vengeance.  As I said, weird.  I couldn't even read; all I could do is listen to music, and I played the grooves off that Bartok album.  (In case you're wondering, the diagnosis was:  an allergic reaction to my body's own antibodies fighting a cold I was getting over.  Did I mention it was weird?)

Vox of Ann Arbor will be making early music again this Saturday in Grosse Pointe and Sunday in Ann Arbor.  The link has concert details.  They are magnificent.  Go if you can, and don't worry:  it turns out polyphony is not a sin.

I don't know who "Alex" is, and the logo (a kind of demonized Napster) does not inspire confidence, but this headline gave me a nifty frisson.  And this story deserves some kind of clever transition from the previous, leading into a brilliantly-written teaser that renders you unable to resist following the link, but frankly, I ain't got it in me today, so you'll just have to supply it yourself.

An Emperor named Schwartz?  I'm not buying it.

At exactly what point did jazz stop being music for hip people and start being music for dorks?

I promised you some pictures from my whirlwind photo tour of Coldwater, Michigan.  Today we begin by looking at a few Italianate houses from that fine old town.

The Italianate style was dominate throughout the northern U.S. in the third quarter of the 19th century.  Because my home area of southern Michigan saw a lot of construction during that period, the Italianate style says "fine old home" to me more than any other.  It vexes me that Queen Annes and even the never-quite-satisfying Second Empires have a clearer identity and fan base; I suppose nothing succeeds like excess.  Today I intend to show that nothing succeeds like obsess; I love these stately Italianates, and when I'm done with you, so will you.  Oh yes, yes, you will.

Italianates are characterized by:  narrow, arched windows with elaborated crowns; cupolas or -- in the sub-style Italian Villa -- towers;  low pitched hip roofs; and above all, decorative brackets in the eaves.  If you see brackets, and the roof is anything but a mansard, you can safely name the building an Italianate.

Had I more time, I could have found many more examples in Coldwater, including some finer than what I have here.  Nevertheless, these pictures should tell the tale.  (Click on any image to see a larger version.)  The first is a well-maintained example on Chicago St., the main drag.  The central dormer is typical, although if were arched, it would be more so.  The second is odd, but charming; its narrow facade reminds me of the many store fronts from that period.  (Nearly all the commercial districts of the towns in the Midwest are dominated by Italianate styling.  Indeed, I can honestly say I can't even imagine what a traditional American downtown would look like if it weren't Italianate.)  The third is disappointing.  The photo turned out poorly, and the house itself is not well maintained.  I include it to expose some of the less successful variations on the theme.  (See, I'm not a reactionary; not everything tradition gives us is wonderful.)  The fourth house is a gem from down the road in Burr Oak, Michigan.  I passed this house probably thousands of times during my childhood, but never really noticed it.  I was stunned to rediscover it, and I marveled at the way it could seem so fresh, yet so familiar, at the same time.  It's highly dominant cupola and the Palladian styling of the porch are daring and satisfying to my eye.

I may have inspired you to build an Italianate house, but really, I'd rather you didn't.  My plan is to build one myself when I retire, and my fear is that baby boomers will notice the style and smother it in their embrace.  If that happens, by the time I'm ready to build, the style will have jumped the shark.  So please, wait your turn; I saw it first.

Permit me to quote Kyle Gann:

There’s still a reluctance in some music circles to allow anything obvious. Some of the most tedious music by famous and oft-performed composers seems to spend all its time busily hiding its underlying idea. Doing something obvious - a memorable melody, a clear chord progression, a rhythmic groove - makes you vulnerable, because it’s something that the listener can latch onto and criticize and make fun of if it sounds stupid. But it is only the courage to be vulnerable that endears you to an audience, and today’s young composers have that courage more than we did. Why was my generation so afraid to be obvious? Was it a fear imposed on us by our teachers? our peers? or did we do it to ourselves?

I blame the Germans.  Friggin' Nazis, that's what they are.

I would like to see Gann's words carved in letters as deep as a spear is long on the World Ash Tree -- no, wait; that would be too obvious.  Let's embed them in one of those magic eye pictures -- no, now I'm just being silly.  Seriously, Gann's lament rings true.

Meanwhile, as I was researching this post, I came across an amazing footnote -- it claims they're bowdlerizing Narnia.  Narnia!  Madness!  Next, they'll be comparing Petra Haden to Bjork, favorably. 

Do I sound grumpy?  I'm in good company.

Silly me, asserting that plainchant can't express teenage rebellion!  Just last night I found something astounding at a garage sale.  They had all kinds of old junk:  a gold chalice, a dusty old spear, etc., but among all the worthless stuff, I found this incredible manuscript -- a page torn from a mediaeval choir book.  I rushed home and transcribed it at once.  (I hope I translated the Latin correctly.)

Today's post brings you the conclusion of Joshua Shank's take on the creative process and his experience writing a choral piece called Autumn, premiered by the Choral Arts Ensemble, conducted by Dale Warland.  You should read part one if you have not already.  You may also want to view the score and listen to the sound file of the piece.  Joshua, back to you!

The Writing
The hardest part about being a composer is the beginning of the writing process.  Movie composer Hans Zimmer once said that, “The Academy Award would be this amazing thing if, with the Oscar, they gave you the next 4 bars of the tune you have to write…because they are impossible.”  I am extremely inclined to agree with him.  I never know where to start but, in this case, I just picked a key phrase to ruminate on: “the leaves are falling.”  During a vacation to the Dominican Republic over New Year’s (in which I intentionally didn't take any staff paper), I came up with the initial motive.

Composer Eric Whitacre calls this initial motive the “primer”:

The primer teaches the audience everything that’s going to happen.  In that moment is encapsulated the entire piece as a microcosm of everything you need to know.  There’s the tonal language, the pace of the piece and the architecture that I’ll be using over and over again.

For me, writing this “primer” is much like how an archaeologist unearths the first bone of what will eventually be a complete skeleton of some mammoth, prehistoric thing.  I feel like the whole piece is already there and that I just have to uncover it.  As a matter of fact, I don’t often feel like I’m 100% involved in my own composition because it doesn’t seem as if there’s much conscious thought or decision-making going into the process until very late in the game when all these little pieces get sewn up into a cohesive whole.  This could be because I usually have a text to hang onto but I have the feeling it has more to do with how I go about composition.
 
There’s a quote I love from Fleetwood Mac guitarist Lindsey Buckingham that goes:  “Music is a means of expression that rings truer and is more connected to things inside than speech.” 

Overtone genius David Hykes puts it another way:  “Every so often in life, one is struck by something that has the ‘ring of truth.’  I think we need to know how to listen for that ‘ring,’ how to hear what life is trying to tell us.”

I think these 2 quotes are probably my mantras.  I truly believe that music is a means of expression that can’t be substituted by anything else and I believe that, in composition, truth should always win out over flashy and dramatic writing that smacks of an upturned nose (not that truthful pieces can’t have these things or that people with upturned noses can’t be nice).  I try not to over think my composition and instead just try to let it be truthful and honest.  Everything the piece needs is contained right there within the text.  It’s a simplistic approach I know—but it seems to work out okay for me.  Consequently, my music is never ambiguous or subtle—you always know exactly what I was trying to get across.

During the time I was writing this piece I was actually between jobs in the truest sense of the term.  I had just finished student teaching and had been living the life of a nightshift gypsy stocking shelves from 3am-11am at a local grocery store.  That job was over with and I was waiting for a maternity leave teaching job to enter the “maternity” phase of the whole process.  So my internal clock was thrown pretty much out of whack and I would write whenever I was up and had the wherewithal to do it.  One of the few moments that I remember in writing Autumn was getting a call from my dad around noon one day saying he had met some “Anton guy” from St. Olaf College who knew who his son was.  (Note: in the choral world my dad sometimes seems to think I’m some sort of celebrity…which I most definitely am not.)  Another moment which sticks out in my mind was writing measures 25-27—I just remember being very moved by the chords that fell under my hands.  Not because they were so good, but because they just seemed to have so much genuine emotion tied up in notes and words.

The End…or is it?
When I finish a piece and send it off to the choir there is much rejoicing in the Shank household.  This usually means I have a beer and go to a fast food restaurant as a treat after throwing the piece in the mail.  (This isn’t the romanticized, upper-crust intellectual way we like to think of composers but man cannot live by martinis and fine wines alone.)  There is a certain ring of finality to this part of composition and a colossal feeling of satisfaction.  However, Autumn was not to be wrestled into submission so easily.

As a member of the choir I had resigned myself to the complete and utter awkwardness of singing my own piece.  It sounds simple but let’s think about this for a second: what if I wrote a monumental clunker?  I would have to sit there and endure my sh*tty piece being sung by a marvelous choir who probably knew it sucked.  In my favor I had the fact that the last couple of commissions had, indeed, been clunkers (one was for choir with electronic, 70s-style synthesizers a-lá Styx and the other was a “Christmas carol” about death which contained some really corny “choralography”).  Not in my favor were a few measures of my piece that had 11 parts in them.  But we got through it and the choir loved the work.  However, Autumn was not to be wrestled into submission so easily. (Note: This phrase is repeated from the last paragraph for comedic effect.)

A week before the first rehearsal I got a call from music director Bob Giere asking me if I would like to prepare the choir on my piece for our guest conductor…Dale Warland!  Obviously I said yes but I have never, ever, ever, ever been so nervous or stressed out in my entire life.  In the end I had a great time and Dr. Warland was extremely gracious and humble when he finally took up the reigns.

The piece was premiered to tumultuous, warm applause (a huge ‘thank you’ to the wonderful people who attend Choral Arts Ensemble concerts—they are simply the best) and I literally had a full glass of champagne for the entire after-party due to many, many nice people who were feeling congratulatory and found out I already had a ride home.  The piece went to my publisher as soon as I got the recording and it was released shortly thereafter.  The CAE’s premiere performance will even be featured on Santa Barbara’s latest promotional CD, Octavos 8.

Conclusion
What I got out of this whole process was two-fold:
1.    I achieved a heightened sense of musical satisfaction due my piece being performed by a top-shelf choir under a legendary conductor.
2.    I received money.

Wow!  Joshua ended his essay with the M word.  As someone who does live by martinis and fine wines alone, I sometimes forget that for many people, the green stuff makes a difference.

Thank you, Joshua for putting your thoughts together.  My entire readership is grateful to you -- I know this for a fact, because both of them told me they were.  Best of luck to you, my friend.

Here we have Alex Ross quoting his New Yorker colleague Leo Carey quoting the new pope:

In 1986 he described rock music as 'the secularized variation' of an age-old type of religion in which man uses music — and drugs and alcohol — to lower 'the barriers of individuality and personality,' to liberate 'himself from the burden of consciousness. Music becomes ecstasy ... amalgamation with the universe.' This 'is the complete antithesis of the Christian faith in the redemption.'

My immediate reaction was, "no, Benedict, the style doesn't determine the content," but I'm not so sure that's right -- Marshall McLuhan and all that.  (Or am I misinterpreting McLuhan?  He said medium, not style.)

Larry Norman, proto-Jesus-rocker extraordinaire, built a career on exposing the folly of certain fundamentalist suspicions of rock.  I was marinated in those suspicions as a kid:  rock music's back beat might lead to dancing; loud music will pump you full of adrenaline and make you effeminate (really!  But other evidence suggests the greater threat is opera); and worst of all, backmasking will deliver satanic messages to your brain subliminally.  Sheesh.  I don't recall a single member of my generation reacting with anything but sarcastic hilarity to those arguments.

I'm afraid all attempts to explain the evil of certain styles inevitably embarrass, but that doesn't mean there isn't a truth rattling around in there somewhere.  Could teenage rebellion be expressed adequately in plain chant, even theoretically?  Must it have, centuries ago when there wasn't a variety of stylistic choices?  Could it ever, from the point of view of a 21st century person aware of western cultural history?  The last question is an obvious no, I'd say, but what about the first?  Anyone care to argue with me about this?  I'm willing to be persuaded by those able to discuss these questions without resorting to eye-rolling.

Or did I somehow jump the tracks somewhere on this line of thought?  What was I just saying?  Darn! Another serious post, and once again I'm left with the feeling I botched it.

Today's post is later than usual because I attended a funeral for Ruth Sutton, the accompanist for the Ann Arbor Cantata Singers during the time I sang with them.  I'll always be grateful to Ruth because she slogged through some really tough piano writing that I imposed on her when the Cantata Singers premiered my setting of God's Judgment on a Wicked Bishop.  Revisiting that score lately made me ask myself, "wasn't there some way I could have achieved the effect with fewer notes?"

In a eulogy, a choir director described a time when Ruth accompanied a choir in a European Cathedral.  The choir sang in a tiny balcony, and the organ was located in a kind of enclosed pit.  No eye contact was possible between the director and Ruth, but he was able to communicate with her by standing behind her and tapping his foot against her backside.  As the tempos increased, his tapping became more energetic, to the point of pain.  For the sake of the music, Ruth said nothing and continued to play.  Afterward, she told him, "finally, I've learned what it means to turn the other cheek."

Wow.  I really wasn't expect to hear that kind of vulgar humor at the Presbyterian church on a somber Friday afternoon.  I suppose it means that, like the Catholic church, they've made a few ... changes.

Lynn found this incredibly good news about a huge collection of ancient manuscripts from a garbage dump in Egypt.  New technology is making the scrolls readable again.  Our knowledge of Greek literature could expand dramatically.  Combine this with the possibility that a partially excavated villa in Pompeii may also contain a large collection of scrolls, and we may see the classics become a seriously hoppin' discipline again.  Or not; Cronaca documents some caveats.

Speaking of the restoration of ancient artifacts from a classic Golden Age, Mark Jordan reviews a new Telarc SACD (surround-sound disc) of Miklós Rósza's scores from famous sword-'n'-sandal epic films.  He's lovin' it:

The ‘Ben-Hur’ suite opens with an ‘Overture’ colored with a rich, handsome glow by the Cincinnati players. The recording also wonderfully captures the rasp of the lower brass instruments in the opening bars. The largest musical instrument in this recording is Cincinnati’s Music Hall itself, and it is played masterfully. It is a huge wood and plaster hall, and it thrives best in lusciously scored music. Here, Rósza’s sumptuous orchestration fills the hall sonorously, and the surround channels give an amazing sense of the hall’s vast size. In the second movement of the suite, ‘Star of Bethlehem / Adoration of the Magi’, the women of the chorus are introduced, engagingly, from the rear channels. Moving into the aforementioned ‘Rowing of the Galley Slaves’, we come to the highlight of the disc. I don’t want to seem over-the-top here, but if in fifty years, music fans are discussing classic recordings of the early twenty-first century the way we talk now about RCA’s “Living Stereo” series from the 1950’s, this is the track they’ll be talking about. It starts with solo timpani thwacks, sounding through the hall and bouncing back from the back walls. The low winds begin rasping as the strings enter with heaving phrases. Then the brass start stabbing short pungent notes as the textures multiply through all the sections of the orchestra. At its height, it seems like everyone is playing at maximum volume, trying to blow the roof off the hall, but in Telarc’s recording, no sections are lost, no textures get submerged. This has to be heard to be appreciated. If you have a surround-sound system with SACD player, the moment the disc is released run out, get it, and play this track (and the next). If you don’t have such a system, get one or else suck up to a friend who has one. Without even having any players in the rear channels, this track exemplifies what a thrilling experience multichannel listening can be.

After the hectic orgy of sound in the previous movement, the ‘Alleluia’ pulls a quiet, but absolutely stunning maneuver. The strings begin the movement with a high, shimmering sound radiating from the stage out into the hall. After the brutality of the ‘Rowing music’, this sounds like the fluttering of angels’ wings. But then the sound of the strings “grows” from the stage and expands into the rear channels, surrounding the listener. It is, of course, nothing that you could ever hear in a regular live orchestral concert, but it is a brilliant manipulation of the multichannel technology to make this disc a work of art in its own right. This shift in perspective pulls the listener “inside” the music, like a vision that sweeps you up into the sky. The music grows to a glowing peak as more and more voices and instruments join in, then recedes to a gentle closing.

Note to the wifeösphere:  doesn't our old stereo, with its mere two channels, seem awfully inadequate now?

I was given an excuse to take a quick trip home last night (my friend Alan needed help in retrieving a pickup truck he just bought) so I took some time to photograph buildings in Coldwater, Michigan.  This is the seat of Branch County, near where I grew up.  Coldwater doesn't have the reputation of its neighbor, Marshall, Michigan, but the number of fine old homes located there is simply stunning.  I'll be photoblogging it over the next few days.

Do you know about News of the Weird?  I just discovered it.  Get this:

[I]n Rockport, Mass., a chaired professor of economics at Harvard, Martin Weitzman, was charged with larceny after a farmer said Weitzman has long been trespassing and hauling away manure for his own nearby farm, thus denying the farmer his market price of $35 per truckload.

and this:

According to a February report in the Israeli daily Ma'ariv, Itzik Simkowitz is suing a pet shop owner in Beersheeba for selling him a sickly Galerita-type cockatoo (price: the equivalent of about US$2,000) that died shortly after Simkowitz got him home. As in a classic Monty Python sketch, the shop owner initially insisted that the parrot was merely lethargic and needed time to adjust to his new surroundings, but when the parrot (to use the Python dialogue) was shown to be "a late parrot," "an ex-parrot," "a stiff," and to have "joined the choir invisible," the shop owner still refused to return the money.

But for sheer impossible zaniness, check this out:  a choir concert that sold out a half hour before the performance.

Those of you following the controversy surrounding the opera The Children of Rosenthal will be interested in this update:

The opera's libretto, which was penned by controversial writer Sorokin, tells the story of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Wagner, Verdi and Mozart, cloned by a scientist in the Soviet Union, who are thrown into poverty after the Soviet break-up, and resort to busking. Three years ago, Sorokin's allegedly pornographic writing led to protests by Moving Together, a pro-Kremlin youth organisation.

Finally:  Hollywood church has reserved parking spaces for celebrities?  What would the Free Methodists think?!

Some weeks ago, I mentioned Joshua Shank while blogging about several choral composers who are writing interesting music right now.  Today I am very pleased to reintroduce him as a guest blogger at The Fredösphere.  Joshua is going to describe his approach to composing.  Part one of his essay follows; part two will appear in a few days hence. 

And by the way, Josh's kind words about The Fredösphere are sufficiently extravagant that I feel the need to assure you that he is a real person, and not some product of my overactive, overly needy imagination.  Without any more ado, take it away, Josh!

What do you do when a great, musically-oriented blog asks you to do a guest post?  You just end up writing about what you know and, in my case, it’s my own music.  I tend not to think too philosophically about my music-making or where it belongs in grand scheme of things (I currently make my living teaching 7th-9th grade choral music in a suburb of St. Paul, MN) and so anything I would have to say to the Fredösphere would have to be about my own experiences as a musician.  Yes, I definitely have opinions about a few things but I don’t think I’m smart enough for anyone to want to hear them (despite this, these opinions will more than likely sneak there way into what you’re about to read).

In my experiences singing or conducting a choral work I have always found that, for some reason, the music comes alive much more when you discover a personal connection to the piece you’re performing.  This personal connection could be something fairly innocuous or something much more profound and emotional.  So what follows is the story of a piece I wrote in the winter of 2004 from the initial commission to its eventual publication.  As a composition takes different forms in a variety of stages, I have separated this essay into sections which deal with these periods in the life of a choral work written by yours truly.  I hope you like it.  If you don’t then you’re probably just really jaded and cynical…and also ugly.  Just kidding.

As an addendum to this essay, you may view the score as well as listen to the premiere performance by the Choral Arts Ensemble under guest conductor Dale Warland.

AUTUMN: The Evolution of a Choral Work Which Was Written by a Stereotypically Romantic and Somewhat Quirky Composer

The Commission
From September 2003 until May 2004 I had the wonderful privilege of being able to sing with the Choral Arts Ensemble of Rochester, Minnesota.  I had a great time singing and blowing off some steam while I did my student teaching in a neighboring town and, due to it being a season of transitioning conductors, was able to sing under some incredible guest artists who came in to helm the choir (Weston Noble of Luther College, Robert Morris of Macalester College and Dale Warland of the Dale Warland Singers!).  Traditionally, there had always been 2 commissions a year with this particular ensemble—a “Christmas carol” every year in memory of a great friend to the choir and another work for the spring.  That year the honors fell to local composer named Kevin Dobbe to write the carol and Pulitzer Prize-winning, Grammy Award-winning composer Dominick Argento to write the other one.  The interim conductor and members of the group knew I was a composer but it never entered into my role with the organization…until late November (please play a loud diminished chord on a piano here for dramatic effect).

I received a phone call on a November afternoon from the commissioning club (which, by the way, is an amazing thing…a group of non-musician professionals in a town in Minnesota who are willing to pay for a new choral work).  This phone call informed me that Dr. Argento had decided not to write a work after all and that my name had instead been suggested and eventually accepted for the task.  This sent me on the journey you’re about to read about.

The Terror
Usually, when I’m commissioned to write a work I end up completely procrastinating.  However, to this date I have never missed a deadline…something which gets harder and harder to do the more and more works I have to write in a year.  Well, I suppose there was this one time I asked for a 3-day extension but, in the end, I worked my tail off and made the original deadline.  (Interesting note: their fax machine broke when I tried to send the work in…presumably because all my tone clusters wouldn’t fit through the dang thing).  Despite all this procrastination, the commission ends up being something akin to Edgar Allen Poe’s “tell-tale heart” that lingers in the back of my mind nearly 24 hours a day until it’s done.  Aside from the commission money, the main reason I finish pieces is just to exorcise them from my brain.  (Note: the main point of this little diatribe is that being commissioned to write a work on a deadline can be a blessing as well as a curse.  Anyone who has experienced this knows exactly what I mean.)

The Text
I am always reading poetry.  For a non-English major, I have an impressive-if-nerdy collection of poetry books which I’ve bought or received as gifts from people.  Consequently, I always have poems that make it into my computer files as possible ones to set to music.  The interesting fact is the ratio of poetry books in comparison to the amount of poems I find which are “settable” to music.  For example, I came up with 3 out of Walt Whitman’s entire Leaves of Grass. 

So, in this particular case, I clicked open my “poems” file on my horrible, P.O.S. computer that got me through college and combed over what I had.  After many hours of searching and reading and re-reading, I ended up with 2 things: an exquisite English translation of a poem by Rumi entitled The Water Wheel and Rainer Maria Rilke’s German poem Herbst (also translated to English).  We’ll take these texts one by one.

The Water Wheel
By Rumi (1207-1273)
Translated by Coleman Barks

Stay together, friends.
Don’t scatter and sleep.

Our friendship is made
of being awake.

The waterwheel accepts water
and turns and gives it away,
weeping.

That way it stays in the garden,
whereas another roundness rolls
through a dry riverbed looking
for what it thinks it wants.

Stay here, quivering with each moment
like a drop of mercury.

I had originally been attracted to this text just based on the commission itself.  It was to be in honor the Ensemble’s music director in the interim year, Robert Giere, in appreciation for his amazing service to the organization (the choir is traditionally directed exclusively by their music director…Bob prepared it for 3 guest conductors and did the Christmas concert by himself).  As such, I thought a poem about service, giving and thankfulness would be appropriate…hence, the Rumi text.

Autumn (Herbst)
By Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926)
Translated by Edward Snow

The leaves are falling, falling as if from far off,
as if in the heavens distant gardens had withered:
they fall with gestures that say “no.”

And in the night the heavy earth falls
from all the stars into loneliness.
We are falling.  This hand is falling.
And look at the others: it is in them all.

And yet there is One who holds this falling
with infinite softness in his hands.

I connect with very few poems as viscerally as I connected with this one.  At the time I first saw this text I was sitting in Avery Fisher Hall at the Lincoln Center waiting for the premiere of René Clausen’s 9/11 commemoration piece, Memorial, with the Concordia Choir and Orchestra (awesome piece—worth checking out).  In the program there was this text.  Dr. Clausen did not set it as part of the work…it just stood out on the back cover in simple black-and-white.  It was amazing and, consequently, set me off on a quest to find more Rilke poetry (did you know he wrote in both French and German?).

After many days of soul-searching, I decided on the Rilke text for some intangible reason that justified my choice.  In the end it’s just a beautiful text (as all of his poems are) and I thought it would be better to just write something truthful instead of using a poem I was half-heartedly connected to only for the subject matter it contained.

Thanks to Josh, and as for the rest of you, keep watching this space for part two.

We enjoyed a fine Saturday night dinner at Eve, a restaurant of unsurpassed splendiferousness.  (The website is pretty tasty, too.)  I doubt this town has a better place to get grub.  We were celebrating a bit of an anniversary:  the wifeösphere has spent one full year cancer-free.  Congratulations, my dearest darling.  God grant you many, many happy returns!

Speaking of websites, you will notice I've tweaked the 'Sphere a bit.  I think it's mostly an improvement, but those blue headlines leave me uncertain.  I'm also hanging onto my serif font by a ... well, by a serif, I suppose.  I used a Times font in the banner image and I'm thinking I should stick with Times for consistency's sake.  Whaddaya think:  should I lop the serifs off and join the rest of the on-line world?  A special prize will be awarded to the first 1000 respondents.

In the news today:

Harry Christophers and the Sixteen
Dr. Who and electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire
Another attempt to prod the very young into composing music.  Is that a good idea?
Freemasonry:  why should I take it seriously?  Once again, my question remains unanswered.

Tomorrow will be a special day here at the Fredösphere.  Tomorrow will be good.  Don't miss it.

All right, each of you, haul your hiney over to Amazon.com immediately and order a copy of Forrest Covington's CD.  I just did.

While we're having a Forrest Cov. moment, be sure to read about this bit of naughtiness.  Posting stuff to a Usenet group to fool people:  who would have ever dreamed anyone would do such a thing?!

I!  Am!  iPod!  Compliant!

I've got the thing loaded and I'm shuffling through my 5.7 days of music.  My first surprise:  that two out of the first five songs made me say, "what the heck is this?"  (Answers:  a bit from Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, and the American Boy Choir singing Softly and Tenderly, Jesus is Calling.)  My second surprise:  I keep thinking, ooh, this is one of my favorites.  There's something about the shuffle mode that really freshens my stale old CD collection.  (I know that's not news to most of you.)

One disappointment I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere:  the repeated need to adjust the volume.  Obviously, pop music fans don't have this problem, since that music is always COMPRESSED/LIMITED FOR CONSTANT MAXIMUM VOLUME.  I suppose what I need is a tool to normalize my entire library.

I gotta go; I feel the ear plugs probing my ears for hospitable places to implant spores of an alien life form, so I think I really should figure out how to turn this dang thing off.  While I'm away, read this and see if you agree that TV's long record of excellence in this kind of programming means we should be optimistic they will get it right.  (And I bet the sound track will feature lots of spooky choirs singing Latin.  Backwards.  Latin, sung backwards and run through a ring modulator.  Latin, sung backwards while drinking a glass of water -- no, while drinking a glass of holy water, and run through a ring modulator while a pack of computer graphics-enhanced jackals lip-sync the music.  I'll stop now, but let me assure you, I could keep going.  I'm that good.)

Brian Sacawa is a saxophonist at the University of Michigan.  He is blogged and dangerous.  I especially liked his description of a session with a "famous composer" playing through a work-in-progress for bari sax.

Something else with a U. of M. connection:  this, uh, thing.

Alex urged me to give Messiaen's The Canyons of the eToilettes another try, so, not daring to cross him, I rushed to the library to borrow the CD.  It's gone:  lost or stolen, but it's gone!  As a substitute exercise in self-abnegation, I picked up Messiaen's equally-impenetrable opera St. Francis the Sissy.  Well, sheee-oot!  I can actually sort of listen to this music now.  It's severe, with long stretches of recitative equilibrium punctuated by blasts from the brass.  Messiaen relies on exotic tone colors rather than harmonic progressions to provide variety, but, for my former self, that trade-off would not have worked.  Some change really did come over me around the time of my 40th birthday.  Now I can pay attention much longer to things that are not immediately comprehensible.  Formerly, when music like Canyons or Saint François would begin, it would only take a few seconds before my mind would begin to wander.  This marvelous transformation doesn't have a name, so far as I know, so we'll have to make one up for it.  Let's call it ... oh, I don't know ... let's call it puberty.

My mother plays the accordion, but she tends to use it to accompany country & western yodeling numbers, not to perform the Goldberg Variations.

Sound files from Maundy Thursday!  At last, your curiosity will be satisfied.  Remember that this was a music drama in two scenes incorporated into a Maundy Thursday service at St. Luke Lutheran Church in Ann Arbor.  These excerpts (wma files) are from a live recording of the performance.

The musicians for this performance were singers Linda Conzelmann, Michelle Armbruster, Alan Young, and moi, plus Jeff Greunke on organ and David Horn on percussion including a freaka (a tube that whistles when you whirl it around).  The drama was directed by Karen Dahmer.

Chant: Bass

Chant: TB

Chant: SATB

The chanted sections show the influence of John Tavener and his disciple Ivan Moody.  I chose chants because they narrate the action (all performed in pantomime) in an understated way, and because I hoped they would give the piece some solemn, liturgical dignity.  The complexity builds; in the first sound clip, the bass chants with minimal accompaniment; in the second, the tenor chants with a bass echo; in the third, the soprano leads with the other three singers echo.  This is a kind of non-harmonic counterpoint; the following voices work like a straightforward echo or delay.  I'm trying to avoid either Baroque or 20th century models of counterpoint.  I try to avoid noisy confusion by directing the lead voice to sing much louder than the followers, by writing mostly static melodies, and by using a long-short-short rhythm that allows for the echo to be staggered with the leader.

"Lord, Is It I?"

Following Christ's announcement that "one of you will betray me,"  we come to a section where the phrase "Lord, is it I?" is sung 11 times, while each disciple except Judas steps forward.  Here are a few phrases from this scene.  Der Drübermensch, who is six years old, heard this sound clip while I was getting it ready to be blogged, and flattered me by singing it to himself later in the day.  Better yet, he complained at bedtime that the music scared him and was keeping him from going to sleep.  Ah, it made an impression on someone -- wonderful!

2-Part Canon

Next, you can hear a 2-part canon in the men's voices.  The delay interval keeps changing, the pitch interval changes between a second and unison, and just to throw you off, there's a bit of homophonic writing in the middle.  At the end, you hear a bit of the freaka.

Hymn and Chant

The second scene of the drama begins by transitioning from two verses of a congregational hymn (to the tune Schmücke Dich) to one final verse sung by the soloists, STB, with the alto jumping in between phrases to chant the theme of the drama:  "I have finished the work."  This is one place where the organ can be heard decently well, although the noise of the recording mostly masks a low D pedal point.  During the alto's chants, the organ adds ambiance with a high tone cluster in a 4' rank plus a mixture.

Final Chorus

I chose to end the piece with some nice, tight chords moving at a slow pace because I thought the listeners would appreciate a soothing tone bath.  As each disciple has abandoned Jesus, he has taken an object from the altar while exiting.  This mirrors the ceremony at the end of a traditional Maundy Thursday service, where the altar is stripped, leaving it bare for Good Friday.  The Bible is always the last item removed, and it is lifted up and slammed shut as loudly as possible.  It's a dramatic moment.  In this music drama, Jesus himself picks up the Bible and holds it above his head.  The quartets sings "Thy will be done" in a half-whisper, then Jesus closes the Bible (but doesn't slam it; that would seem defiant) and the final note sounds in a chime.  Jesus bows his head and exits, leaving the stripped altar behind.

I am appalled by my failure to use the upcoming papal election as an excuse to make fun of the unfortunately-named Cardinal Sin of The Philippines.  Colby Cosh beat me to it.  Memo to self:  I love you, but you're never going to blog with the big dogs if you keep overlooking opportunities like that.

My friend Tom reacted to my post on Jester Hairston with this memory (which I quote with permission):

[T]hinking I might come across something mind-stretching (or at least fun to hear) I stopped at the Fredösphere tonight and came across your blurb (blogurb?) about Mr. Hairston. 

Were you in the Choral Union when he directed us?  [Answer:  no. -F]  1994 or thereabouts.  We did a couple of spirituals with him directing - he was in his 90's by then, short and thin,and a little senile - Tom Sheets had to remind him of what he was trying to do, every so often - but still an embodiment of energy, even though his legs had slowed a bit since his quarterbacking days.  He clearly knew what he wanted and how to get it.  He brought in this amazing tenor to sing the solo in this one piece, and this guy whipped the initially staid Ann Arbor audience at Hill into a swinging, soul-lovin', rockin' group.

The Iron Tongue of Midnight is a choir tour survivor.  She also survived Robert Shaw, who was known to conduct with a rubber truncheon:

Shaw had an obsession: he wanted every last rhythm to be perfectly precise, and we had been working more on notes, choral sound and the musical line than on perfect rhythmic precision.

He had a solution to that: he threw out everything we'd been working on and had us count all the rhythms, and sing them with numbers, mostly staccato, for the next several days.

He got more precise rhythms, all right, but at rather substantial cost. Most of the choristers were ready to kill him; I certainly was. The beautiful work that was emerging from the first, relatively chaotic rehearsal got lost under the precise rhythms. Our voices were starting to shred, too, from all the staccatto singing.

And Shaw, like his mentor Arturo Toscanini, had a temper. I understand that when he first saw what shape the group was in, he nearly stormed out and broke his contract. I think we would have had more fun if he had. There were a couple of impressive displays from him, in any event.

That's typical.  A good friend who is a very respected church music director in Ann Arbor told me this one:  a singer dies, goes to heaven, and asks permission to sing in the heavenly choir.  An angel ushers him into the choir rehearsal room, and he notices a famous blue cardigan sweater draped over the conductor's chair.  The singer is stunned.  "Does that mean what I think it means?  You guys are so lucky!"  The angel rolls his eyes.  "No, that's God's sweater.  He only thinks he's Robert Shaw."

I saw an article that introduced me to Jacqueline Hairston, a choir director and preservationist of Spirituals.  I suspected, and confirmed, that she is related to the legendary Jester Hairston who died just shy of his 98th birthday, in 2000.  (Jacqueline Hairston is his cousin, and therefore not his widow, right?  Right???)

Among singers, Jester was famous as an arranger of Spirituals and as a clinician (boy, I hate that word; can we come up with another?) whose enthusiasm could transform a choir after only a few minutes in his presence.  Surprisingly, he also kept quite busy as an actor, appearing lastly as "Lester's Friend" in Being John Malkovich of all things.

I used to get Jester Hairston confused with William Dawson, another enthusiast who arranged Spirituals and lived to great old age.  If you've sung in a choir for any length of time, you will have sung Dawson's Swing Low or Ev'ry Time I Feel the Spirit or Ain'-a That Good News.  I had the pleasure of speaking to William Dawson once on the phone, not long before he died.

I was directing a small choir and we were putting a CD together.  We were singing Ezekiel Saw de Wheel, a piece we really had no business singing, since it ends by breaking into more parts than we had singers.  Anyway, this was my first time dealing with copyrights, and not knowing any better, I found Dawson's phone number and called him up to ask how to get permission to record his piece.  He quickly explained I should contact ASCAP or whomever, then he settled down into a nice long, rambling (yet fascinating) reminiscence of his career.  (So I told Mr. Stokowski, "the trombones ain't playing that phrasing right," and Mr. Stokowski said, "if they were Europeeeeeeans, they would"....)  Oi, if only I had a tape of that conversation!

Neemi Jarvi and the DSO have recorded Dawson's Negro Folk Symphony.  You can also listen to a bit of Soon Ah Will Be Done, although I prefer it sung much faster.  The soft parts are spooky, and the loud sections knock you out of your seat.  In fact, don't listen to that excerpt; it will only confuse you.  Soon Ah Will Be Done became the signature piece of that small choir I mentioned; when we would nail the final B major chord (a picardy), voiced high and tight, our first soprano topping it off with an unwritten high B, well -- how can I describe it?  That's the kind of moment that keeps me believing.

Via Sploid, I caught a slightly peevish Slate article on the new "lifestyle centers," open-air malls that try to realize New Urbanist dreams.  Yes, there's something phony about these places, but sheesh, for now we need commercial developers to give us our downtowns because the civic authorities seem to be unable to do the friggin' job.  Why is that?  I notice Mickey Kaus also finds the article's hostility overblown -- or really, the Sploid headline.  Also, it sure would be nice if we could have these kinds of debates without requiring the traditionalists to waste half their time explaining they are not Nazis.

Yesterday's post was fairly serious, so naturally the whole business of writing it vexed me.  Wittgenstein?  Wittgenstein???  What the heck do I know about him?  Almost every sentence of that post needed about an hour's worth of thought, research, and rewriting.  I simply don't have the time to do serious posts properly.  Unfortunately, my Serious Ideas bladder is stretched to the breaking point, and every so often I have to relieve the pressure a bit.  So anyway, I wrote the post; it got silly at the end; then I came up with the silly title that only makes sense if you follow the last link.  Last night, I felt I had to email Ian Moss to make sure he understood I wasn't trying to undermine or make fun of the excellent point he made in his guest-post.  Fortunately, he's cool with the whole thing.

So, let's talk about something shallow, shall we?  Japanese pop sensation angela keeps turning up in the news, since they created songs for a couple of sci-fi-themed anime series.  The lead singer (a woman)  is described as employing "a truly unique falsetto and vibrato vocal style."  I needed to find out what they could possibly mean by "unique falsetto," and finding an audio sample turned out to be a chore.  Amazon.com has their albums, but not with sound samples.  Eventually I found my way to the official (I guess -- it's mostly in Japanese) website for the anime series Fafner and started clicking blindly on lots of links with labels I couldn't read.  Finally, I stumbled upon a video clip.  (Go here, then follow a link under "Fly me to the sky.")  It's remarkably unremarkable.  I'm exhausted.  All this hard work:  I do it for you, people.  You better be grateful.

A while back Ian Moss guest-blogged at the Fredösphere, asking what it would take to get the public excited about new music.

The conventional way to get noticed is to obey genre discipline.  Write something that belongs in a preexisting category; if it's good enough, fans of that category will give your work easy acceptance.  Many musicians are comfortable doing this, although some find such sluttish behavior despicable.

The other way is to create your own genre.  This requires enormous ability plus an iron will.  Expect to toil for years without reward.  Don't be terribly shocked if the reward never comes.  If you're lucky, you'll win in the end.  If you're very lucky (i.e., if you're Wagner) they'll name the new genre after you.

A third way consists of ignoring genre boundaries and creating an eclectic body of work.  If you're good, you'll gain the respect of those peers who know you, but you'll never receive wide recognition.

Is this "system" fair?  No, but human nature being what it is, I just don't see how fighting it is worth it.  There is a vast horde of people out there whose approach to music is ... well, the not-nice word is lazy, but I think a better description is that they simply don't make it a priority to spend the time wading through music of all genres to find all possible pieces that fit their idiosyncratic tastes.  Thus, they rely on genres as a filter.

Will modern communications make searching so much easier that genre discipline breaks down?  I want to believe that.  Collaborative filtering says "yes."  The internet's tendency to grease the wheels of the power law says "maybe not."

If you really want to start a new genre, I think you have to look at what motivates people to give new music a chance.  I think new music works when it acts as a vehicle delivering religion or sex.  I really don't think a new sound will succeed on its own, no matter how novel or well-crafted it is.  If you look at innovators from Wagner to the post-WWI modernists to Elvis to the Beatles, you'll see it all boils down to religion and sex -- or most compellingly, a religio-sensuality.  A sensulotatry.

Read Hanslick's description (I can't find it online) of Wagner devotees wandering around Bayreuth with copies of the Ring libretto under their arms, or Mark Twain's experience at the Festival.  Think about the screaming, fainting girls at Beatles concerts.  What the heck is going on?  Whatever it is, is definitely is not merely musical.

I'm no expert, but I get the feeling the same dynamic is at work in philosophical movements.  Think of Wittgenstein's acolytes, or Steiner's.  Even Nietzsche, the most groupie-resistant of them all, found popular acceptance after madness had wiped his personality clean, allowing others to read thereon whatever they wished.

I hope I don't sound cynical here; I don't intend to be.  Nevertheless, to encourage the kind of cultish mentality needed to build up a following, I've resorted to wearing outlandish clothing and making extravagant claims.  Look at this picture of me trying out my new persona.

Gravity Lens found this Guardian piece on the resurrection of Prog Rock:

As Bill Bruford, the original drummer with Yes, points out: "Half the main protagonists had come from the church - a lot of organists and choirboys. Chris Squire from Yes sang in a choir. The Rick Wakemans and Keith Emersons were organists. So the church had quite a lot to do with it. There wasn't a note of jazz in it. Completely white. Completely pertaining to south-eastern, middle-class nice boys like myself. The classical influence came from the fact that classical was the only music being taught in school."

"Completely white" -- now that he mentions it, I see he's right.  I actually happen to like prog rock (hey, some of my best friends are white)  -- or rather, I like it when it's good, where "when it's good" is defined as most of the tracks from Yes' 90125 and almost nothing else.  Well, that's not fair, since my knowledge of the genre is far from complete.  I do happen to like Snow by the mega-coolly-named Spock's Beard.  Or at least I resoundingly believe it to be very close to quite good.  Most of the time.

The French have their own prog rock.  (Don't overlook the mp3 for downloading.)  The extremely clear diction must be what makes it prog.  I can understand every word -- or I could if I could understand French, if you know what I mean.  Nuit.  That means night, right?  See, I can understand it.

Unrelatedly, Virginia Postrel found this collection of aircraft ... aircraft ... well, I guess the best word is "designs," from the U.S. patent office.  If you're in a hurry, go straight to the deformed manta ray or the grass-skirted cutie or the conjoined miscarriage.

The Catholic Church has a secret Cardinal.  This is so cool.  Does he come and go at the Vatican by way of an underground passageway?  Is he the only keeper of the fourth secret of Fatima? Can he fly?  Does he use a globelike viewing device to peer into the 13th century?  Was he born on a collection of private islands arranged to look like a map of the world as part of a program for breeding a race of superbeings?  I'm just asking.

You're wrong:  Francis Arinze would not be the first black pope.  Here's a fascinating page of black saints, including three popes who were probably black-skinned Africans.  "Saint" is defined broadly; there's a dazzling but jarring icon of Martin Luther King Jr., complete with gold leaf halo, and they didn't overlook St. John Coltrane.  (It turns out St. Coltrane was an American musician who played Jazz music.)  Hat tip to St. Jonah Goldberg.

Meanwhile:  Slate begins a nifty series on anti-poetry poetry by quoting that impressive oddball Marianne Moore.  The New Criterion had a nifty review of Moore's poems a year ago that is useful for those like me who need an introduction, or at least do not yet know that...

The Ford Motor Company asked her to help name a new car, then apologetically, and with great delicacy, rejected her bizarre suggestions: the Intelligent Whale, the Arcenciel, the Mongoose Civique, the Pastelogram, the Turcotingo, and, surely the weirdest and most delightful, the Utopian Turtletop. The company eventually decided to call this disaster of design the Edsel.

Aha!  Utopian Turtletop.  Aaaah!  Yes.  Aaaaaaaha!  Ah.

Finally:  The Guardian takes another look, more detailed look at the royal wedding music, in light of Prince Charles' famously conservative taste.

Okay, today I'm working on a concept for a new TV show, a refinement of the idea I first floated here.  I'm thinking of that super-competent, super-confident, loud-mouth obnoxious U.S. marshal so compellingly created by Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive.  Only here, Jones will play a monsigor on special assignment from the Vatican to investigate and apprehend anti-popes.  He'll wear one of those magenta fascias that the monsigors wear, including some funky headgear.  He'll be a master of martial arts, naturally, so we'll get to see him twirl his black cassock as he delivers repeated roundhouse kicks to the bad guys' heads.  He'll have confrontations with the local police wherever he goes, yet such will his reputation be that he will need merely to flash his diplomatic credentials and all will let him go his way.  In fact, he'll have a licence to kill that is recognized by every government in the world -- cool!  Some anti-popes will be gangsters or spies trying to take over the Vatican, but the most interesting ones will have made a pact with the Devil; thus they will possess supernatural powers.  Yes ... yes!  I can see promise in this concept.  Just let me get Tommy Lee Jones signed up, and we'll be on our way.

The BBC's experiment in reviving live drama for TV is a remake of a sci-fi classic:

When the seminal TV science fiction thriller The Quatermass Experiment was first screened in 1953, pubs and shops would empty as viewers crowded around their newly purchased sets to watch. Those of a nervous disposition were warned not to tune in for fear they would be psychologically scarred.

Sounds like you better avoid it -- although, if you're worried about psychological scarring, then what are you doing reading The Fredösphere?  The live element will make things exciting for everyone:

There are 17 locations, with indoor sets including a laboratory, a newspaper editor's office and a ministerial den. Ten minutes of pre-recorded footage apart, much will depend on getting cameras, actors and sound people from one set to another on cue. Even the music will be played live by an onset composer.

Here's more on the 1955 original, which earned an "X certificate" due to horror and violence.  I wonder what I would be rated nowadays.

Writing film music is a tough job.  The successful ones keep fixed in their mind the visuals their music will accompany.  By "visuals," I am of course referring to not-yet-existing film trailers:

This would appear to be the way to make your millions as a composer for the cinema: Hans Zimmer, who wrote the score for the 1995 film Crimson Tide, is estimated to have made at least 50 times more from its subsequent exploitation - in trailers for Armageddon, The Devil's Own, Independence Day, Mulholland Falls and others - than from its original use.

But the current record, according to the website Soundtrack.net, is held by the composer Randy Edelman. You may not have seen Come See the Paradise, Alan Parker's 1991 film about the wartime romance of an Irish-American man and a Japanese-American woman. But the score proved so useful for trailer-makers that it has been used in the advertising for no fewer than 24 films, including Clear and Present Danger, Cry, The Beloved Country, Devil in a Blue Dress, Donnie Brasco, A Few Good Men, The Joy Luck Club, Patriot Games, Philadelphia, The Sum of All Fears, Swing Kids and Thirteen Days. Edelman, a former pop songwriter, is now a wealthy man.

What a beautiful dream I had last night.

We were in Coldwater, touring a restored Victorian mansion.  Has it been a while since you've been to Coldwater?  Let me remind you:  of the many small towns in Michigan with interesting 80-100 year old homes, Coldwater is a standout.  As you drive down Main Street, you see so many magnificent specimens of every variety of the Victorian styles:  your Italianates, your Queen Annes, your Gothic and Greek revivals, your Neoclassicals.  If you take a quick detour down the side streets, you see many more, some neglected, some restored.  My dream was based on the home pictured here:  the Wing House, with its raised basement and an unusual arcade, which is maintained by the local historical society.

In the dream, the house we toured was haunted, naturally, by a woman.  I found myself caught up in solving the mystery of her violent, untimely death.  I seemed to be able to find creepy clues that all others had overlooked:  a message etched in a window that could be read only when the light hit it a certain way, and a photo of the woman and her bizarre brother, pictured with a slash cleaving him top to bottom.  (What did that evil sign mean -- that he was schizophrenic?  We'll never find out.)  The house seemed to be lousy with trap doors and secret passageways.  Once I was startled by the woman's body, lying in a bed, suddenly sitting up.  Ha, ha! -- because it was merely an animatronic display, built by the historical society to frighten and amuse us.

Then in my dream we left the house and toured the town.  Everywhere I looked, the narrow streets were packed with an dense, old-growth forest of Second Empire mansions, tall and dark and displaying a sinister nobility.  The streets were overrun with cable cars.  It was gorgeous (but a nightmare for car owners).

Well, I'll never adequately convey the spooky mood of that dream -- as is always the case.  You'll just have to take my word for it that dreaming a full-fledged whodunit was a blast.  Rarely has waking to the corporeal word been such a disappointment.  That's what you people are to me:  a let-down.  Please don't take it personally.

Will these opinions stand the test of time?

Check out the Big Belt House at Massie Architecture; it's got just about the funkiest sink I've ever seen.  I'm not sure how exactly you clean the thing, however.  Oh, silly me -- supposing that it would ever get dirty.  One doesn't use a sink like that, does one.  It's just there for pretty.  (Hat tip to Core 77.)

Here is a fine article on the photography of Bernd and Hilla Becher, whose subject is large-scale industrial constructions.  The author describes the strange effect these photos create...

It's dangerously easy to get lost in the Bechers' photos, while at the same time losing your place in the recognizable world. It's also easy, turning the pages of these monographs, to miss the inspired variety amid the cumulative and deceptive sense of uniformity, the utter strangeness of so many of these portraits, the formal repetition and austerity offset by queerly buttressed towers, arches, ornate cupolas, and bizarrely stylized façades. There are huge gas tanks girdled by elaborate iron scaffolding, to the point that at first glance they resemble nothing so much as an old amusement-park roller coaster. The water towers range from medieval-looking brick structures topped with detailed porticoes to the more familiar streamlined and bulbous monstrosities of the Midwest, which still seem inspired by nothing so much as the futuristic visions of the 1950s.

...and the difficulty of imitating that effect:

Ultimately, however, the problem with my field trip was that, while I had no problem finding source material for a great Becher photo everywhere I went, I couldn't quite translate what I was seeing into true Becher art. What these artists do, of course, isn't quite so easy as just looking at something carefully. A great photographer is a translator, and the Bechers translate everything they look at into their own language. Though I suddenly found myself seeing everything around me in Becher-like abstraction, I could never quite manage the atmosphere of those photos.

I found a Becher monument just once in my life.  Somewhere on the road from my parents to my Aunt Virginia in Goshen, Indiana, in an empty field stands an abandoned grain elevator with strangely classical proportions that for some reason strikes me with pure terror every time I see it.  It gave me the ambition to capture it in a B&W photo I would call Saturn Devouring His Children, a name I can't justify except to say it feels right.  Now I wonder if it would be so easy to capture my feeling in a photograph.

For more creepy buildings, try the Modern Ruins and this linkörama of Detroit historical buildings, including the fabulous Ruins of Detroit.  Alas, Babylon!

What's that?  You came here on April Fools' Day to have fun?  Sorry if I and my grain elevators have brought you down.  Here, try this list of the ten worst hoaxes of all time.  (But you may have to wait until tomorrow; I hear this is a busy day for them.)

Ask me sometime about the internet hoax my friends and I tried to start.  In fact, we gave up on the idea; we realized there was no way to start a rumor worth spreading without creating the risk of troubling some innocent people.  I can't even remember the various ideas we considered, except that the ones I liked involved the IRS and some monstrous injustice they were about to cook up.  Others less squeamish than me have conducted internet rumor experiments, like this lame one linking John Rhys-Davies to a rogue branch of the CIA, a space alien fetus, ABBA, and St. John's Lutheran Church of Sioux Rapids, South Dakota.  (Ha!  Made ya look!)