The Fredösphere

It's got realistic lighting with scattering and refraction, dynamic simulations that model the effects of gravity on massive objects, a renaissance choir sound track, and giant dominoes falling inside St. Peter's Basilica.  It's Fiat Lux.

It's a Friday grab bag:

* Some blogger has identified a curious sub-genre of sci-fi:

stories in which human (or post-human) civilization has spread across the solar system, but in which the Earth is somehow unavailable—devastated, off-limits, or ignored.  There's no name that I know of for this genre, but I privately think of it as "Earthless circumsolar civilization fiction".

He's got summaries of some compelling stories:  The Eight Worlds Series (aliens take over Earth and Jupiter), Shaper/Mechanist Series (post-humans have outgrown Earth), Vacuum Flowers (Earth is taken over by a hive mind), Bloom (a space-born nano/viral goo kills all life on Earth) and Cowboy Bebop (an industrial accident blows up the moon, subjecting the Earth to a continuing shower of giant meteors).  Ooooh, sounds like melancholy stuff -- Alas, Babylon, and all that.

*The Well-Tempered Blog found robot music instrument that play themselves (don't miss the Emergency Bot TV Theme) and a few other cool things (the Avant-Garde Grandpa's Tribute to Beethoven is also required listening).

*On an Overgrown Path asks a question.  Here's the answer:  it's not so bad, if you can leave it alone and avoid picking the scab off of it.  (But see the comments for opinions that are more positive.)

*Yes, Don, that is the worst song ever.

*David Salvage found a bizarre story of a young pianists struggle to perform at Carnegie Hall -- where "struggle" in this case means wrestling on-stage with 62-year-old female piano teacher.  See the comments at this post if you want to taste the full range of reactionary reactions.

Something came on the iPod and I said to myself, "hmm, that's really nice; tasteful note choices; kinda soothing, kinda spooky ... it's not Stravinsky ... not Rautavaara.  So I looked to see what it was.  (I'm embarrassed by how often I have to look.)

It was Anagoge by Forrest Covington.  Nice work, Fo' Co'.

I hope I don't need to explain that the whole point of this is that I liked it before checking; thus my approval is completely unbiased.  I'm not just giving him a good word because he saved my life -- twice! -- in East Berlin in 1949.

It's a question we've all asked at one time or another:  "What would Bach be doing if he were more fun and less dead?"  Here's the answer; here's an alternate possibility.

Architecture Week is taking us down a back alley in the latest issue.  Literally:  alleys are a key element of the New Urbanist movement toward traditional city planning.  I think they're great:  houses can get those dang protruding garages and driveways tucked away in the back where they belong.

Cops dislike alleys because robbers lurk in them.  Firemen dislike alleys unless they are given the width and function of a conventional city street.  (Believe it or not, that has been tried:  check out the hilarious pictures of the perversely proportioned alleys and streets in the Parkside neighborhood of Houston, Texas.)  Sadly, exhaustive building codes can suck the life and charm out the environment.  If a flight of steps are old, weathered, and slightly uneven, that makes them beautiful -- but also slightly more likely to cause a fall.

Here's an introduction to New Urbanism, with photos of Seaside, Florida, perhaps the best known example of what the movement can do.  Unfortunately, as a resort town, Seaside cannot really be considered a proper test of the claims of the movement.

Here's a photo of an alley in Celebration, Florida, which I took during a whirlwind tour of that town a year ago.  Celebration is the famous, notorious, shark-bejumped New Urbanist experiment by Disney.  For more Celebration photos, go here.  For the full story of how Disney, Inc. promoted the concept of the town, then gutlessly abandoned the settlers to shifty developers, read Andrew Ross' account of living there for one year, or for the quick version, see Wikipedia.

Personally, I wanted to find that Celebration had succeeded.  In many ways, I suppose it has.  Nevertheless, the town has a slightly phony atmosphere everywhere you look, and it perpetuates the myth that New Urbanism is really about restoring the Queen Anne style to the dominant place in domestic architecture.   I wonder if they finally got the roofs to stop leaking.

Of all the buildings in Celebration, I thought only its moderne cinema really looked completely comfortable in its surroundings.

You would expect the choir director at your local Unitarian church to be a staid, predictable, upstanding member of the community.  Most of the time, your expectations would be met.  But not always.

It's Pavlovian:  I mention Adams and Ives in the same sentence; Robert Gable of Aworks links me.  I've got him trained!  (Or is it vice versa?)  He noticed M. C- found a connection to a techno drum beat in Run Lola Run.  Speaking of beats, techno or otherwise, Colby Cosh admires this research paper on a bit of drumming history that illustrates the state of intellectual property law and practice today.  It's a lecture on a sound file; of the many things I could say about it, let me just mention the odd, stilted delivery of the reader:  it's a nerdy academic solemnly describing the "Amen" break beat that originated in a B-side single released in 1969 by a funk 'n' soul band called The Winstons.  Finally, Don of Mixolydian Mode promotes yet another type of beat:  one inflicted -- in his imagination -- on comment spammers.  Once again, it's probably those Presbyterians who are behind it all.

Add this band name to the list:  The Spaghetti Western String Company.  They do classical, jazz and bluegrass.

Horror:  the one film genre that never allows itself to become defined by clichés, as these upcoming films prove:

Slither -- people turning into zombies.
See No Evil -- a homicidal maniac in a hotel.
The Devil's Rejects -- a nation-wide killing spree.

How fresh!  And while I'm linking to news about horror film music, let me just confess that the most terrifying two movie-going minutes of my life was during the trailer for The Ring.  Oh, how desperately I wanted that thing to end.  The whispering voices recalled every nightmare I've ever endured.  I did not see the film; I notice most critics thought it was uneven anyway.  You may find a place to download the trailer if you start here, but beware:  everyone I know who's done so has died one week later.

Today all I have for you is a belated link to Carnival of Music VII.  I especially like the link to John Lanius' post on vintage synths.  I'm thrilled to report that I am old enough (barely) to have used patch cord-era synthesizers in an electronic music class.  He mentions The Dark Side of the Moon, an album with almost endless opportunities for weirdness, and he credits Chan for adding to the discussion.  (Psst, Chan:  better check the formatting of your permölink pages.)  She in turn, links to ... me.  Aw, how nice.

This morning's listening was devoted to John Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls.  The CD has one single track, 25 minutes long.  ITunes wanted me to spend 10 bucks to download the file; I bought the physical artifact instead for $14.  This post is not really about the disappointment that is iTunes' delivery of classical music; instead I will simply note others have complained as well.

I was surprised by Adams' dependence on taped sounds in Transmigration.  Since I generally dislike mixing of tape and live performance, I'm surprised by how moving I found the piece.  It moved me; it almost transmigrated me.  The tape includes voices repeating words and phrases taken from missing-persons notices and memorials posted around New York.  "Eye color:  hazel.  Hair color:  brown.  Date of birth:  July ninth, 1963.  Please call...."  Hopeless hope.

Adams chose a solo trumpet to sail above the sea of murmuring sounds.  The trumpet recalls Ives' asker of the Unanswered Question, but this trumpet is surrounded by noisier "silence."  We say a trumpet "calls," and for that reason, this sad trumpet well expresses the futile summoning of these notices.

Meanwhile, on the lighter side:  the jpeg image compression algorithm is a powerful tool.  In the wrong hands, it can devastate.

I like James MacMillan.  He's generous to choirs with his compositional output.  I have no desire to dwell on his less successful works.  Nevertheless, when I belatedly noticed this negative review of the January premiere of his opera Parthenogenesis, I just had to mention its truly weird premise:

In 1944, a young German woman was caught in an Allied bombing raid on Hanover. The trauma of the attack, so we are told, caused cells in her womb to begin to divide. Nine months later, though still a virgin, she gave birth to a daughter who was an identical copy of herself. This story, reputedly true, forms the basis of James MacMillan's music-theatre piece Parthenogenesis. Its London premiere, given by the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, formed the centrepiece of the last day of the BBC's weekend survey of MacMillan's work.

"Reputedly true."  I like the way those two hot little words are dropped nicely into the lead paragraph.  So, can we confirm this story?  Google is not telling me; instead, it coughed up the chronology of the Marvel Comics Universe and Brooba, a Japanese-made Tarzan movie.

Parthenogenesis was one of four results of a project that grouped artists and theologians into "pods" (an unfortunate choice of words) to created new works.  Here's the announcement.  MacMillan sees in the story a kind of mirror-image of Christ's incarnation.

Here's the opera's synopsis.  Brace yourselves:  they found a way to make this deeply weird story weirder:

Coded sounds transform into a heartbeat. The voice of Anna, a clone-child to be, is heard speaking as if an adult, bitter that she is only her mother’s twin, cursed to have no identity of her own. Her mother, Kristel, is visited by Bruno, appearing to her as an angel but one who seems earthbound, perhaps fallen. She asks if he is her Gabriel, her guardian or her Azazel? Anna mocks them both, suspicious that Bruno is in love with Kristel's mortality, declaring that this is no annunciation. Bruno questions the absence of kindness, but Kristel explains that humanity has been torn apart by war. Anna describes how her life-code is determined by her sister-mother-stranger – Adenine, Cytosine, Thymine, Guanine – that is what Bruno is foretelling through his worldliness. Bruno yearns for mortal experience and challenges Kristel to cleanse the world through accepting him. Kristel offers to heal humanity's scars through kissing Bruno's wounds.

Oh my.

So this Haydn thing came on the radio this morning:  Divertimento for horn, violin and cello in E flat major.  For the thousandth time, I exert myself to give Haydn a chance, to look for whatever it is that other people (including certain very respectable people) admire in this man's music.  For the thousandth time, I do not find it -- because it's not there!  This miserable little tune (hear a bit here) wanders around pointlessly for a while, as Haydn's tunes are wont to do, then expires in a spasm of futility.

Folks, it's time I used my powers.  You know:  my powers.  I will exert myself to change history.  Tonight, I will arrange for an unfortunate fatal accident to befall a certain special child who was one year old in the year 1733.  When we wake up tomorrow, the music of Haydn will no longer exist.  All memory of him will be erased.  His pernicious influence on the music of Mozart and Beethoven will be washed away.

Oh, joy!  My only regret will be that I didn't act sooner.

As the father of two young children, I have become very familiar with the Huggies diaper baby, to a degree far beyond anything I would have wanted.  Gradually I have realized that this baby has a face I have seen before.


The baby's face, particularly the hair, belong to none other than 20th century Russian composer Alfred Schnittke, as this 1989 photograph proves.  Within a decade of this photograph, Schnittke was dead.  Soon after, the Huggies baby started appearing on diaper boxes everywhere.  Coincidence?  I think not.

Well, the scanner I was counting on to make today's post is not performing as expected, so my plans are postponed for a day.  I was going to blog on my shocking discovery of a link between a certain 20th century composer and the Military Industrial Disposable Diaper Complex.  Return tomorrow; you will not want to miss it.

Other bloggers will have to pick up the slack:  Scott has found musical hallucinations, and Lynn recommends Weird Events.  Plus, today's Gravity Lens (sorry, no permölink) has a great round-up of experimental domestic architecture:  "trippy,"  "intelligent" and (yum, yum) retro-futuristic.  Don't miss the link to the related Things Magazine article, but Mozilla users will have to look past the minor formatting confusion.

This composer quotes poetry in five languages, plays piano and guitar, sings professionally, takes award-winning photographs.  He also stays fit:

An omnivorous and glibly articulate intellectual with an appetite for everything, MacLean has a body as sculpted as his mind. He is an avid windsurfer, runner, skier, swimmer and kayaker. He loves to paddle among the otters in the evenings after work near his Madrona apartment, and to run at night, barefoot, through the rain forest, which he calls the best symphony on Earth.

He also cooks.  No doubt he also builds large suspension bridges in his backyard and woos women with his godlike trombone playing.  And now, he's working the turntables at KING-FM commercial classical radio.

Meanwhile, banjo player and singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens has one album under his belt.  He has 49 more to go.  After all, there are a total of 50 states in the U.S., right?

Summertime, and the orchestratin' is easy:  there seems to be a lot of movie and video game soundtrack concerts happening.  Hmmm.  Must ... decide ... if ... this ... is ... a ... good ... or ... bad ... thing.

Thanks to visitor CGHill, who corrected a bizarre mistake I made in my post on the Kingston Trio.  Here's what I remember:  I found out the Trio's breakout hit was a song called Tom Dooley, and my first thought was that it might be the official title of the MTA song.  I selected the Tom Dooley track from the Kingston Trio CD I was listening to, and confirmed (as I remember) it was the MTA.

Well, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.  Could the tracks have been mislabeled?  It seems unlikely, especially since Tom Dooley is correctly identified in the sound clips at amazon.com.  Maybe I misread the track number.  Or maybe I just thought about checking it, then forgot to do it, then remembered my thinking about it as if I had really done it. 

My memory has played tricks on my before.  Once I was telling a friend about a report on NPR about a innovative civil engineering project in Edinburgh, where a causeway was being built across the bottom of the Firth of Forth, and the waters of the Firth would be pushed back by powerful electromagnets to allow vehicles to cross on dry land.  As I related this story, I realized I had no idea how the electromagnets could do this, and the whole thing started to seem very implausible, so I googled it.  And googled it, and googled it some more.  No such causeway exists.  I never heard any report on NPR.  Somehow I dreamed up the whole thing.

Right now, I have a Polaroid photo in my pocket of some guy I don't recognize.  I've written across the bottom:  "don't believe his lies."  I'm going to check myself in the bathroom mirror to find out if this person is me.

Welcome to the Carnival of Music.  Thanks to John for letting me play host this week.  Sadly, this fledgling carnival is getting off to a slow start, so I've padded the few submissions with some links I found all by my lonesome.

I'm also tying things together with an improbable theme.  (What, you say?  An improbable theme?  On the internet???)  This week I introduced a new quiz, called What Sci-Fi Film Score Are You?  There is evidence at least one person has tried it out.  After I created the quiz, I realized I overlooked the classic film score to The Day the Earth Stood Still.  To atone for my mistake, I will make it the central organizing principle of this post.

I can't say I loved the movie; at the time I saw it, I would have called it The Day the Plot Stood Still.  Nevertheless, the score to the movie was groundbreaking and widely imitated.  (Someone has claimed that Lost In Space directly ripped off the music.)  Thanks to TDTESS, theremins will always bring to mind aliens in flying saucers.

The story is simple:  Klaatu, a humanoid alien with superhuman wisdom and technology, comes to earth to warn us that we must give up our violent, destructive ways and learn to live in peace and harmony  -- or else mankind will be wiped out in a violent, destructive armageddon by the alien's giant robot named Gort, who melts tanks and vaporizes soldiers with laser beams.  "Klaatu barata nikto" apparently does not mean "I love you" (that would be "eep opp ork ah ah").  When the stupid authorities reject Klaatu's message, he goes incognito and lives with an ordinary family.  Apparently Klaatu suffered from a bit of a messiah complex.

In light of all this, Scott Spiegelberg addresses one of the fundamental questions in music:  are the major and minor scales of western music rooted in the harmonic series, i.e., in the physics of music?  Scott says, give it up:  it's all artifice.  Sorry, Scott, I cannot completely agree.  To prevent you from spreading this destructive idea, I am afraid I will have to vaporize you with my laser eyes.

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZT!

There.

When things aren't working out, aliens like Klaatu need to take time off from war and politics.  Certain other aliens, called composers, similarly go on retreat to rethink priorities.  Paul Bailey tells us what it's like.

Lynn takes a break from music posting to comment on the terrorist attacks in London.  Those poor people need someone like Klaatu to establish law and order.  Oh wait; the terrorists probably think that's what they're doing.  Meanwhile, Jessica describes a London concert made transcendent by the deadly context.  Helen wonders if she is fiddling while London burns.  The Overgrown Path says:  the show (that is, the Proms) must go on.

Speaking of ponderous, statuesque executioners:  A. C. Douglas let's us know what might really be going on at the end of Mozart's Don Giovanni.

A word to the wise from the woodwindy Patricia Emerson Mitchell and Brian Sacawa:  a good reed is hard to find.  Hey guys, switch to theremin and your happiness will never again depend on a tiny, fragile strip of wood.

Does music theory mess up your mind?  Corey Dargel worries it warps creativity;  Kyle Gann has been having similar thoughts.  This one doesn't have a space alien theme; the improbable tie-in is fruit preserves.

Mel Brooks once said that "tragedy is when I cut my finger.  Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die."  That explains how a fairly sad story can seem kind of funny when it happens in Turkey and involves 450 sheep.

I'll be hosting the Carnival of Music come Monday.  If you have a post from this week you want included, send me the link by Sunday morning, and I'll include it.  Listen, people:  this Carnival is new, and we must feed the fledgling if we expect it to thrive.

Meanwhile, we started watching our very own purchased copy of The Incredibles last night.  We, meaning the whole family:  we've begun administering measured doses of this powerful stimulant to Der Drübermensch and the Maharincess.

I don't want to understate my opinion of this film, but caution is always wise when dazzled by brilliance such as this, so let me assert merely that The Incredibles is

The Greatest Movie Ever Made By A Human Being.

To those who feel I have just damned the good people at Pixar with faint praise:  I apologize.

The boy is quite taken by the concept of super powers, and I manipulated him to my parental advantage.  He now uses his super speed to get dressed in record time.  This morning he opined that Ricky Ricotta's Giant Robot would likely achieve parity in a test of strength vis a vis Mr. Incredible.  Thus, it begins:  the seven fat years of pre-pubescent male bliss, when everything is quantified and ranked, especially superhero prowess. 

When I entertained the notion Mr. Incredible might fight the Giant Robot as a test of strength, I almost got my head bit off:  they're both good guys.  They don't fight one another.  Sorry!  I'll try to do better in the future.

C'mon, people, take the quiz!  It'll be fun!

His fame came from a single stunt, yes; nevertheless, that stunt required quite a bit of brains and guts to achieve.  Then his happiness was destroyed when his son was kidnapped and murdered.  The resulting trial, with its suspect evidence, and his later flirtation with fascism, sullied his reputation.  Charles Lindbergh was definitely not the seventh luckiest person in history.

(Art Garfunkel, Ed McMahon, Erich Seagal, Ringo Starr:  now there are some lucky sons of guns.)

The wifeösphere and I closed out the holiday watching a bit of High Sierra, an old B&W Bogart movie from a low point in his oeuvre.  He plays a gangster pardoned after eight years behind bars.  "I can't wait to find out if the grass is still green."  Sorry, bud; in this film it's all shades of gray.

The director decides to begin with the governor in the "State Capitol" signing the pardon document.  We see him only from the back -- holy cow, it's the old Don't Dare Show the Face of the Executive thing again.  Maybe they want to portray him as Everygovernor of Everystate, but I can't help wondering if there's a bit of misplaced majesty and awe at work.  It reminds me of the light bulb-headed God in Jack Chick cartoons.

It's all downhill from there.  A gangster tells a "dame" to "scram,"  Bogart flouts the law and flaunts his upper gums, and lot's o' bad acting follows.  Henry Travers (you'll remember him as the angel from It's a Wonderful Life -- my least favorite actor from my least favorite movie) shows up as the not very majestic or awesome paterfamilias of a family of Okies fleeing to California.  Astonishingly, no pee-stained mattress is in sight; it's the one cliché they overlooked.  Next, a servile yet cheerful black youth and his little dog provide comic relief.  Oh dear, oh dear.  At this point, if God were not merciful, he would leap from his throne and send bolts of blazing energy from his unseen, unapproachable countenance to consume in unquenchable fire every print, video, and DVD copy ever made of this movie.  Or wait:  maybe not doing that is his way of punishing us.  Boy, this religion stuff sure is complicated.

Today's featured library CD is An Evening With The Kingston Trio.

Credit the Trio for making the song Tom Dooley known to everyone:

Did he ever return? 
No!  He never returned,
And his fate is still unlearned.

What is it about that tune that works so well?  Must - learn - secret - of - great - melody - writing.  The success of Dooley seems especially mysterious because the tune frankly does not fit the words; it gives a driving, heroic quality to a stupid story about a guy who can't figure out how to escape from a friggin' city bus -- oh, wait, that's the plot of that Keanu Reeves movie that made a gazillion dollars at the box office -- as I was saying:  stupid.

The Trio has an official website.  Bob Shane has continued to work the crowds down through the years with a group called the New Kingston Trio.  Like The Who, the Trio had to appease long time fans angered over the replacement of an original member.  Unlike The Who, the Trio was not particularly known for smashing guitars (or even banjos) on stage.

An Evening is a live recording of a 1962 concert not released until 1997.  Most of their albums were not live, but the group's banter on stage was a great part of their appeal.  They certainly paid their dues; this is manager Frank Weber, in The Kingston Trio On Record, recalling the trio's days at the Purple Onion in San Francisco:

We did seven months there, daily.  We would do every job with a clipboard, and I would say I choreographed every song.  Every move was planned, every line ... and the character of the performance was developed in seven months of three and four shows a night, six nights a week, and a session after each show - football/basketball team style....  My sphere of reference never included records.  I was knowledgeable in performance, communication across the stage ... I never considered that this was to be a "record hit act."  I was really focusing on performance and projection and music, of course, but "Tom Dooley" .. I could never say I planned that.

Frankly, I find the yakking off-putting.  The guys seem extraordinary bored with what they're doing, and the jokes are brittle and in-bred.  The audience laps it up, but I suspect a lot of what they are experiencing is:  we're in the presence of celebrities!

I will never regard the Trio in any kind of normal light.  My introduction to them came via the purchase of a used stereo, the first my family ever owned.  Get this:  the thing had two speakers.  The people who sold it to us (via a garage sale, I imagine) threw in their entire record collection as part of the deal.  It was a sampling of music my family would never have bought, or even known about.  It all seemed so incredibly worldly to my young eyes, a mix of neo-folk, orchestral proto-musak, and (most shockingly) the soundtrack to Goldfinger.  (That song still gives my a multi-dimensional frisson to this day.)  Yes, I am the only person on earth who associates the Kingston Trio with worldliness.

UPDATE:  Silly me, I've confused the songs "Tom Dooley" and "The MTA." Thanks to CGHill who pointed out my mistake in the comments section. See this post for more reax from moi.