The Fredösphere

Thanks to Gravity Lens, I found out about the podcast at starshipsofa.com.  Their subject is the history of sci-fi.  They discuss anythink about science fiction and they say fan email is loovey, but I think the effort is promising nonetheless.

"Vonage rebate scam."  Why have those words been floating in and out of my mental focus lately?  Vonage rebate scam.  Hmmm.

I'm deep into planning for the upcoming church choir season, so naturally I'm in a foul mood generally.  Planning is always a struggle of the lone-martyr-against-a-vast-array-of-evil-forces type (with which I am so intimately familiar), but to intensify the moody foulness, I foolishly broke with a usual practice of mine:  I failed to ignore some promotional CDs sent to me by a couple of choral music publishers.  Now, we're not talking about your Oxford University Presses here, but these publishers are hardly fly by night operations either -- these are established, well-known names in the choral music world.

So I started listening, and the old, familiar revulsion set in.  These selections demonstrate an astonishing -- one is tempted to say, impressive -- dedication to blandness.  A kind of superlative, uncompromising, take-no-prisoners commitment to blandness.  Now, these publishers cannot be offering this kind of music out of some perversity.  I can only assume they are serving customer demand.  How much of this demand is for conventional music, and how much is for easy music, I cannot say.  I hope it is for the latter, because there is always hope that composers will find a way to write easy music that is nevertheless interesting.  Not that writing good, easy music is easy; merely that it is possible.

In any event, I hearby announce my manifesto:  church music is too important to be left to the generals!  More to the point, church music is too important to be left to the church musicians!