The Fredösphere

More on my favorite mashup, vocal-heavy soundtracks of science-fictional stuff:

Via A Cappella News we read of Gaggle, a not-your-mother's-female-chorus from England with a sound described as "sci-fi riot." Fusty reputations, begone. You can here their heavily post-processed sound at their MySpace place but bewarned, perfect intonation is not a priority.

Via SF Signal comes this animation accompanied by the Schubert Ave Maria (of all things) depicting the rings of Earth—or what the rings of Earth would look like if Earth had rings, like Saturn's. Dang, rings would be cool. We gotta get us some of them rings!



Okay, this last one has no vocal music, but it's futuristic, it's (even better) retro futuristic, and terribly arty: it's the art of Retropolis: The Future That Never Was! Do visit the posters page. Heck, do visit this future! Let's please go there, and never come back.

Labels: Choral, Futurism, sci-fi, VideoClip, vocal

Saturday, 23-Jan-10, 9:20am We enter the school. I'm surprised at the lack of crowds; already this is looking better than last year. I am holding a cane-sugar-sweetened Mexican Coke in a tall bottle of real glass, thus signaling I am not to be triffled with. Der Drübermensch checks in.

9:30am I chat with my friend Daryl. He, his wife, and son are the only people I know here. Soon they are distracted by tournament administration, however, and I am left alone. The first of many stretches of time to kill presents itself. I am not afraid. I am armed with novels, histories, notebooks and music manuscript paper. I know how to kill time. I am the time slayer. I will teach time to fear me.

10:10am Der Drübermensch's first game begins. I walk to the other side of the room. Der Drü has asked me to stay close by in past tournaments, but I see no other parents hovering today. I decide he has probably outgrown it. Also, as this is a local, non-rated tournament in a familiar location, the pressure is less. It is very unlikely I will need to kill a fellow dad out behind the school in a bare-handed contest of family honor at any time today. If I die, I die for points.

10:25am I glance up from the stage at the end of the caffetorium. From across the room I see Der Drü make a move. Did he just capture a queen?

10:40am My optimism was unfounded. Der Drü looses his first game. As is typical at this level, it was a war of attrition. In the end, his army of pawns was no match for an army of pawns plus one rook.

11:10am 2nd game. I think about Light, a novel by M. John Harrison, which I finished reading in the interlude. A literary SF novel; high probability of being my kind of book. Sheesh, what a chore to read. What Terry Teachout would call an eat-your-peas aesthetic experience.

11:35am Der Drü loses the see-saw battle. This is his first game ever that was truly close. His queen and support staff were converging on the enemy king, but his opponent's pieces were similarly deployed. In the end, it felt like Der Drü was simply one move behind. Check-mate on a crowded board.

11:45am Pizza. I try the new Domino's for the first time. They weren't lying. I move their pizza out of the Inedible column, into the Reasonably Good column. As I am loyal to the local company, this feels satisfying.

12:25pm Game 3 begins and the tournament is, incredibly, ahead of schedule. I begin reading René Girard's The Scapegoat. The sudden shift to a sympathetic author is bracing. I do not like you, M. John Harrison / I do not like green eggs and venison. (Note to self: edit out this self-indulgent crap later.)

12:50pm Loss #3. The first frustrating game for Der Drü, since it was played on a tiny board and its unfamiliarity made him overlook a line of vulnerability.

1:15pm Pizza slice #3. This is boredom eating. I run into Daryl; he and I discuss Bay Bucks, Social Credit Theory, and Chestersonian Distributism.

2:35pm Der Drü, on the cusp of his first win! But, what is this? Why won't he capture that knight (his enemy's last powerful piece) and finish the kid off? Why, having promoted a pawn, does he start promoting another? Is he toying with the poor kid?

2:50pm A break, and a dad is subjecting his son to a post-mortem. "What's your move here?" Silence. "Look. At. The. Board." Yikes. And yet, I can sympathize, although I generally confine my yelling to the inside of my head.

3:05pm René Girard's thesis emerges: myths are records of acts of violence against scapegoated outsiders: panics, persecutions & pograms in times of pestilence. Interesting.

3:10pm Round 5—or is it? why is the tournament director ordering all games halted? Where did Der Drü go? Ah, here he comes. All is well. The games begin.

3:18pm The Scapegoat, borrowed via inter-library loan, is marked on every page with notations. Who are these markers, these defiling scribblers in books they don't own? Makes me want to assemble a mob to find these offenders and subject them to some persecution.

3:42pm Game 5 is a chessathon. Der Drü ahead, then behind, then ahead again! Now, nothing but kings and pawns on the board. And just like the ending of that Searching for Bobby Whatshisname movie, Der Drü and the pint-sized Evildoer sitting opposite him are marching pawns down the board. Said pawns arrive in consecutive turns, just like in the movie! No joke. And now, Der Drü extends a hand, graciously offering a draw. That movie, again! Unlike that snotty little fool from the movie, my son's opponent accepts the offer. Stop searching, gentlemen: my son, the new Bobby Fisher, is alive and living in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Labels: Culture, CuteKid, local, Mythos

It's right there on the front cover. It says it in the title of Geoff Dyer's book, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz. It says it again, in LA Times critic David Thomson's blurb: "maybe the best book ever written about jazz." It's those two words "about jazz." I'm not sure those are the words—the precise words—I would have written.

I would have written that this book is about the jazz life. And this difference feels like more than a nitpick to me. Call me crazy (in fact, call me a crazy composer) but I was hoping for more talk about the music. You know, all that crazy theory stuff: harmony, counterpoint, form, orchestration. Or maybe some words on performance: the ins and outs of getting sound out of the iconic instruments of the style, or even talk of performer-audience dynamics.

Instead, Geoff Dyer gives us something completely different. My expectations (unformed, unfounded, I admit) was so subverted it took me a while to adjust. It took me a while to realize Dyer is attempting something very different. Something very risky.

Inspired by the intuitive and improvisational character of the music itself, he's composed a series of riffs in prose on some of the heroes of the style that he finds compelling. With caveats, he writes a kind of history of imagination. Maybe he's another Capote, writing a non-fiction novel. Maybe this could be classified most simply as historical fiction. In any event, it feels very unusual to me, possibly sui generis. (Hey, I've been called sui generis before so it can't be bad, right?)

It ain't history, but it still feels like an exhaustively researched book. Dyer convinces you he's been inside the heads of his heroes. It's a leap of the mind good enough to be disturbing. I'm honestly afraid to finish reading But Beautiful; I might end up with my head stuffed with a bunch of truths about the heater in Duke Ellington's car or the flask on Private First Class Lester Young's hip that just ain't so.

I'll also admit to a bit if disconnect from these stories. So much of the jazz life, particularly the rootlessness and especially the booze & hookers & drugs--is so utterly unseductive to me. The Lester Young chapter is the one I have in mind especially. Unless it were an overwhelming pity, I can' imagine what motive would make Dyer write it. (Maybe if I listened to some of Young's music, I would get it. Or maybe not; long ago I learned to appreciate jazz; more recently I've begun to steal from it; but to this day it still typically leaves me cold.)

Well, at least I've given you some information. I hope those of you who will love this book have figured out who you are, and will go get a copy. Believe me, this book has an audience. Any book this imaginitive is bound to.

Labels: Jazz

The Collage Concert is a showcase for ensembles and soloists of the University of Michigan School of Music (and Theater & Dance, as I must start calling it since that's what it's been called for years now). It began as part of the annual Michigan Music Educators conference, but has endured even as the conference has found a new home. Professor Emeritus Gustav Meier is credited with bringing the collage concept to Ann Arbor. As a student I performed in it but had not been back as a spectator ever, until last Saturday.

The concert's format is simple to describe, but terribly difficult to pull off: the final note of each piece overlaps with the first note of the following piece. Using light cues, the eyes of the audience are directed to various parts of the stage as (for example) wind ensemble is followed by piano soloist is followed by jazz band is followed by a marimba quartet is followed by choir is followed by brazilian singers and drummers are followed by the school's cast of Evita . . . etc., etc.

Think of the planning nightmares! There's the politically delicate task of choosing soloists and ensembles such that each department gets a chance to show off. Then there's the insane job of choosing music such that coincident starting and ending notes are consonant (yes, they do impose that requirement on themselves).

The show is simply the most densely entertaining thing I've ever seen, even more than a Michael Daugherty opera. It perfectly accommodates modern attention spans. Even music chosen from the most rigorous of the bleep-honk-snort schools of composition becomes a welcome diversion. And, if you truly hate what you're hearing, the consolation comes immediately to mind: this too shall pass, in about four minutes from now.

I'm already recommending next year's Collage to all my somewhat-but-not-very-classically-inclined friends. I hope I never miss another one.

Labels: local

Once again my good friend Tony C. Smith comes through in the StarShipSofa podcast by running a six-minute-long commercial for They're Made Out of Meat, or what Tony so affectionately refers to as my "meat opera." Listen to the whole thing, or better, subscribe to the podcast . . . or best, head over to Amazon with 89 cents in your hand and BUY THE MEAT!

Labels: Starship Sofa, They're Made Out Of Meat

The oldest musical instruments yet found are flutes made from bone and estimated to be—brace yourselves—35,000 years old. Wow. Then there's this tantalizing bit:

The sound produced by the flute "is almost identical to tones of the major scale played on today's flute," says Nikolaj Tarasov, a recorder specialist at the Music University of Karlsruhe in Germany. The five-holed instrument—carved from the bone of a griffon vulture—might be capable of expressing greater harmonic variety than the modern-day flute, he says.

Not enough information, people! It's almost exactly like our modern scale, only better???? How now, brown cow? Nevertheless, these flutes are seven more sticks in the eye of that arch-fiend and enemy of all tonality, M. Boulez. 35,000 years of brawny cave-man musicianship beats a few decades of etiolated, frenchified, 20th century intellectuals in my book.

The flutes were discovered in Hohle Fels, a cave in the Swabian mountains in present-day southwestern Germany. I expect the craftsman who invented them shouted "I have today made a discovery that will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next 35,000 years!" If so, he was right.

It would be too bad if these ancient artifacts are too fragile to handle. I'd love to hear something relatively recent on them. Something like the Bach B minor Sonata for flute and harpsichord. Shades of "To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence" and all that.

Labels: Culture

Audio omnivores Jesse and Scott of the SFF Audio Podcast (SFF means Science Fiction and Fantasy) have very kindly and enthusiastically mentioned my science fiction jazz chamber opera They're Made Out of Meat (on sale at Amazon et al.) during their December 21 podcast. Thanks, guys. You da mensch.

Labels: Podcast, sci-fi, They're Made Out Of Meat

My friend (and regular guest at the StarShipSofa podcast) Dr. Amy H. Sturgis wrote an essay that lists all the ways we all will die in 2012. It's a surprisingly long list.

Labels: Starship Sofa, We're All Going to Die

As a counterweight to Joseph Campbell's railing against religious literalists, I give you Rene Girard, as interviewed by Peter Robinson at Uncommon Knowledge.

Regretfully, the interview is not long enough (in spite of its having five segments) to allow M. Girard to get past mere assertions, so what he says will likely change no minds. Nevertheless, the interview serves as a pointer to his books, which I hope will be argument-rich. Beyond that, it serves as an interesting artifact: here's proof of the existence in the wild of an intellectual—a French intellectual, with a real, live heavy French accent— who is neither a Communist nor a nihilist (or both). By all indications, he's to the right even of Bernard-Henri Lévy!

Girard doesn't buy the Campbellian myth that the founding stories of Christianity are mere myth (although they are that, in the anthropological sense). Girard asserts that Christianity has additional components that makes it unique among religions. And if unique, than worthy of further understanding of the what, how and why of its uniqueness. (Hint: maybe unique, because uniquely true.)

Again, I must stress Girard never gets past his assertions, so those inclined to be annoyed by such should prepare themselves before following the link. (Perhaps the only truly safe route would be to shield one's eyes with a Joseph Campbell mask.) Nevertheless, it's worth it for the thrill of hearing some old French guy's quavery voice speak the unspeakable.

By the way, I've been a regular viewer of Uncommon Knowledge for a while now. Peter Robinson is such a gentle soul, it's hard to believe he's not a sap. Yet he regularly brings in heavyweight guests. I can especially recommend interviews with Shelby Steele and Richard Epstein who give provocative and persuasive analyses of President Obama's temperment.

Labels: Culture, Mythos, Religion