The Fredösphere

André Michelle has made an addictive sequencer-like music toy and put it on the web. If you are, like me, someone who pines for evidence that auto-generators of non-sucky music need not rely on minimalist forms and the pentatonic scale, prepare to be disappointed once again. Still, the interface is so easy, it really is a tool that everyman can use to make music that is, as I said, non-sucky.

More ambitious, yet much higher on the suckiness scale, is CODEORGAN. I entered the URL of this blog and, by an algorithm which I didn't bother to research, my blog was turned into a pop song. C'mon, guys, the Fredösphere must sound better than that. You haven't come close to capturing its essence. It's soul.

(Both these toys come via the Daily Zeitgeist at Seed Magazine.)

Labels: Creativity, MusicTheory

How is it I made it to my forty-nth birthday (yesterday) without knowing it (almost) coincides (probably) with the birthday of the guy I was named after?

Bonus material: check out this truly horrifying bit of Prohibition History and the role of musicians in in predicting the future.

Labels: Composer, Culture, Futurism

Oh dear. They tolerated his clown costume. They forgave his use of Leonard Cohen songs. They pretended not to notice the Hawaiian shirt. But when the new vicar decided to fire the church choir director, that's when people drew the line.

Labels: Choral, Religion

You ought to visit Dark Roasted Blend for many reasons (for the retro-futurist art—yummy!—or the totalitarian architecture or non-Egyptian pyramids—yee-ha!) but today especially go see the World's Most Magnificent Pipe Organs.

I had to smile as DRB made a few mistakes with the terminology on a topic obviously unfamiliar to it. Like not knowing how to count how many manuals an organ has, or possibly meaning "ranks" when it says "rows" of pipes. (Where did they get that? The Wikipedia entry cited does not contain that word. Did they translate a foriegn source a little too literally?)

As a bonus, there's a bit of tantalizing information on "acoustic locators" intended to be used as aircraft detectors by a pre-radar Imperial Japanese military. They look like something you'd find if you dissected a 40-ton bat.

Labels: Organ

SFF Audio found out about a new audio dramatization of C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters. Watch the promo and see the actors having way, way too much fun recording these diabolical words:

Labels: Religion, Spooky, VideoClip

I see my old voice teacher, and now executive director of the American Choral Directors Association, Tim Sharp has recently conducted the premiere of a work for chorus and orchestra. Good for him, promoting new music and all that. The work's harmonic language belongs solidly in the Common Practice period, and indeed, shows no influence whatsoever of any of the various schools of experimental music of the last 100-plus years. Yet there is no disputing the craftsmanship on display; this is not the work of an amateur. (Follow the subsequent link for a brief video excerpt.)

The composer, by the way, was some guy named George Frideric Handel.

Labels: Choral, Composer

Terry Teachout Laura Demanski, a/k/a Our Girl In Chicago, loves the Edward-Goreyesque cartoons of Kate Beaton and so do I—whimsical confections of weirdness on historical subjects. I can recommend with especial enthusiasm Beaton's snapshot character studies of a self-revealing Genghis Khan, a self-regarding Søren Kirkegaard, and a self-restrained Nikola Tesla.

UPDATE: In the comments, Terry Teachout points out my mistake, since corrected. I don't know if I should be mortified by my careless error, or thrilled that it was noticed.

Labels: Comix

My friend and fellow StarShipSofa podcast groupie Matthew Sanborn Smith has started his own podcast called Beware the Hairy Mango. It's micro-casting with a focus on Matt's own flash fiction. (Matt specializes in flash to facilitate his goal of writing 1000 stories before his 50th birthday.)

Matt's stories are characterized by zany non sequiturs delivered via fire hose. If that isn't incentive enough for you to subscribe, perhaps your devotion to my science fiction jazz chamber opera They're Made Out of Meat will drive you into Matt's hairy, mango-y arms, since TMOOM is a subject of the Hairy Mango's episode 25.

Labels: Podcast, They're Made Out Of Meat

Why do we read a composer's biography? I know I'm supposed to appreciate each composer's body of work as an artifact utterly divorced from its context, but close readers of the Fredösphere (hi Mom!) already know I take a dim view of that Absolute Music mentality. The fact is, each composer's bio I've ever read has helped me enormously in understanding music. Intent is revealed, and a sympathy is built that gives me the motivation I need for close listening.

Fine. But that leads to another question: what about composer autobiography? John Adams has written his, called Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life, and I feel a strange curiosity: if you can write music really, really well, why turn to prose?

It all turns on the composer's abilities as a self-observer, and a prose stylist. It's likely most of my readers (hi, Aunt Virginia!) understand music composition, self-awareness, and writing prose are three nearly-orthogonal vectors. Granted that John Adams' life is worth studying, it does not follow that John Adams is necessarily the best guide to John Adams' life and work.

Well, I can say at the least the prose is no problem. Adams expresses himself very well, negotiating the shoals of a family with more than its fair share of, uh, colorful characters. (The Adams family produces bohemians, most of whom have little talent for making a living.) I admire the delicacy with which Adams describes his formative years, and the environment his parents created for him to develop as an artist and a man.

Someone—was it C. S. Lewis?—has opined that the first chapters of any biography are always the most interesting. Certainly they are there to answer the question, where did this strange, remarkable, miraculous personality come from? Yet, I don't think we get that question answered here. At some point John Adams begins playing a clarinet (his father's instrument) and very soon, he's the concertmaster of the local wind ensemble, outplaying his fellows 4 or more times his age. Modesty, or something else, prevents him from digging deeper into this mystery: why do some kids take to an instrument like a dog to a bone and worry wonderful music out of it?

Labels: Composer