Fredösphere

Shock of the New

2010-02-04T16:50:00.002-05:00

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.

Kate Beaton

2010-02-03T17:11:00.005-05:00

~~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.

Matthew Sanborn Smith

2010-02-03T14:16:00.004-05:00

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.

Hallelujah Junction

2010-02-01T15:29:00.006-05:00

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?

Til SF Voices Wake Us And We Drown

2010-01-27T13:56:00.004-05:00

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.

Chess Tournament Diary

2010-01-25T15:31:00.010-05:00

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.

But Beautiful It Is

2010-01-21T12:15:00.003-05:00

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.

Collage

2010-01-20T21:42:00.003-05:00

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.

Commercial Meat

2010-01-15T09:57:00.003-05:00

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!

Ancient Song

2010-01-07T19:27:00.006-05:00

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.

SFF Audiophiles

2010-01-06T13:18:00.004-05:00

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.

Apoca-List

2010-01-06T12:57:00.003-05:00

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.

The Empire Strikes Back

2010-01-02T13:48:00.006-05:00

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.

They're Made Out of Meat: The Commercial

2009-12-24T11:37:00.003-05:00

My good friend Tony C. Smith of the StarShipSofa podcast has very kindly agreed to run a commercial for my science fiction jazz chamber opera, They're Made Out of Meat. You, my faithful readership (Hi, Aunt Virginia!) are about to be rewarded with a Christmas gift. Among the privileges of membership here are an early hearing of the audio I prepared for Tony. That's right, folks: you get to listen to a commercial ahead of everyone else!

Enjoy:

He Spreads the Burning Sands With Lava

2009-12-18T16:30:00.003-05:00

In the past I have warned you about the Yellowstone Caldera and told you that we are all going to die. I was laughed at. Now it seems that, when the great rain of fire and brimstone wipes out all life in North America and plunges the world into years of subzero temperatures, initiating a period of human suffering never before seen or imagined, I will have the last laugh.

Fear Not

2009-12-16T15:58:00.007-05:00

Lately I've been hearing the words of the angel "I bring you tidings of great joy" in strong, phat, masculine, sustaaaaaained chords in close voicings. I hear a men's choir bellowing in that comfortably high area of the voice that is so satisfying to sing in and listen to. I wanted to hear male voices sing "Glory to God in the Highest" and hear them land on an A-major triad on the word "highest." I asked my friend Aaron for suggestions that fit that description and his reaction was what I expected: "that's usually for women's voices." Yes. Scored for women, and usually with plenty of flouncy bounce. I think we have discovered a cliché, and when we discover them, what do we do? We smash them.

Not finding what I wanted in the existing repertoire, I considered writing something myself. But I was running out of time. Should I compromise and pick something ordinary? I received a sign, a word straight from the pulpit when the preacher of last Sunday's sermon urged us to consider the implications of that first command: "fear not!" Perhaps the sheperds were ordered to stop being afraid because they were in the presence of something legitimately frightening. Perhaps these angles were warrior angels. We were asked to imagine a Rambo angel, or an Ah-nold angel. Yes. I can do that.

Which brings me to one of my favorite adjectives: seraphic. A terribly underused word, I think. I wanted to hear an angelic choir purged of all things cherubic and binging on all things seraphic. (And now is time to mention the choir with my all-time favorite name: Seraphic Fire.)

Sunday night, I jotted down a few notes for the vocal parts and came up with a motif for the piano accompaniment. Monday night, starting at 9:30 p.m., I faced the necessity of starting from an empty Finale document, and creating in one shot an entire piece in one night. I much prefer a plodding pace and had never before faced that much pressure. The gamble paid off. By 1:00 a.m. I was done.

The piece is hardly perfect—a future revision would probably need to expand each section, and as you can see in the excerpt below I let slip an embarrassing parallelism—but it achieves all its mission-critical objectives. The men's choir I assembled for this piece obviously liked it. It was written very much for the purpose of being a blast to sing, and that was evident in last night's rehearsal. I gambled that my tenors, none of whom are true first tenors, would not be worn out by the several sustained high-Gs. I was elated when they rose to the challenge. (Alan: you're a star!) Lots of high Gs, but no high As: by long, bitter experience I've learned to live with limitations.

If you've ever sung in a men's choir, look at this part (in 6/8 with 60 bpm), then tell me honestly: wouldn't you love to bellow away at this phrase? Be honest. This is what men singers live for, no?

Canibalized

2009-12-07T17:33:00.002-05:00

You don't need to be a fan of extreme missionary stories to be moved by the BBC's account of a ceremony of repentance and reconciliation 170 years after the Rev. John Williams was killed and eaten by fearful islanders in the South Pacific.

They're Blurbing For Meat

2009-11-30T10:31:00.007-05:00

Yesterday around supper time my good friend Thad phoned me, sounding exhausted and desperate. It seemed he and his family were stuck in the family van somewhere south of the Maryland/Pennsylvania border in a huge parking lot commonly referred to as Interstate 70. He had been essentially motionless for an hour and wanted any information I could find on the internet about the extent of the traffic jam he was in.

This I was happy to do, happy, that is, until I found that neither Triple-A nor the official government websites of Pennsylvania or Maryland had any current traffic information. They had websites that described themselves as traffic information sites--but which were empty. They also contained links to other, equally worthless, non-governmental traffic-monitoring websites. In those cases, the links came with amusing warnings that the government could not be responsible blah blah blah and that the user was at risk blah blah blah and that you might go blind blah blah blah. Sheesh, so stupid, so. . .so. . .nineties.

Then suddenly a little light went off in my mind, and I went over to Google maps and turned on the Traffic option. Immediately the highways were color-coded with the information I needed. I called Thad back and told him to expect traffic to clear up right around the state line. He said he had just done that and he confirmed the accuracy of Google's information. Apparently Google has taken over this function on the internet completely, and I am among the last to find out.

In any event, Thad took a moment on the phone to tell me his whole family was enjoying listening to They're Made Out of Meat, my new science-fiction jazz chamber opera I told you about a while back. He said his youngest daughter, who is the Maharincess' best friend, is the biggest fan of them all. (Oooh, good, I can market this thing to children, the most gullible demographic there is!) They all love the part that says, "They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

Thad told me, "it's not only entertaining, it's also philosophically interesting," and immediately I sensed I was witnessing the birthing of a blurb. With Thad's permission, here it is:

THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT. Text by Terry Bisson, Music by the Fredösphere
"Not only entertaining, it's also philosophically interesting." -Fred's friend Thad

No, not quite right. Let's try this:

THEY'RE MADE OUT OF MEAT. Text by Terry Bisson, Music by the Fredösphere
"Not only entertaining, it's also philosophically interesting." -Dr. Thaddeus Polk, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan, and Co-Editor of Cognitive Modeling

Muuuuuch better. They're Made Out of Meat, the opera, is on sale at iTunes, Rhapsody, Napster, eMusic, and Amazon, where you can get it for a lousy 89 cents. C'mon, people: get your clicky finger busy and buy the dang thang!

2009-11-24T16:53:00.004-05:00

All evidence indicates (Untitled) is not currently showing in any theater in the Ann Arbor area. (Perhaps the Michigan Theater, our local art house, will get to it eventually.) That's sad because the film promises to be the best thing since my beloved Art School Confidential, a film the review of which I would link to had I ever bothered to write such a thing. (I'm shocked to discover its absence from the Fredösphere.)

(Untitled) must be great; it has inspired so much brilliant writing about it. First there's this from Eve Tushnet:

I get that art can go beyond beauty; I just want it to go beyond beauty into sublimity. [Emphasis Eve's.]

. . .and also this:

[W]hy some media and not others? Why are painting and "orchestral" or non-pop music so incredibly conflicted and self-doubting, so willing to accept narratives about the death or dearth of meaning... while novelists continue to churn out adultery stories, and movies continue to do more or less everything, and even comics seem to be recovering from a late-'90s period in which they were swallowed up into the maelstrom of their own navel? Seriously... if the Weakerthans are doing something new-enough; if The Wire did something new enough; where does anyone get off saying that painters, sculptors, and non-pop musicians have exhausted the possibilities of meaning?

Can we all agree now that the expression "tempest in a teapot" has been made obsolete by Eve's genius, and that "maelstrom in a navel" is its replacement?

Then there's Roger Ebert:

It's easy to take cheap shots at conceptual art. (Untitled) doesn't do that. It takes expensive shots.

Then he goes on to admire the remarkable quality of the art made up for the movie (mostly visual and musical), describing it as plausible. Eve agrees, saying the movie avoids the lazy perspective of someone who says "my kindergartener could do that." Oooh, these are good signs. If nothing else, I'm sure my local library will get the DVD eventually, so I'm sure to see it. I can't wait.

Collaboration

2009-11-23T20:13:00.006-05:00

An alarm went off in my head when I read the following story by my two kids. The Maharincess (now 8) started it off, then gave her brother (Der Drübermensch, 10) permission to add something of his own. Here's the first few sentences of the story. Figuring out where the girl leaves off and the boy picks up is left as an exercise for the reader:

Once there was a princess in a castle. Her name was Lexi. She was 15. Her favorite toy was Pollys. Lexi's best friend was Snowy, her cat. she wished she had a friend, a real friend. She was never happy aways sad.

One day Lexi fond a friend, her name was Nancy she was so nice Lexi asked if Nancy could have a sleepover at there castle. Her mother said "yes."

When Nancy came in she gasped and said "you live in a castle!"

"Yes." said Lexi. "I'm a princess."

They had a great tea party with apple tea. In bed they told secrets. The next morning Nancy had to leave.

Lexi played with her cat and Pollys for the rest of the day.

The next day Nancy and Lexi saw this really cute boy. His name was Jacob. Then Lexi ran home to rite a letter to him. It said, "dear Jacob, I just fell in love with you. I'm a princess. I will ride my bike on Saturday you will to. Love Lexi."

So, on Saturday, Jacob told Lexi a secret. He was a member of Team Dogatron, and was on a special mission. He needed to find the Lost Sapphire that was under the ocean before the evil Team Catomatic found it. He asked her to come with her. Then Snowy started talking, which was a surprise since Snowy had never talked before. He said that he used to be a member of Team Catomatic, but when he heard that they were evil, he secretly quit, and Team Catomatic had been looking for him.

The alarm in my head was the feeling I had seen this somewhere before. In a moment, I remembered: it was a materpiece called The Writing Assignment, ostensibly the work of two students in a college writing class, working tag-team style, so that the woman writes the odd-numbered paragraphs and the man writes the even-numbered ones. It begins like this:

At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The camomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked camomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So camomile was out of the question.

Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. "A.S. Harris to Geostation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator. "Polar orbit established. No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.

. . .and after that, it only gets better and better. Go thither and read it now!

Mo' Fo' Co'

2009-11-23T17:54:00.002-05:00

Forrest Covington has returned to the blogosphere. Rejoice.

Concrete

2009-11-19T22:42:00.004-05:00

This latest in a long line of denunciations of Le Corbusier, written by my favorite atheistic pessimist, Theodore Dalrymple, is a little too heavy on assertion, I agree. If you already have an opinion of Le Corbu's buildings, words like "monstrous" and "ugly" won't change it. I did find one fresh insight, however, and it's the kind that seems obvious in retrospect—which is to say, it's the best kind:

When one recalls Le Corbusier's remark about reinforced concrete—"my reliable, friendly concrete"—one wonders if he might have been suffering from a degree of Asperger's syndrome: that he knew that people talked, walked, slept, and ate, but had no idea that anything went on in their heads, or what it might be, and consequently treated them as if they were mere things. Also, people with Asperger's syndrome often have an obsession with some ordinary object or substance: reinforced concrete, say.

Of course. The narrow focus, the weirdly selective intelligence, and above all, the yawning ignorance of his fellow human beings. Asperger's. No question.

Senator to the Rescue

2009-11-18T12:26:00.002-05:00

This brief post is not about weird religions per se, although that is certainly a principal theme here at the Fredösphere. It's about a story found on Slashdot about an Australian senator denouncing Scientologists. Great fun and all, for those of a particular psychological type. (I belong to said type, and I blame my unhealthy interest in other people's kooky beliefs on the R6 Implant.)

No, I link to this story because the name of the Senator in question is Nick Xenophon. Xenophon! Isn't that just perfect? He sounds like he's a space alien who first visited this planet 75 million years ago. Xenophon! I still can't get over it.

Rajaton

2009-11-16T17:30:00.004-05:00

Via Philip Copeland at ChoralNet, I present Rajaton, a fab six from Norway:

The group's English-version website says "Rajaton" is Finnish for "boundless" but I think it must be American for "wonderfully precise vocal ensemble singing." Here's there tune "Butterfly," with velvety-soft pop vocals:

Thud

2009-11-13T16:35:00.001-05:00

Mahler's 6th Symphony caught my attention a while back when Alex Ross mentioned the big box constructed especially for the Redwood Symphony, to be used in the symphony's final movement. Something in Alex's description moved me, especially when he wrote "to produce the famous hammer blows in Mahler's Sixth, the orchestra deployed a large wooden box that matched Mahler's original specifications."

Oooh, that got the latent speculative fiction author in me thinking. The resulting story is still gestating and will continue to do so for a while, as fiction writing is my third-ranked hobby (after composing and bread baking) but I may finish the thing eventually. Meanwhile I am loathe to give away all the details, but I'll mention that the story will feature a black hole, a skeleton orchestra sawing away on their violins with femurs--or something--and will definitively explain why Mahler was never comfortable with that last thud at the end of the fourth movement.

The thud whereof I speak is one of three (later revised to two) thuds Mahler specified in his score. He did not, however, specify the means, asking only that the sound be loud but dull, and non-metallic, "like the stroke of an ax." They were meant to be three blows that fate delivers on the heroic protagonist of the symphony. Alma Mahler famously described these blows as prophetically depicting Gustav's own coming disasters: the death of his daughter; his forced resignation from the Vienna opera; and the diagnosis of his (eventually fatal) heart condition. (Keep in mind that, for whatever reason, almost anything Alma has said about Gustav and his music is generally treated as dubious. And one critic has pointed out her oversight in mentioning another hammer blow of fate: her own infidelity.) Various orchestras have devised ingenious devices--usually big wooden boxes or giant bass drums--of varying thuddiness in an attempt to carry out the composer's wishes. Mahler himself was doomed to frustration with his thudders, never finding a satisfying instrument.

For more information on Mahler's 6th and its tripartite thuddiness, do listen to Benjamin Zander's superb analysis of the four movements, and his decision to restore the 3rd thud in the recording he made with the Boston Phil. (The mp3s are available at the link; I'm told the files of the symphony itself are low-res, but those of the discussion disc are crystal clear, and feature the most awesome, phattest thuds imaginable.) Meanwhile, Ionarts has a good comparison of the various recordings of No. 6. I've enjoyed Iván Fischer's Budapest recording, even though he chooses Mahler's second (and final, apparently) thoughts on both the thud numbering (only two) and the ordering of the middle movements (Andante, then Scherzo). I lean heavily toward Mahler's original concept, although I'm hardly ready to call myself an expert on the work. (I can say I also bought Lenny Bernstein's reading as a bargain from Amazon, but the recording seems veiled; perhaps a failing of the original engineers, or a mistake in conversion to a compressed file format.)

Finally, let me leave you with a quote from David Hurwitz, writing in The Mahler Symphonies: An Owner's Manual: "There has been more nonsense written about this symphony [no. 6] than any other work by Mahler." As I sketch the outline of my story, to be titled Mahler's Box, I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to this opportunity to contribute yet more nonsense to the pile.