Tim Jarrett

New mix: Hurricane Irene

Well, here we are again, in the middle of a storm. So far, knock wood, it’s been a lot of rain and very little wind, but this will be the day that Massachusetts really gets it. So I threw together some music to weather the hurricane by.

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall – Bob Dylan (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan)
Rain In the Summertime – The Alarm (Eye of the Hurricane (Remastered))
Goodnight Irene – Tom Waits (Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards)
Florida Hurricane – St. Louis Jimmy (Chess Blues 1947-1952)
Goodnight Irene – Johnny Cash (Sun Recordings)
I Can’t Stand The Rain – Ann Peebles (The John Peel Singles Box)
The Rain Song – Led Zeppelin (Led Zeppelin Remasters)
Rain – The Beatles (Past Masters, Vol. 2)
Have You Ever Seen The Rain? – Creedence Clearwater Revival (Pendulum)
Devil Sent The Rain – Charlie Patton (Founder of the Delta Blues)
In The Rain – The Dramatics (The Stax Story: Finger-Snappin’ Good [Disc 3])
When It Rains, It Really Pours – Elvis Presley (The King of Rock ‘n’ Roll: The Complete 50s Masters)
Rain (Falling From The Skies) – Frank Sinatra (The Complete Capitol Singles Collection)
Comes a Hurricane – Shannon Worrell (The Honey Guide)
Irene – Lead Belly (Where Did You Sleep Last Night?)
Ballet For A Rainy Day (2001 Digital Remaster) – XTC (Skylarking)
Blowin’ In The Wind – Bob Dylan (The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan)
Wild Is The Wind – Cat Power (The Covers Record)
The Wind – PJ Harvey (Is This Desire?)
Sauget Wind – Uncle Tupelo (Still Feel Gone)
Rain Please Go Away – Alison Krauss (Lonely Runs Both Ways)
Dry the Rain – The Beta Band (The Three EP’s)
It Can’t Rain All the Time – Jane Siberry (City (collaborations))
Goodnight Irene – Robert Cage (Can See What You’re Doing)

New mix: a piece of hope holding us together

End of summer is happy mix time. Now that I’m putting out only two mixes a year, it seems like one is downbeat and the other is happy. Lots of fun tunes in here, including a rare Shannon Worrell track that I had to pull off a 17 year old cassette tape.

Moonlight In Glory – Moving Star Hall Singers (Sea Island Folk Festival)
Sunflower – Low (Things We Lost In The Fire)
Postcards from Italy – Beirut (Gulag Orkestar)
The Ballad of Ronald Jeremy Hyatt – Justin Rosolino (The Leaves Are Right to Tremble – EP)
Boy With a Coin – Iron & Wine (The Shepherd’s Dog)
Lighthouse – Shannon Worrell (Shannon Worrell (EP))
Lowdown – My Morning Jacket (At Dawn)
You Can Have It All – Yo La Tengo (And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out)
Hex – Neko Case (The Tigers Have Spoken)
Home – Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros (Up From Below (Deluxe Edition))
Love And Anger – Kate Bush (The Sensual World )
In Liverpool – Suzanne Vega (99.9 F°)
Neither Heaven nor Space – Nada Surf (Let Go)
My Back Pages – Bob Dylan (Another Side Of Bob Dylan)
Begat Begat – Jane Siberry (Maria)
Inside of Love – Nada Surf (Let Go)
Give Up the Ghost – Radiohead (The King of Limbs)
Polegnala e Todora – Bulgarian State Television Female Choir (Le Mystere Des Voix Bulgares)

Late August

Tomatosauce

Ah, late August. The temperatures are still high (well, high by Boston standards, anyway–growing up, 83° was more like a warm fall afternoon) but you can tell summer is getting to be a little long in the tooth.

For starters, the tomatoes are starting to come in. We only have a handful of tomatoes on the plants this time around; I have no idea why, except that we didn’t spend as much time with the plants this year. So we’re supplementing with the big boxes of seconds that are starting to show up at Wilson Farm and using those for our annual tomato sauce exercise. The process looks something like this photo set from last year, except this year we didn’t have a big crop of cherry tomatoes so I diced the big ones by hand instead of using the food processor. We make about a dozen to 20 quarts every year, and they last all through the winter and into the high summer if managed right, even given our relatively high pasta and pizza consumption. Case in point–we opened the last 2010 jar just last week.

So I’m making sauce. Instead of mowing the lawn (it can wait a day) and instead of napping while my son naps, which I might regret later. But right now it’s feeling like the right thing to do. Because sometimes you have to take a look at the future and say, I want to be ready.

Earliest Virginia Glee Club concert program

I got a digital download the other day from the Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia. It contained what I’ve jokingly been calling my Historian’s Christmas present–high resolution scans of ten artifacts from the Glee Club’s archives, which have been donated to Special Collections over the years and have therefore been less accessible to Club. One of the items was of particular interest: the earliest known Glee Club concert program, dated December 1891.

Let’s put that in context for a second. This concert happened a mere 20 years after the Glee Club’s founding, and a few years before its first significant tours in 1893. It was before the authoring of the Good Old Song. It was before Thomas Jefferson’s original Rotunda burned to the ground. In fact, the concert was held in the Public Hall, which was the large auditorium in the Annex that was totally consumed by the fire and never rebuilt.

I had known that the concert program existed, because a scan from it was used to illustrate a library exhibit on American song. But that scan was only of the cover. The library digitized both sides for us, including the program and list of members. In doing so, it gave us one of our earliest full Glee Club rosters, and a rare glimpse at the repertoire performed back in the banjo & mandolin days.

Oh–I’ve also been able to do some mini-bios of the Club members listed as officers. See the articles on W. H. Sweeney, W. P. Shelton, W. S. Stuart, Charles L. DeMott, and O. W. Catchings. I particularly like the history on DeMott’s involvement with the founding of the Natural Bridge Appalachian Trail Club.

The Diamond Sea

I am often awakened these days at 4 am by our dogs. As I stumble over the pile of clothes I leave beside the bed for the early morning wakeups, our girl dog whines urgently. I take them outside in the early morning pearl-light and return to bed.

This day, like many, the next step is my son awakening at 5:15. My wife takes pity on me this morning and gets him, leaving me to unsettled dreams. I am just starting to get past the unsettled sleep schedule that has kept REM sleep at bay for almost a year, and my dreams crowd in resentfully when they are allowed.

This morning, after I rolled back over, I helped house guests down to our basement, where we walked through the tunnels that connected the house to Boston’s Red Line. Arriving a few stops later, we were in DC, where we walked past the Space Needle and along the booths of an outdoor festival. I spotted a pair of students from the University of Virginia, who helped me find graduation programs and band posters from the early 1990s. It struck me that it was like eBay but with sellers you could actually talk to. And then I woke up.

It seems as though the last 17 years, since I started as a young, know-nothing business analyst at American Management Systems, have flown by. It was only a few years after that that I picked up Sonic Youth’s Washing Machine and had the top of my head removed. I’m listening this morning to the uncut version of “The Diamond Sea,” and as always I’m floating in infinity, carried along by the interplay between Thurston and Lee. Then hits the point about 11 minutes in where the ripples have calmed and all that is left is the drone, until a new voice clusters around the second and diminished second in the chord. A storm has blown up. All I can do is hold on and ride.

QTN™: Gnomegang

When I read that American brewer-in-the-Belgian-style Ommegang was collaborating with actual Belgian brewery L’achouffe on a beer, I was a little nonplussed. But then I saw the name of the collaboration: Gnomegang. And it all made sense.

This is a remarkably, even dangerously, easy drinking beer at 9.5%. A shade lighter than the classic Chimay gold but darker than Achouffe stablemate Duvel, only the slight sour on the tongue flavor tips off the uniquely enjoyable threat lurking within. There aren’t too many Belgian styles that are just right for sitting by the grill, but this is one.

I had to hunt to find a bottle of this collaboration, but it’s totally worth seeking out.

Tanglewood, 2011

I’ve been indulging myself at Tanglewood this week for the TFC’s opening weekend performance. I used to do several residencies a summer; with two young kids at home and a lot of other family vacation planned I’m limiting myself to one this year. It’s been a worthwhile residency, despite the compression, because I’ve actually had time to sit and think and read and digest.

Our repertoire for the run has consisted of one old friend, the Berlioz Requiem (which I last sang over ten years ago with the Cathedral Choral Society–man, how time flies), and a new one, Bellini’s Norma, from which we sang excerpts. The Bellini performance was last night as part of the opening night show. Musically the opera is not particularly complex, particularly compared to the Berlioz, but it has some beautiful moments, including of course the “Casta Diva” aria which we sang. (Opera newbie that I am, I didn’t realize until this run what that aria was, though I heard it often, including in sampled excerpt at the beginning of Shannon Worrell’s song “Witness.”)

The Berlioz is a whole different matter, in ambition, scope, and energy required from the singer. For this run the most taxing thing about it has been forcing the Latin text into my brain. I have the music fairly well internalized but the texts are, as always for me, a different story. When I sang it at age 25 it was taxing for a completely different reason: I simply didn’t know how to sing.

I’m envious of my friends in the chorus who have formal voice training. It took me about ten years of singing in amateur choruses to find the person who would set me on the road to vocal health–Christina Siemens. She finally taught me that sound is produced with the whole body and amplified through the facial mask, and that truly resonant vocal sound isn’t forced. It’s a lesson every singer should learn, that I hope Frank Albinder is teaching the current Virginia Glee Club, and that I learn over and over again under John Oliver’s tutelage. I need that lesson for just about every minute of the Berlioz. While as a second tenor I don’t have some of the most thrilling vocal lines of the work, there are plenty of cases where we’re called upon to provide power and volume in a high range. As long as I remember the words it works, as I can keep the vocal production forward and resonant. If I have a brain cramp and forget part of the text, oddly, the instrument has trouble working too; the vocal production falls back in the mouth and suddenly everything’s forced. It’s literally easier to sing correctly. I hope I can remember that tonight for the actual performance.

Securing freedom

On this Independence Day, I was looking for a photo of a flag when I came across this one. I shot it in Concord, Massachusetts in a cemetery that was full of graves like this one. And I realized there isn’t a better image for this holiday for me.

On July 4 I normally write about Thomas Jefferson, who took the work of a committee and turned it into a universal declaration of human rights (and who died 185 years ago today, along with his comrade in revolution John Adams). But on this day for celebrating freedom we should also remember those who gave nobly and without reservation, even to the ultimate sacrifice, to secure those freedoms.

Ten thousand voices: alumni singing from the Glee Club reunion weekend

Rehearsing with John Liepold, March 19, 2011

I’m slowly processing mountains of data from the Virginia Glee Club 140th Anniversary Weekend. After a long delay, the audio recordings of the alumni sings and the banquet speakers have been posted at the Virginia Glee Club wiki.

While there are a few glitches in the performances here and there (unsurprising given only a morning’s rehearsal), what’s moving to me is hearing voices from multiple Glee Club eras come together on both Club standards (“Shenandoah”, the Biebl “Ave Maria,” the “Winter Song”) and one or two that were new to many. I think for me the standout performance is the Fenno Heath arrangement of “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” with Morgan Whitfield reprising a solo he had sung almost twenty years previously. You’d never know that most of the alums had never sung the work with John Liepold.

The banquet speeches are good too, if you’re into that sort of thing. Of particular interest to me was the description by Patrick Garner about how the Club’s first European tour came to be. But the whole thing is well worth a listen.

Next project: sort through a few gigs of high resolution photos from the weekend and get them up on the site.

Blogaversary 10 (a little late)

True to form for this year, not only did I miss writing about my blogaversary on June 11, but I haven’t written much in almost a month. But yes, ten years ago I was a lonely intern at Microsoft, and decided to start writing on line for my family, and Google.

One of the nice things about the blog turning 10 is that I no longer feel like I have to write for anybody. Which is good, since I don’t think anyone other than my friends is still reading. So expect to continue to see occasional links, posts about Glee Club history, and miscellany.

Who knows? Maybe now that I’m a professional product strategist (yes, still working for Veracode, just doing my product management job plus more), I’ll start to write about technology strategy again. We’ll see.

The thing that most strikes me, looking back to ten years ago, is that blogging used to be a thing technologists messed around with. Then it was a subculture for 20somethings. Then, for a few minutes, everyone in the online space did it. Now everyone is sharing their life, but generally doing it through one of multiple competing proprietary spaces, and generally doing it in bite sized chunks.

What has most changed, though, is that no one finds it odd any longer that people would want to have a voice on line. Maybe the majority of folks are choosing to share that voice only with their closest friends, relatives, and that one guy in high school that they sorta remember and friended so as not to offend him, but that’s OK. I think we won the fight between the consumer and producer mentality, when it comes to people producing things online.

Virginia Glee Club in the 1870s and 1880s

I’ve often complained that the founding era of the Virginia Glee Club is the most obscure, the hardest to get information on, the time most shrouded in mystery. (The uncertainty around the founding date of the group is just one example here.) Part of the challenge for the first twenty years of the group’s existence is the lack of primary materials: Corks and Curls came along in 1888, and College Topics (later the Cavalier Daily) was first published in January 1890. So where does the UVa historian turn for information about anything earlier than 1888?

Fortunately, students were still writing about their own activities in the 1880s and 1870s, in the only venue at hand: the Virginia University Magazine. Founded in the 1850s as the University Magazine, it continued under the sponsorship of the Jefferson and Washington societies as the V.U.M. or the University of Virginia Magazine through the 1920s. Up until the publication of Corks and Curls, it was one of the few outlets that talked about student activities in print, and its column “Collegiana” provides snapshots of student life during the period.

Now that Google has added quite a few issues of the Magazine to Google Books (most pertinently, 1870; 1877; 1878; 1879; 1880; 1886–1887; 1888; 1890, among others), we have a better view of the life of the Glee Club during those first twenty years. In particular, we now know:

The Glee Club faded in and out of existence in the 1870s, with its prototype emerging in 1870, the first official group forming in 1871 and the emergence of the “Claribel Club” in 1874 and 1875
We now also know that Glee Clubs went away entirely during the 1876-1877 and 1877-1878 seasons, then re-emerged in 1879-1880 (the year Woodrow Wilson was a member). Reassuringly, the Cornell Glee Club went through a similar patch in its early years, according to chronicler (and one-time Virginia Glee Club conductor) Michael Slon.
In 1880-1881 the Glee Club was seeking “a tenor” (only one? then the group was probably a quartet) after Wilson’s departure from Virginia, and may not have re-formed.
In 1886-1887 the Glee Club got more ink in the Magazine than any year before or since, probably explaining why in the 1930s they thought that this was its founding year. The group (re-)formed and went on tour in the “Northern states,” though nothing else is known about this tour.
1886 is also the earliest year where we know the name of a Glee Club president: Sterling Galt. (Alas, we know almost nothing else about him.)
The group had a moderately successful 1887-1888, apparently enough so to swell their heads, since the magazine joked that, regarding the proceeds from an upcoming concert, that “Some think that the club will give the Ladies’ Chapel Aid Society enough to complete the chapel, and that all the rest, excepting probably a small amount which will be given to purchase four or five boats for the boat club, will be used to construct a Glee Club building. The building will be located at the foot of the Lawn.”
After 1887-1888, the group fell back into a swoon during 1888-1889 and did not organize at all, according to the Magazine.
This backsliding was remedied in 1889-1890, with a group that toured as far as Lynchburg and Richmond. This time things caught in earnest, and, save minor hiatuses in 1906-1909 and 1912-1914, things kept going from here.

It’s taken a lot of digging to build this timeline, and there are still quite a few blanks to be filled in. But I think at this point that things are relatively solid regarding the earliest history of the Virginia Glee Club.

Runs in the family

The Internet Archive has all four of my dad’s college yearbooks digitized and available for viewing on line. The N.C. State Agromech of 1959, 1960, 1961, and 1962 may not make for the most engrossing reading, but they definitely have the best blackmail photos.

And they carry a good reminder that I come by my Glee Club obsession honestly: Dad sang in the NC State Glee Club all four years, and was in the quartet for the last two, as this image proves:

oj_1962 — NC State Glee Club Quartet, 1962 (Olin Jarrett on the left)

A special bonus for me was seeing my Dad’s four yearbook “headshots.” It’s amazing how much the 1959 Olin looks like photos of his brother from the same era, and how much the 1962 one looks like the dad I remember from ten years later.

oj_college_headshots — Olin Jarrett, 1959-1962

New mix: every day is getting straighter

This mix has been percolating a while. I didn’t know how to move beyond Jeff Buckley’s absolutely epic reading of his lament for his dead father, but it turns out that anger works remarkably well when played against grief and loss. And that’s how the rest of the mix went.

I make no apologies for the elegiac (some would say self indulgent) triple punch of the Death Cab, Cure, and Jane’s songs stacking up all together. Somewhere there is a sixteen year old who’s just broken up with his girlfriend who only wishes he could put that much misery together in one place on the mix that he’s going to send her.

Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s a cappella version of “To the Pines, to the Pines” is both more matter of fact and more chilling than the version by Leadbelly (and the bloodcurdling Nirvana cover it inspired).

Dream Brother – Jeff Buckley (Mystery White Boy (Live))
Careening with Conviction – Mission Of Burma (The Obliterati)
Written In Reverse – Spoon (Transference)
Company in My Back – Wilco (A Ghost Is Born)
What Is Your Secret? – Nada Surf (The Weight is a Gift)
Revelator – Gillian Welch (Time (The Revelator))
The Queen Is Dead (Take Me Back To Dear Old Blighty) – The Smiths (The Queen Is Dead)
Pump It Up – Elvis Costello (The Very Best of Elvis Costello And The Attractions)
Radio Cure – Wilco (Yankee Hotel Foxtrot)
Progress – Mission of Burma (Vs. )
Transatlanticism – Death Cab for Cutie (Transatlanticism)
Disintegration – The Cure (Disintegration)
Then She Did… – Jane’s Addiction (Ritual De Lo Habitual)
To The Pines, To The Pines – Bascom Lamar Lunsford (Ballads, Banjo Tunes, And Sacred Songs Of Western North Carolina)
Einstein’s Day – Mission of Burma (Vs. )

1990s Glee Club archive (nearly) complete

Thanks to the contributions of Jeff Slutzky, the archive of information about the Virginia Glee Club of the 1990s is now nearly complete. It stands at 90 articles, including concert articles, information about tours and rolls, and information about members of the group. For an alum who was a member of the group during this formative time, the archive should stir quite a few memories. If you’re inclined, please go and check it out and leave some impressions.

Incidentally, the places where the archive comes up short is in the 1990-1991 season, and the 1999-2000 season. I believe we have concert programs at a minimum for every home concert and most of the away concerts in the other seasons.

Pictures of the past: 1896, 1898, 1912, 1921, 1922

If you do research on a topic that has useful materials in Google Books, it pays to periodically check again to see what else has turned up. Yesterday, I happened to try my customary search term (“university of virginia” “glee club”) and was pleased to find a full five editions of Corks and Curls from the late 1890s through the 1920s that had previously been unavailable, and which shed light on five Glee Club seasons which had previously been obscure. So we have:

Glee Club of 1895-1896. This Glee Club was directed by a student whose name is variously spelled F.G. Rathbun or F.G. Rathburn; the president was McLane Tilton, Jr., who was a member of O.F.C., the Thirteen Club, and the Z Society, and manager of the baseball team.

Glee Club of 1897-1898. This group was conducted by George Latham Fletcher and had John Lawrence Vick Bonney as its president. Both were in Eli Banana and the Z Society; Bonney was also captain of the baseball team and voted “most popular man in college.” Note Francis Harris Abbot in the back row; the man who would later be French professor “Monsieur Abbo'” would also conduct the Glee Club in the following season.

Glee Club of 1911-1912. This season was previously thought to have ended in failure (the group actually disbanded in the fall of the following year), so it is interesting to see a picture of the group looking hale, if not entirely cheerful. Arthur Fairfax Triplett was president that year, and the still-mysterious M.S. Remsburg was conductor. Three of the four officers who disbanded the Club in the fall of 1912 were in the group in the 1911-1912 season.

Glee Club of 1920-1921. This yearbook entry cleared up a misapprehension perpetuated by the 1921 Yellow Journal: while John Koch (Skull and Keys, Eli Banana, College Topics) was the president of the Glee Club this year, he was not its conductor. That was Nevil Henshaw, class of 1902, novelist, short story writer, and author of The Visiting Girl, written in 1907 for UVa theatrical group The Arcadians and performed by the Glee Club to no few brickbats in 1920-1921.

This yearbook also provides the first documentary evidence proving what was once conjecture: that John Albert Morrow, author of “Virginia, Hail, All Hail,” had been a member of the Glee Club (though he was not during the 1920-1921 season).

Glee Club of 1921-1922. Interestingly, no conductor is listed for the group this year (Arthur Fickenscher became conductor the following season), but the president, Frederick R. Westcott, was a graduating student that year who served in the German Club.

Finally, looking at the accomplishments of our forebears, it’s tempting to judge later generations of Glee Club officers as, to use the modern vernacular, a bunch of nons. It’s hard to imagine anyone covering all the bases of Greek, secret society, yearbook, newspaper, drama club, athletics, and Glee Club today, at least while still graduating.