I was watching the evening news tonight, something I do rarely, when my attention was caught by a local item about a man named Peter Vadala being fired from his job because he “expressed his opinions” about gay marriage.
The story went on to clarify: a coworker mentioned that she was getting married to another woman, he apparently told her at length how wrong he thought gay marriage was. She complained to HR and he got the sack. The termination letter was then described, in which the company essentially said, you’re welcome to your beliefs but don’t use them to make other people uncomfortable in the workplace. Now he’s on MassResistance.org telling people in other states that if their state legalizes gay marriage, they too could be fired.
The real lesson of Peter Vadala, though, is that if you can’t keep from using your beliefs as a bludgeon, you can be fired. And rightfully so.
Here’s the letter I wrote to him through MassResistance:
I’m sorry for Peter Vedala that he hasn’t learned an important professional lesson: don’t impose your beliefs on others.
I’m also sorry that he hasn’t learned about Christian charity.
I was further sorry to see him digging himself in further in continuing to claim that he is being persecuted for his faith. If I were his manager, I would have terminated him in a heartbeat for creating a hostile work environment, and I would have had cause.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. This was supposed to be Maestro Levine’s first complete Beethoven symphony cycle (he’s never conducted the 4th). But he ruptured a disc, is still out following surgery, and so the entire cycle has been taken by guest conductors. For the orchestra, it’s been a high profile opportunity to show their musicianship under a variety of batons. For me, I’m getting used to Lorin Maazel‘s style and getting ready to head into our last rehearsal prior to tonight’s performance.
He’s got an interesting style. During last night’s piano rehearsal, he put us on our toes by asking for adjusted dynamics, entrances, pronunciation, and balance in a number of sections. I think some of the chorus, who sing this work every summer at Tanglewood, were surprised. I’ve only sung it once before and was more or less rolling with the punches. After the orchestra rehearsal following, he turned to the basses and said, “You sang that part better than I’ve ever heard it sung”–high praise indeed.
The whole run is sold out, but it should be on Boston area radio on Saturday night.
A reminder that addons, extensions, and other bolt-on software capabilities aren’t free:
It was a maddening bug. On my machine, and mine alone, our web based application slowed to a crawl when I chose a particular option. No one else could recreate the bug.
As I was showing the bug to the developer, we had a hunch, checked my add-ons, and turned off about half of them. The problem went away. Now I had a hunch about where the problem was. I turned on all the add-ons except LongURL Mobile Expander. The web application was working properly again, and I had my culprit.
I’m not a JavaScript developer so I’m not sure, even looking at the source code, why there was a problem. I wonder whether the issue was the fetch of the list of supported services, which seems to happen on every onload() event — possibly on our Ajaxy web app, the lookup was firing more than once per page? (Update: No See below.) All I know is that it’s turned off for good for me.
It’s kind of a shame, because LongURL performed a useful function: with it installed, when you hover over a link to tinyurl.com, bit.ly or one of the other URL shortening services, it looks up the link and shows you the destination in a tooltip–so you can tell if you’re going to get RickRolled, essentially. Useful, but not at the cost.
Update: the developer who looked at the issue with me does speak JavaScript, and he says the issue is not the fetching of supported services (happens once, then cached). Instead, the real issue is that the script re-parses the web page’s document object model each time a new node is added. This is what just about every AJAX app does all the time, which explains why the problem is only visible on apps like ours–or Facebook, as one rater of the add-on points out.
The Virginia Glee Club in concert at the 1947 Virginia Music Festival.
We’ve visited the Virginia Glee Club during their spa years in the 1930s, but what was the group doing in the 1940s? Part of that history, the group’s participation in the creation of Randall Thompson’s “Testament of Freedom” (dedicated to the group and composed in honor of Thomas Jefferson’s 200th birthday), is well documented. The postwar years find the group in a variety of settings, including preparing for the first Songs of the University of Virginia recording, but little is documented publicly except for one concert appearance at the inaugural Virginia Music Festival.
The Virginia Music Festival was started as an “experiment” in musical performances in the state–a non-profit organization bringing “the best in music to the Old Dominion.” Its founders included Dr. Meta Glass, president of Sweet Briar College, and Edward Stettinius, Jr., UVA alum, former secretary of state, and then-rector of the University. Performances were hosted in Scott Stadium at the University. In its first year, 1947, the “best in music” was three performances by the National Symphony Orchestra. In subsequent years, there were school band competitions and folk musicians (the latter program curated by none other than my distant cousin Bascom Lamar Lunsford). In 1949, its cofounder Stettinius died of a coronary thrombosis at the age of 49. After 1950, the Festival was no more, at least in this incarnation.
It’s tempting to imagine the Virginia Music Festival as a possible Southern incarnation of the Tanglewood Festival, but its small scale, lack of a permanent orchestra in residence, and lack of a musical education component render it just a curiosity of history, albeit one in which the Glee Club was involved. The photo above shows the Glee Club, resplendent in summer whites, on a temporary stage behind the NSO, accompanying Mona Paulee of the Metropolitan Opera in Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody. Unlike the northern glee clubs, the Virginia Glee Club did not often collaborate with major symphony orchestras (due in part to proximity issues), so this has to be counted as a high point in the group’s mid-century artistic history. In fact, between the association with Randall Thompson, this event, and musicologist Stephen Tuttle’s involvement in directing the group, this period was a high point overall in the group’s musical renown. Five years later Tuttle would be gone to Harvard University (and in eight he would be dead), and the group’s focus would be narrowed, for a while, to University audiences.
This is the season of Virginia Glee Club CDs. After a long drought, Frank Albinder’s years as director are finally documented with not one, but three new recordings available now: Virginia Glee Club Live!, Christmas with the Virginia Glee Club, and Songs of Virginia. The latter disc is the most ambitious of the three, and is unique among recent Glee Club recordings for being a thematic recording rather than simply capturing the group’s repertoire at a point in time. The theme: songs of the University of Virginia, as documented through old recordings, sheet music, and books, and running the gamut of the group’s existence.
The recording project won a Jefferson Grant in April 2008, and the group has been at work since researching and recording the songs. The provenance of the songs is extensive, with some performances echoing the 1947-1951 recording Songs of the University of Virginia, some later songs (such as “Vir-ir-gin-i-a”) that were documented in 1972 on A Shadow’s on the Sundial, and some that are only known in published form, for instance from the 1906 Songs of the University of Virginia songbook. The earlier Songs recording is the most prominent touchpoint, with “The Cavalier Song,” “Rugby Road,” “Hike, Virginia”, “Yell Song,” “The Good Old Song,” and “Virginia, Hail, All Hail” all reprised, five with accompaniment from the Cavalier Marching Band as in 1951. The remaining tracks on the original recording, including the Eli Banana and T.I.L.K.A. songs and “Mr. Jefferson’s favorite psalm,” were wisely discarded in favor of more interesting repertoire.
The rest of the repertoire includes some of the more interesting selections from the 1906 songbook, including “The Orange and the Blue,” “In College Days,” “Here’s to Old Virginia,” and “Oh, Carolina!” (in an updated arrangement), as well as other fight songs and alma maters (“Virginia Chapel Bell” and the “Rotunda Song” are especially touching). Lyrical authenticity is kept–football songs that refer to the University’s ancient and quiescent rivalries with Princeton and Yale keep their original references, rather than being updated to reference more modern opponents. (It was regular practice when I sang in the group to substitute Maryland for Carolina in the lyrics of “Just Another Touchdown for UVA.”) The liner notes are thorough and well illustrated, featuring a fewphotos that have appeared on this blog, albeit without explanation–see my earlier notes on why the Glee Club wore dresses in 1916, and how the old Cabell House was tied to the Club’s birth. My hat’s off to the students and director of the group for their research–though I am credited on the liner notes, the only direct contact I had during the process was providing some scans of the cover of the Songs of the University of Virginia record that weren’t used.
So enough about the repertoire–how’s the recording? In a word, wonderful. Dusty old songs like “Oh, Carolina” are given sharp new readings that ought to stir up the UNC rivalry (imagine singing “See the Tar Heels, how they’re running/Turpentine from every pore/They can manufacture rosin/but they’ll never, ever score” in Scott Stadium today!), while more familiar standards like the “Good Old Song” and “Virginia Hail All Hail” are made more potent by being put in the historical context of the song. Perhaps one minor quibble is the balance–melody lines in the second tenor and baritone are sometimes overshadowed by more prominent high harmonies–but this is a small point in the scope of things.
Bottom line: if you are an alum of the University, you ought to own this recording. And Alumni Hall ought to be giving copies out at Reunion.
I’ve been busy, which is of course no excuse, but there are going to be posts forthcoming. I received my long-awaited copy of the Virginia Glee Club’s Songs of Virginia today in the mail, along with a new Christmas CD from the group, and notes on both will be forthcoming. I was tickled to get a credit in the Songs of Virginia booklet, presumably for the digging and research I’ve been doing about the group’s history.
As before, I’m having a hard time keeping up with our contractors. The picture above is from Friday. At the end of last week, they had sunk a pair of drywells (one visible above), established the drainage field with perforated pipe and gravel inside and outside the foundation, and backfilled the foundation (poured the previous week). Today they got the lumber on site and got the sill plate down. This despite snowfall yesterday that was still on the ground and cars this morning.
We were busy over the weekend too. I had a PODS storage unit delivered on Friday, and filled the back part of it with the contents of our storage/mechanical room and our laundry room on Saturday. The plan right now is that they’ll cut the door opening from the house (inside the current storage/mech room) to the addition tomorrow. We’ll see how they do. I forgot how much I like the PODS guys–we used them to move our stuff across country when we moved from Kirkland, and they had a real can-do attitude about backing the pod down the narrow driveway (officially, with six inches fewer clearance than they needed) to drop it behind the house.
And now, we know, the group was branching out in other ways as well. As I trolled the catalog of the UVA library in search of more clues to the Glee Club’s past, I found a recording I had never heard of, by a group I had never heard of–the Tin Can Quartet of the Virginia Glee Club, on a 16″ aluminum transcription record from 1933. A further Google search for the group turned up exactly one reference to them–in a presentation from the preservation department at UVA. And a contact to the author turned up two MP3 files, all that could be recovered from the record.
I should note that this isn’t the full Virginia Glee Club. Instead, this barbershop group was “of” the Virginia Glee Club, in much the same way that the Virginia Gentlemen would start as an octet of the Club exactly 20 years later. And the repertoire isn’t Club repertoire, either–instead, the traditional barbershop songs “Aura Lee”, “I Want a Girl (Just Like the Girl Who Married Dear Old Dad)”, and “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” take pride of place. But the harmonies are tight and the recording is quite good–just about as good as any recording I’ve heard from the pre-war era. I’m trying to resolve copyright questions to figure out if the music can be freely shared, but in the meantime I’m just kind of basking in the light of discovery. Update: The copyright on the recordings is owned by the University of Virginia, so alas no audio samples on this blog…
Oh, and the photo? The 1930s were also when UVA professor Ernest Mead was in the group as a student. And that’s Harry Rogers Pratt front and center. No photos are known to exist of the Tin Can Quartet, but I might have to drop Mr. Mead a note and see what he remembers…
View of downtown Boston from the basketball court at Robbins Farm Park.
(I got a new iPhone 3Gs. The camera delivers photos that are much more saturated, especially when they are of golden afternoons. This wasn’t retouched, just resized. Also: you can actually see the skyline, finally.)
Our contractors were, as I noted before, busy last week, and you can see the results of their labor above. The foundation is poured and the waterproofing has been applied, and there’s just another day or so of cure left before it’s time to start framing. Their vigor has inspired me to take on some projects of my own. My office is closed but the rest of the family is busy (not all institutions give props to Columbus, I guess). So I’ve got a day to catch up on projects around the house.
Our front door, which had a supposedly troublefree finish, has had peeling paint on the inside since about a month after it was installed–apparently the guy, who no longer works for our contractor, didn’t bother to prime before he put the finish coat. So that’s project #1.
Work on our addition is proceeding faster than I can document it in photos. They broke ground on Monday (the picture above was taken by Lisa on Monday night), unearthing enormous boulders. (I now fully believe the story that the stone fireplace in our basement was built from rock found on site by the builders.) By mid-day Wednesday, despite heavy rains in the morning, they had poured the foundation. And yesterday they removed the concrete frames, waterproofed the foundation exterior, and left it to cure. I will have pictures of the foundation shortly.
The site work the team has done so far is impressive. That one big boulder isn’t the only one in that rock pile, and a few of its friends are visible at the bottom of the hole. (Fortunately, unlike a lot of our neighbors, we don’t sit directly on the massive rock ledge under Arlington Heights, but it’s clearly not much further down.) And they removed the crumbling stone wall that sat next to the garage , and tore up the driveway pavement around the defunct drywell and the scary French drain that was illegally connected into our main sewage outflow.Part of this contract will include capping the connection to the sewage system, and putting a proper drywell in at the base of the driveway. At last.
And last night we went and resolved at least some questions about bathroom fixtures. The addition will have two bathrooms, one at basement level (which, as you’ll note in the picture above and the architect’s drawing I posted previously, is above ground in the back), and one on the first floor in our new master suite. So we had fun chasing around with the consultant and picking pieces.
The fun is going to come to an abrupt end shortly. Once the foundation work is done and they backfill the hole and cart away the excess dirt, we’ll be bringing a storage pod onsite and emptying the storage room, utility room, and first floor spare bedroom to prepare for the Cutting of the House Wall. And then the disruptive part of the process begins…
While Zalm was going condo, my wife and I were planning for a little addition–namely, two floors, office below, bedroom above, with two bathrooms. We’ve known for a while that it would be good to have a little more room in our Cape-style house, and this seems to be the best way to go.
In the process, we’re going to accomplish a few goals:
En suite master bath
Dedicated office space
Finished utility room (at last, at long last–no more plaster chunks falling on us in the laundry!)
Fixing the drainage in the back driveway (this will merit a post by itself)
Removal of the old fixed concrete trash disposal from the backyard.
And getting more space in this tiny little Cape.
And, you might ask, how much of the work are we doing ourselves this time around?
Um. Well. We’re planning to lay a floating floor in the basement. We’ll certainly plan and assemble the storage ourselves. And I think that’s about it, really. Yeah, this time around we’re planning to let the professionals do the work. Because after the last few projects, I think we know our limitations.
So tomorrow, excavation starts in the back yard for the addition foundation. Photos, I guess, to come…
It’s been a few days since I posted anything, but I have good reason. Not only did we push a big release at work at the end of last week, but it’s season opening time at Symphony Hall. This week’s concerts feature two choral masterworks, Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms and the Mozart Requiem.
Both works have particular demands on the singer. The Stravinsky is challenging because of the combination of rhythmic precision and intensely fervent power, not only in the loud passages but in the quieter fugues of the second movement. Theologically, Stravinsky’s re-imagining of the Psalms reclaims both the desperation of Psalms 39 and 40 (“Hear my prayer, O LORD, and give ear unto my cry”…”I waited patiently for the LORD”) and the ecstasy of Psalm 150 from their normal status as platitudes. The texts are made over into cantica nova, new songs, and the singer’s challenge is to bring those songs to life against the structural challenges of the work, which include unusual harmonic modes and slow tempi that can either transport the listener or bog the work down into the mire.
When those challenges are surmounted, the work can be amazing, a deft 25 minute masterpiece. I felt good about our Saturday performance but am keeping my wits about me for the final show tomorrow night.
The Mozart Requiem has a different set of challenges. The harmonic language is more familiar, though certainly Mozart’s writing was breaking new ground at the time. But the real challenge is breathing a distinctive life into a work that by turns flirts with overuse (the first movement was used as background music for a mock tragedy on “30 Rock” last season) and obscurity (the little homaged “Hostias” movement). I’ve written about the work before, in my performance on September 11, 2002 and my Tanglewood performance in 2006. This time, the major difference was that I knew the work from memory, mostly, already, and that I knew my vocal instrument well enough to keep from blowing it out in the early movements. (Interestingly, this, the beginning of my fifth season with the chorus, was the first performance that repeated repertoire I had already sung with the choir.)
At the end, the big unifying factor in the two works was the expression of deeply personal faith in two very different times and styles. The Stravinsky grabs new life out of old psalm texts, while the Mozart breathes a very real personal terror of death into the mass for the departed. It’s perhaps no surprise that singing both in the same concert wrings one out like an old washcloth.
I just got back from the craziness that is the opening week of the new H Mart in Burlington, MA. It was instructive on several levels, not least of which was the personal (note to self: wait three weeks after the opening of a new highly hyped destination before attempting to visit). But there were also some business lessons in capacity planning to learn.
I was curious about the supermarket’s general offerings — always happy to find a new place to get specialty vegetables like galangal and lime leaves, and the prospect of picking up a carryout pint of kimchee fills me with something like culinary concupiscence (Korean takeout being thin on the ground in the northwest Boston burbs). But this visit, at noon on Monday, was about the other big letters on the sign out front: Food Court.
Takeout options are thin on the ground in this part of Burlington, with only a handful of places (Ginger Pad, Fresh City) within walking distance of my office, and only one or two more (Panera) within a reasonable drive. So I was excited that a new prospect was available. And I wasn’t the only one. When I parked (and the amount of time it took to do that should have been a warning flag) and got inside, I saw the big food court, about six counters in all covering various Asian cuisines, packed full of people. I parked myself in the line at the end for Korean food and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
There were some real operations problems happening behind the counter. The wait time to place the order was about twenty minutes, and when I got to the counter I found that about half the selections were marked as unavailable (“No pork,” the harried cashier explained). Average order fulfillment start to finish was on the order of thirty minutes or more, with about ten of that cooking time. The rest was consumed with waiting for someone to pack the order and get it out, a problem exacerbated by un-bussed trays and dishes, only two visible line cooks, and short supplies.
H Mart had, famously, months to get ready for the launch. How’d they goof it up? Chalk part of it up to opening week snafus, perhaps. But easy things like staffing the counters should have been solved problems by four days into the process. I think the real operational lesson is that H Mart neglected to anticipate all the potential sources of demand for its offerings. They didn’t have visible staff problems or lines elsewhere in the supermarket, and even had fully staffed demonstration tables nearby. What they didn’t count on was a large number of office workers eager for a new lunch option. That left-field demand spike apparently swamped their available capacity of workers and their foodstocks.
The general lesson? When doing capacity planning, consider all the possible uses of your service and think day by day and hour by hour how they will be consumed. Then ask: am I ready?
Virginia Glee Club Live!, the first of this year’s new recordings from the Virginia Glee Club, is now listed on the group’s website and available for purchase through Paypal. I received a copy in the mail about six weeks ago and have had some time to listen and digest, and I can recommend this recording without hesitation.
After I published the recent series on early 20th century Glee Clubhistory and leadership and, um, performance practices, one of the members of the Alumni and Friends Association commented to me that each generation’s Glee Club is different, and I think that’s right. The 1910s group was as different from the 1890s group as the 1990s version was from Don Loach’s Renaissance singers from the 1960s and 1970s. If each group is different, Frank Albinder’s Glee Club is in unusually good shape. This is the best sounding Glee Club recording I’ve heard in a while. (Disclaimer: I didn’t hear all of the Paris live disc or of Bruce Tammen’s recordings.)
The new disc, as the name suggests, is a compilation concert recording over the past five years, spanning Albinder’s tenure to date as Glee Club director. The repertoire includes some “usual suspects” — “Brothers, Sing On!”, Chesnokov’s “Spaseniye sodelal”, “Ride the Chariot,” and the Biebl “Ave Maria” make appearances — as well as mini-sets of more specialized material, such as commissioned works and Virginiana. The focus on short repertoire makes the disc eminently listenable, and the performance standards are generally quite high.
A note on the commissions: The recording features the first appearance in Glee Club history of the group’s recent commissions, Lee Hoiby’s “Last Letter Home” and Judith Shatin’s “Jabberwocky,” in a set together with the Club’s 1991-1992 commission of James Erb’s male voices arrangement of “Shenandoah.” The Hoiby work, a setting of the last letter home from Iraq of PFC Jesse Givens, is given a sensitive performance, and Shatin’s “Jabberwocky” is the surprise hit of the recording, an adventurous and jazzy rollick through Lewis Carroll’s poem. Sadly, the Erb is one of the few low points on the disc. I remember all too well the many opportunities for a group to go flat in the first stanza, and the Glee Club doesn’t avoid them, ending the piece about a half tone low.
The Virginiana at the end, consisting of Loach’s arrangement of “Vir-ir-gin-i-a”, the “Virginia Yell Song” (which regained currency during my tenure with Club), “Rugby Road,” and the University’s alma maters, is sung powerfully and with gusto (and, unlike the 1972 recording, this version of “Rugby Road” includes one of the more scandalous verses). I look forward to playing it to console myself as the football team buries itself this fall (seriously: William and Mary???)
All in all, the piece is a great souvenir of a student group that is performing at a high level of competence. If the concert recording is this good, I can’t wait for the Club’s next recording, the Songs of Virginia collection.
