Category: Boston

An emotional and thought provoking sermon from Jennifer Mills-Knutsen at Old South on Sunday, on the occasion of music director Gregory Peterson’s last service prior to taking his post at Luther College. In the course of the sermon, she raised John Wesley’s instructions to singers, which I hadn’t read in a while and which seemed particularly pertinent, not only to our choir on Sunday but to me as I prepare to sing Mahler’s 8th:

1. Learn these tunes before you learn any others; afterwards learn as many as you please.
2. Sing them exactly as they are printed here, without altering or mending them at all; and if you have learned to sing them otherwise, unlearn it as soon as you can.
3. Sing all. See that you join with the congregation as frequently as you can. Let not a slight degree of weakness or weariness hinder you. If it is a cross to you, take it up, and you will find it a blessing.
4. Sing lustily and with a good courage. Beware of singing as if you were half dead, or half asleep; but lift up your voice with strength. Be no more afraid of your voice now, nor more ashamed of its being heard, than when you sung the songs of Satan.
5. Sing modestly. Do not bawl, so as to be heard above or distinct from the rest of the congregation, that you may not destroy the harmony; but strive to unite your voices together, so as to make one clear melodious sound.
6. Sing in time. Whatever time is sung be sure to keep with it. Do not run before nor stay behind it; but attend close to the leading voices, and move therewith as exactly as you can; and take care not to sing too slow. This drawling way naturally steals on all who are lazy; and it is high time to drive it out from us, and sing all our tunes just as quick as we did at first.
7. Above all sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing. Aim at pleasing Him more than yourself, or any other creature. In order to do this attend strictly to the sense of what you sing, and see that you heart is not carried away with the sound, but offered to God continually; so shall your singing be such as the Lord will approve here, and reward you when he cometh in the clouds of heaven.

While Rule 5 (also known as the Tenor Rule) and Rule 6 (the Bass Rule) are always pertinent, Rule 7 is interesting in the context of praise. The question of what it means to praise God through song (or any music, really) is of more than passing academic interest if, like me, you are starting to ask questions about the nature of faith, but you spend every Sunday in the choir loft instead of the congregation.

Well, I may have missed Sleater-Kinney at Avalon (sob), and I can’t make My Morning Jacket and Wilco tomorrow night, but I’m damned if I’m going to miss Alex Chilton at the Hatch Shell on Saturday—for free. He’s going to be there with “the original Box Tops”—not sure if that means the actual band or the session players that played on all the group’s classic 1960s Memphis soul albums—but he could turn up with a Turkish prison band and I’d still go if he were singing.

For the uninitiated: Alex Chilton was 17 when he had his #1 hit with the Box Tops, “The Letter” (as in, “My baby, she wrote me a letter”); then went on to be the core of Big Star, a band which single-handedly created both indie pop and power pop, as well as reviving the “jangle” sound of the Byrds so that it could be absorbed by early REM. Unfortunately Big Star failed to make a chart impact and the band fell apart over several years, but not before releasing three incredibly seminal albums.

So this should be a fun show. For more modern day Box Tops stuff, check out what’s in Current Listening on the lower right side of the page…

A week late, here is an assortment of photos I took near Symphony Hall last Saturday, the morning of my first Pops concert. The vantage point is at the intersection of Massachusetts and Westland.

In the captions, I joke about not knowing the Boston skyline. It’s true, though I have learned that the funny round building with the Darth Maul spikes is called 111 Huntington Avenue. It needs a better name.

I thought the TFC performance at last night’s Pops concert went quite well, although it is quickly becoming clear that doing a lot of these concerts back to back on weeknights has the potential to take some of the magic from the experience—primarily by exhausting me. However, in the haze of the last few minutes of last night’s concert, I found out something: Saturday night’s audience wasn’t “roaring with approval” because the chorus stood to sing.

It was roaring with approval because an enormous American flag had just unfurled directly above us in front of the proscenium, ending some ten feet above our heads.

Heh. At least I wasn’t alone in my ignorance. The guy right in front of me found that out for the first time last night, and he’s been singing in the chorus for several years.

Boston.com: Cambridge streets close after reports of exploding manholes. No one was hurt after a piece of N-Star equipment underground failed, causing manhole explosions in Central Square. More to the point, it also caused massive power failures, crippling the Red Line and bringing traffic to a standstill in much of Cambridge.

You know, tonight was going to be the night I went to Harvard Square for the Monday night trivia contest at John Harvard’s. I guess God doesn’t want me to go; the last time I had an opportunity to go, it was two days after my hand injury.

It was a great weekend, but hot. As in, I’m surprised I didn’t melt right off the stage Saturday night in my new tux. Lisa has business in New York this week and went yesterday with her parents back to NJ, taking the dogs with her. Definitely the right move. They would be having some trouble at this point, it’s so hot.

Yesterday I escaped the heat for a while by going to the movies, where I caught the Hitchhiker’s Guide at the Arlington Capitol Theatre (verdict: about a 3 out of 5. Marvin wasn’t as effectively used as he could have been, but there was a fair amount of magic in the rest of the story), then came home and napped in the air conditioning of the bedroom for a few hours. But the portable AC unit was having a hard time keeping up with the heat too.

Last night I dreamt that our new AC system had been completely installed and that we didn’t have to patch any of the walls afterwards. Oh well. Back to reality.

Having sung my first Boston Pops concert last night, I can honestly say that this is the greatest city in the world. How many places do patrons come armed with little American flags to wave when the orchestra will play “Stars and Stripes Forever” as an encore? And how many audiences roar with approval when the chorus stands up to sing the final verse of “Stars and Stripes Forever” (which I really appreciated, by the way).

Incidentally, I now know the actual lyrics to “Stars and Stripes Forever”—and, contrary to popular belief, they don’t start “Be kind to your fine feathered friends/for a duck may be somebody’s mother.” Below are the lyrics that the Tanglewood Festival Chorus sings when the Pops plays the march; print them out and bring them to Tuesday or Wednesday’s show and sing along:

Hurrah for the flag of the free.
May it wave as our standard forever
The gem of the land and the sea,
The banner of the right.
Let despots remember the day
When our fathers with might endeavor
Proclaimed as they marched to the fray,
That by their might and by their right
It waves forever.

In Christopher Baldwin’s moodily brilliant Bruno, there’s a great moment early in the strip’s run where a Minneapolis (or St. Paul) punk says to Bruno: “…but I’m not an emotionally constipated self-degrading punk on a reckless streak. Are all New Englanders so uptight?”

Her reply: “Lemmings march into a drowning watery grave, elephants go to the secret sacred burial grounds; depressed, introverted, workaholic intellectuals migrate to New England. Go figure.”

Which, as Laurie Anderson says, explains quite a few things.

Of course, one of the compensating factors about being in Boston with all the other introverted, workaholic intellectuals is the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the Boston Pops. So I thought I’d mention that my debut with the Pops (as a member of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus) is tomorrow. The theme is “Red, White, and Blue,” and the music includes some really nice pieces by American composers as well as about the American experience. There are no tickets available online for tomorrow’s performance—you’ll have to go to the box office—but tickets may be purchased online for the Tuesday and Wednesday shows. Hope to see you there.

Alas for all of those who like to believe that Egyptian pharaohs have an afterlife in which they travel by automobile trailers, here is the scoop on the longboat and Tut head I saw last week on Rt. 128. It’s a carnival ride called Pharaoh’s Fury. Thanks to 1896 Victorian Owner for the scoop.

Thanks to all who voiced their concern about my stupid hand injury. I am, fortunately, pretty functional now, though I just found out that using a mouse with a splinted hand is next to impossible. Oh well. With the combination of injury and attendant slowness, I was unable to join Dave for dinner or breakfast on his brief swing through Cambridge.

On to other challenges. I neglected to write about my first two rehearsals with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus last week; suffice it to say, I was more than a little rusty for the first practice, but things got better with the second. This makes sense, I think; prior to last week, it had been something like seven years since I sang with a symphonic choir (the Cathedral Choral Society at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC). It’s going to take some time for me to get my vocal chops back. Fortunately, the Mahler is helping in that direction. It really only has two dynamics: mezzo-piano in about four or five measures, and fortissimo everywhere else. Since dynamic control is one of the hardest things to do in a symphonic chorus, where you are lucky to be heard above the orchestra even at your loudest volume, Mahler’s dynamics help tremendously.

So with no rehearsals this week, my mission is a little different: get a white dinner jacket (standard dress for Tanglewood performers). The chorus recommended Keezer’s, so I guess I’ll be checking out a Cambridge institution. Notes TK.

Beginning a day with 600 pounds of topsoil and ending it in the emergency room is probably not uncommon. Ending it in the ER because of a wineglass is a different story.

After a bunch more lawnwork yesterday (including borrowing a Very Heavy Roller and raking about 600 pounds of topsoil), I grilled some t-bones alla Fiorentina (coated in a blend of rosemary, sage, thyme, salt and pepper, with a little olive oil) and cooked about a pound and a half of spinach with olive oil and garlic, The consensus is that we could have used another pound of spinach; the steak was good too.

The first warning sign that our glassware was revolting came when I pulled out four champagne flutes from our corner cabinet and discovered that one had a bad crack in it. (The adjunct bad sign was looking up the price of the replacement this morning.) The second bad sign came a while later, as I was drying a wine glass. I dried the bulb of the glass with my left hand while I held the base in my right. Then in a split second, the stem broke and I plunged it into my palm.

After applying pressure to stop the bleeding, we decided I probably needed to get someone to look at it to make sure no glass remained in the wound. So we ended up at Mt. Auburn ER, where I left four hours later with a tetanus shot, a cleaned puncture wound closed with three stitches, and a splint to keep me from creating more pain by moving my thumb while the cut closed.

I am learning to do a few things left handed, and fortunately after some initial awkwardness it seems my typing is mostly unimpaired. I could have been much less lucky.

After a week of Seattle-like weather, it has finally cleared and turned sunny. Just in time for my inlaws to come to town. The blog will likely be quiet for a few days; enjoy Memorial Day.

Oh, almost forgot: a year ago tomorrow we saw our house for the first time and put in an offer. We were in stealth mode about our decision then, so there are no blog details save a description of the miserable state of my health that day. Looking back it’s pretty clear that the fierce indigestion I suffered was due to stress, but I wasn’t capable of putting two and two together until I had a recurrence of the symptoms during my first week at work.

Spotted a little after 8:30 driving south on 128: a car carrier with an Egyptianate gold-plated longboat and two giant King Tut heads.

Really.

After I passed it the first time, I got stuck in a non-moving line of cars waiting to exit, and was able to grab a photo (albeit blurry).

Man. I knew traffic in Massachusetts was weird, but I had no idea it was this weird.

Signs of spring in Boston:

1. The street sweepers have been around to remove some of the beach-worth of sand left after a season’s worth of snow.
2. We’ve had a few 90°+ days.
3. There are flowers in Copley Square.

I had a few minutes last night to walk around before practice, before the light failed, and got a few good pictures, including the rooftop shot which was taken from the fourth floor of Old South’s bell tower.

Looks like our favorite Robbins Farm Park is going Hollywood. We got fliers yesterday announcing that “a History Channel production will be taking place” there today and tomorrow. I’m not used to getting these sorts of notices, so was amused by some of the text (emphasis mine):

…The documentary we are filming requires battle scene re-enactments. There will be yelling, campfires, and sword fighting.

Ah yes, the great Broadsword Battle of Menotomy! Good to know that the History Channel guys are plumping for authentic locations.</sarcasm> Anyway, I’ll see if I can get photos tonight or tomorrow.