Still going after all these years.
In other musical news, the first ten seconds of Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms makes a pretty good ringtone:
Recording courtesy the Internet Archive, who had a copy of a 1931 78RPM recording of the symphony conducted by Stravinsky the year after it premiered. I’ll be singing with the Tanglewood Festival Chorus and Boston Symphony Orchestra when we perform the work, alongside the Mozart Requiem, at Tanglewood on July 16, reprising our performance from last fall.
I don’t plan to make a habit of this, but I had to post Sage Francis’s “The Best of Times” today because it woke me up and made me think this morning. It’s a richly funny and sad look at growing up. Plus! The rhymes are not wack, as the kids would have said when I was growing up. Check it out. (Via KEXP Song of the Day; buy the full album at Strange Famous Records.)
[audio:http://www.strangefamousrecords.com/sfr-audio/_common/Sage_Francis_Best_of_Times.mp3|titles=Sage_Francis_Best_of_Times]Thanks to Google, the UVA library, and other online resources there is now a wealth of information available about the early 20th century at the University of Virginia–so much so that we can start to trace the history of individual student leaders of the Virginia Glee Club, not just the group’s directors. Two examples stand out from the Glee Club of the period from 1910 to 1920–Malcolm W. Gannaway and DeLos Thomas, Jr.
Malcolm W. Gannaway bears the unique distinction of having been president of the Virginia Glee Club twice, in discontinuous years. He was there in 1910-1911, when the Club reformed under the direction of M. S. Remsburg, and graduated in 1911. He seems to have been not just a leader but also quite a fine singer, having been tapped to sing at Baccalaurate in June 1911. Leaving for a fellowship at Harvard, he picked up a Masters there, but seems to have been unable to escape the gravitational pull of Mr. Jefferson’s University. He returned to UVa as a summer session instructor for the years 1912-1914, then enrolled as a law student. While he was there, the Glee Club reformed again under the leadership of A. L. Hall-Quest, and Gannaway apparently stepped up again as president.
DeLos Thomas, Jr. was never president of the Glee Club, but was present as an officer in the pivotal 1915-1916 and 1916-1917 seasons when the Club got back on its feet for good after a spotty existence in the early part of the century. Thomas served as secretary and treasurer under Gannaway’s leadership in 1915-1916 and went on to serve as vice-president in 1916-1917. Then the Great War happened, and Thomas joined the Navy, eventually becoming an aviator. He was still flying at the end of the war, when he led a squadron that helped to prove the efficacy of aerial bombardment as an anti-submarine defense. Quite effectively, too: his squad was to have been the first of three to attempt to sink a captured U-boat, but the following squads never got a chance to attack it as the U-boat sank after being hit with only about a dozen bombs. Thomas’s story sadly ends in tragedy, as his aircraft disappeared on a flight back from Bimini in 1923.
The BSO announced two new albums this week. I’m looking forward to hearing the Carter, and am ordering multiple copies of TFC: Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Not because it’s my chorus (I’m not on the disc–these were small group recordings that went through the year I started with the chorus), but because the repertoire is astonishing. A pair of Bruckner motets, including the Christus factus est, the Lotti Crucifixus, the Frank Martin Mass, and of course Copland’s In the Beginning.
Of course there’s a small irony–the cover photo shows the group holding music! But it’s a great image of a large Prelude concert group in Seiji Ozawa Hall. One of these days I’d love to be in that setting; our Prelude performances have been done by small groups since I joined the chorus, so I’ve never performed in Ozawa.
I am working this afternoon in my garage, having cleaned off the top of my workbench for the first time in recent memory. I find a cassette tape next to the workbench–the garage radio is the only one in the house that can play cassettes–and put it in. It’s the Virginia Glee Club and Smith College Glee Club at Smith, fall 1992. I listen to side B first—Smith sings the “Alice in Wonderland” songs by Irving Fine, a few other tunes, and then a reasonable joint performance of Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. (Though I’ve never forgiven the Smith director for insisting that we use an alto soloist in the second movement instead of a countertenor.)
Then I flip the tape to side A. The Glee Club set that fall opened with a four-part meditation on the death of Absalom: Josquin’s “Absalon, fili mi,” the Sacred Harp tune “David the King,” Tomkin’s “When David Heard,” and our premiere of Benjamin Broening’s setting of “When David Heard.” In other words, a fine uplifting set. Then I heard—a hum. Some multi-tonal stuff going on. I go over and look at the tape liner notes. It’s “Time Piece.”
“Time Piece“! Written for the King’s Singers in 1972, it goes from polytonal to high comedy to low comedy. After a while, there are cuckoo clocks, roosters, and other vocal effects, and then C. J. Higley, bless him, as the voice of God, yells “STOP!” The chorus intones, “‘Stop’, said God, holding his head…” and then continues for another five minutes more. Total run time: about 15 minutes. The Smith chorus (and audience) were moved to laughter at more than a few points.
And then we wrapped up with another three song set of spirituals.
I can’t imagine doing such a long guest set today. I also can’t believe that we only performed “Time Piece” twice (once during the Kickoff Concert that fall, once at Smith). But by springtime we were on to Young T.J. and a totally different repertoire.
I was startled and saddened last night to read about the passing of Alex Chilton, lead singer for Big Star (and the Box Tops). I came to the music of Big Star late, but became a full convert after arriving at the band via a Chris Bell recording. Big Star was really the band of the 2000-2009 decade for me in a way; I spent weeks with “#1 Record/Radio City” on repeat, put songs by the band on no fewer than 14 mix CDs, and posted a gushing love letter to the band on Blogcritics (where I was rightly remanded for my callowness).
It’s hard to believe he’s gone. I know he was a completely different artist after the first two albums–hell, even their third album is a completely different experience–but listening to “Give Me Another Chance” he seems like he should be immortal.
Other posts: Joe Gross on Alex Chilton’s passing; another link to an article about the recording of the classic Radio City album.
The aftermath of a big flood feels like the right time to publish my first mix in about six months. Happy time is one part of a two part mix. This time, I might not ever get around to part two, because it’s the downside of this mix, and I’m enjoying the happy side too much.
Track list:
Commentary: Did R.E.M. record “Finest Worksong” with the horns in mind, or was it a cynical touch by some producer when it was time to release the single? It reads as a brilliant move, though, 22 years later. I’m of two minds about “Reena”–such a simple song for Sonic Youth–but the fact that I can’t get it out of my head two years on settles it for me. Ditto “Moby Octopad”, which is less a song than an extended riff, but no less brilliant for that.
“Scared Straight,” on the other hand, is a song, and a flipping brilliant one. And the horns alone are worth the price of admission. The horns also provide a great segue into “Hot Pants Road,” which makes a very nice segue into “I’ll Take You There.” A nice little singer songwriter set–“Helicopter,” Paul Simon’s “Beautiful,” “Cello Song”–follows, before we get into the psychosexual set of “Thirteen,” “It’s Not the Only Way To Feel Happy,” “Hopefully,” and “Fistful of Love” (and only Lou Reed could set up that song).
And then the last set. I won’t say anything about it, except that “Sweet Thing” may be the greatest single song ever. How was it that I missed out on Astral Weeks for all this time?
(Update: now on Art of the Mix.)
I was going to write up Monday night’s Virginia Glee Club concert yesterday, but a couple busy days at work and a rehearsal last night ensured that I would get beaten to it (see the Tin Man’s writeup of the New York concert here). So I’ll just give a few thoughts about my experience at Monday night’s concert at Wellesley College.
First: I had not been back to visit Wellesley since our spring trip with Club in the spring of 1991. I saw an old friend (now the editor in chief at Rosetta Stone–time flies) there, but don’t remember much else except the beauty of the campus and of Houghton Chapel. On Monday night, it was a different story, largely because I arrived after dusk and had to scramble to get to the concert on time. Parking in the dark, I found my way back to the chapel via a brisk walk and got there in time to catch a little pre-concert warmup by the Boston Saengerfest singers. As I oriented myself, I saw a tall goateed man in a tux with a Virginia bow tie coming my way, and was delighted to finally meet Frank Albinder after various conference calls and emails. As we were chatting, up came another familiar face–Alex Cohn (Club ’97), now writer and photographer at the Concord (NH) Monitor. It was starting to feel a little like old home week.
Then the concert started. The Wellesley College Choir were lovely (vocally), performing many numbers from memory, and their conductor Lisa Graham was energetic and brilliant. Their performance was followed by a four-number set by the Boston Saengerfest Men’s Chorus. It was observed near me that the average age of the men in the chorus must have been about 70, but their energy through their numbers was unmistakable, and the tenor soloist in the third number had a brilliant voice. And then there was their performance of “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady,” which had the entire Wellesley Choir in giggles.
Afterwards, the Glee Club joined Saengerfest for a joint performance of a few songs, then went through their own set—beginning with “Alle Psallite Cum Luja,” continuing through a set of more modern works (“Embraceable You,” an hysterical song about the real meaning of “Glee”), and then an alumni sing-along section. I had forgotten more than I remembered of Frederic Field Bullard’s “Winter Song,” but “Ten Thousand Voices” and the “Good Old Song” were permanently embedded in my brain. And the joint performance of the Biebl “Ave Maria” with the Wellesley Choir was something else again too–not an SATB arrangement, but the two choirs traded verses before performing as a double chorus at the end.
If I had a tear near my eye by the end of “Ten Thousand Voices,” I had more from laughter after the show talking with Frank and the Club guys about past tours and their current endeavors (and seeing Frank and Lisa Graham exchange hats, above). I hope that all continues well for them on the road and that their crowds in DC and Virginia are full to overflowing.
The 2010 Tour of the Northeast of the Virginia Glee Club is underway, and you can follow it on the first ever Club tour blog, Virginia Glee Club On Tour. So far it is bringing up memories of tours past: vain exhortations from group leadership to not strain the voice, movies on the bus (tip to current Club guys: at night, cars driving next to the bus can see what’s on the TVs through the tinted glass. Just sayin’), and the first performance of the tour. Looking forward to seeing everyone on Monday night at Wellesley.
Today’s Virginia Glee Club history update looks at a Glee Club director who was head of the U.Va. music department before he chucked it all for a career in Hollywood scoring films such as … H.O.T.S.?!
David Davis, to the extent that he is remembered today, is best known for his arrangements and compositions for the Glee Club (“Summer Songs,” “Broken Glass”), but he had a long career in music of both a more serious and lucrative kind … though not at the same time. Originally from New Orleans, he came to the University with degrees from Peabody College, Vanderbilt University and Harvard. He made his name as a serialist composer, and got the sort of reception that serialists usually got (a 1964 New York Times review of a concert of his works noted of his Sonata for Trumpet that the piece “showed more manipulative ability than imagination” and that his Three Canzone for violin, clarinet, saxophone, and piano “went on too long with too few strong ideas to maintain its flow”).
In Glee Club history he is noted as a co-conductor of the Glee Club alongside Donald MacInnis, but that may be simply due to unclear chronology and poor record keeping. Certainly he was the sole conductor of the group in 1961, as attested in Corks and Curls of that year. Whatever the case, as a University professor he rose through the ranks fairly quickly. By 1964 he had been promoted to Chairman of the Department, having made associate professor in 1962, four years after arriving at the university. (This might explain Donald Loach‘s transition to Club director in that year.)
Then in 1966, with one year left to go on his chairmanship, he resigned from the University “for personal reasons” and headed out West, to Hollywood. While subsequent student newspaper articles that discussed Davis (in the context of his compositions for Club) generally breathlessly reported that he was “now a Hollywood theme writer,” the extent of his career there is unknown. IMDB records only four credits for him, including one TV series (“Thrill Seekers”) and three films; the aforementioned H.O.T.S., a T&A film, was his last credit in 1979.
How does one follow a career in music and years in Hollywood? Why, by becoming director of a sanitary district in Oregon, of course! Davis retired there and was elected director of the Roads End Sanitary District in Lincoln County, Oregon, in 1994, a position he still held as of 2005.
I can’t resist posting this. I don’t even listen to the band, but the video… well, see for yourself:
As I prepared the wiki page for the 1994 Tour of the Northeast, I couldn’t help but think about the upcoming itinerary that this year’s Virginia Glee Club has set for their Songs of Virginia tour, the 2010 Tour of the Northeast. Both itineraries had their outliers–1994 began in Knoxville, Tennessee, before a hell-for-leather bus ride up to South Hadley, Massachusetts. The 2010 tour begins innocently enough–Philadelphia suburbs up to Northampton and Wellesley, Mass., then back down to New York, then back into Virginia. Then there’s that massive detour up to Michigan.
Yes, Michigan. There are a few legendary gigs in Glee Club history, and being invited up to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the second oldest still extant glee club (Michigan) in the US, along with the oldest (Harvard), will surely shape up to be one of them. Three of the seven oldest glee clubs in the country on one program should be news in and of itself. And the fact that the next president of UVA will be in the audience is just icing on the cake. The 440 Years of Song gig should be legendary. (As long as it doesn’t end with this year’s version of Jim Wiser going to “reason” with anyone, it should be a good afterparty too.)
I’m looking forward to seeing the group at the Wellesley gig on March 8. I hope to see a bunch of other UVA alums there too. After all, how many times do you get to hear Virginia fight songs among the Wellesley hills? Or do a brisk round of Alle psallite in the parking lot? (OK, maybe not the last one.)
Some new features on the Virginia Glee Club wiki. Pages have been added for selected Glee Club seasons which list the concerts, tours, and other events known for that season, and include information about the conductor and officers of the group, where available.
The most fun part of this section of the wiki has been the old concert programs. The administrator of the Virginia Glee Club has scanned quite a few concert programs, including the one from the premiere of the Testament of Freedom, and I was inspired to do the same, starting with programs and posters from the 1993-1994 season (that’s the group photo from the spring of 1994 above, as used on the poster for the Tour of the Northeast).
As always, contributions of information from other alumni are welcome as we build this record of the Glee Club’s history together.
For the love of me, I don’t know how I ended up here again. The last time I moved my iTunes library to a bigger disk, I was able to use the Consolidate Library command and let iTunes do all the file moves. This time… not so much.
I was trying to do two things at once with this move: put all my music onto a larger external drive (a 1TB MiniStack from OtherWorld Computing. Can’t recommend the enclosure enough for form factor, ports, and reliability; my older 500 MB drive is in the same enclosure), and move to the new iTunes library layout, where there are separate top level folders for music, movies, podcasts, etc. This didn’t work, because partway through the process writing to the disk errored out. I quickly realized that the problem was that I was doing it over the network (the new 1TB drive and my older drive were both connected to my AirPort Extreme). So I directly connected the new drive via FireWire, left the old one on the AirPort, and tried to consolidate again. Only this time, it told me I didn’t have enough disk space. On the new 1TB drive.
What?
Then I realized what was going on. The restructuring of the library wasn’t moving files, it was creating another copy of the files on the same drive. I had started consolidating before I did the library restructuring, so now it was trying to write a second copy of all my music on the drive. Since I probably have about 515 GB of music to work with (some resident on my MacBook Pro’s internal drive), two copies weren’t going to fit on the new drive.
So now I had: a full copy of my library spread across the old drive and my hard drive; one partial copy at the root of my new drive; and another partial copy in the proper location in a Music subdirectory. I didn’t want to delete either of the partial copies because songs in my library were mapped to both locations; I couldn’t reconsolidate on the old drive for lack of space. But I still had over 160 GB free on the new drive, so I could probably copy over the missing files by hand.
So I’m going the manual route to clean up. First, I went to the Terminal and ran the comm command, which compares two text files line by line; I fed it the directory listings of the old external drive and the new final destination, and it spit out about 165 differences, directories that didn’t get copied from the old drive to the new one.
Second, I’m going line by line through the results of the comm listing. For each line, I:
I expect I’ll be done with the process sometime next week. Painful, but at least no data is lost. Then I can repeat with any files from my laptop’s disk, a much shorter list.
The final cleanup may take some XSLT fu. I will need to triple check the final library to make sure no tracks point to locations on the old drives. I’m going to try using XSLT on the iTunes Library.xml file to see if I can cull out the problem tracks that way; if not, it’ll be a matter of trial and error, because there’s no convenient way to find the file system locations of iTunes tracks from within iTunes itself, other than one at a time.
I’d love to have this be a more error-free process. I’m beginning to think that iTunes libraries on external drives simply isn’t a well tested scenario by Apple.
I have quite a few updates to post about the progress of the history of the Virginia Glee Club on the wiki, but today’s item deserved a jump to the head of the line: the resurfacing of a lost recording of the 1993 Virginia Glee Club singing our commissioned work to commemorate Thomas Jefferson’s 250th birthday, Young T.J.
Some background: Thomas Jefferson is a Big Thing at the University of Virginia, the school he founded and one of only three accomplishments on his tombstone. When the 250th anniversary of his birth rolled around, there were a lot of stops pulled out to celebrate: Mikhail Gorbachev came to speak at the University, the Today Show did a remote from Monticello, Bill Clinton spoke at the Jefferson Memorial…
And Judith Shatin wrote a setting of the Declaration of Independence that proved what the Testament of Freedom had hinted: setting Jefferson’s writing to music was full of pitfalls.
The Glee Club had begun commissioning new works for men’s voices in the 1991-1992 season, and for Jefferson’s birthday we wanted something special. So our fearless director John Liepold reached out to his old professor and mentor Neely Bruce for a Jefferson-inspired composition. They decided that, since the Glee Club had already gone down the Jefferson words path with Testament, the smart thing was to choose texts that inspired Jefferson instead. Bruce selected ten texts from Jefferson’s Commonplace Book and set them to music that Jefferson might have heard in his youth, songs heavily inspired by the Sacred Harp and other shape note music. The result was Young T.J., a group of short settings that try to imagine what influenced the young Jefferson.
The Glee Club performed the whole work a few times that year, notably at our spring concert, and used a short set of the works on a number of occasions, mostly notably during our trifecta of performances on April 13, 1993. We began the morning at Monticello, shivering in the pre-dawn light on risers, and using Young T.J. to provide music for the commercial cutaways during the broadcast. I also remember standing at a urinal under Monticello next to Willard Scott, and of course Katie posing for pictures with Tyler Magill, Paul Stancil, Scott Norris, Denis McNamara, and Mitch Harris (above). We also performed portions of the work at the Jefferson Memorial for Bill Clinton and a capacity crowd (after a frantic drive from Monticello to DC at top speed followed by a sprint across the grass to get to the stage on time). A final performance at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond that night was the capper.
So, the lost recording. This page, linked from Neely Bruce’s publisher’s site, has a full set of recordings of all ten movements. When exactly they were recorded is subject to dispute–the page claims they were recorded at Monticello on April 13, 1993, but there’s no background noise and we didn’t have time to run and record everything that day, I don’t think. But they are unmistakably a document of the 1992-1993 Glee Club under John Liepold’s direction. And since none of Liepold’s recordings have ever been transferred to digital release (only three tapes, the 1991 Christmas Concert, a concert at River Road Baptist Church, and the Dove in the Hall recording surfaced from his time with the group through the summer of 1994), this is a nice present to have, even if it’s not available for download.
