Category: Music

Boston Globe: Glimpses of Fire, Passion at Symphony Hall. As I mentioned last night, Dwayne Croft’s cold was in evidence, and Jeremy Eichler mentions it, and is negative about Marcello Giordano’s performance as well. But he gives thumbs up to Yvonne Naef and practically glows about the TFC, giving the longest review mention (a full paragraph!) that we’ve had from the Globe in recent memory:

The hero of last night’s outing was the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which sang, from the outset, with unflagging energy, commitment, and focus. The expansive contours and sheer tonal force required for the score’s massive climaxes were all present, but so were the delicacy and transparency necessary to bring across passages such as the beautifully tender prayer sung by the Trojan women at the outset of the second tableau of Act II.

Oh, and thanks to the angle the photographer took for the article photo, you can clearly see me. Look directly above Clayton Brainerd (the second standing soloist from the right) and I’m two rows up, with my mouth wide, wide open. Hey, it was a big scene.

And regarding the “rough-edged” comments about the work: we have three more performances, and history tells us that each one will be better and better.

Opening night is past. Les Troyens, Part I is a magnificent beast, and it has already bloodied the cast—poor Dwayne Croft had a cold the likes of which I’ve never heard from someone singing a part like that. I think we all breathed a sigh of relief at the end of the duet. All the soloists were magnificent, but the prize has to go to Yvonne Naef, or as I called her in my Facebook status “Yvonne Fricking Naef” in homage to John Moltz’s Jennifer Fricking Connolly. Her Cassandra is vulnerable, fierce, and fey, and easily the strongest presence on stage. A close second would have to be our women: hats off to Fanw and other women of the chorus, whose second act number is one of the great heart-seizing moments in Berlioz (or in all women’s chorus literature, for that matter).

I’ve been overwhelmed with the rehearsals, but now I can’t wait to sing it again. Good thing we repeat Part I three more times!

My friends and colleagues in the Suspicious Cheese Lords have been busy lately. This weekend they sang for Pope Benedict XVI (Yes, seriously.) at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center. The piece was a composition by George Cervantes, a setting of the Peace Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, making the occasion that much cooler. Plus Skip was interviewed on CNN about the performance. And the video is prime Skip. Full video of the performance (starts at around 18:30). and other activities at the center is available through the EWTN Global Catholic Network site.

Way to go, guys. I expect to hear about your official appointment as choir in residence at the Sistine Chapel any day now. (But maybe not an appointment to be a CNN correspondent! Boy, they cut Skip off pretty fast in that interview!)

My 2:42 mix is now posted at Art of the Mix. I decided to keep to the format of the original, and only included twelve songs.

I noticed, looking at Isis’s version, that some of her track lengths were different from mine—for instance, her version of “That Teenage Feeling” by Neko Case is 2:42, whereas mine is 2:43. A second’s difference is surprising—maybe it’s just the difference between buying the track digitally and ripping it. Or maybe different media players round differently, who knows.

I haven’t had a chance to take up Greg’s challenge and make a 4:33 mix yet. Who knows what that would turn out like? Very quiet, I expect.

Joshua Allen at The Morning News (via BoingBoing) writes about his deductive process of identifying the perfect pop song length, at two minutes and 42 seconds:

The scientists then dug up this song by a group that pretty much defines one-hit wonder: the La’s. The song is “There She Goes,” and is so flawless that it instantly made everything else the band did pointless. This ditty is two minutes and 42 seconds, and is all about songwriting economy….

What else is at 2:42? “Don’t Do Me Like That” by Tom Petty. “Divine Hammer” by the Breeders. “Helplessly Hoping” by Crosby, Stills & Nash. “Get Up” by R.E.M. “California Dreamin’” by the Mamas & the Papas. “This Charming Man” by the Smiths.

You need more proof? Jerk. Let’s look at Sgt. Pepper. “Lovely Rita” is two minutes, 42 seconds. It delivers that psychedelic vibe and a coda but then gets the hell out of your life.

Allen then lays down the challenge with a mixtape of twelve songs that clock in at exactly 2:42. Which sounds like a meme waiting to happen. Unfortunately my iTunes library is at home so I can’t try the experiment, but I’ll put it out there for the usual suspects. Can you top his mix?

We had an unusual rehearsal the other night. Instead of being in the chorus room in the bowels of Symphony Hall, we were on stage, and we had cameras on us. It was for the BSO’s podcast series, and the episode is now out: an interview with our fearless leader John Oliver, with shots of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus rehearsing the Berlioz Les Troyens and some footage from the recent Met staging of the opera. I think it gives good insight into both the piece and the chorus (as well as some amusing photos of John in the 1970s).

What’s that? You didn’t know the BSO had a podcast series? Well, that might be because the podcast link is ill-placed on the front page, is not autodiscoverable, and isn’t in the iTunes directory. Not to mention, the podcast URL has a session ID in it. Hey BSO webmaster—fix it, won’t you?

In another of an intermittent series of posts about past acquaintances of mine who are now Doing Great Things, I happened to think the other day about Darius Van Arman. Darius and I went to the University of Virginia at around the same time, and primarily bumped into each other in the basement of Peabody Hall, where all the University publications were at that time. I was getting a poetry magazine called Rag & Bone off the ground; he was working on a music and creative magazine called 3.7. I publicly disclaimed some things the magazine did (spending lots of money on heavy cover stock, lookalike black covers, extremely goth fiction and illustration, heavy reliance on distorting type on a path in Quark—the latter was a Darius trademark) and privately admired the magazine’s confidence in its own aesthetic and their ability to get interviews with musicians and artists, a real differentiator between the magazine and anything else that was going on.

I bumped into Darius a little while after graduation. He was still living in Charlottesville but was working on starting a label, which he was going to call Jagjaguwar.

This week I decided to search for Jagjaguwar and see what I could find. What I found was: Jagjaguwar is the home of bands like Okkervil River, Black Mountain, Bon Iver, Wolf Parade side project Sunset Rubdown, and Ladyhawk. They’s got a good nationwide scope through a distribution deal with indie label Secretly Canadian. Heck, I’ve been listening to Jagjaguwar cuts on the KEXP podcasts for a year or more without knowing it. Darius has made it… well, not big, but he’s made something real without compromising his credibility. Heck, he even did an NPR interview with ex-Sleater Kinney guitarist Carrie Brownstein. Back in the Hook, that would have gone the other way around.

Busy today, so just a quick note: I think eMusic just justified the cost of a subscription to the service. All the Rolling Stones albums on ABKCO are on the service now, including the singles compilations. Go, go, download.

The big concert, that is, or concerts to be more precise. The last Tanglewood Festival Chorus concert series of the Symphony Hall part of our season is coming up, and it’s big: Hector Berlioz’s two part opera, Les Troyens. Everything about it is big: five acts divided into two nights, big chorus, big orchestra, big writing.

The background on the opera’s composition makes for some interesting reading, a classic battle between artist and public. Berlioz wrote what he felt to be a magnum opus, only to have it whittled down by the only opera house willing to perform it. Of the audiences who came to see the opera, he remarked glumly, “Yes, they are coming, but I am going.”

We’ve had a pair of rehearsals, and all I can say is that so much tonality, after the astringent aesthetic of the Bolcom, feels kind of sinful. Should be a fun run.

I don’t know what it says about me that I spent a good part of Saturday morning obsessively trying to remember the name of a toy that I had twenty-five years ago. In my defense, I was only trying to get the second movement of Bolcom’s 8th out of my head.

The toy I was trying to recall was a construction set. The main parts were a polygonal hub to which one connected struts to build the structure. After a good amount of aimless Google searches (though building toys 80s rods does turn up some funny things), the name swum into my head, unbidden. Ramagon.

The best image I found of the Ramagon toy was in an eBay listing. You can see the struts, in multiple lengths, in the front of the photo, with the soccer-ball-like hubs beside them. I had forgotten the snap-in panels, which were in different shapes to adopt to the different angles that could be formed from the intersection of hubs and spokes. And this was one of the cooler bits about the toy: while you could build right angles with it, its native symmetry was triangular and pyramidal. The symmetry came from the hubs, which are octagonal in cross section. The hubs could accept eight spokes in the same plane around their equator, eight more above or below the equatorial plane, coming off at about 45 degree angle, and one more at each pole. The spokes snapped in and out easily, as their tips were composed of two prongs that could be compressed together to fit into the holes in the hubs, and compressed again to come out.

The spokes were the weak link in the set; while the rest of the construction was solid, the plastic was just on the brittle side of strong and those prongs were prone to snapping off. (You’ll notice in the eBay image that a few prongs, disconnected from their struts, are included). But the set as a whole was very cool. You could build stuff with it that simply outclassed anything that you could do with either Lego (of the time, with its strongly rectilinear bias) or Erector. In fact, I remember hearing from one of my Dad’s NASA colleagues that the set strongly resembled something that was to become the foundation for the Space Station frame, and that NASA used the Ramagon sets to model future structures (this mention of the toy in a Kennedy Space Center kid’s book is kind of suggestive).

So what happened to Ramagon, and why isn’t it remembered in the same breath as Lego? One issue, perhaps was the purity of the hub and spoke model. You’ll notice in the eBay picture that the hubs had to do a lot of extra duty as engines, gun barrel mouths, and even wheels (with special rubber wraparound “tires” applied). There was no real room for the custom pieces that allowed Lego builders to extend beyond the basic brick.

And the company building the toy had its own issues. The founder, Richard Gabriel, took the concept from licensee to licensee but was apparently never able to get enough going to build market momentum.