Category: Music

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.

I’ve turned in my score and come back to work from Carnegie Hall, but I still can’t get Bolcom’s 8th out of my mind. Then the perilous path was planted/And a river and a stream/from every cliff and tomb/till on the bleached bones/red clay brought forth, indeed. My bleached bones are a little sore from too little sleep and the train ride, but I remain under the spell of the piece.

There was no review in the New York Times this morning—one hopes one will be forthcoming—but a pair of reviews in other sources give a pretty good impression of the concert. ConcertoNet gave a positive review, pointing out the strong role of the women of the TFC in the work (“At other times, as in The Shadowy Daughter of Urthona, the rarified women’s group (as well as a lovely solo by Lorenzee Cole) illustrated this feminine poem”). And on a blog called Leonard Link, New York Law professor Arthur S. Leonard specifically called out the “excellence of the chorus” while declining to give a detailed impression of the piece since he and other listeners in the balcony did not receive text booklets. It’s unfortunate, as I thought our diction last night was particularly clear; I guess the hall swallowed the consonants.

For the benefit of Mr. Leonard and the other balcony listeners, the texts, as well as the full unexcerpted program notes, are available in PDF on the BSO web site.

It was one of those concerts where you had to wait for the review to see how it came out.

William Bolcom’s Symphony #8 is an enormously complex work compressed into less than 40 minutes of polychromatic, muscular, dense writing, in which the chorus is singing for approximately 35 of those minutes. And the chorus runs its vocal gamut, from sprechstimme to dense six-voice a cappella passages to pure melodic intervals that recall the Andrews Sisters to big Mahlerian finale scales. Add to that an orchestral arrangement that crams a marimba, piano with plucked strings, bells and half a dozen other unusual percussion instruments alongside the strings, winds, and brass, all playing hell for leather through the opening and closing movements, and you begin to understand why the audience response might be muted as they absorb what they heard.

And muted it was. At the end the audience applauded seated, rising to its feet only after the orchestra and chorus stood for their bows. None of the wild adulation that greeted our Gurrelieder performances. We joked onstage that the applause was actually much louder, but that we had been deafened by the French horns and timpani in the final chords.

The Globe’s review (Jeremy Eichler) captures some of the challenges and the rewards of the piece:

The chorus has an extremely prominent role throughout the 35-minute work. Those not steeped in the mythology of Blake’s prophetic poetry will need to rely on help from the program to grasp the meaning of figures like “the shadowy daughter of Urthona” or “the red Orc.” Or you can sit back and let the textual details slide. Bolcom’s choral writing is so assured that the expressive force of the music comes through clearly. This is especially true in the rich and harmonically pungent passage that closes the second movement. The finale ends with a grand orchestral-choral tapestry woven from Blake’s line “For every thing that lives is Holy,” and crowned with a blazing apotheosis.

The sincerity of this music is touching and there is no denying its primal expressive power; its dimensions feel at times overstuffed and its emotional pitch less varied than one might imagine for a cosmos as vast as Blake’s. Singing from memory, the Tanglewood Festival Chorus gave a positively heroic performance, and Levine and the orchestra went a long way toward bringing out the countless buzzing details in this score.

An article in the Globe last week about composer William Bolcom’s new string octet, given its Boston premiere on Friday, spilled the beans about Bolcom’s new Symphony No. 8, commissioned by James Levine and the Boston Symphony Orchestra and dedicated to the BSO and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. It’s a monumental work in four movements, a choral symphony that sets the prophetic poetry of William Blake (“The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” “America: A Prophecy,” and “Jerusalem, or the New Albion” among others) into a four-movement symphonic poem. It’s a foreboding piece to learn, particularly for the chorus that has to memorize six to eight voice harmonies that are frequently in augmented sevenths and diminished ninths to each other.

But last night we ran through it for the first time for Maestro Levine, and it started to make sense. And the moments of great lyricism started to insinuate themselves into my skull. And I started to realize that part of coming to terms with this piece is coming to terms with Blake himself, which is no small task.

I feel, as a lone chorister facing the work, somewhat like one of Blake’s copper plates. Having received my acid bath I am ready to reveal his text in all its glory.

We will premiere the work at Symphony Hall next weekend and in New York at Carnegie Hall on Monday night. If my good friend Pes, whose undergrad thesis was a work on Blake that he etched into copper plates (!), is out there listening, you should come by. I’d love to hear what you think of Bolcom’s take on the visionary.

I had been meaning to post this for a while and finally got around to it. I couldn’t quite pull off a top 10 for 2007, but I did manage a top 12, and you can find it on Lists of Bests (where you can create your own list of “Best of 2007” and see how your tastes stack up against other LoB users).

My number one, unsurprisingly, was Radiohead’s In Rainbows, which stayed at the top of my playlist for a good three months—longer than any other album this year. Right behind it, of course, was Black Francis’s Bluefinger. And behind that? A few surprises. Marissa Nadler’s Bird on the Water totally pwned me the first time I heard it, and it’s one of the few albums I listened to twice in a row this year. Only a little weakness in some of the lyrics kept it out of the top 2. M.I.A.’s Kala, on the other hand, snuck past me when it came out; it took her KEXP in-studio appearance to get me to listen to it again, and now I’m hooked. And Feist’s The Reminder is a nice chocolate ice-cream of an album, in that it’s probably unhealthy how many times I spun it this year to enjoy its sweet pop hooks.

The rest of the list is probably unsurprising—Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, new records from Iron & Wine, the White Stripes, the Arcade Fire, and PJ Harvey. But two were kind of surprising to me personally. I didn’t expect Nick Cave’s side project Grinderman to be as much fun as it is, and I was totally blown away by Rickie Lee Jones’s rambling, honest, and deeply devotional Sermon on Exposition Boulevard—highly recommended for all, and a must listen if you’re a seminarian. (Ahem).

The only mix that I’ve ever done that started as a visual pun, coverflow contains a set of covers that hit some familiar ground and some unfamiliar items as well. It’s hard to do these right; my previous effort suffered from some lofi recordings and the same is true here. But there’s some fun stuff here. Particularly fun was sorting through the long hidden track at the end of Justin Rosolino’s first self published album to call out a few items that I feel are totally what covers are about.

Usual Suspects™: you’ll get this mix along with days that you choose to ignore.

I love the awful classical covers linked in this post (via). Not least of which the one that provides the spectacular thought that Die Walküre = breasts, or VW hubcaps, or breasts covered with VW hubcaps!

But I was especially pleased to see, on the Westminster Gold fansite, this particular number—which my sister actually gave me for Christmas!

Here’s one for the end of 2007: days that you choose to ignore, now posted at Art of the Mix (AOTM Mix ID 116837). I’m particularly proud of the first three or five transitions on this one; afterwards it gets a bit choppy.

Copies en route shortly to the usual suspects; contact me using the link below (on the site, if you’re reading this in a feedreader) if you want to be a usual suspect or haven’t been getting copies of my mixes already. Artwork also forthcoming…