Last night I went to see my friends Jason (aka mrwhistlebear) and Karen perform at the Registry Theatre, as Gaedelica (named from a Gaelic book of poetry, Carmina Gadelica). They are both quite talented. One of their pieces was an original arrangement of The Huron Carol, which I hope they record. Great job guys!

They were followed by a Celtic band, Rant Maggie Rant, which I knew nothing about, other than the evening theme was "Celtic" and "Christmas music". If you know me well, you might know this pairing might make me apprehensive. It did, but I'm glad I stuck around. The Registry Theatre was packed to the gills; they were turning people away when I got there (20 minutes before the show). The band was talented, very energetic, and their two lead singers were attractive, too. One sort of looked like a slightly more fey version of Sting. The other singer made me want to start wearing vests- he wore his well- black vest, black dress shirt, purple tie, gray slacks. Porkpie hat.

And home by 10:30.
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This weekend's main project was cleaning my home office floor. I rented a carpet vac, followed the instructions, and hey, the carpet is clean! ...-er, at least. I'm worried about the off-gassing- my last attempt to clean carpet in this house resulted in a severe reaction from dan, and while it didn't smell like anything yesterday, today there was something like new-car smell, so I went over it again with the vac with just water instead of soap. And there was a distressing amount of dirt picked up the second time around, as well. I suppose this is a cost of dog ownership. Yeah. I'm blaming the dog. She's the main reason we still have one room with carpet- it would make her unhappy if we took it out, because she uses it as her towel when she comes in from the rain and snow (after she's already been dried off).
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Also yesterday I made fudge for today's Christmas Desert Potluck at Quaker Meeting. I was, once again, apprehensive (it's been years since I've made fudge), but it got a number of accolades, including people coming around asking who made it, so I'm happy. Meeting was good, too.
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My desk is a disaster area. I haven't gotten back on top of the scattered papers since getting back from two weekends away, and we're reaching critical density. Ack.

At least the house is otherwise clean. Except for the furniture from my office which I moved out to clean the floor. Hm, I guess I should put that back when the floor's dry, or dan will be surprised.
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Dan comes home on Tuesday! Yay!

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I finally upgraded my laptop to Snow Leopard; the "family pack" DVD has been sitting on my desk since dan did his upgrade. It wasn't as painless as I'd hoped, because when I last swapped drives, I apparently used the wrong default partition map (Apple Partition Map instead of GUID) so Snow Leopard said I had to wipe the drive. So I babysat a reformat/recopy/upgrade (in the process discovering that my backup was not, in fact, bootable as I had thought; whoops.)

Apple did an excellent thing with this release, by the way- I was still running 10.4, and the upgrade DVD jumped me up to 10.6. They didn't have to make it this easy, and in Windows and Linux, I would be looking at either a sequential two-step upgrade, or wiping the disk and reinstalling my software and data; both probably a more fault-prone process than whatever Apple had to do to make this upgrade work in one step.

And I like Snow Leopard.

(Although, chatting with dan in iChat, we discovered the graphic for :-P looks like a big smile-and-tongue, which is just wrong. I don't know if it was that way in 10.4, but NOW IT IS WRONG.)

Ahem.

We went to Toronto last night to see A New Brain, a musical put on by Acting Up Stage- which closes tonight. (Hey, there are still tickets! Go see it! I'm thinking of a few Toronto friends who would enjoy this- particularly metalana & amaryllis...)

Music and lyrics are by William Finn, who also wrote Falsettos and 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee. It's mostly autobiographical; he wrote it after he had a brain aneurysm. Gordon Schwinn (not Finn) is a songwriter for a kids' TV show with a tyrannical frog for a boss (Mr. Bungee is the TV personality; he shows up in a number of scenes, via hallucinations and in Gordon's imagination. He's always in a frog suit.)

There are songs about calimari, sailboats, craniotomy, genetics, and horse-racing. There is an unsympathetic doctor who is very excited about his patients' diseases. Roger and his Jewish mother have a messy relationship; Roger and his seemingly upper-crust boyfriend have a complicated relationship that seems a bit sketched-out instead of properly developed.

The songs have made me chuckle ever since dan got the audio recording of the show a few years ago. But seeing them acted was a real treat- there is overall flow to the story when you see the players interact; and they do an excellent job constructing story-scenes from Gordon's memory.

My favourite example, I think, is all the medical professionals put on patient clothes, come out with walkers and saline drip poles, sing the beginning of the song about Roger's father- which segues into a horse-race, where the three walkers turn into the wall of a racetrack and the players are all super-slow-motion bettors at the track waving on the horses, as Roger sings about how his father lost their family fortunes but claimed it was worth it; sometimes joy is expensive. It really worked for me.

There were also great dance numbers on Gordon's Laws of Genetics ("why is the smart son always gay?") and a dream scene when he's convinced he's brain-dead and he'll never get to finish his best songs.

The overall tone is "madcap," which does fit the off-kilter medical emergency side of it. But there are places it doesn't quite flow properly (some parts with the boyfriend seem sketched, and the parts with a homeless woman who never seems to exactly have a place).

I'd give it 3 of 4 stars, where 2 stars is "go if you like musicals." (And I suppose 4 stars is "even go if you don't like musicals...")

An interesting History of Hallelujah from Leonard Cohen to the 100+ covers of the song. The author suggests it's been dumbed down- the first few covers changed words and tone; and subsequent covers were covers of one or another of the previous covers and lack some of the emotional complexity of the original.

And so when Jeff Buckley decided to cover "Hallelujah," he didn't really cover Cohen, he covered Cale; the form and lyrics of their versions match almost exactly, while none of the three previous versions (Cohen studio, Cohen live, Cale) match at all. [Buckley's] effect was to flatten the song emotionally, to take out all the different Hallelujahs Cohen depicted and reduce them to one: the cold and broken, which appears here twice.

And that's the version that gets recycled for TV and movie, it becomes a placeholder for "people are being sad now."

melted_snowball and I went to see the Met production of Doctor Atomic, a John Adams opera set just before the first atom bomb test at Los Alamos.

It was at our local Cineplex, which made for a surreal "brave the hordes of afternoon children's matinees to sit down and see the Metropolitan Operahouse live in front of me in High Definition video." d. saw a Britten opera (Peter Grimes) in the same theatres, earlier this year, but this was new for me.

I consider myself a poor opera watcher- I've never gotten into the form, partly because it's so darn expensive, and watching opera on video has just never turned my crank. This experience was neat. Probably not as neat as seeing it front-row-centre at the Met, but it was a fine afternoon activity (instead of a weekend NYC trip such as bats22's experience last month.)

The opera?

I *loved* the set: we first see the periodic table projected on the curtain; which goes translucent to show a rough mountain landscape made of suspended fabric, and metal junk dangled from the ceiling. The curtain goes up, and two three-story walls come in from either side- each with pictures projected in a 7x3 grid. The grid elements turn out to be window-shade curtains, which are raised to show people working in individual cubbyholes, sitting at tiny desks doing math. And there we have the setting of much of the first act; the scientists at Los Alamos stressing over their as-of-yet unproven (and decidedly scary) atomic bomb.

The music was neat- staccato, rhythmic- d. said it sounded too much like a film score, but I liked it, admittedly not as much as his orchestral work (indeed I don't think I know any Adams by the sound of it other than that linked piece. More to explore!)

I feel poorly qualified to judge the performers; I didn't see any faults, certainly.

The only false note in the opera, I felt, was the very end. The program describes the conclusion as: "the triggering circuits begin to fire. 'Zero minus one.' There is an eerie silence."

They ended the opera with a bright light behind the stage, lighting up the metal junk and the suspended fabric mountains. This didn't feel eerie; it felt like an attempt to evoke a nuclear blast, and it fell short.

There were wonderful eerie moments- in the second act as the scientists are revealed turned every-which-way in their cubbies, many upside-down and looking like they got scattered like toys. Then, minutes later, the top row of scientists are replaced by other figures, which I won't describe in case it's a spoiler.

The best background info I found was an annotated synopsis by The Exploratorium, though it's a few steps to find on the site ("enter site" -> skip intro -> "annotated synopsis"). Lots of depth there- the Muriel Rukeyser piece they used for Oppenheimer's wife Kitty's soliloquy (Easter Eve 1945) is set just months before the events in the opera, with the narrator exhausted of war...

Anyhow. Glad we went. Now I think I see a dog who needs a walk...!

Elora Festival Singers put on a sequel to their concert last year, "Paradise Lost," which was a lovely program of Pärt and Whitacre. (melted_snowball reviewed that concert here).

The Festival Singers were in fine voice, but the program wasn't as stunning as last year's. They played two Latin masses, Cantus Missae in E flat by Joseph Rheinberger, Messe En Sol Majeur by Francis Poulenc. They played an arrangement of Kein deutscher Himmel from Mahler's 5th Symphony, and Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine by Eric Whitacre.

The first mass soared with great harmonies. The second didn't do much for me, but I'm fairly convinced I just don't like any Poulenc.

The Mahler was sung to "Excerpts from Sennette aus Vendig (Sonnets from Venice)," and it was gorgeous and well-sung. But it had an "Off Stage Soloist," a feature I spent too much time trying to figure out when I should've been listening more closely, and now that I'm home I haven't been able to track down why they did it. It wasn't a particularly ethereal piece, and it wasn't the "funeral march" movement of the symphony. I dunno. Also, they flubbed up the program, merging the beginning of the Whitacre with the translation of the Sonnets from Venice. (Da Vinci didn't live in Venice!)

The Whitacre was beautiful, and the piece seems well-represented at youtube in case you're curious.

Leonardo dreams of his flying machine
tormented by visions of flight and falling,
more wondrous and terrible each than the last...

[I think this treatment of the piece is better than the one we heard today; which isn't too surprising because it was conducted by Eric Whitacre himself. The one we saw had a bit too much percussion in the last minute; it felt gimmicky, where the version Whitacre conducted just feels upbeat. ]

All in all, a good concert, just not a great concert.

But the company was wonderful- persephoneplace and I kibbutzed about life and such on the drive up and back. And we had cucumber sandwiches and punch served to us by clergy.

And then for something different, after we got back to town we stopped downtown at the Craft Beer and Ribsfest, which hurt our ears and sensibilities just a little. (Both of us wanted to go tell a young woman to pull up her damn pants; and the Blues musicians seemed to be slightly soused.)

Oh, and we have a photo we'd like your collective wisdom as we try to figure out what the hell it is...

Last night d. and I went to sleep at 10:15. I woke up feeling creaky.

In this morning's paper, I was most enthusiastic to read the obits. And a piece about some musician close to death.

The obit that made the most impression on me was yet another "I remember" piece from a reader, about Sheela Basrur, a doctor and public servent who was Ontario's public face during the 2003 SARS crisis. At the time I asked d. how the public service sector managed to hire such an intelligent spokesperson. Since she died on Monday, the Globe and Mail has printed a large number of remembrances; today's was from a 25-year-old woman whose career in health care were directly chosen because Basrur immediately stood out to her, as well; in her case, first as an ethnic minority and a woman; then, for her career and dedication to improving healthcare. And they met, and Basrur backed her up when she got a panel of male doctors mad at her at a conference. It just made me smile.

And the Arts section profiled Oliver Schroer, a violinist with leukemia who expects he has one concert left in him. And two CDs. And whatever else comes together. Dude! The article makes me wish I were half as energetic and focused and upbeat with whatever time I do have left.

So yeah. I'll keep feeling old-and-young. It probably helps that I seem to have slept 9.5 hours last night. So aside from being a bit creaky, and obsessed with death this morning, I feel great.

Also, some of that Oliver Schroer guy's music is beautiful- one of his CDs is from walking the Camino de Santiago through France and Spain and recording music in some of the churches he passes through. Tis haunting, and I expect I'll buy it in physical form instead of via itunes, because it comes with a booklet with photos of the churches.

I'm earwormed by Popcorn. Look! Moog synthesizer! It's older than I am.

First I was just looking for the DJ Bell mix I heard on di.fm (and I can't seem to find legally). But I made the mistake of looking for the history and now I have a dozen mixes stuck in my head.

This album cover is my favourite. That font just shouts out 70s/80s PBS, doesn't it?

(I brought work home with me; I was going to write this review tomorrow, but the work turned out to be an easier read than expected, so this becomes an earlier review).

This evening was a DaCapo concert with the Guelph Chamber Choir, rescheduled from nearly a month ago when we got plastered with snow. The theme was two choirs and two versions of some texts. The first half saw "Lobet den Herrn," a motet by Bach, paired with "Lobet de Herrn" by Sven-David Sandström; the second had "When David Heard" by Thomas Weelkes and "When David Heard" by Eric Whitacre, and "Agnus Dei" by Barber and "Agneau de Dieu" by Rupert Lang. It's clear DaCapo is the stronger choir; but I thought the Guelph Chamber Choir did fine in the second half. Roughly half the pieces were conducted by each choir's conductor; Enns did more of the talking, which was fine with me, because he's a charming guy.

The first piece was written by Enns, "Te Deum Brevis", opening with a big sound though the piece didn't do much for me. The second piece, Bach's motet, was... a bit ragged in singing (and so I also overheard from a few people who thought the same).

DaCapo's conductor, Leonard Enns, took time to deconstruct the Sandström, which has two choirs singing in harmonies but different tempos, which was fun to listen to. There was a Kyrie & Gloria Mass by Frank Martin with 12-tones, that also didn't do much for me, though I think melted_snowball would've liked; and there was a piece by Knut Nystedt, "Immortal Bach" which takes the first three phrases of Bach's Come sweet death (Come blessed rest, Come, lead me into peace) set for five choirs, each singing a different tempo. The intent, according to Enns, was to make the rest/sleep feel timeless- it worked for me, except the piece was surprisingly short, considering it was supposed to feel timeless. I wanted the patterns between the five choirs to play a bit more! Never mind how f'ing difficult I'm sure it was to sing! ;)

After the intermission, we had an introduction of Past Life Melodies (by Sarah Hopkins) from Gerard Yun, a local music prof, who demoed a digeridoo and two kinds of vocal overtones. It turned out I'd once heard a recording of this piece, and I'd liked it; the overtones worked much better in person, which isn't such a surprise... (the link above is the piece played by Chanticleer.) K., who came with me to the concert, said afterward that this piece alone was worth the price of admission. I've never heard overtones sung by 50 voices before!

Then two pieces just by DaCapo's 22 voices: "When David Heard" by Thomas Weelkes was written in the early 1600s, and had great runs and harmonies. But the Whitacre piece by the same name. God. I've heard DaCapo perform this piece three times, and it continues to put a lump in my throat. Of the 13-minute piece, the majority of it is singing the four words "O Absalom my son." I think it is the choral piece I know that most concretely embodies grief- it rages, it murmurs, it holds the refrain for many minutes, it finishes with a powerful many-part harmony of the text, "when David heard that Absalom was slain he went up into his chamber over the gate and wept, O Abaslom, my son, my son." It's chillingly beautiful.

They ended with two pieces for both choirs. "Agnus Dei" is the text Samuel Barber used to set the eight-part choir version of his famous string quartet. I hadn't known, until I read this program, that the Adagio for Strings came over 20 years before the choir version. They did a wonderful job with this. They ended with "Agneau de Dieu" by Rupert Lang, a Canadian composer, who set the Agnus Dei prayer for a solo quartet along with the choir, a quieter ending.

K and I stayed a bit for refreshments, and while she caught up with old friends who sung with DaCapo, I took the opportunity to finally thank Enns in person for so consistently bringing us such exciting music.

And now, to bed. :)

The weekend was fun. Conveniently, the chest-cold I've acquired didn't show itself until last night late- well *after* the Easter dinner out with melted_snowball and his colleagues. But last night I went to bed with a tight chest and woke up at 5ish this morning feeling pretty icky. Today was blah, but manageable.

I'm drinking tons of fluids and hope I can get over it quickly- if I'm still likely infectious on Friday, I'll scuttle my trip to NYC to see my grandmother... ("Happy 100th Birthday! I brought you a cold!")

Anyhow. This weekend: I slept in (till 8am! wow!), did more paper-sorting in the closet (getting down to the end on the left-hand closet!) did some art-wrangling [1] (three more framed pieces in my study: one by catbear of d. [2]; one an odd-sized matted piece I bought and promptly stashed in the closet when I realized it would cost a mint to get it properly framed, but catbear's advice gave me the proper $30 solution; and finally, I bought a frame for the LP album fuzzpsych gave me when I became a citizen) [3].

[1] Ugh, apologies for the dreadful sentence structure. I bet you can guess what my excuse is?

[2] which looks like a much wider view of this:

[3]

We also attended the baptism for tbiedl's youngest, who's young enough that neither d. or I had met her yet. It was a sweet welcome to her; though the church service was long- it included four readings, three skits, an outdoor portion, two candle lightings, and communion. Whew! :)

We also saw the Phil perform St. John's Passion, with surtitles and projected art. I don't have the oomph to properly review it, but I'm glad we went.

We shared two quite enjoyable dinners. One with catbear, dawn_guy, and Boy; it included scads of double-entendres, talking about games, food, and favourite stories. And the miracle of the Uncovered Pie. The other dinner was with colleagues of dan's, plus other academics at the Other University. It included no double-entendres, some French, many bottles of wine, shop talk, favourite stories, and a Devon Rex kitten who looked much like this. (Awwww!)

Hm. It's probably a good idea for me to go thud now. Hopefully I will wake up well-rested and less sick than today.

Because I'm lazy: Cribbed from here

NUMUS Presents... REVOLUTIONS: Turning the Tables on DJ Culture
Export to Personal Calendar
Start Date: Thursday, March 13, 2008
End Date: Saturday, March 15, 2008
Description:

A Three-day mini-festival of turntablism.

March 13-15, 2008

Starlight Social Club
47 King Street N.
Waterloo ON
519-885-4970
http://www.janebond.ca

Concert 2 - March 14, 2008 - 8pm
(Un)settling the Score: DJ Olive and Friends
Gregor Asch, better known as DJ Olive, is a turntablist and improviser active in the free improvisation and "illbeint" idioms. He has worked with a remarkable array of musicians including John Zorn, Dave Douglas, Medeski, Martin & Wood and many others. For the past six years, he has been developing a concept that he calls "the vinyl score" - compositions made specifically for the turntable. For his NUMUS appearance, DJ Olive will perform a solo set on turntables. Additionally, one of his vinyl scores will be performed by several of KW's finest turntablists.


Concert 3 - March 15, 2008 - 8pm
Subliminal Strings: DJ Spooky meets the Penderecki String Quartet
This concert will feature highly acclaimed DJ and conceptual artist Paul D. Miller - better known as DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid - in a world premiere collaboration with KW's own celebrities of contemporary music, the Penderecki String Quartet. Incorporating cutting-edge live video mixing technology, this performance promises to be an unforgettable evening of sound and image.

We just came back from seeing the musical Children of Eden put on by the Grebel Student Council.

I love the show; it was composed by Stephen Schwartz (who also did Wicked). It's loosely based on Genesis, with nuance and colour added to form a touching story of people disappointing their parents, falling in love with the wrong kind of people, doubting their roles in life, and so on. I think it makes wonderful overlays on top of those dusty allegories from that book.

We saw this when we lived in Boston, in an excellent production at Emerson College. And I've listened to the soundtrack a million times. This production, unfortunately, had a few problems. Biggest was tuning. I'm somewhat pitch-deaf and I was wincing a bit. There were some good moments, and with my mind's ear, I was also listening to the soundtrack version to make the harmonies work better.

I can't decide whether to recommend seeing this production; but if you like these songs, eh, give it a shot (also showing tomorrow and Saturday). :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GAJ7Gy8Els - Ain't it Good
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEgm0pBweVs - Title Song
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKS_jy5zVV4 - Generations

melted_snowball and I caught a Thursday-evening concert at KWCMS, the Chambet Music Society. Neither of us had been to that concert space before. It was essentially a living-room attic with 80 chairs in it and good acoustics and lighting. The performers had good things to say about the high ceiling. It felt intimate, though not warm- while I was OK, d. was incredibly cold, and he didn't warm up much during the concert. But the woman sitting next to me said that usually it's much warmer and often too warm.

This was my third time seeing Patricia O'Callaghan sing. The first time, at Open Ears in the King Street Theatre, blew me away- it was all Leonard Cohen songs, and I liked them all more than Cohen's versions. The second time, at the Guelph Festival, was a large affair with a full band, and she sang a wider repertoire, which I liked about half of, but I bought two of her CDs. I just bought her third CD, and between them, I don't think I've heard her sing more than one or two songs that aren't on the CDs.

She sang well, I think. She was accompanied by a pianist and bassist, who make up her traveling backup band. The pianist had two solos by Poulenc, in the second half. The two sets had Cohen pieces mixed throughout: "Take this Waltz," "I'm your Man," "The Gypsy Wife," and an encore of "Hallelujah." These, and the Magnetic Fiends' "Book of Love," were my favourites, because I'm not so much a jazzy-cabaret kind of guy. The rest of the concert was roughly themed. Mostly Kurt Weill in the first set, in German and English. In the second set, French singers and composers in the first half (Piaf's "La Vie en Rose", Poulenc's "Hommage a Edith Piaf"), and three Ladino folk songs at the end.

Even though I'm not a jazzy cabaret kind of guy, I enjoyed the Weill and the Ladino songs (which she translated; some were amusing and I have a bit of context for the tunes on the CD now).

I loved the "living-room concert" feel; she has a stage-presence and I think she's attractive (if not traditionally so) And she was pointing directly at me during "I'm your Man" which is a fun gender-bendy image. ("Here I stand / I'm your man / If you want a boxer / I will step into the ring for you" as she makes a fist directly at me, four rows and 15 feet away...)

And the encore was what I hoped she'd play when it didn't appear on the program (she does have a beautiful voice for Cohen songs!)

We left into the frigid wind and came home and got under the covers.

My weekend was much more social than usual, possibly to make up for the bitterly cold outdoor temps (I didn't keep track, but I think it didn't go above -10 all weekend, plus wind chill.)

Friday night d. and I hung out with J. and L. at an Elora pub, with musician-friends of theirs. The conversations were fun. And in the end, the music and folky music conversations made me nostalgic for Bound for Glory, the Ithaca live-to-air folk show I briefly volunteered with as sound guy in the mid 90s. It's the closest I've come to being involved with professional live music, and you never knew whether the artists would be transcendently beautiful-sounding or maybe just middle-of-the-road.

Saturday afternoon d. felt like staying home, but I went out to increase my pub quotient and meet up with J. and L. uptown, along with J. and P., a gay couple who we *might* actually see more of, since P. lives in town.

And d. made us a very tasty leek/potato soup and roast chicken and roast beets mmmmmmm. I feel incredibly lucky that when my sweetie feels antisocial he prefers to shut himself away in the kitchen! :)

Sunday was a pileup of Quakerness: regular Meeting, then Business Meeting (extra-long because December's was snowed out), then potluck lunch, and finally after a break I chaired a Wedding Clearness Committee. (I could talk more about the Quaker weddings process, but for now I'll just say there's a committee struck to meet with the couple before the Meeting will agree to undertake holding the wedding under its care). I feel grateful to have been part of this- it was a totally new experience for me, and we had one very experienced Friend who made things easier, though it wasn't at all what I would consider easy.

Then I went home, said hi to my sweetie, then shut myself away and played DDR for an hour.

Yup, here we have life with a pair of social introverts. :)

This afternoon I went to Westminster Abby, which is close by our hotel, for 5pm Evensong services.  They  were OK, but not as transcendent as I remember the last time we visited.  There was a guest choir, as the regular choir is on holidays.  The sermon and hymn were devoted to the Feast of the Innocents (and no we didn't get to taste any ourselves.  Innocents, that is.)  The skies opened up shortly before the service ended, and when I finally left to walk back to the hotel, a tree-branch fell on me. Not a big one, just a stick. But we'll see if I ever go back there again!

Here we have an entry in the "Filing Oops" department:


“[T]he forty-part Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno ... by Alessandro Striggio languished throughout the twentieth century disguised as a nameless four-part Mass by Strusco. Since such a work would appear to be entirely banal, and since no such composer ever existed, scholars have not been in a rush to study this music.”


mirabilis_syn :

http://mirabilis.ca/2007/12/02/lost-16th-century-mass-discovered-by-berkeley-music-scholar/

Lost 16th-Century Mass Discovered by Berkeley Music Scholar.

More than 400 years after Italian composer Alessandro Striggio wrote his extravagant 40-part Missa sopra Ecco sì beato giorno, it has been rediscovered by a Berkeley music scholar who identified the work and rescued it from obscurity.

Although most of Striggio’s piece is in 40 different voice parts, the last movement is for 60 separate voices (five 12-part choirs) and is the only known piece of 60-part counterpoint in the history of Western music. "It’s one of the first great pieces to use architecture and space, with musical phrases physically moving around the ring from choir to choir," says Professor of Music Davitt Moroney, who after years of research located a complete set of partbooks for the mass in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. "It is an intellectual achievement of the highest order. There are other large choral works, but Striggio’s mass is unique, with its five eight-part choirs. This is Florentine art at its most spectacular."


I wonder if anyone will ever get to perform this. *hopes*

We drove into Toronto for Soundstreams' "An Unfinished Life", a concert with Renaissance music by the Hillard Ensemble, and a world premiere of a piece about a young Dutch woman whose diaries were recovered after she died in Aucshwitz.

The choral music was wonderful- two pieces by Palestrina, two by Solomon Rossi (a 16th century Rabbi), and one by Orlande de Lassus, a 16th century Dutchman. One each of the Palestrina and Rossi were based on Psalm 136, "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion." I love that text, and not just because Boney M sings it also. Though, um, that's part of it.

The Hilliard Ensemble is two tenors, a countertenor and a baritone, who look like four completely unassuming middle-aged men but they have exquisite voices. d. and I have seen them before, probably in Boston, though I don't have the details. (yet- I bet d. will remember). I liked the first half very much.

(Except someone's cellphone rang in the closing phrase of the last piece! Argh!)

The second half, about Etty Hillesum, sung by the Hilliard Ensemble, Tafelmusick Chamber Choir, with narrator and Chamber orchestra, was challenging for its composition; much of the piece was spoken with musical accompaniment. As d. pointed out, nearly none of the music was memorable or even hummable. But I think the piece worked, overall- once I became accustomed to the narration, which was done quite well, it was at times quite affecting.

A brief snippet from Hillesum's diary, from July 1942, when she was held/working in Westerbork, the Dutch transit camp from which Dutch and German Jews were deported to Auschwitz:

Dear God
these are anxious times
Each day is sufficient unto itself
I shall try to help you.
and defend Your dwelling place
inside us, to the last.



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More prosaically: I think I drove us back home in record time; it appears it was 1h 16 minutes from the parking lot under Dundas Square to our garage. What can I say, I wanted to get home. :)

And now, to bed.

I couldn't get to sleep last night. My brain kept prodding, coming up with trivia to think about. So today's going to be a meh, low-energy low-brain day. ...Now available with more grumpy.

I'm frustrated about the election yesterday: voter turnout was a record low 52% beating the last record of 54% in 1923. The Liberals won by default. Apathy sucks.

There wasn't nearly enough in-depth media discussion of the referendum question in advance, and consequently MMP Representation failed like a lead balloon. The government's information about it was so basic as to almost be useless, which I think was their intent, so now they can say The People Have Spoken, and They Are Happy. Aren't they happy?

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I'm not grumpy about much else, thankfully. Last night when I couldn't sleep I spent a while cozying up with iTunes and now I have a bunch of music I'd heard on Pandora but never bought. So I have a heap of new songs to prop me up today: including some VNV Nation, Apoptygma Berserk, David Bowie, Neuroticfish, and Tiiinnaaa, (What's Love Got to Do with It?)

I was amused to go from browsing David Bowie to Supertramp (The Logical Song) to Scooter (Ramp/Logical Song to (does he take himself as seriously as he appears to in that video?) to realizing Oh, that's what the heck that song's called. I decided Scooter's gone all the way around bad to being good again. I mean: that euro-jock posturing. Those lyrics. Wow. And here I thought there was a trend of club DJs shouting nonsense at their audience and recording it. Turns out it's all one person. Heh.

Also, Apoptygma Berserk has some catchy hooks, but it's awesome for making fun of too.

1) If you're gonna have a vanity license-plate, Mr. HAS INC, don't drive like a total asshole. 'Cause if you almost cause three accidents in a two-block distance, and it's clear where you're parking, somebody just might call the cops on you.

2) The Indian restaurant up on Northfield has an excellent dinner-buffet for $15 on Friday nights. Yum.

3) If a festival is gonna hold a music concert in a city-owned barn, there should be plans to deal with rain. These plans should not be to let all the rain come under the doors and pool in the middle of the floor. Especially if the barn is designed to hold water/salt-brine in the wintertime rather than letting it drain anywhere. 'Cause a torrential downpour will do spectacular things to one's concert space.

I'll have photos (and possibly a movie) up soon, it was an awe-inspiring flood. After they spent a lot of energy trying to sweep away the (many hundreds of litres of) water, they ultimately moved the concert to Knox Presbyterian Church in downtown Elora, where the show did indeed go on, only an hour after it was supposed to.

Cantus sung quite well- they opened with an Eric Whitacre piece (Lux Aurumque) which was probably the best piece of the evening (d. and I agreed, at least). I liked the first half more than the second- there were two Walt Whitmanesque pieces I liked- A Sound Like This, by Edie Hill, based on poetry by Kibir, translated by Robert Bly. The second was actually based on two poems by Whitman; titled We Two, by Steven Sametz, based on "Not Heat Flames up and Consumes" and "We Two, how long we were fool'd."

The second half seemed a bit percussion-heavy and with a few meh pieces.

But their encore was Franz Biebl's Ave Maria, a piece d. and I both adore, which was a wonderful ending to a somewhat long evening.

Much thanks to melted_snowball for driving us home through fog and wet, when we'd both rather be home sipping a drink.

Speaking of which, I never got my drink. *goes off to fix*

I'm quite looking forward to a choral concert in Elora this evening ("Cantus" on this program) and another choral concert on Sunday ("Paradise Found"). In between, who knows. Likely hiking tomorrow, and possibly some hanging-out and stuff. Yeah. The week seems to have zipped by quickly. I've gotten a fair bit at work done; and some great social stuff too. Life, indeed, is good.

Last night, we watched the second half of Becket, which might be up your alley if you've seen and enjoyed The Lion in Winter. Both feature Peter O'Toole as King Henry II; the guy makes the job of King sound like a real pain. First his best friend (Thomas Becket) turns out to not be a toady when he's made Archbishop of Canterbury; then his kids and wife turn out to not like him very much at all. Sucks for you, Ed...

Becket is apparently the much less historically accurate of the two films; but it's got a really wonderful story and (apart from some awful Italian accents) great acting. It's long: 150 minutes.

Time to go home. See y'all later!

A few weeks ago in the car, I heard a catchy pop song called Grace Kelly (by Mika). The video is fun- and so is the video for Big Girl (You are Beautiful).

'n I figured maybe some people on my friends-list would agree. ;)