speaking of poems ...

Here's a little poem inspired by reading John 1:15 that I started back in mid-January and just finally finished tonight. The rhymes aren't all that precise in a few spots but I'll let that slide. Like I said earlier I'm not going to claim to be that great at either traditional or free verse. It's a hobby of leisure. Anyway, here's the poem.

O Word of God who formed the sun,
Who formed the billions and the one;
O God, the Word, who made all things,
Whose praise the universe still sings;
Our origin and end you are
And in all ways we prove your power.
Of you we can't be over-awed
O Word who is true God with God.

O Life that is the fount of life
In slighting you we loved our strife,
Your breath is how we came to breathe,
Your health our sickness will relieve;
Your blood makes our dead hearts to beat
And makes our withered hands complete;
O Life of Life you can decree
That e'en the blindest eye may see.

O Light that makes the cosmos shine
Please fill our minds with light divine,
That with yourself our hearts may glow
And you our darkness overthrow.
O Light in whom no shadow lies
Give sight to all our blinded eyes
That we may see you are the Word,
True Life and Light to all the world.

new gear

At last I have the new gear I need to start blogging again and this time, perhaps, more prolificly than before. As promised I plan to finally start writing more detailed stuff about the Jonas Tamulionis CD at the start of the blog; about the new Atanas Ourkouzounov CD; about This Is Your Brain on Music; about the book by Messiaen by Peter Hill and Nigel Simeone should I finish reading it soon; and about the exigencies of writing a Mass that so far no one has really heard yet beyond one movement and that on a small scale.

What else was I planning to blog about? Um ... well, I will have to review my own silly blog to find out what it was. But as a side note I plan to post a bunch of old poems I've written over the years. Most of them are merely of average quality and are no more than competently put together. I will not vouch for their inspiration or quality beyond saying that it was something I used to do more than I've been doing. So once in a while you'll see a little poem up here, probably a lot of poems now that I can just mass upload them from my archives!

Ghost Rider

I promised at least one friend I would write a review of Ghost Rider. I will try, perhaps here, perhaps in some other context. Since Ghost Rider is the last movie I saw ina theater maybe I should write about it. I'm not sure exactly what to say yet but I may get around to it when I have more time for being leisurely about it. I don't quite have that time now.

new cds and older books

I don't quite have all the resources to blog away as I did (not that i blogged at some frenetic pace) but I have more stuff for that now and hope to write more in a week or so. I finished reading This Is Your Brain on Music and have picked up the new CD by Atanas Ourkouzounov, which is a lot of fun. And on a more personal but not personal note, I now have a cork, a sliced up barbecue skewer and a carved up foam filter from a CPAP machine. You guitar literature geeks tell me what piece of music I am studying based on just that information.

It has come to my attention that I haven't read fiction in a while and while bits of Gogol and Dante are laying around I'm thinking of reading another Jane Austen book instead, at least at first. I could try reading more Dostoesvky but I'm not in the mood.

I also picked up an older book about Messiaen, a spendy book that smells of strange paper stock and has lots of pictures. I recently finished a book by John Piper. Desiring God is a better book than Don't Waste Your Life. There's a new N. T. Wright book out that I will try to get to as well but lately my thoughts have turned to Hanon.

So far I like Hanon. I like him because his exercises are clear and he actually tells you what you're even supposed to be playing them for. Czerny's School of Velocity is probably quite a school but it's not self-evident what precepts and physical movements you're supposed to nail with mastery of each exercise. I'm trying to get Michael Jackson's "Speed Demon" out of my head. I may have to listen to something to do that.

cartoons vs cartoony

When I was in college i met more than a few people who were English major types who didn't think comic books or genre fiction could probe the deep questions of life. Some of them like the various authors who have a veneer of honesty about themselves. Beatniks, particularly, a literary genre I abominate. And the truth is that a number of beatniks liked Krazy Kat and even went so far as to emulate aspects of it in their own work. So what is the derivative work in this context, eh? I found more poetry in Krazy Kat than in just about any work by a beatnik I came across. Sure, some of them have their moments but when I read Krazy Kat I knew I had discovered the thing which had been dilluted through emulation.

Even though I don't read children's literature and tend to read non-fiction; and even though I don't watch a lot of movies or TV lately I have often thought about the purported gap between cartoons and live action. I'd rather sit down and enjoy the Simpsons or a Pixar film or a Batman cartoon than watch something that is considered high and serious, though I can do that, too. Let me frame it this way, I don't see any reason to assume "kid stuff" is less profound or provocative when the alternative proposed is adult entertainment. Put those last two words in quotes and you'll get why I have such a dismissive view of so much stuff that aspires to be high art. Sure I like Kafka or Dostoevsky or Didion or Austen or Gogol. I also enjoy poetry by T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, John Donne, and Robert Frost. I even found a poem or two by William Stafford and William Carlos Williams I've liked and Levertov has some wonderful pieces. But I don't see why we have to cordon off a cartoon or comic book as not able to speak at the same level to the human condition. All creative media are equal and if they weren't then no one could be sitting in a chair sturdy enough to read this blog entry, assuming anyone IS actually reading this blog entry.

Snobby literature students may rip on Perrine for saying this but it's true because they're the snobs who help ensure that it is true: it is better to have a genuine affection for the second rate (by academic standards) than to feign a love for the greatest literature. I happen to think Shakespeare isn't all that great compared to Dostoevsky or John Donne and I know about the whole anxiety of influence bit that could explain Dostoevsky reacting to Shakespeare and all that. But, for those who know this reference, Iago, too, is but a little lamb. Now I'll sign off and go get a bite to eat and practice some guitar.

down for some technical adjustments

I.e. I need my own gear. I can't rely on the access to computers at my alma mater forever! More to come later.

practical considerations for transcribing piano literature for guitar

Boy! Doesn't this sound exciting. Well, maybe it will interest a handful of people and if not I don't expect my blog to get a lot of traffic.

The most basic questions of what kind of piano literature to transcribe for solo guitar are as follows: in no particular order, and all of these are basic.

1. What is the compass of the writing?

Let's be reasonable. If the range of the piano writing goes beyond five octaves odds are pretty good that unless you're Katsuhiro Yamashita you better not transcribe this stuff. If the range if five octaves and you don't mind simplifying the harmonic language to its most essential elements you can get away with transcribing something like the first movement of Hindemith's first piano sonata for solo guitar. Not that I'm suggesting you should actually try that, exactly.

2. What is the contrapuntal density of the writing?

A certain composer I won't name said that the human brain can't meaningfully perceive more than three completely independent melodic lines and that rule holds mostly true for solo piano literature. In short fugues are out with the exception of fugues written for the violin, which has strings that are arrayed in an even less inviting pattern for contrapuntal music than the guitar. So Bartok or Bach fugues for violin can be played on the guitar. For that matter basically anything written for the viola can PROBABLY be played on the guitar just be playing everything at pitch. You'll never transcribe Hindemith's Op. 22 viola sonata, movement 4, of course, unless you choose to transpose down to E.

Even two voices with a high separation between parts or a lot of activity are not practical. No one transcribes a solo guitar version of the two voice fugue in E minor from the Well-Tempered Klavier and for good reason!

3. How extensive is accompanimental figuration used to support the melodic line?

A tight, close harmonization and simple arpeggiations or block chords are relatively easy to adapt. For instance, if you take something like, oh, Hindemith's Sonata II for piano and just play what's written in the treble staves as guitar music you can actually get through the whole first theme just by playing it on solo guitar. This is because the separation between melody and accompaniment isn't that severe, there aren't any abrupt changes of register, and the writing is in a simple key. When you CAN make a transcription that leaves the original key in tact it's preferable to do so even if it costs you a certain amount of effort.

That's my opinion anyway. Even if you have a piece in B flat major and it's tough to play you should still consider keeping it in the key if at a contrapuntal and textural level you can preserve the essense of the music which gets to the next question, jumping past piano music to other types of music.

4. How broad is the timbrel pallete of the music you plan to transcribe?

Transcribing piano music and string music is a relatively simple affair for solo guitar because of the homogenous tone colors. Transcribing trio music is trickier because while the three strings may have a consistent sound you'll make sacrifices in the contrapuntal and harmonic range of the piece you're transcribing. If you have an unusual instrumentation for a piece of chamber music (say, violin, clarinet, and cello) you can still transribe away despite the drastic differences in timbres among the instruments if the contrapuntal density and harmonic pallete are simple enough to let you distill its musical essence on to solo guitar. What you will lack in the timbrel variety of the instrumentation above you can make up for in using guitaristic effects like harmonics or pizzicato, ponticello, and the like.

But what this by and large does NOT mean is that you have any business transcribing symphonic works unless the musical form and structure is plain enough to survive the transition. One of the most overblown and meaningless declarations in guitar circles is that the guitar is like a miniature orchestra. Toru Takemitsu could say something like that and get away with it because he had some clue how the guitar was played and anything he didn't grok he could run by his good pals Leo Brouwer and Julian Bream. When you're friends with THOSE kinds of guitarists you can choose to not sweat the hard stuff. It doesn't hurt if you're a musical genius, either. Takemitsu had a keener ear for the tonal colors of the guitar than most guitarists so he could write stuff with unusual and complex timbrel shifts and have them work.

Anyway, end of that particular rant.

To throw a bone to orchestral transcriptions for solo guitar to the extent that a score is more pianistic it could work. Pictures at an Exhibition was originally a piano score and that gets back to my earlier observations about homogenous timbre and the compass of the writing. Once you eliminate the artificial extension of range created by orchestration you may find that music that spans a bunch of octaves can be reduced to maybe three or four, which puts it in a reasonable range for transription for the guitar. An example of this might be a work by Haydn. You could get at least a decent approximation of Haydn's Op 76 string quartet, movement 1 by keeping the points of melodic interest and simplifying the accompaniment patterns. Oh, wait, that's not an orchestral score. Oh well, I think the point probably speaks for itself. If Yamashita can put The Firebird on solo guitar an orchestral score can be transcribed for guitar.

But something tends to be sacrified. If you've heard even the fastest guitarst blazing through Esturias or an Albeniz piano piece transcribed for guitar it won't prepare you for someone playing the piano scores as they are originally set up. Every guitarist owes it to their art and to an understanding of Albeniz' piano music to get familiar with performances of the original piano versions. It might give you some incentive to look for more original works for guitar. :)

Transcriptions aren't bad or anything but I feel like when I attend guitar recitals I so often hear the same old pieces. Not saying I'm even remotely a better guitarist than any of these people, I'm just saying that as a paying audience member I can't help but agree with Matanya Ophee. I could hear even a great guitarist play a Bach partita or I could hear Hilary Hahn play the same thing. I'm a loyal guitarist and a composer who loves the guitar but when push comes to shove I'm hard pressed to find a guitarist whose version of a Bach partita for violin beats Zoltan Szekely's older recordings.

Something I don't see happening much in transcriptions for solo guitar is choral literature. This is a little odd because in a way choral literature is governed by restrictions at least as harsh as those the guitar presents to a composer. I suppose there are Bach chorales but I notice not much is done with more recent choral stuff. Is there anything wrong with transcribing a motet by Poulenc? Even I would concede that a solo guitar transcription of O Sacrum Convivium would need to transpose away from F sharp major ... but even allowing what for me is an unusually liberal concession to the reality that some things are easier to play in keys adjusted for the guitar it seems like there's some choral repertoire ripe for transcribing if we're going to keep playing transcribed music along with stuff origianlly written for the guitar.

Another little tangent. Things aren't that much different for two or more guitars. I can't shake the convention that the more guitars you multiply for a performance the lamer the music sounds. A guitar quartet has no sustain except through tremelo and tremelo doesn't sound that hot compared to the sustain of bowed string instruments and woodwinds or ... really any other instrument in the orchestra. Maybe it's more honest to say the guitarist is not a miniature orchestra but a really great harpsichord you can carry around with you that has some special effects the harpsichord doesn't have. This seems more honest than the dubious claim that the guitar is a miniature orchestra. The guitar and harpischord even have somewhat similar ranges overall ... which gets me back to why Bach gets transcribed so much. Ah, well, Badh is as fun as he is unavoidable if you don't overdo him.

the art of transcribing for the guitar

I'm anything but an expert at this but I sometimes think about this because it seems so many pieces played at guitar recitals are transcriptions of some kind or another. Albeniz, all transcriptions. Bach, Mozart, stuff like that. What goes into a good transcription? It seems to me that the more guitars the goofier the sound but if you have that philosophy then what goes into a good SOLO project? I love Yamashita's transcription of Pictures at an Exhibition for solo guitar and yet if almost any other guitarist did something like that I'd have doubts about the enterprise.

I have been thinking lately particularly of the tendency to transpose the original material into some new and easier key. I don't tend to be into this approach. I prefer to stick with the original key and to transpose pitches by octave when necessary rather than simply put something into a key where open strings are handy. Why, though? I guess I feel that the music sounds best in the key in which it was originally conceived. Chords can be reduced or distilled to their essence and maybe conveniently dropped an octave but I just feel that a guitarist should be willing and able to play in any key no matter how awkward he or she may find the key conceptually and physically.

Why is that? I guess I feel that way because the most challenging and rewarding repertoire for other instruments was not written just with the idea of being easy to play. Beethoven and Bartok didn't just write music for less technically ambitious players. I'd write more but I really need to get some sleep. This is obviously a topic about which I can blog later, not that anyone has a reason to care about what I have to blog about transcribing non-guitar literature for guitar! Still, I'd like to make a case that there are some paradigms you can try out that could lead you to transcribe stuff by Messiaen or Durufle or Hindemith for the guitar, all great composers whose works could and should be more adequately represented in transcription literature if we guitarists are just going to keep playing stuff that was never written for our instrument.

new stuff

I picked up, not without a few emails, the new CD by Atanas Ourkouzounov from Gendai Guitar. Since I can't read a lick of Japanese despite owning every Miyazaki movie and even having Tezuka's manga adaptation of Crime & Punishment I can't relate anything more than the minimal English language information about the CD. Furthermore as I have only heard it once I can't say much more than that I am glad to have bought it. An actually detailed review will have to happen sometime after this weekend is over and I have had time to listen to it carefully.

I can also attest from first hand experience that Leo Brouwer's little masterpiece Hika is back in print and can be purchased in case you don't have it or if you (like me lost your copy due to unfortunate circumstance). No word on when Shin-ichi Fukuda's next CD of music for guitar by Takemitsu will come out but I know from his website that it's going to come out some day and Atanas Ourkouzounov helped play some of the music, which makes that TWO CDs you should really get of classical guitar music that he's involved with lately.

Then there's the upcoming recording Hilary Hahn has of Schoenberg's violin concerto and I think Ana Vidovic has a CD of Torroba's stuff coming out. More locally Michael Partington is premiering a guitar concerto called the Underdog. Since I actually have a budget and am sick I can't go catch everything but there's always something coming up. Of the releasing of CDs there is no end as Koholeth might put it but listening to them once in a while is anything but wearying to the soul ... unless it's Cornelius Cardew or Ginastera. Sorry, I just don't care for those guys.

hibernation

THat's mostly what I've been doing lately. I had one or two sketches for poems I considered posting but they're not done and in any event I'm sick anyway. I haven't forgotten what I have forgotten to write about in detail, namely Koshkin's sonata for flute and guitar; the Tamulionis CD (yeah, really that long ago but I want to keep giving the topic a chance because I like his music); and Atanas Ourkouzounov has a new CD out on Gendai Guitar called Legends. I get emails from him once in a while which is how I heard about it

I just had a spell of violent coughing that made me feel pretty uncomfortable. I need to be back in bed and not using a computer to make a blog entry! Consider this a short preview of possibly coming attractions.

books and books

One of the things about last year's change of scenery that has been a benefit to me is having time to read without distraction (some distractions were quite good and others more in the tedious category, like free-way noise). So I have finished a couple of books in the last few months about which I hope to blog some in the future.

One of them is a little book called This is Your Brain on Music. For years I have felt convinced that music is as much a function of the perceiving mind as anything else and that musical form is shaped by a mixture of physiological and mental parameters.

Another book, obviously, was the dissertation on Koshkin's music and still another book, that came out two years ago, is about Olivier Messiaen, which I hope to get into shortly.

And some books are of a greater vintage. I recently read Proverbs 17:6 (I think) which says, roughly, "grandchildren are the crown of old age and a child's glory is his parents". This has gotten me thinking. How many Americans view their parents as a source of glory? Even among professing Christians? Many, I suppose, but our culture is saturated with the motif of parents who don't get it (whatever "it" happens to be); or stifle the true nature of the child who then has to rebel to assert identity; or who can't keep their own lives together enough to be of much use to the kids.

The trouble with interpreting wisdom literature as that proverbs are just what they are. Ecclesiastes can be seen as a lengthy study in Koholeth measuring one proverb against another to test the limits of what the wisdom literature can reveal. Many times parents are not everything they should be and yet Proverbs 17:6 is still there. So what does that mean? Not really sure but it's food for thought. One thing is certain, if we spiritualize the proverb by talking about our Heavenly Father we miss the point of the proverb by skipping the first and plainest meaning of the text.

postscript on the review

A bit of information that guitarists may want to know regarding Koshkin's work. Because he has focal dystonia Koshkin isn't playing concerts or playing guitar much at all anymore and there are some pieces he has composed but never played. Chief among these is his Sonata for solo guitar, which Elena Papendreou has recorded. There are also a couple of pieces for flute and guitar that, to my knowledge, no Americans have recorded. So if any of you ambitious classical guitarists out there in pro-land want to tackle his guitar sonata go for it. I'd like to see a recording of the flute/guitar sonata that gets done state-side, too.

short review of G. Cain Budds' dissertation on Nikita Koshkin

Wow! I can say that now that I know his dissertation is out there for people to read I don't NEED to blog so much about Koshkin's music. Most of what is available to be read about Koshkin's work is only in the form of what Matanya Ophee might call "liner notes musicology". For living composers who want some kind of private life this is as inevitable as it is understandable. The only downside is that this often means a detailed study of the work of a living composer doesn't really happen unless the composer is sufficiently a super-star to be considered worthy of the attention. This dissertation adds to what you could read in liner notes by including a lot of basic biographical material that isn't available elsewhere by way of interviews the author conducted with Koshkin by various means of correspondance. He also includes a structural and thematic analysis of six of Koshkin's major works for solo guitar. With the exception of The Porcelain Tower these are all works you can order through Guitare Diffusion if you can't drive or can find at a well-stocked local vendor. This book is something I'd like to see have a more commercial release than just having a handful of copies through ProQuest UMI. This book is, if not all by itself, the first and only significant published written study of Koshkin's music, is also a candidate for what I would consider to be a pretty good popular level introduction to Koshkin's music for musicians in general. There are ample extracts from scores and the discography and list of published works is solid. The only things I wish could be added to research on Koshkin's music is that someone would investigate his chamber music. I may just have to do that myself. For the sake of trivia I found it fun and funny that Koshkin's favorite rock bands included The Rolling Stones, Yes, Pinkfloyd, and most of all Led Zeppelin! It's just more proof that musicology departments should be able to account for how the "high" and "low" in music in the contemporary scene cross-pollinate. One word of warning, the dissertation as published is NOT cheap.

a doctoral dissertation on Nikita Koshkin's music, and random stuff.

Yes! There IS one and I bought a copy. It cost me a bit, too much most of you would tell me if you knew how much ... and I'll never tell!

But I plan to compensate for not providing a thematic/motific analysis of Koshkin's sonata for flute and guitar by at least reviewing this dissertation on Koshkin's music when I have some time. heh, whenever THAT is.

I haven't even gotten around to my observations about the use of the classic dorian progression as a structuring device in Dark Side of the Moon yet.

Because of where I work (that's not for public broadcast, either) I have a three-day weekend so I plan to do some reading I haven't managed to do yet and maybe will pop in a few episodes of X-Files season 1. But I have to get around to finally watching Hotel Rwanda and I've got a convenient chance to do that, too.

I don't feel like blogging about Children of Men. It's fun, though. My favorite visual thing is replicating the whole album cover of Pink Floyd's Animals. Trust me, if you have ever even seen that album cover it will leap out of the screen and dance for you.

I gotta say I don't know why British military units will be using Rheinmetal 120mm smoothbore tank guns in 2027, though.

The structural use of i-IV in the dorian mode in Dark Side of the Moon

Hah, here's a subject for musical geekery! If I weren't blogging from a city government sponsored terminal I'd be able to write about this in more detail but I lay out the simple outline that Dark Side of the Moon as a concept album can be viewed as a song cycle in a triptych lay-out in which the characterist minor tonic and major subdominant of the dorian mode is used as a structural modality at the start of the three major sections of the song cycle. I hope, later, to explicate how this symmeterical mode musically symbolizes the dystopian world-view of the band and reinforces both the musical and textual premise of cyclic time or the life cycle.

But, as I said earlier, this has to be explained later.

culled from the experiences of friends and acquaintences

I. Here are a few simple reasons to join eHarmony.

3) You'll get a huge discount on three months so that theyr’re cheaper than awfully expensive Christian dating services out there

2) It's made easy for you to find other people they have in their network, though they can make no guarantee that even though you read books by amillenialists that you won't end up getting a match that reads Left Behind books.

3) If nothing else, they won’t stop spamming you until you join.

II. There's exactly one reason to join Equally Yoked:

Hey, why SHOULDN’T you blow a year’s worth of tithe checks on a matchmaking service that doesn’t necessarily work? You’d spend that money on dates of your own choosing that won’t work either! Maybe if you object you should consider the third option after correcting your doctrinal problems.

III. Sovereign Grace Singles

Seriously? Do you have to ask why anyone would join this one? You're not truly Reformed enough. ;) hat tip to Internet Monk for being one of the people who brought THIS one to my attention.

doctoral dissertation on Nikita Koshkin's music

There actually is one and I am going to see what I can do to get my hands on it and give it a review. Yes, brace yourselfs, those of you who actually read this blog, for a review of a recent doctoral dissertation. I've never even gone to a single class in grad school, let alone doctoral work but I'm gonna review this thing anyway because I admire Koshkin's music and because if someone else out there has written something insightful about the man's work I want to plug for it. Plus from the look of things the dissertation covers some pieces I meant to write about anyway. So, if ever you should happen to read this author of said doctoral disseration, I'm looking forward to reading your work.

Conveniently for me I was planning on writing about some music you DIDN'T list in your dissertation!

not much else to blog about

At least not for now. I'm fully aware I haven't yet blogged in more detail about Tamulionis or Koshkin in a while. I'm sort of distracted of late and having no computer of my own makes it tricky.

Well ... that's about it. Happy holidays and the like. :)

the limited generational appeal of middling shows

In other words, how did Starsky & Hutch ever become a feature-length film? We really ARE getting a "live action" Transformers movie? Don't get me wrong, I DID love the show Transformers when I was a kid but, seriously, there's a tiny generational appeal for the original series and it seems that the generation that grew up seeing that has since gone on to have enough money to make a movie on this franchise.

I'll go see it. It's probably the one movie Michael Bay was BORN to make. Isn't his film-making style perfectly suited to big anthropomorphic talking robots blowing things up? I just hope he sticks to big robots and doesn't give us some lame human-interest story about character's we're supposedly supposed to care about. That kid in the show, never liked him. For that matter I always wondered why the Decepticons, who had no less than three F-15s, were always beaten by the Autobots. An F-15 has a thrust to weight ratio to take off with its own empty weight in payload. You'd think one of the jets could just do a fly-by and carpet bomb the Autobots into atoms. The absurdity of the continuity of this level of destruction being possible or not possible was evinced painfully in that movie back in the late 80s where Megaton kills dozens of people with that gun of his that was never allowed to make so much as a scratch on characters hit with the SAME GUN in the TV show. Why is it that Ironhide can survive a shot to the shoulder with no sign ofinjury and then gets his head blown clean away in the first five minutes of the movie? I don't get it and I wanted to play along and be nice.

Well, hey, what can you do? I suppose that at least Peter Cullen is back as the voice of Optimus Prime. I wa sannoyed by how utterly perfect the character was but he was a whole lot better than the replacement. When I was a kid my friends saw the Transformers movie and warned me that Rodimus Prime was lame. My friends did not lie, at least not that time. I can't vouch for their honesty on other topics. Besides, that was possibly two decades ago.

But as I was saying, it seems that in each generation there exists the money to transform a TV show into a movie against all evidence that it need be done. Dukes of Hazzard? Yeah, riight. Jessica Simpson as Daisy Duke is a bad joke even on the dubious supposition that the character of Daisy Duke herself isn't a bad joke. Yeah, I watched the show when I was a kid (and the Incredible Hulk, and those shows were your best options as a six-year old in the early 1980s) but it just seems like some forms of nostalgia are best kept as they are. You don't actually want to watch old episodes of Transformers that often, or at least I don't. I'm not sure I could really handle doing a marathon of the A-Team. Mr. T was cool and all but I have my limits. I still remember the theme music from his cartoon anyway and can probab ly still sing some of the brass parts. No, really. Not kidding about that one.

As the man himself would have put it at the end of every episode, "Take it from me, Mr. T."

cowardly composers

In the ream of sacred choral music most 20th century composers are total wimps. Why? Because they all chicken out in setting the Credo, most of them. Vaughan Williams gets a pass for composing a Credo, and a pretty good one at that. Penderecki set JUST the Credo in a musical juggernaut that's well worth checking out. Fear not, this is not the Penderecki of the notorious Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. I've been listening to his 7th symphony and it's fun, though something you admittedly have to be in the mood for.

More recently I have been looking at Frank Martin's Mass for double choir, a very nice piece. His contribution to the tradition begs the question of whether Calvinists can do ANYTHING to make a decent setting of the Mass. I mean, Martin's Mass is cool but his Calvinist credentials are not fully settled that I know of, in my ignorance. More to the point, even if we're sure of his Reformed lineage this is ONE GUY in centuries of Western musical heritage. :) Most of the time Calvinists suck mightily at writing classical music, which is usually more ably handled by Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Orthodox. I mean, Catholics have Palestrina, Byrd, and basically almost any Renaissance composer by default. Anglicans get Byrd, too (hah, lucky them indeed!) and a couple others (I guess) but the English Renaissance composers are about all England has, which is good enough for them, fortunately. Lutherans have Bach and Schutz, too, I think, and probably win just for that. The Orthodox get Stravinsky, Arvo Part, conscripted numbers from Rachmaninov, and a couple other pieces. The Anglicans fare badly, actually, after the 18th century.

But the Calvinists? Dude, what do they have? I mean, black American music is cool but in the world of classical music Calvinists are more than just a little pathetic. I suppose their historical stance is they've got better things to do than break the 2nd commandment by actually writing any music. Okay, half kidding now.

My own beliefs lean quite a bit more Reformed with snippets of Lutheran, Anglican, and Pentecostal in my background so I make fun of the Reformed traditions pitiful and mostly useless contributiions to actual art music from the perspective of wanting to contribute in some tiny way to being an exception. I mean, even simple artistic mediocrity would be a step up. I hope one day I can at least accomplish that much.

But the real losers in my mind are the composers who write sacred choral compositions as a musical challenge and then just dump the Credo for some silly reason like:

In the 20th century the evils and bloodshed of fascism and fundamentalism cast doubt on whether or not there is anything one can firmly believe. Or the Credo gets short shrift for some huge Agnus Dei that is upposed to be a big "plea for peace". Settings of the Mass are settings of the Mass, not dumb songs by the Byrds' that mangle Ecclesiastes for the sake of making a hippy anthem (which is not saying I think Vietnam was in the least bit a good idea for foreign policy). Settings of the Mass are, you know, functional at some level.

I admit I give slack to Poulenc for not writing a Credo but he only barely gets a pass because he did so much better than average writing all the other parts of the Mass.

For now my favorite Mass in a smaller scale form (i.e. it doesn't require 2 CDs) is Frank Martin's Mass. I even like it better in some ways than Kodaly's Missa Brevis, though not quite as much as Part's Berliner Mass. Ah, but if you don't know any of these pieces there's no point in my rambling on about them.

meditation on gender stereotypes in gifts

Supposedly a diamond is a girl's best friend and men like power tools. That would mean the perfect wedding gift for a newly married couple ought to be a diamond-tipped drill.

blogging sure is tricky without your own gear

Due to the exigencies of relocation I am without my own computer or net connection and so must blog from places a bit remote from my new abode. That works out okay because lately I have relatively little to blog about. Regular readers of the blog (however many of you there may actually be) know that I'm not one to divulge tons of personal information.

I did, however, pick up a recording of Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth on CD. It's been out on the market for a while and has thus gotten pretty affordable. Handy, especially since I've been wanting to satisfy my curiosity about the opera that single-handedly and inadvertantly ushered in the baleful cultural phenomenan (sic) known as Socialist Realism.

So far I've only managed to listen to about half of it since Thanksgiving weekend is full over family related visits about which I will not blog. :)

I also picked up a recording of Takemitsu's "In the Woods", his last work for solo guitar. Cool stuff. The first of the three pieces in the set is the most charming.

Now that I'm settled into the new pad I plan to have time to actually read books, study music, and catch a movie or two. I probably won't blog much until I have a system of my own, though.

Five Sacred Trees

You know, I was meaning to write about this piece but I don't feel up to it having caught up on a ton of personal email and other reading stuff by the time I got around to adding anything to the blog. For now let me simply say this:

Five Sacred Trees is better than most of John Williams' soundtracks from the last decade but is not on par with the tried and true Star Wars soundtradcks, the Superman soundtrack, or Raiders of the Lost Ark. Five Sacred Trees would be a little more fun if there were only four of them but I'll see if I can flesh out that sentiment later. It's less grating to me than anything by Pierre Boulez but it's still a little sad to hear Williams is doing good but now awe-inspiring work. Wellk, correction, parts of the bassoon concert ARE awe-inspiring but not as many as I had hoped.

the paradox of pitbulls

Pitbulls are physical tough specimens, no doubt about it. But the paraadox of their physical toughness is that at the level of doggie emotions they are total weenies. And sometimes they chicken out at strange, unexpected times. I don't say this from personal experience or from owning pitbull but from observation of the creatures of others.

I recall an incident in which I was spending time with some family and we left their house and the pet pitbull was so distraught at being left behind for even a short time she bayed and howled and wimpered and whined and blubbered as though she were having one of her legs removed. She might as well have been crying in English, "Oh no! Jesus has come back to judge the living and the dead and I have no soul because I am a lowly dog!"

Well, EVENTUALLY they get used to the idea of being left to their own devices just a little bit but that isn't always a great thing. Even so, I recall a babysitting task I did for the relatives who have a kid and a pitbull and when they came back they asked how things went for me looking after the baby. To that I replied, "Oh, the baby was fine and it was the DOG who acted like a baby."

But pitbulls have an existence I can understand having a purpose, despite their emotional high weenie-hood. It's chihuahuas whose existence still mystifies me. To me chihuahuas are proof that humanity is a fallen race just by having bred them at all, to say nothing of what terrible things it says about us that we not only make breeds of dogs who are useless but for whom we also knit sweaters. What more can be said? Nothing, at least for this blog entry.

Ten years of South Park?

I remember seeing early episodes of this show and thinking it was the dumbest show I had ever seen. THe attempts to be offensive were merely offensively strained. The idea that four eight year old boys would be potty-mouthed had all the novelty of, well, nothing, really. The earliest episodes had forced jokes and plots that just didn't gel together. The show was simultaneously "irreverant" yet remarkably preachy. It seemed to be less an animated accomplishment than even Beavis and Butthead, which seemed the greater precurosr.

And so I held this view about South Park for about three years.

Until I saw Trapper Keeper.

A show that could so ruthlessly but gleefully make fun of James Cameron's Terminator franchise, Bill Cosby, Akira, Stanley Kubrick's 2001, and the 2000 election for president whie implicating Dawson's Creek ... ?

Well, I was from that moment sold on at least giving the show a chance, if not just plain loving the show.

And then, just a year or so later I stumbled upon Christian Rock Hard.

And then I was hooked.

Well, for me, if you've seen the episode and know Romans 2 the rest is self-explanatory. NOt that you have to actually go see the episode where Eric Cartman starts a Christian rock band or anything. For me what Parker and Stone were able to do in making fun of CHristian subcultures is point out how true Malachi 1 and Romans 2 can be. There are times when Christians offer sacrifices that were apparantly snagged from someone else walking down th eroad. Instead of "ooh baby" someone replaced the drippy phrase with "Jesus". ANd thus Eric Cartman encapsulates the most absurd and obscene aspects of the Jesus-as-girlfriend song form. One could also include the Jesus-as boyfriend paradigm. I won't belabor the point since Cartman (and accordingly, Parker & Stone) made the point so eloquently for me.

postscript

As it is written: "God's name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you."[

Romans 2:24

Maybe this makes no sense but when I saw the South Park episode "Christian Rock Hard" THIS was the verse I thought about.

That and Malachi 1

But I digress. I recognize that not everyone wh watches South Park thinks of those verses as he watches Cartman start a Christian rock band. Then again, I can always blog here to suggest people put those things together, can't I? :)

cartoon renaissance

It seems obvious to me, on the release of Justice League Unlimited volume 1 on DVD, that for the last, oh, fifteen years we've been living in a cartoon renaissance. I'm obviously biased toward Burce Timm and Paul Dini's creations, especially as a Batman fan from days of yore. But the 1990s ushered in an age of cartoons like no other. Sure, I'm acknowleding that Looney Toons are classic and that Bugs and Daffy and Disney did great stuff in the Golden Age but I think we're easily in a new one.

In the early 1990s you had stuff ranging from Animaniacs, Duck Tales (hey, really, it wasn't at all bad), Tiny Toons (at least early on before they sucked), Freakazoid, Batman: the animated sereis, Superman: the animate dseries, Gargoyles (that I never saw but heard good things about), Beast Wars (frankly, better written overall than the firs Transformers cartoon), and eventually Justice League. I don't really need to mention the Simpsons because their cultural significance is indisputable but I'll mention them anyway. And then there's South Park, only recently become a favorite of mine. Yes, I like cartoons, and I obviously don't discriminate based on restrictions about style or content. I enjoyed Ranma 1/2 and what I've seen of Samuai Champloo. I do want a good story and interesting characters.

Then there's Pixar and the ascendancy of Miyazaki's work into American animation markets and Brad Bird's Iron Giant and, of course, the SOuth Park movie. It's hard to imagine a wider variety of styles, subjects, and stories available in animation now. But some people seem to think things were better fifty years ago. I submit that they were just as good but in a very different way.

I think to some degree we can credit the surge in good cartoons to people who get blamed for bad movies: Lucas & Spielberg. I don't know if this was always intentional or directly caused by these two guys but I read somewhere in some interview with Paul Dini that he thought these two guys had behind the scenes credit for getting a lot of great cartoons started. I suppose some could snipe that glorified cartoons are what those directors are good at. I think that's a bit unfair. On the one hand such a move presumes that animators working on Looney Tunes knew they were making classics. Maybe they did but the fun of those cartoons is they weren't acting as self-important as "important" film-makers have sometimes come across.

And the insult "glorified cartoon" is passe because it makes an assumption about a whole field of art that, if applied to two different groups of people instead of two fiels of artistic expression, would be seen as being as stupid and ethnocentric as it is. Putting down cartoons for being cartoons is sort of like ripping into American Indians for being American Indians. Harsh overstatement, perhaps, but I'll stand by it. I've seen some more real human emotion in The Incredibles than in stupid films like American Beauty. If people wonder where all the intelligent films have gone since the 1970s (as I see a few bemoaning) I wonder if they would stop looking only at live action once in a while.

Speaking as a single guy I have heard some people lament how sometimes there seems to be a meat market around them. I think this is analogous to complaints about a loss of "intelligent" film. The thing I ask is, by analogy, is the meat market always there or did you bring it with you? Did the intelligent film-makers stop making intelligent films or did you overestimate them based on the best sampling of their work when their just like all the others, fallible artists who got lucky?

I'll admit I can be snobby about a few things but even I know that sometimes having fun is the first prerequisite to discovering something is art. Fun and art don't have to be contradictions in terms. But not everyone is going to have fun with Messiaen at first hearing. The best education is an invitation to find new ways to have un rather than impose a definition of fun on the student and that's a problem everyone can stumble into.

Well, I've had my rant for the day.

GInastera's Guitar Sonata

Okay, here's where I rant about a piece that some people adore.

Ginastera's Sonata for guitar sucks.

Mind you, I like some of Ginastera's piano music. Some. But on the whole I find the work for guitar to be feather-brained. There are a few ideas that could have turned into something cool if we were talking about, I dunno, Brouwer, or Chavez, or a couple of other folks. I once didn't care for Roberta Sierra but Ginastera has gotten me to warm up to Sierra's work REALLY fast.

I'm at a loss to explain exactly why the Sonata drives me up the wall, still less why I got a CD of music by Ginastera and others for piano and guitar. I wanted to be generous but finally could only console myself that instead of just buying this CD that I won't name I also got a Takemitsu score. Takemitsu is like Villa-Lobos in that he, in my opinion, could do no wrong in composing for the guitar.

Well, since sleep is good and I could probably use more of it I'll just leave things as they are. If you adore GInastera and his guitar sonata, more power to you. I'm just using my blog to complain about one of the apparant warhorses of the guitar repertoire.

old CDs at new fangled prices

Years ago, when I was just out of college, I came across a CD> The CD was by Fabio Zanon and it was full of the complete solo guitar music of Heitor Villa-Lobos. On the off chance that you're reading this blog and don't know who Heitor Villa-Lobos is he's he's like a Mozart or Haydn or Bach in guitar literature. You WILL study, hear, or play his works at some point. It is inevitable. It is your destiny.

But the thing is that though all Villa-Lobos' great works for solo guitar are bound to be on CD any time anywhere until the end of electronic civilization not all Villa-Lobos CDs are necessarily equal. My personal favorite I unfortunately lent out to someone who has not returned it to me for about two years, the aforementioned Fabio Zanon CD> I had no idea at the time I boughht it that it was based on the 1928 manuscripts rather than the puboished edition, i.e. the first published editions that some recordings are based on.

Why is this important? Well, because some of the original edition bits of the 12 Etudes, for instance, don't make any sense as written. The 1928 edition Zanon plays from does. Since the CD was released an actual sensible format of Villa-Lobos' scores seems to have come out so weird repeats aren't in Etude 1.

Thing is that Zanon's CD is scarce. YOu can only get it used and whilst shopping for my replacement copy I found that four vendors on Amazon have two basic prices for it. About twenty bucks and about eighty-five bucks. Eighty-five dollars! I did NOT make that up. That price is a rip off even for one of the finest Villa-Lobos recordings I've ever heard in my life. Thirty and maybe no we'll talk.

I say this ont to discourage anyone from hearing this great CD but to say that sometimes people are aware of how scarce something is and jack up the price. Maybe I'm not as devoted as the next Villa-Lobos fan who will pay nearly ninety bucks--or at least that much if you factor in tax and shipping and handling fees.

On the other hand, sometimes you have to bite the bullet for something you really want to pick up. I paid probably thirty bucks for the Gyorgy Kurtag score for piccolo, tenor trombone, and guitar, and that was to have it imported to me from Italy. Thanks to Clarius. :)

But there are points where if you have to pay a certai amount of money for recordings of scores that you can get for a quarter of the price yo uhave to ask yourself why you're not playing through them yourself. Oh, yeah, because I'm not a professional and am too busy composing to learn all of Villa-lobos. But then that's not something I can complain about. I've managed to find a copy of Zanon's CD for a price I'm willing to pay. If you don't already have the CD Norbert Kraft has a Cd that's almost as fun that takes the Lullaby etude way too fast for my tastes but sounds okay. Still, it's not my favorite compard to Fabio.

a change of scenery

I think a change of scenery is in order. I'm not sure I have much to elaborate on why that is. It's just where I'm at for the time being. Until such time as the change of scenery taes effect I am probably not going to write tons and tons of stuff. Plus, in my current line of work things actually start getting busy.

Owing to a not-quite legal borrowing program some stranger embarked upon I have been a bit technologically deprived of late. The same reason I don't have the axe I have been racticing upon for some of my musical projects. This has a nasty habit of obstructing blogging, at least if you're me.

Well, at the end of the month Justice League Unlimited comes out on DVD. I'm enough of a cartoon geek to admit that this is one of the mass entertainment media events of my 2006 year.

I wish I had more to say but for now I can't really wax rhapsodic about how fine Jane Austen's Pride & Prejudice is. I've got that pending change of scenery to consider and prepare for.

third time is the charm, I guess

After two different vendors (Guitar Solo PUblications, and Hal Leonard) failed to fulfill a planned order of Gyorgy Kurtag's Op 15b, The LIttle Fix (or "The LIttle Predicament", depending on how it gets translated). I finally came across avendor who actually had the score.

Ironically, the actual publisher never got back to me about selling me a study score directly so I found a vendor in Italy. Fortunately for me the bulk of the sales page on the websie was in English. I have bluffed my way through foreign language purchases before! I know just barely enough Spanish and Vulgate Latin and a smattering of koine Greek that if you present me with a web page that has an order form in a foreign language the bbasic logic of the visual design will tell me what I need to know.

And so I managed to get the score. But first I had to contend with the inherent laziness of postal workers who refused to walk p an admittedly steep drive-way to get a signature from me. So after two non-attempts by the United States Postal Service I ended up having to bus out to well, kinda the middle of nowhere, to pick up the score at a "local" post office. Fortunately for me I have today off because of an appointment I made with a sleep specialist to see if I have any problems. I probably do. Well, it gave me a chance to actually pick up a music score I probably wouldn't have sen if left to the ever eager hands of local United States Postal Workers.

For anyone actually trying to get Kurtag scores I advise the obvious, check out Editio Musica Budapests' webpage and contact Hal Leonard for most of the big and obvious Kurtag entries. For more obscure ones, especially Op 15b. Go with Clarius' web page. Just make sure that when you pladce the order it's to a delivery address you know that you personally can sign for when the big envelope arrives.

ramble on

These two most recnet blogs were really long, I know. I'll see if I can be a bit more streamlined in subsequent posting.

Then again, I'm sort of blogging for lost time. I had quite a weekend of concerts. I could write a bit about the Friday concert in which I heard, thankfully enough, an Aaron Copland piece that was NOT the usual over-played Americana stuff I keep getting tired of hearing over and over. Music for Theater was cool. So were Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto and Brahms' Third Syphony. Those are works, I know, that some people tire of hearing. YEah, they get overplayed on radio sets and in symphony halls but here's the deal ... DON'T listen to the radio and don't GO every time the symphony gets played and the symphonic works won't lose their beauty or power to inspire. Sometimes I listen to Hilary Han playing Mendelssohn's concerto and I do it when I REALLY feel like hearing that concerto. Great art can diminish in the mind and heart's perception through overexposure.

And the type of exposure is crucial. I would rather hear very little music but hear that music with my mind at work than to hear hours of sonic wallpaper. There are few things more offensive to me than music that is not chosen, music that you are subjected to. I don't mean to say that it is literal torture, or perhaps even that it is mental torture. I just mean to say that after a whilie I'm gonna tune out all those Kenny Loggins songs with conversation or work or something like that and then even the purposes for which Kenny wrote those stupid songs are no longer truly served. Music that is written to be forgotten goes against the heart of why anyone bothers with the struggle of the creative enterprise. So if you're going to have music on have it because you're actually listening to it.

Having said that, I DO listen to music that I just sort of zone out to once in a while and it's usually music I've listened to. Not only that it's usually music I've studied the score for a number of times. When you can sing the whole exposition of Haydn's Op 76, 1 you can give yourself the luxury of not really paying attention to it beyond the generally good vibe it brings you. :)

to dance or not to dance

Public education can be the nadir of many a good thing about the arts. By this I don't mean that public schools shouldn't have music education or art education or anything like that. No, I mean to say that the single greatest reason I disdained dance as an art form and pasttime was the public school system of the state of Oregon. Truth to tell the state itself is not so important as the nature of compulsory education.

Dance and appear to be inextricable. The old joke that having sex standing up looks suppciously like dancing is going to be around for as long as humans are. Point noted. That dancing is considered grounds to determine the sexual vitality or suitability of a potential or actual partner is also a commonplace.

But for me all that was moot because I was compelled to take physical education classes and when I had to choose between one of only two options of swimming or dancing I chose dancing. I think those were the options and that was surely my Scylla and Charybdis moment because I just sink like a stone and the only thing that would be more humiliating for a thirteen year old boy who was self-conscious than dancing would be to have no idea how to swim and be around a bunch of other hormonally lobotomized simians wearing a swimsuit. So I took the dance class in seventh grade.

Whether it was seventh grade or eighth I don't clearly recall now so much as that I remember "sock hops" held in the gymn during lunch hour from time to time. THis was apparantly the low-rent variation of prom and it was considered a big deal. The lights were low and various soft rock standards by Journey or Foreigner were playing. It was the late 1980s, after all. I never ventured in to the gym for any of that because it all seemed like some kind of custom wanting a justifiable explanation. Boys and girls asked each other out without regard to a junior high school having a sock hop. And most of the dancing didn't seem to be dancing so much as opportunites to stand holding each other while rotating, as it were, on invisible turntables while some awful song by Eddie Money played amidst dim lights.

Well the dance class would relieve me of my misconception that dancing didn't involve moves. I learned a couple of simple and simly irritating country dance styles. During this time the boys and girls were paired off randomly (in theory) and then every boy ended up dancing with every girl in sequence. This must have been terrible either for the reason that you wanted to dance with just a handful of cute people of the opposite sex, or that you didn't want to dance at all. There were, no doubt, other reasons. It was the whole compulsory nature of it I grew to detest. I grew to detest that the dancing was always based on the motiff of sexual pairing every single time. The idea that dance had some expressive or social function apart from the sexual bond never got explored and I was a wallflower type so I most dreaded the end of each session.

Slow dancing.

Damn it, this was why I didn't go to those stupid sock-hops. It was literally a ree for all until you were literally the wall flower and then you were told to find someone, anyone, and dance with them. I was always one of the people chosen last or had someone chosen for me, usually, to be quite blunt, a fat and inscure girl who didn't deserve to be forced into it any more than I did. I'd occasionally get made fun of for getting who ever it was I got stuck with. The only thing worse than being the last kid picked to be on a team sport is to be the last kid picked (and entirely not by your own choice) to dance with someone you don't know and don't like and don't consider attractive. What's there to like about it? Does it build character?

Now if people like dancing, cool. I'm happy for them. If people consider dancing to be a sign of character, though, I'm afraid I must always disagree. Gene Kelly kicked ass. Really, I love Singing in the Rain, and I totally dig how Kelly elevated dandce to a level where a non-dancer can appreciate his art for its narrative and archtypal value. But, dude, most people are NOT Gene Kelly or Cyd Charisse. For one thing they don't look that good and for another thing they surely dont' dance as well.

I know, it's sort of cowardly to not like dance or dancing as a personal activity for these reasons but I was really soured on the whole idea by that formative experience. If you don't win a kid over to the idea of dancing at that point then basically the average boy is going to feel like any dancing that doesn't involve a female is going to be pretty gay. I know, not exacty PC or caring or thoughtful but I'm revisiting teenage trauma, for want of a better phrase.

I will say that there have been a tiny handful of times when I have danced. I have a five-year old niece who likes to dance and because she likes to dance I sometimes dance with her. I might put on Stravinsky's Petrushka (see, I can connect this to my earlier post on Spectrum). Or I might play Stravinsky's awesome violin concerto. My dances are simple pogo jumping deals and my niece doesn't mind that simplicity.

ANd I can have fun doing it even though it's tiring and I don't think I'm great at it because the five year old girl isn't judging me by any preconceived criteria and it's not about some mandatory pairing off of guys and girls in some tacitly endorsed mandatory dating ritual or something like that.

In short, I dance with my niece because it is a form of expression that isn't tied to a social requirement imposed from the outside but because I care about my niece. THIS is what dance should be about, in my highly biased non-dancer opinion.

I've never been very good at sports ofteam activities. I never had the eyes for them, really. So I'll admit to being small-minded about the value of the two arts in which the body is most front and center--dance, and theater. In film and TV the body is still present and there is often dancing but the screen is a mediator. In a live setting something seems faintly silly about actors and dancers. It's as though the certainty of the ilusion cannot be revoked and the fourth wall is not the fourth wall so much as the very medium of perception. Mystery Science Theater 3000 is what it is because it produces at a meta-level the meta-entertainment of ripping into bad movies. Watching a TV show about puppets watching bad movies just drives the point home more forcefully.

Whereas in a theater production or a dance production the mediation, the barrier, isn't there. It's just you and the people up there on the stage. Where actors and dancers, it seems, sense some kind of sacred connection or interaction for me it merely amplifies and reinforces the distance. My eyes are bad, after all, so what I don't see are the various shades that actors and dancers may bring that for them carry the heaviest weight. And sometimes the acting is just laid on so thick to project from the stage that there is no subtlety to it. It is sometimes said that theater is life, film is art, and TV is furniture and I, as I must have said somewhere before, believe that distinction to be reversed. If you have the disposable time and money to go out of the house to see a dance or theater production you are buying a form of cultural furniture that proves you have some status as an intellectually-functioning being. It sounds really harsh, harsh than I actually mean it to be because film snobs and music snobs aren't any better and, believe me, I know I'm a music snob. I'm a cartoon snob, too!

I have tried over the years to appreciate every form of art and here is my rambling account of why in at least one medium of artistic expression that journey took a while because of some mundane but very trying and irritating formative expriences.

dance of the S&M fairies

This Saturday the Spectrum Dance Company staged Petrushka (music by Stravinsky) and The Miraculous Mandarin (music by Bartok). Being a fan of both composers I did what I could to attend this concert. Now that I have my feelings are decidedly mixed. My brother had never been to a ballet production before and I was anxious to take him to an event that had music I know he loves. He adores th emusic of Stravinsky and Bartok. Who doesn't? Well, who doesn't who would ever read this blog? That might be an irrelevant question. So noted.

At any rate the big event came and I and my brother went down to the Moore theater to check out the event. The Moore is, first of all, qute a bit smaller than I thought it might be. We're not talking the Paramount here, let alone McCaw Hall, and the Moore as a theater is more the broom closet to the living room in terms of sheer size.

This didn't have to be a bad thing and it wasn't. It meant I didn't need the binoculars I brought with me after all. I brought 8x binoculars on the assumption that I wouldn't be able to see much of anything. Not the case. I managed to see a decent amount.

Sort of. Don Byrd came out and seemed to half apologize for staging these "violent" and "disturbing" productions. The program notes spoke of the latent racism, misogyy, and homophobia in the ballets. Homophobia? Where exactly is homophobia in Petrushka or The Miraculous Mandarin? I mean, I've read through the score and read the basic story and I'm not sure where the homophobia is. Maybe because I'm not gay I just don't see it.

Racism? Ah, yeah, I TOTALLY get that there are are racist bits in the two ballets. The Mandarin as the "other" is obvious and perhaps too obvious for a sophisticated Seattleite to fret about. I mean, come on, who would really be shocked that people from an aristocratic Russian background with nominal Russian Orthodox history like Stravinsky would think gays are the greatest thing on earth? More or less ditto for Bartok. That's sort of like being shocked that Bible believers attend fundamentalist or evangelical churches. Now speaking as the son of an interracial marriage I'm hardly condoning racism but it just seems, as my brother pointed out, that if you apologize too much in advance for all the things you find objectionable about the ballets what on earth are you staging them for?

Apparantly the solution or explanation was to restage Petrushka in an S&M club. Great. So the audience was regaled with a black woman reading boldly about the "definitions of terms" as said definitions pertain to sadism and masochism and power and pleasure and so on. Then we got a techno/mod dance routine in which the basic power inequalities that come out in Petrushka are presented in advance. On the one hand I liked that the basic essence of Petrushka's plot could be distilled into a single scene, on the other hand, it annoyed me that the whole story and its most rudimentary meaning had to be telegraphed out to music that I found boring before I got to see the actual Petrushka staging I had ostensibly paid money to see.

And then we got to Stravinsky. Turns out the smallness of The Moore meant we got a trio performance. Two pianos and one percussionist. It was a bit underwhelming. Getting Stravinsky's music without Stravinsky's orchestration is, I don't know, it's sort of like seeing black and white photos of Rita Hayworth and being told she was a sultry redhead. Well, cool, hot redhead, so I'm told, but I have to take people's word for it. Similar deal with hearing Petrushka without the instrumentation.

But I want to be generous so I watch all the dancing and I guess it's okay but I keep hearing these people, mostly women, screaming. Why they're screaming I'm not really sure. It's a bit beyond me. I'll admit to being mostly a neophyte and a Phillistine on the matter of ballet. I know that I thought Pacific Northwest Ballet's staging of the Firebird, Apollo, and Rite of Spring was a lot of fun. I also had the distinct sense that this staging of Petrushka was, to put it nicely, a bit overcooked.

The black dancer came back on stage and turned out to be the magician. The magician apparantly has a much bigger role than a short perusal of the score would tell you. As in she's on stage the whole time. I've never seen any other stagings of Petrushka and if I'm to believe the program notes the likelihood of seeing another staging is remote, but I just wondered what the deal was with the Magician turned young black woman dominatrix was about. Is it supposed to mean something? I mean, the idea that an old white guy with magical powers is abusing his puppets I could sorta see maybe.

But it could also be that most dances and dancers are not that great at telling stories, at least not stories like Petrushka. Truth be told when I look at the story of Petrushka I see something that makes about as much sense as an episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. No, seriously, I like some Aqua Teen Hunger Force I'm just not sure that means it makes a whole lot of sense. Well, Petrushka's plot is sort of like that. Magician brings puppets to life and the puppets proceed to bicker and fight and have amorous relations with each other while a huge circus rolls thorugh town, replete with a dancing bear.

I knew where that came in and I knew that in addition to the two pianos being in place of the orchestra I was not going to see any dancing bear. Call me small but I wanted to see a dancing bear! Come on, people! Dancing bear.

Since so little of Petrushka lends itself to the least bit of explication as narrative I get to the end quickly here. Petrushka gets killed and there's no ghost of the little guy taunting the Magician, the Moor has this whole time been a big beefy white Aryan dude who beats people around. At the cl.imactic moment of Petrushka's demise some dancer screams "What are you waiting for?" Was this because a dancer missed a cue? Was it supposed to indicate that the Moor was compelled to action by peer pressure? Does this have something to do with a somewhat nebulous "violence cure" talked about in the program notes to the effect that 20s art relied on violence as a resolution in contrast to a "talking cure" advocated by Freud? Well, if so, wasn't Petrushka composed and staged BEFORE the 1920s? This study provided by Spectrum's program notes seems a bit ahistorical.

So the production of Petrushka ended and well, what can I say? It was competently danced, even well-danced. The music was Stravinsky's and it was fun to listen to but the whole thing seemed overdone and yet underdone. If the ballet was or is as problematic and strange as described why not have the nerve to stage it as it was? Why recast the entire drama into an S&M club and then tweak the end a bit?

So then came the Miraculous Mandarin. Here Spectrum seemed closer to the mark in as much as they stayed closer to the story in the ballet Bartok wrote music for. Since this is Seattle the guy who was the "brute, the Moor, in the Petrushka production is now the Mandarin in the Bartok ballet. How obvious. Symbolically the idea that the abuser becomes the abused and that the abused becomes the abuser holds traction in a work of art if the two switches happen within the same dramatic work, the same story. Merely juxtaposing two drasticallly different tales and then making that juxtaposition via casting just comes across as too knowingly PC and self-conscious.

Okay, so the set-up is a dreary little flat in which two guys and a girl lounge about. SOme kind of conjugal something or other happens and then the girl gets out of bed, off the floor, and rather comic and absurd slowness puts some clothes on. This is the girl who is going to seduce two or three guys throughout the production. I heard a few people snort and ssnicker and my hunch it was because the gestures were too obvious. I don't mean merely in the sense that lingering on an undressed dancer in a stage production might be cause for tittilation or something. No, it's that the staging was done in such a way that it conveyed the sense that this was supposed to be defused.

See, in my limited experience no artists have greater pretense to relevance and profundity with so little grounds for the presumption as theater troupes and dance troupes. Why? Well, because who watches the stuff who hasn't already consigned themselves to a cultural elite that is rare? I implicate myself. Dude, I am part of the middle clas and I know it. I have the disposable income to see art productions. So to me the pretense of art troupes to confront the indifference of the middle class is pretty stupid since they need the money of patrons to do that. Tangent, yes, I know. That's what blogging is for.

TO put trhings another way, if you're casting a dancer to be aseductress then if her dances are so mechanical as to be comic that COULD be a commentary on the artifice of seduction. Okay, cool, I'm there with you. The big 80s hair suggests as much. But by now I'm wondering about the fcomment about misogyny. Maybe, maybe there's something to it. But at the same time the idea of having the one woman in the ballet as a whore is subversive in a way that from a modernist angle would make sense. If you're really upending the expectations of dance as a traditional form then by having the only female in the ballet as a prostittute shows how you upeend ballet's presentation of women as iconic of what is beautiful and salutory about the human race. I mean, we could even consult something no further away in Stravinsky's output than, say, the Firebird, or Apollo to see what seems to be a more conventional deployment of the woman as dancer. It makes sense even to a neophyte to dance like myself.

Mandarin worked as a ballet staging for Spectrum partly because they stuck to the story and partly because there was a story, a simple one, but a story. In terms of dance as naarrative I'm not sure I'm likely to see anything cooler and more narratively senseible than Gene Kelly's huge set piece in Singing in the Rain. But here, too, the experience felt a bit small without Bartok's orchestration. In Bartok and Stravinsky you have two 20th century masters of orchestration. The tone colors and sounds they coaxed from instruments were amazing! And even though Bartok's music survives a purely pianistic approach for the sim ple reason that Bartok could shred on the keyboard it was still a let-down.

I wouldn't say the productions were altogether bad but they just seemed overdone and overthought. So apologetic were they for elements that the troop thought unsavory and offensive that it left me wondering why they bothered. Why are things like homophobia, misogyny and racism so particularly bad in THESE productions and not in countless other ballet productions that reflect the same nasty tendencies in human nature? It's a strange thing for the dancers and choreographer to find the material more offensive than I, schmuck from the street, find it.

This hasn't put me off ballet by any means. It's just put me off trusting the advance self-praise of the Spectrum Dance company.

shows and shows

This weekend features a few concerts I'm going to visit. Tomorrow night Seattle Symphony plays Mendelssohn's violin concerto and Brahms' Third Symphony. Both of which are awesome pieces. Then Spectrum statges Petrushka and The Miraculous Mandarin this weekend, which I am ALSO going to see. I have hardly ever gone to see ballet productions and remain diffident at best toward dancing. Dancing and I do not have any pleasant memories, personally speaking. If I merely mention the words compulosry physical education class you might start getting the basic idea. Where most people may see dancing as fun or at least neutral I actually have only bad associations with it as a form of recreation.

But as an artistic endeavor I see value to it. I own Singing in the Rain, for instance, which is a cool movie. But I'm not here to expound upon my lack of happy thoughts connected to dancing. I plan to write about ballet stuff as a total layman sometime after this weekend is done. So bear with me if I seem to have no idea what I'm taokling about with respect to dance stuff. But I at least know a pittance about Bartok and Stravinsky.

another villanelle

Feline grace is merely an illusion
Held by those who have not seen a cat stumble
Of course the cat will accept this conclusion

Even as his paw makes the miscalculation
That will send him a long a nine-foot tumble
Feline grace is merely an illusion

But the supple spine is the cat's possession
That lets him refrain being humble
Of course the cat will accept this conclusion

For that supple spine resists concussion
As his paws on the ledge merely fumble
Feline grace is merely an illusion

As he falls through the air, his meditation:
Quick-healing bones permit him to bumble
Of course the cat will accept this conclusion

With hours of purr-filled sleep, recuperation
Is too near that the cat should grumble
Feline grace is merely an illusion
Of course the cat will accept this conclusion.

Obviously not as effective as the earlier villanelle but I wanted to experiment to see if the form was as difficult as its reputation. In some ways, yes, because writing a villanelle where the structurally commanded repetitions are what they are makes it hard to find lines that both serve the structural purpose and invited developmental significance throughout the form.

On the other hand, there is a sense in which if you just nail lines 1 and 3 of the 19 lines with an ear for their rhetorical/structural significance and their function in the logical sequence of an argument there is a sense in which villanelles write themselves as long as you start one with the clear understanding that you're making a single point with manifold implications.

It's like setting up the recipe for a cake. After each key instruction in the process you're reminding people that we're baking a cake and the non-repeating lines should explicate the significance of each progressive step in the baking process. Then at the end you explain what you just accomplished that you said you were going to do at the start. So, in a way, you begin with a question or premise that can become its own conclusion.

Perhaps it is the recursive, even circular nature of the rhetoric created by the form that makes the form hard. People don't like circular arguments but, as some philosophers note, not all circular arguments are false. This is especially handy when thinking of writing out a villanelle, or so it seems to me.

posting fuzz

I just watched Jet Li's "last" film. Fearless is fun, though as an artistic accomplishment it's similar enough to Hero that I would have put Hero last if I were Jet Li. Oh well. I'm not so Jet can do what he likes.

A VILLANELLE

After sending a raven

Sea foam is full of the filth of the world
Life-giving water is poisoned by salt
From this all things known as life have been hurled

Now the dreams of countless dreamers have swirled
Together within the watery vault
Sea foam is full of the filth of the world

Though each dream might be embroidered or pearled
In each one was found a terrible fault
From this all things known as life have been hurled

And as each dream its own banner unfurled
It did above others itself exalt
Sea foam is full of the filth of the world

So dreams exalted themselves in the world
Prompting the sea to begin its assault
From this all things known as life have been hurled

Now the countless dreams and dreamers have swirled
Together within the watery vault
Sea foam is full of the filth of the world
From this all things known as life have been hurled

I wrote this in a couple of days. No fooling. Mainly on the 22nd and the 26th. The beauty of the form, just as a form, is that the repetition makes it easier to develop patterns for the language. It's a good thing, too, because not a whole lot of words rhyme with "world" or "salt". I think I covered all the most likely candidates.

As to the theme, well, that's self-explantory. Even without any biblical literacy the motiff of the flood or the sea as agent of destruction is simple enough. After my little alphabet poem the villanelle is positively easy.

Superheroes in modern Western culture

It is occasionally popular for literary critics to proclaim the death of or the general irelvancy of the traditionally defined hero for the modern age. And perhaps the surest harbinger of post-modernism, whatever that was, was the transformation of Space GHost from a violent basher of putative evil to a self-absorbed idiot hosting his own talk show. Personally I prefer the Space Ghost: Coast to Coast show to the highly over-rated orignal show. By that I mean if people have sentimental attachment to SPace Ghost I'll understand that but not loytalty to the actual and actually terrible original show. It's just a few steps up from Rubik the AMazing Cube or Turbo Teen.

But the mutation of Space Ghost from hero to moron was perhaps as emblematic as anything else in demonstrating the idea that the heroes of yore are not relevant the way they once were.
But that would be an utterly mistaken supposition.

The ob office numbers tell us a different story, a story that critics at the Village Voice or Salon may or may not want to pay attention to. Someone at the National Review may say that a good chicken mcnugget is just that but I bet I won't hear or read him saying that about his favorite rock bands even though the same elitist trope is more salient in snubbing the Beatles than it would be in snubbing Batman, Superman, or Spiderman.

Why?

Well, it's simple. The three superheroes that any non-comics reader would care about, per Paul Dini, all have a few traits in common which place them squarely in the traditional hero category despite us being in an age when people are supposedly too sophisticated to believe in those kinds of heroes anymore.

The differences between Superman, Spiderman, and Batman are real and obvious but fanboys tend to let those issues obscure the deeper points of commonality. In all three characters we see a few things in common.

1. ORPHANS

Each one of these heroes is an orphan and is raised by an adoptive set of parents. For Clark Kent the surrogate is obviously Jonathan and Martha Ken. For Bruce Wayne the surrogate parent is Alfred, the family butler. For Peter Parker the surrogate parents are Uncle Ben and Aunt May. Batman is the unusual member of the trio for witnessing the death of his parents first hand and for seeing them murdered. That accounts for the temperament he has but it's also true that that is not something to be set aside as being entirely different from the shared origin, the dead parents and the upbringing at the hands of a surrogate family.

Spiderman, of course, came about in response to Peter Parker's realization of his coimplicity with his Uncle Ben's death. He never knew his original parents So his story is unique amongst the three in that guilt over his part in the death of his surrogate father impels him to be a hero. BUt that gets us to the second point.

2. HEROISM AS A MEANS OF HONORING FATHER AND MOTHER

Despite what Christians might consider ostensibly pagan or neo-pagan trappings, Batman, Superman, and Spiderman all do what they do as a way of honoring the legacy of their parents. Honor your father an dmother, that's it. I think that here is probably the simplest reason for the appeal of the characters. If they were in it merely for revenge we wouldn't consider them heroic, would we? They'd be antiheroes. But that they are spurred to act on behalf of the death of people they love would be hard to dismiss as being something unheroic regardless of how we might interpret the way the characters are written.

3. RELUCTANCE TO KILL

This didn't become a common point until the Silver Age because in the Golden Age stories Batman and even Superman were perfectly willing to let people plummet to their deaths and don't get me started on Robin the boy wonder. That little punk killed four people in tthe first issue in which he appears. But over time and thanks partly to editorial fiat and partly to the Comics Code all three major heroes became reluctant to kill even though they all existed in settings in which it was easily within their power to do so.

The shared reluctance Superman, Batman, and Spiderman share with regard to killing seems to spring partly from phliosophy and partly from the realization that their parents died violent and horrible deaths. Ben was murdered. THomas and Martha Wayne were murdered. Clark Kents parents died on an exploding planet, which is pretty violent to say the least. In early c9omics Superman's parents BOTH died before he became SUperman so if we consider the earliest versions of the characters Spiderman was unique because he had one of his surrogates still alive and now dependent on him.

In the case of SPiderman, my favorite initial run, we get an interesting dramatic arc in the original run Stan Lee wrote. Peter Parker becomes Spiderman to make money as a professional wrestler and when he realizes he has become responsible for not stopping the mugger who eventually killed his uncle he becomes a hero. So complicity in his surrogate father's death by inaction spurs him to guilt which spurs him to become a superhero. At the end of issue 90 Captain Stacy, Peter's adoptive surrogate father via his girlfriend Gwen has filled the gap lost with Ben's death, for a short time. But ironically Peter Parker's activities axs Spiderman, specifically his battles with Doctor Octopus, actually CAUSE the death of his second surrogate father figure, Captain Stacy.

It's maudlin, of course, but most tragic arcs are. Spiderman's actioins as a superheo are the catalyst for the death of the second father figure where his refusal to act was the ctalyst for the first father figure. The dramatic irony is certainly obvious but no less effective if you are willing to set aside snobbery long enough to noitce the thematic arc across the 90 issues of Amazing Spiderman.

ANd you get a similar dramatic reversal with Norman Osbourne, the Green GOblin. After the death of his wife he is so obsessed with material success so he can provide for his son he becomes alienated from the person he loves most and his business methods become crooked. IN the process of trying to provide for his son with possessions he denies his son emotional and personal bonds that are what the son really wants. Finally Osbourn's experiments cribbed from a work associate backfire and he unknowingly develops a psychotic second personality in attempting to create human performance enhancers. They work, of course, but at the price of creating a personality he isn't aware of. The tragedy of Peter Parker's plight as Spiderman is he is all too aware of his double life and how it could harm his family. NOrman Osbourn is totally oblivious to his double life and how it came about from things he had already done to harm his remaining family. This is why the Goblin and Spiderman are such well-matched foils.

This is also why I submit that after Stan Lee's inital run most of the stories lionized by Spiderman fans are actually stunts in comparison. If a person didn't find Captain Stacy's death striking but found Gwen's death striking then they are more impressed with the less impressive story. It's really easy to kill off the pretty blonde girlfriend of the hero as a way of making drama. But it is a drama which in some sense is more alien to the nature of Spiderman and his origins than the losss of the second surrogate father.

Most comic book runs, especially comic book runs in superhero titles really DON'T have this level of literary value or, to put it another way, they don't really REWARD literary analysis at the level I've described, which itself is pretty basic. But that doesn't mean, as some of my old college associates have maintained, the superhero comics are incapable of dealing with serious themes. It's not a matter of art style because no one questions the lkterary value of Maus even though over time I suggest that repeated readings of Maus reveal that it is not necessarily more thought-provoking than Spiderman 1-90 by Stan Lee or even necessarily more subtle in its presentation of morality. Spiegelmann can object but I don't he has any reason to. Besides, I never said anyone shouldn't read Maus. Maus and Spiderman issues 1-90 are both great works of comics as an art form.

Of the three superheroes I'd have to say SPiderman is the only one with a continuous run by a single author that I think holds up with literary value. Batman and Superman easily have the characters, basic story, and potential to have stories that are of substantial literary value but I've simply yet to see many stories that fit that level of craft. There are some great and terrible tales in the DC titles. Some of the trouble is the tendency to obsess with c9ontinuity that should have come about naturally as the result of the creative work of a single cohesive creative team. Stan Lee had that with his company and DC didn't really have that despite having characters that in some ways are better and more enduring characters overall.

And if we consider heroic characters from earlier period sof literature we get Odysseus, Hercules, Beowulf, Samson, and a number of other characters who moderns tend to consider poorly sketched in terms of psychology or plausibility. This is one of the recurring mistakes of modernist and post-modernist literary criticism, which is basically to pretend that the nature of the reading experience must be the yardstick by which we assess narratives that frequently derived from more oral cultures. And in the case in which a story was written we are still looking at cultures in which paper was at a far greater permium than it is now. Paper was harder to come by and the reasons to use it tended to compell a different sort of narrative. It's not for nothing that pulp fiction was named what it was named. The real problem has less to do with pulp fiction than with pulp literature of every strip,, fiction or non-fiction. As Ecclesiastes put it, of the writing of books there is no end.

And, of course, the same goes for blogging.

"Christian" music

This is always a curious topic and one that I have been considering lately because sometimes I visit a few forums by conservative Christians whose views I sometimes respect and sometimes disagree with. I also occasionally get books run my way on the development and evolution or demise of Western music or about Christendom and the West and music in general.

I sometimes come across statements like "tonality is Trinitarian". Well, cool, I suppose diatonic scales and equal temperament "could" be Trinitarian but I'm at a loss fot he acoustic principles and physics that exlpain that one. The ubiquitous presence of the melodic and harmonic perfect fifth seems like a case for universal conceptions of tonality until you dig into Pythagorean, mean-tone, and other forms of intonation. The whole doctrine of affections in Renaissance and early Baroque music clearly derives from the practical issues of how nasty B minor sounds on an instrument using mean-tone intoation compared to an instrument using Pythagorean or equal temperament. A piece that wouls sound like Hell, as the old saying might have it, might not sound so hellish thanks to equal temperament.

So there's that. And then there's the broader question of the connection between the medieval/ecclesiastical modes that evolved into the majorminor key stem and what connection, if any, can be established between these tonal organizational principles and ancient Greek or Hebrew music.

The case is fuzzier than some people would have you believe. I've read Aritstoxenus, who is cited as a refernce by Plato and others on the matter of music and the sad truth is is that experts in the field admit to being at a loss for what these dudes were really talking about. A decent guess is that the ecclesiastical modes may have been inversions of the Greek modes but this, too, is fairly speculative.

I'm all for Western music and tonality and I dig the music of that tradition at least as much as the next guy but the idea that tonality can be proven to be Trinitarian and Christian and that the West embodies Christian precepts still seems shaky to me. Not because I am not a Christian or don't believe that Chrsitianity is foundational to the development of Western culture. My hesitancy is based on my understanding that Christianity is global in its scope and that the differences between ancient Middle Eastern music and even ancient Greco-Roman music and the medieval musical legacies that led to the Renassiace and Baroque periods are underplayed for the sake of political expediency by polemicists interested in saying this or that musical style is less Christian than another.

For instance, modal music and tonal music are not exactly the same deal. They sound similar but that'snot the same as saying they are actually organized along the same principles. The simplest explanation of how these differences manifest is that in modal music a descending melodic sixth is rarely endorsed whereas in functional harmony from the major/minor system this kind of melodic interval happens frequently. Why? Because conceptually there is a sense of tonic over which the descending interval can be tuned. In the earlier style the melodic consideration took precedence of the idea of a home base for a key center.

"Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" is not a song that you're going to find written prior to the advent of functional harmony.

Conversely, most really great modal melodies predat the Baroque era because Greensleeves and other modal melodies did not necessarily survive their, if you will, sword-point conversion to functional harmony. Most people know "What Child is This" in natural minor rather than dorian. That is one of the few modal tunes that survived the transition that I can think of, or that most of us can think of. "What Wondrous Love is This?" is yet another onee.

IT is only in the context of functional harmony that a perfect fourth could be considered a consonant interval (thank you, second inversion chords).

Why am I saying all this? Well, where the rubber hits the road is when Christian commentators say that this or that composer wrote music that defied the Trinitarian ideal of functional harmony by injecting rampant chromaticism. There are problems with this approach from a historical and musicology standpoint. The first problem is that Bach opened the floodgates of chromaticism in his generation in a way not entirely different from the way Gesualdo wrote chromatically far-out music in HIS time. Mozart and Beethoven both employed chromaticism in ways that were highly unusual for there time and then you get folks like Chopin or Berlioz. By the time the pet whipping boy of Christian conservative commentators appears, Wagner, most of the revolutions they decry and attribute to his music had basically already happened.

And then you get the slow and spotty assimilation of non-Western musical styles or the employment of ecclesiastical modes apart from the voice-writing precepts outlined from the era in which they were initially employed. Debussy did not invent dorian or mixolydian but what he did was to employ the modes iin fixed form without regarding for the intervalic strictures of the pre-Baroque era. That's what made his music sound trippy in its day. Debussy also incorpoated elements from styles where ever he dug them.

How does this connect to Christianity and more "modern" music? Well, I could write some more about that but feel like saving that aspect of the discussion for another time.

scores that are advertised but hard to get

Sometimes a publisher will advertise a score on their catalog or website they can't exactly get right away ... or at all. This is one of the downsides of hunting for chmaber music for classical guitar. It probably can't be helped as it is a bit hard to keep something in print just because it's cool chamber music if no one buys the stuff.

Take The LIttle Predicament for instance. I discovered this awesome little piece for piccolo, trombone (tenor) and guitar and the Hugarian publisher has it around but Hal Leonard may have problems getting it and my local Hal Leonard procurment point Capitol Music seems undecided on whether or not the piece is available or unavailable. It wouldn't be the first time I've asked them to hunt for obscure chamber music that may not be easy to get. It took me three years, I think, to find Castelnuovo-Tedesco's SOnatine Op 205 for flute and guitar.

Anyway, here's hoping I can actually get the Gyorgy Kurtag piece because it's a sweet little piece. If anyone happens to know how I can get it feel free to post something here. :)

Snakes on a Plane

The distinction between a bad and a gloriously bad movie probably just comes down to whether the movie is what you might call "self-aware". I have friends who can't stand the element of self-awareness or anything reflexive in a genre flick, or at least they give me that impression. But a film that is aware of its innately silly premise is qualitatively different than a film that presumes you should be scared. So a gloriously bad movie might be something on the order of Eight Legged Freaks and, of course, Snakes on a Plane. A merely bad movie would be something like The Butterfly Effect though to be fair to this very day I defend Ashton Kutcher's performance. It's not Kutcher's fault the film was as bad as it is. The SCRIPT is the reason the film is as lame as it is.

Since I'm on that topic a bad movie is one in which a mechnanism is needed to accomplish the plot which is abandoned as the mechanism by the time the film is over. Exhibit A ... well, you've already got Exhibit A. Let me break down the breakdown.

Dude has memory gaps and can't explain why they happen. Dude is told to keep a journal to write down what he DOES remember. Mysteriously the dude who can't remember what happened during his blackouts can actually write down EXACTLY what happened and in the process of writing down exactly what happened that he can't remember he is transported back in time to that moment that he never remembered to begin with. Gee, this is sort of like a bad episode of Quantum Leap without the faintest semblance of internal continuity.

Of course flashback after flashback allows him to interact with his past so that he has a multiple choice past but is not fundamentally a different eperson for it. The whol epedophile dad incident actually never changes which gets to another glaring plot problem. When the final home-movie time travel incident happens and Kutcher's character decides he can't have met the girl, ever, he spurns her and is able to somehow have fixed the problems that led to her eventual demise. Sort of. The pedophile dad isn't out of the picture, though, so effectively none of the bause and trauma he (Kutcher's character) is hoping t9o avoid, is ever actually avoided, just his direct presence or participation in the events as they unfold, which somehow fixes everything, or so we're supposed to believe, I guess.

The problem is the film is played serious and not for laughs. Snakes on a Plane has spectacular plot holes that don't beg explanation but merely beg the suspension of a hefty amount of disbelief. A story that just asks you to suspend disbelief is a more honest story in some ways than a story that bets you take the story seriously and then can't keep its internal facts straight. This is why parables work more effectively than didactic tales sent via spam that are putatively based on real events. We can accept the unreality of the parable long enough to accept that it is making a point about the real world. A spam that claims to be about a real confrontation between a professor and a student in a classroopmm about the existence of God or the evils of this or that president that claim to be real events tend to seem like mere parables. The street definitely doesn't go both ways.

This was ostensibly supposed to be about Snakes on a Plane but I suppose it's not now. :)