Some side notes on composing a Mass

Masses are tough. I suppose if I didn't care what I was really doing musically with the text of the Mass I could say it wasn't hard or if I was some lazy dork who refused to set the Credo for some dubious reason besides just not believing that what the Creed says is actually true then I could decide that maybe it's not really hard ... but it's hard.

It seems the most crucial issue is to take the text and consider its theological content and form as a starting point. The text tends to suggest its own musical form. Kyrie settings are usually some variation of binary or ternary form, usually the latter. Glorias and Credos tend to be more free-floating but this is not something I'm sure I entirely endorse. I think that if you take the literary structure of the Gloria you'll find that a persistent pattern emerges in which declamations about God alternate with descriptions of how we respond to the nature of God's glory. Since the Gloria incipit is taken from the worship of angels to Yahweh I consider it to be not merely a descritpion of how acclamation of the Lord but of the divine court's description of the Lord. I.e. we're not angels so appropriating the worship of angels as our own should not distract us from the observation that angels are the Lord's messengers. Therefore I found a way to compose a Gloria where the incipit is used in a number of forms to describe the Lord's nature and attributes and to use a different thematic gesture to describe our own response to the Lord whether through thanksgiving or supplication. And it came out in a loose rondo form of ABabA.

The Credo presents another set of problems, a HUGE set of problems. I'm not Bach or Penderecki so a large scale multi-movement setting of the Credo feels utterly beyond me. But I am often stymied by attempting to just imitate the Credo forms I've seen other composers use, not because they're musically unsatisfying but because I"m just not sure the musiccal form explicates the theological significance of the text. Text-painting is cool and all but sometimes text-painting just creates a big mush of tunes and textures that don't always make formal sense. It's seeming terribly easy to create a big musical mess where people don't remember the content of the Credo.

So for me the plan that seems most logical is to build the musical setting of the Credo around Christ and to have that be the measure. There are two aspects of Christ to consider via hypostatic union--his divine nature and his human nature; His oneness with the Father and His identification with us as sinful men and women. So how would this work itself out? So far I think the best approach is to establish a thematic and structural link between Christ's earthly ministry, death, and resurrection and the ministry and gifts and hope of the Church. This would also entail finding a thematic and structural link between the Son with the Father and Spirit. So, of course, this means that the melody and harmony associated with the persons of the Trinity should be shared. So far the only composer I've found who made a point of doing this in his Mass is Frank Martin (way to go Frank!) but I imagine other composers have done this and I trust I'm not the last, the first, or that people besides Martin haven't done this already.

Yeah, I know, I've blogged about this before but making sure you are, as a Christian and a composer, putting a lot of thought into the meaning of the text is the smallest prerequisite for bothering to write a Mass at all. I've only been working on this for seven years so I figure I've got no one's deadline and only my artistic goals to worry about.

This is Your Brain on Music, part 2, connections to biblical literature

Now this may seem like a total joke to any of you who aren't Christians or don't see how scientific research on musical perception would have anything to do with biblical literature. Since I'm a Christian and a musician with at least a passing interest in some scientific research (though I admit I don't have any scientific training) I feel that this book Levitin has written provides some interesting stuff Christians, and Christian musicians, should at least be aware of.

I skipped entirely Levitin's points about how brain development connects to musical taste because I think it basically speaks for itself and I've tended to think that people stop expanding their musical tastes around the time they think they've "grown up". Still, it's another interesting excurses Levitin touches on to explore why people seem to have expanding musical interests and tastes up to about their early 20s after which many, many people just stop listening to new music and keep playing that same album by Boston or Led Zeppelin over and over again.

But I think Levitin's explanation of sexual selection, while probably pretty accurate, seems incomplete. To assume we must explain music in terms of the earliest humans is actually a perfectly good idea, though, even if it's not clear that just one explanation of the use of music would do the job. Scientists are still not sure why any animals need to sleep so why would we necessarily have one cover-all explanation for music?

Still, Levitin's proposal that music is a form of sexual selection, that music signals a guy is a good suitor and mate, is something Christians can extrapolate from the Bible. The first song ever sung in Scripture is Adam's song to Eve. When the first song in Scripture is invented by a man for his wife when he sees her for the first time I defy any Christian to just dismiss Levitin's explanation of sexual selection as being inaccurate. It may be incomplete but the Bible pretty well backs it up as far as it goes.

For that matter, let's just look at the titles of biblical books. The Song of Songs is not actually about God except by means of theologians forcing it to be an allegorical exploration of God's love for His people or the individual believer by means of sheer historical accumulation of avoiding the more obvious content of the book. It's a series of love poems celebrating sexual love between a husband and wife. If the first song in Scripture is about sex and the Song of Songs, which advertises itself as the greatest of all songs, at least uses the sexual relationship as its central metaphor (hey, I'll throw a bone to people who assume Song of Songs MUST be allegorical) then we can't avoid the truth that sexual selection and song are linked in a way that even the most conservative Christian can't deny.

Not that this necessarily is presented as a justification for polygamy but consider the two greatest kings in Israelite history, David and Solomon. Both were legendary for their abilities as song-writers and both had quite a few wives. Even if we are not presented with prescriptive teaching from Scripture that Levitin's hypothesis is correct the descriptive evidence of the biblical account is that Levitin's still right that the song and dance man impresses the women.

But I think even a non-Christian could argue that Levitin overstates the explanation of sexual selection. We know for a fact that not all songs are about getting the attention of the hot guy or hot girl. We learn songs to learn things we really need to know. Despite dismissive statements that music is a parasitic offshoot of language centers in the brain it's hard to ignore that we all learned the alphabet through some form of song. Music and memory are intertwined. We remember things when we sing them and Scripture supports this, too. God told Moses to teach the Israelites a song so as to remember what He wanted them to remember. Many of the Psalms are devoted to summaries of Israel's history. If these psalms have ever seemed boring keep in mind that it would be easier to read one of the Psalms covering Israel's history than to read the whole Torah. In a culture where literacy was rare using songs as an aid to memory was crucial. In cultures where written languages were not invented this role of music to aid memory and shared a common history would have been even more important.

Which is to say I think Christians and Christians who are musicians, should read this book and other literature dealing with scientific research into music and musical perception. Levitin's book is pretty easy to read and in some ways is boring because he deals with music at such a basic level for Western repertoire.

And people will justifiably complain that Levitin grossly oversimplifies all musical idioms in terms of Western thought. He's not covering Eastern music and assumes the half step is really the smallest interval the human ear can perceive. This is, to put it mildly, not even close to true! I've visited the Seattle Composer's Salon enough times to tell you that there's all kinds of micro-tonal music out there. The major/minor key system we take for granted still includes tiny distinctions that are real and practical for the notes E sharp and F natural. Enharmonic spellings don't mean the notes are necessarily ever really the same in terms of actual pitch. This is a distinction that people who played fretted instruments may not always care about but string players care.

So besides having a simplistic explanation of music as a way of getting nooky, Levitin's book fails to account for the wide range of ways in which humanity organizes sound and divides tones within the octave. In fact this is where things come full circle on the issue of biblical literature because we know so little about ancient Greek and Hebrew music it would be hard to say with any authority what those musical idioms would sound like beyond a few broad guesses.

What purpose does msuic serve? Levitin's question is still one we'll answer in each generation. I'm not sure there is a clear, cut and dried answer. To tie things back to Levitin's proposal of sexual selection, a lot of people in the modern West might only agree that music is connected in some way to sex and sexual selection but may not want th ekids that would be the natural consequence of sexual selection from the time in which Levitin proposes the evolutionary adaptation developed.

In the end I'd say that Levitin's attempt to explain music in terms of ancient human history actually puts him in the same boat as the theologian who attempts to explain our musical impulses in terms of divine revelation in Scripture. Either way we're dealing with material referring to events that can't possibly be replicated in a lab and is therefore the result of some guess work. The Bible doesn't attempt to explain our musical inclination so much as presuppose it and suggest some directions for where to put our musical inclinations.

Since I've spent quite a bit of time blogging in just two posts about this book I figure I'm done for now. :)

This is Your Brain on Music, part 1, summary

Daniel Levitin
This is Your Brain on Music


In 2006 Daniel Levitin's book This Is Your Brain On Music was published. I read about it in Salon. I don't usually take things in Salon that seriously because they're sirt if shriekingly paranoid half the time and often articulate political and social views that don't always gel. At any rate, whether or not their ideas make sense or are any good they can sometimes be an interesting read, which is really the most you can say about any magazine, and they had a review of this book that caught my attention.

Music, like almost any art, is the kind of thing where detailed study simultaneously demystifies and remystifies the nature of the art. When you figure out how to juxtapose two different chords whose roots are functionally a tri-tone apart and figure out how to do that in a piece of unabashadly tonal music it's just more fun all around than if you just stumbled on something without knowing what you're doing. Understanding how you understand music doesn't make music less fun.

It turns out there's debate as to how we understand music and what that means because there are competing explanations for why humans have music to begin with. Levitin approaches this topic from an evolutionary, socibiological angle (to simplify a bit and since he simplifies quite a few things I don't feel guilty doing to his work what he's done to the work of others, I don't think I'm really misrepresenting him).

The actual cognitive aspects of musical perception are what makes this book interesting. The first two chapters rehash so many basic points about music theory and in such a simplified way that anyone with a couple of years of music theory will find them dull. It was interesting to read that electrodes attached to the brain of a barn owl reveal that barn owls perceive rhythm in the same way we do. This simultaneously indicates that all animals have to perceive sound in real time at some comparable level but also that the governing intelligence behind perception may not strictly require sounds to be heard "as" music.

The most interesting part in the earlier chapters is that the ear itself does not do as much of the perceptual stuff as the brain. Air molecules hit the ear drum but it is the brain that grasps the distinction between discreet vibrations on the ear drum that might be the sound of my typing as I write this blog entry verses the sound of shuffling chairs in the living room upstairs where my roommates are having a meeting with some guests.

The capacity we have to perceive sound in direction is something Levitin could have explored in some more detail around chapters 3 and 4. That we can perceive in 360 degrees how we are immersed in a world full of sounds fascinates me but I guess I'll have to go for scholarly research on that rather than the pop science level Levitin is writing at, which is still interesting and informative. His explanation of how we learn to ignnore steady sounds like the sound of rain outside or the sound of a washing machine is a great explanation for how our alertness to sound connects to the need to be aware of dangers and of causal relationships between sound X and threat Y.

The book gets interesting for me as a composer around chapter 4 dealing with how we anticipate and perceive musical form. He uses language as a springboard and describes how we can recognize words as words despite constant variations in the lettering, font style, font size, the font itself. It's on page 113 for those who have read the book.
Here is an approximation of the effect Levitin uses but compressed into the first part of the sentence. Despite constant shifts in the font, font size, lettering style, and even the color of the letters you can still read the first four words of the preceding sentence because your brain has trained itself (or been trained by socialization, too) to understand that what I just wrote earlier is a comprehensible sentence. Levitin's example is on page 113 of his book, for those of you who have it.

Well, the same cognitive process that allowed you to read that sentence in the previous paragraph is what allows you to perceive musical form and recognize a melody despite a series of drastic transformations. Even if a tune is played at half speed or double time; transposed into any key other than its originalkey; even if the melody is transformed by means of modal mutation from major into parallel minor or from the dorian mode to modern natural minor; even through all of this you can recognize a tune. We know Greensleeves (i.e. "What Child is This?") whether it's played in the original dorian form or in the modern minor form because the melodic contours and rhythms remain unchanged despite modal mutation. Levitin doesn't flesh this out but he notes that perception of musical form tends to display activity in the left frontal lobe of the brain, traditionally associated with intellectual or abstract perception.

But this, too, may be simplifying a bit because we have been able to learn that perceiving music activates a whole range of areas in the brain, including lower segments of the brain associated with autonomic responses and emotion. Music moves us, obviously, but to perceive the emotional content of music we have to grasp its form and so a truly affecting piece of music will engage, at the risk of overstating Levitin's case, our whole brain and not just parts of it. What we have been discovering through research is that the left brain is involved in perceiving musical structure and that these regions are also involved in understanding sign language or any structure that must be conveyed over time (page 127-128). But perceiving musical form requires both sides of the brain rather than just the left side which is all that is in use for the perception of language structured over time.

The question naturally comes up, why? For something that seems to have little practical value like music the way we experience it as background sound in a shopping mall; or listening to some jazz masterpiece reduced to music you listen to while you're on hold; or the set list at your favorite band's concert in your town; why is it that music affects is so? Why is it that people can sing from memory songs they heard twenty years ago?

An interesting partial explanation for this that Levitin offers along the way is that in adolescence the brain is closing up its soon-to-be complete set of neural networks for perception. The way my brother would put it is that it's medical/scientific proof that people decide rock music is dead once they have grown up and that the new stuff has no soul or is crap. What has changed is not really musical style per se but the perceiving brain. The brain gets gone making its set of ocnnections and unless people continually seek out new styles of music (by new I mean styles that really are different from what they like, not merely finding new variations on a sound in which they've comfortably found their style-listening rut) the brain hits an end point, so to speak.

Unsurprisingly a crucial element in musical structural perception involves memory and it's in chapter 5 that Levitin has his most interesting material. Levitin introduces, in chapter 5 the debate between two theories of memory. One theory has held that memory functions as a record-keeping function, comparable to a VCR tape; while the other theory holds that memory allows us to retain relational observations without necessarily retaining all the details about the things we remember. It doesn't take long to see how both theories fail due to reductivism and Levitin spends quite a bit of time in chapter 5 explaining how each theory hit roadblocks in lab research in the 1990s. A theory that is now getting preference is the proposal that memory is connected to cues and that if a person is presented with the right series of cues for memory that they will remember something. This accords with common sense and the anecdotal experience of quite possibly every human on the face of the earth!

It also explains why people can remember things with a high degree of accuracy in some cases but not in others, and why people with brain damage can be incapable of remembering some things accurately. But more to the point for the sake of this blog, it demonstrates that memory and perception turn out to overlap when it comes to how we perceive musical form. We simultaneously construct or infer a musical form from a song as we're listening to it, or any music we have heard before or never heard before. Hindemith explained this in A Composer's World fifty years ago saying that if we hear a piece of music and our minds can't get around the form presented to us our reaction is bewilderment or amusement.

Between the summaries of Hindemith and Levitin in their respective books it's easy to suggest that memory is vital to the perception of musical form. If a form is too simple we find it dull and if it is too complex we find it infuriating or frustrating or simply puzzling. Our capacity to perceive musical form is mediated by how our memory developes. This is not a point Levitin necessarily makes, or makes a primary concern in his book, though.

I'm going to skip the content of the other chapters as they are sort of interesting but not so interesting I want to write an even longer blog entry than I planned to write. Suffice it to say that research suggests that there are no prodigies on the basis of "talent" so much as a vast amount of practice and training. As Hilary Hahn has said in interviews, she was never a child prodigy, just someone who practiced a lot.

Levitin spends his last chapters attempting to sort out what purpose music serves. A number of scientists have dismissed music as nothing more than aural cheesecake, some useless by-product of evolutionary adaptation. Levitin refuses to concede this particular point and attempts to explain music on other grounds. There are no cultures that have no music so music can't be dismissed as aural cheesecake if every culture has it. And if it is merely the by-product of evolutionary adaptations what adaptations were those? Levitin argues that musical ability is a form of sexual selection. Any ancient human from fifty centuries ago who had the leisure time to sing and dance was advertising to prospective mates that he had the time, health, mental ability, and will to sire offspring and, perhaps more importantly, enough time left over to RAISE those kids. Levitin argues that this means that music is not useless since it seems to be one of the main means for a man to attract a woman. Considering how many songs over the millenia are love songs it's pretty hard to ignore Levitin's point. Levitin also notes briefly that in every culture available for study music and dance are constantly linked.

Scientists who think that music is just useless sound probably haven't examined the nature of memory enough. Why is it that so many children learn the alphabet through song? Scientists who think music serves no purpose might want to consider whether something is lost if they go on a date and there's no music anywhere. It seems to have a history of setting a mood.

So this is a basic run-down on the more interesting ideas in Levitin's book. I think it's a good summary but some questions seem to linger. Certainly I can tell you conservative Christians who aren't inclined to assume a Darwinian explanation won't exactly dig Levitin's assumptions about music as an evolutionary development and may not buy his attempt to explain musical idioms in human cultures as chiefly being a form of sexual selection. But interacting with Levitins ideas and study and the way this may be read in interaction with biblical literature is something I will set off in another post.

Dark Side of the Moon as a tryptich and the structural function of the dorian mode

Here we are, the post I threatened to write earlier about how Dark Side of the Moon, as a concept album, uses the signature i-IV dorian chord change as a structural device and a harmonic leitmotiff to explicate the textual motiff of endless cycles, or a highly secularized variation of "vanity of vanities" or "a breath of a breath, everything is a mere breath". If Ecclesiastes were re-worked so that it wasn't Jewish but atheistic British-navel-gazing you'd get Pinkfloyd's magnum opus. And I still happen to like the album. In fact I appreciate it more now than I did in the past, I just happen to like Stevie Wonder in all his cheesiness a little better because he's the greater musical genius. But enough of that digression on Stevie.

The tracks on Dark Side of the Moon are listed as follows and include several chord changes I'll mark off in brackets:

1. Speak to me/Breathe (e minor)
2. On the Run (um, not quite tonal)
3. Time (F sharp minor, coda reprising Breath)
4. Great Gig in the Sky
5. Money
6. Us & Them
7. Any Colour You Like
8. Brain Damaged
9. Eclipse

The first actual song opens up with an e minor to A major chord vamp that serrves as the introduction to the whole concept album and lays out the most common harmonic motiff in the songs. "On the Run" is a piece of electronic music that has several chromatic bass lines moving by means of glissandi (for want of a better word) under a rapidly moving static line that oscillates around G with pentatonic notes (g d b d e, as best my ears can hear them). "Time" is written in F sharp minor with a standard i III VII progression at its core. These two songs don't employ the dorian mode and use natural minor or phrygian elements. Of course "Time" recapitulates "Breathe" with new lyrics and returns us to the dorian chord change that began the album.

The closing track on the first side of the record is "Great Gig in the Sky" This song presents us with a simple binary form that is played just twice but to great effect. On the LP this closes off the first half and it opens with an interesting and lengthy chord progression:
(all chords are held for one measure of 4/4 unless otherwise indicated)
b minor
F major
B flat major
D minor
G minor
C major
G minor
C major
F major
B flat major
C minor
F major
B flat major (half measure)
E flat major 7 (half measure)
B flat major (two measures)

This chord progression takes a full minute before the keys the keys slide up into G minor and the band oscillates between G minor and C major for Clare Torry's solo. This section lasts for about a minute and serves to provide a static harmonic point in the song to contrast with the fairly violent but steady harmonic changes in the opening section. The transition back into the first section comes through half measure shifts from G minor to D flat to G flat to B minor before playing through the entire sequence a second time, this time with greatly reduced textures and dynamics.

I find this interesting as an overall composition because the chain of fourths guides the whole process except at three points where a tritone substition or oblique motion are employed to affect a key change. For the most part the dorian mode is the underlying harmonic vocabulary of this piece even with the key changes. The tritone substitution is the first significant alteration of the harmonic motif, which makes sense since the song is about death, the one part of the cycle of life that we arguably can't completely reconcile ourselves to even if we claim we can.

"Money" is obviously the opener on side B. This is a simple blues number in b minor that is predominantly in 7/4 in the outer sections and 4/4 in the middle. It creates the impression of a ternary form despite being essentially a set of variations on a theme because of the change from assymetric to common meter.

"Us & Them" is in D major, the relative major to the preceding song. At the risk of putting it crudely the song uses a prettified variation of the chords we hear in "Louie Louie". Tonic, submediant superimposed over a droning tonic, passing to a dominant chord, which proceeds to a subdominant chord and on back again. This is a chord progression that in terms of functional harmony sounds cool but doesn't go anywhere, per se. This works well for the song's lyrical conceit that things don't change, that cycles of violence, death, bigotry, and decay continue on and on.

The chorus consists of the chord changes B minor, A major, G major 7th (probably), and C major. Once again a violent sequential change takes place but this time instead of a tritone substitution like we saw opening "Gig" we get a stepwise descent in root movement that sets up a rising root movement of a fourth to the neapolitan chord of B minor, which is used as a subtonic for a harmonically weak transition back in to D major for the second verse. The chords are still moving in predominantly stepwise motion but they've been deprived of the harmonic pedal point that existed throughout the verse and have been subjected to change through oblique motion. If the verses sustain the motif of the set-upon, indifferent "Us" the chorus introduces the motif of "them", who invariably break in upon our indifference and destroy our peaceful indifference, usually through violence or simple death. Fun, huh?

Where "Us & Them" ends is to use the C major chord to create a deceptive ending that leads straight into "Any Colour You Like", which is just a big jam session on i IV but this time in D. "Brain Damaged" retains the tonic-subdominant chord progression but through modal mutation presents them to us through alternating dominant seven chords. D7 G7 D7 E7 G D E7 G D through the verse.

The chorus gives us G A C G, played twice, with a quick transition of B minor, E minor, A to get back into the verse. What's interesting here is that the chromatically altered supertonic lets the band retonicize G as the tonic of the chorus in place of D. That's one of the great things about repeating phrases is that when you employ a harmonic sequence in transposition it does the modulating for you and the listener can expect it.

The final song is basically a classic passacaglia, a compound meter piece with a steadily descending chord progression. D C B flat A throughout to the final cadence in D major.

Now despite the fact that LPs are supposed to be flipped over for a continued listening experience the album wasn't designed with the CD format in mind. But this is an album that, whatever it may lose in getting transferred from vinyl to CD (I don't feel like getting into the debates of audiophiles while I'm writing about this as a song cycle) there is an advantage to cramming the album on to a single disc.

And it is in the CD format that the tryptich pattern becomes apparent. The first song opens with a i-IV progression and "Gig" opens with a tritone substition but eventually gets us back to the i-IV but in a new key. From here follow two more songs before we get another appearance of i-IV, this time in the key of D minor. This is why I've color-coded the three different segments to show how the triptych plays out on CD. The keys in which the signature harmonic gesture occurs are E, G, and D, a sort of extension of the chord progression of "Time" but without any cyclical resolution back to tonic.

But I would never say the members of Pinkfloyd or their production team actually planned the songs as a song cycle in advance, even though a case could be made for that. They planned a concept album dealing with the life cycle but the modulations and harmonic gestures seem more to have come from what comes easily to the fingers rather than through deliberately mapping out every key change and chord change across the entire album. I don't mean this in a bad way but if you're in a rut exploring the same set of ideas then a concept album is a good way to go because your literary and musical gestures will overlap and reinforce each other. This is why I think Dark Side of the Moon actually is a concept album and Seargant Pepper is merely considered to be one, because Pinkfloyd created a musically cohesive whole where the Beatles didn't.

The keys the songs are in are all keys we'd expect a bass and guitar driven band to play in rather than keys that a keyboard player might pick (i.e. there are no songs except "Gig" that employ flat keys. The first side of the album tends to have pieces in E minor or F sharp minor while the second half of the album is predominantly in D. I think the overall effect is that the songs have moved down in overall pitch (a gimme, since that's how it works for the string instruments). It reinforces the downer motif of the album and the persistence of the dorian mode and chains of fourths reinforces the idea of the lyrics that the life cycle is what it is and everything would be perfect if it weren't hopelessly screwed up. It's a kind of art rock exposition on the theme of Ecclesiastes but without any hope, as such.

I still love this album because the musical vocabulary at the formal and harmonic level reinforces that lyrical conceit of the album as a whole. I think this is why the album holds up well and is also why some people don't like it and have gone so far as to say there aren't any really great songs on it. I think that particular view and explanation is patently silly but for people who are looking for individual knock-out songs that you remember apart from any context then, yeah, Dark Side of the Moon doesn't give you that; instead Pinkfloyd gives you a type of rock gestalt. If you listen to it all the way through you can hear that the album is a great deal more than the sum of its pretty good parts. Since no one in the band that I'm aware of is Jewish or Christian my comparison of Dark Side of the Moon to Ecclesiastes is purely speculative on my part. For you it may just be a great rock album or a total bore. I'm just blogging here to lay out the structural and harmonic things about the album that still make the album fun for me to listen to seventeen years after I heard it for the first time.

Legends, Atanas Ourkouzounov & Mie Ogura

Well, this is the new CD by Atanas Ourkouzounov and Mie Ogura and it's a fun little album. I've been listening to it for a while and it's mainly all new material or recently arranged material. The only stuff on here that has been recorded before is Ourkouzounov's Labrynthes, which appears on his first CD Contes de Balkans that he recorded with the Ourkouzounov Ensemble.

Whereas his first CD included just chamber music for the guitar this new disc on Gendai Guitar contains some solo guitar works, which is nice. Both his first and second CDs are full of chamber music, though, so if you pick up a disc of his expecting solo stuff be prepared to get tons of chamber music instead. It's one of the reasons I like his work.

You can find this CD on Gendai Guitar's website, though you will have to navigate the Japanese version of the website and share some emails with them before they'll be able to complete your order--that is, of course, unless you read Japanese fluently but I don't read Japanese at all.

http://www.gendaiguitar.com/

Product number is GGCV1003

I had planned on making a basic track listing and then writing about things from there but now that I'm finally blogging I want to make this relatively short and sweet. If you have any love for chamber music for classical guitar you really ought to buy this CD. Repertoire for the flute and guitar is fairly rich and there are lots of great pieces out there. We can all find at least some recording of Histoire du Tango, Castelnuovo-Tedesco's charming Sonatina, and if you do some digging there's even more than one recording of Koshkin's Sonata for flute and guitar. And those are all great pieces. But Ourkouzounov is doing his own thing, which is a good thing, and why I got his second CD. First get Contes des Balkans and then get this CD.

The CD opens up with Quatre Legends, four short movements with evocative titles (I'll just use the translated titles). Masquerade opens with an upbeat dance in a dark, dorian cast. The Macedonian song is a beautiful slow piece that also has some dorian elements. Naughty Petar comes across as a pretty vivid musical portrait of a little boy (or an older fellow who's the wrong kind of boy at heart) who women don't necessarily want around. This piece uses great special effects from both flute and guitar to create a musical portrait. Ourkouzounov employs harmonics on the guitar to suggest how sneaky Naughty Petar is and the shrieking breath-tones Mie Ogura produces on the flute, well, if you hear the pieces you'll get a very clear musical portrait. It's the most intriguing and amusing of the four pieces and something I'd like to take a stab at playing one day. Traditional Fair is the last piece in the opening set and it most resembles Ourkouzounov's earlier works from his CD Contes des Balkans from the KLE label. It's got a great propulsive drive to it and shifting accents and rhythms.

The next track is actually unusual for Ourkouzounov on this CD and his previous CD. "Toryanse" Tales is a work for solo guitar, it's actually long compared to his other works (almost 10.5 minutes) and it's unusually dark and brooding for him. There are a lot of coloristic and spatial elements to this work but in a really good, way sort of like a fusion of Brouwer with Takemitsu of the sort you might hear in Hika.

Ourkouzounov or Ogura proceed to transcriptions of Romanian Folk Dances from Bartok. These are all great because, well, almost anything from Bartok is great anyway. Labyrinthes is a three-movement work that appeared on Ourkouzounov's earlier CD with the Ourkouzounov Ensemble. In case you have the Ourkouzounove Ensemble CD this is still worth having even if you've heard it on the earlier CD.

Next comes "En Bateau" by Debussy arranged for flute and guitar. It's a nice arrangement, as all the arranged works on this disc are. Ourkouzounov steps into arranging jazz on this disc and ventures into flute/guitar transcriptions of Gershwin and Jarrett. It's great stuff and speaking as an American I'm happy to say (for whatever this may be worth) that I think Atanas gets what makes jazz fun to listen to and fun to play. I don't think I've had this much fun listening to an album of flute and guitar music since Nikita Koshkin's incredible Oratorium CD on the Kreuzberg label.

As can be heard on his first CD Ourkouzounov loves to play with special effects that are unique to the instruments he's writing for and things like key clicks, multiphonics, and breath-tones show up regularly. While I admit that in some of his earlier works this could sometimes feel just a tad gimmicky to me he's really nailed down how to use these kinds of coloristic effects without over-doing them now. Plus he's always good at employing a musical form that is appropriate for the ideas he's exploring.

I admire that he devotes so much material on both of his CDs to chamber music. This means that when he takes a few spots on record to record solo guitar works or works for guitar duo he's always picked pieces that are really interesting and not just the usual suspects that are all great music but end up taking on the quality of filler because so many guitarists have recorded them already. It's also nice to be able to put on a CD by a guitarist composer I like and hear how he is both branching out into things he hasn't recorded before and still exploring aspects of his musical voice from his earlier work. I wish Atanas the best and hope to keep seeing more CDs from him down the road. Atanas, if you happen to read this, consider putting out a CD of solo music some time down the road. Toryanse Tales has gotten me interested in hearing more of your solo guitar repertoire.

the beginnings of new blog entrys, I hope

But first I feel like I need to get outside and do something once in a while. It can't hurt, you know. Of the writing of blogs there is no end. I at least feel like just playing guitar or something. Besides, I posted a bunch of old poetry earlier in the week. Still, I gotta write something about a few CDs here soon.

Hmm, a curious trip down memory lane, this poem

For my Teddy Bear revised 8-26-98

You're older than some of my friends,
old enough to drink wine if you could,
but of course you can't.
I still have you next to my bed
after 21 years.
Your leather paws the same as they always were,
counterpoint to the now rough coat.
Strange how your skin went from silk to gauze to burlap.
I see your sunken chest as you sit by my bed.
Maybe the years of neglect broke your spirit
but you're still there, if missing an eye.
I can't remember all my crimes against you.
I know promised not grow up.
My body broke that promise
It was too late by the time I realized
the rest of me had.
I can't even say I'm sorry.
Only that I'm sorry crime led to crime.
You can always stay by my bed.
Let it be enough that I remember the day
Mom sewed you for me, when we were both young.

I know when I was a kid I didn't particularly thrill to the idea of growing up but this feels a bit overdone. I suppose I can respect the sincerity of the sentiment but now that I'm nearly 33 instead of 24 this poem seems like a weird reminder of things about myself I don't like. On the other hand, I really do still have the teddy bear next to my bed. It's one of the stuffed animals my Mom made for me herself and I've never had the desire to throw it away. This probably only goes back as far as my being about four years old when I think my Mom had to fix the bear for me. I'll try to make a point to not post too many poems that actually include biographical information in the future.

Another undated poem that's probably from about 1998

Some questions about prophets

Am I a fool for wanting to see
The coal that burned Isaiah’s lips?
The seraph that plucked it from the fire
As the prophet stood in the Temple?
Is it wrong to wish I could scorch
My fingertips on the ember
Or blacken a nail on it?
What was it like to see such a thing?

And where are the wheels within wheels,
With the eye-covered spokes, that Ezekiel saw?

How could ravens feed me in the desert?
What could they bring?
And what privilege is it,
What ineffable status,
That makes the difference between
Being fed by ravens
And searching for locusts and wild honey?

And if protection is being saved
By the enemy of your people,
Who have thrown you in a cistern to die,
What keeps you crying in the wastes
They call the Promised Land?


I think this one was supposed to have more images or ideas in it but I just abandoned it. I didn't feel like adding more to the poem by way of references to Ezekiel 1 or 2. A no-prise to the person who figures out who the last two prophets are.

Another undated poem but from around 1998 or 1999

Hand me your big black umbrella

Hand me your big black umbrella
I’m walking out and it’s raining.
I won’t be long, a few minutes,
And it will be back in your hands,
Wetter, of course, and colder, too.
I was just thinking the only part of you
An umbrella keeps dry is your head.
That’s good enough,
Enough to keep the tumbling clearness
From blinding me as I walk.

I don't really know why I still like this one but as soon as I wrote it I liked it. I'm fascinated by how water, as clear as it is, can blind us in so many ways. This is another poem about the nature of perception and how the barriers we observe between us and what is can help us see things more rather than less clearly. It's sort of a poem about writing and perception for me, I guess, and it's another hat tip to Frost.

undated but probably from around 1998

The Lizard

God, I’m a lizard you caught by the tail
And I shed my tail as all lizards do.
Then you caught me by the ribs and I had
No escape.

But instead of killing me you made me your pet,
Fastened a gold chain around my neck.
Now I sit on an ivory stool by your throne
Wondering why I miss my old tail at all.

A more accurate rendering of the proverb that inspired this would probably be the spider but it's less poetic that way for the conceit of the poem. :)

A really old poem I still like

There is rarely a silent night 6-30-96

There is rarely a silent night.
If there aren't cars on the street then
the lights overhead will sing to
the road their tedious song,
their orange eyes riveted open.
Crickets will chirp, hidden in grass;
frogs croak in suburban ditches;
and fans and clocks will count hours
by the turn of their blades and hands.
In the woods, where all other sounds
seem missing, someone camping will
hear blood in his veins,
hear the wind in her lungs, or the
buzz of her nerves
that keeps her awake until day

Even though I wrote this eleven years ago I still feel pretty happy with it. The monotony of the language reinforces the theme of insomnia and the allusion to the legendary Christmas song is also a lot of fun. In hindsight this was one of a number of poems inspired by an as yet undiagnosed sleeping disorder.

This one pretty much explains itself, too

Sonnet for Eucharist

However it is that the blood resides
In the cup, it is memory that guides
Us through the holy supper and memory
that brings to mind what has gone before.
Whether barley, corn, wheat, or rice the bread
Will never tell us if his skin was red,
If his laughter was like an untuned horn.
The bread will only tell us he was born,
That he lived and died. This we remember
As we drink wine that tastes like vinegar:
Cast-out demons and leprous hands made clean.
A vision of God heretofore unseen
Has walked the earth, more than a mere vision,
Whose flesh and blood buys our salvation.

a really short one

11.03.01
no one is more dead
than the stain that was a spider
forgotten, on a winow sill

A poem for office space

Restructured Olympus 5.23.01
The mouse does not take instruction
I have tapped on its head in vain
And so I have seen the downfall
Of another one-eyed idol.

When little gods are outwitted
They seek the help of bigger gods,
Yet now Zeus will not deign to help
Even his favorite son.
It looks like a new, restructured Olympus
Has arrived.

I don't remember when I wrote this one

Studies in Sound
1.
The brakes of the truck at a stop light
Whine like a dog with a wounded paw

2.
That you may know the folly
Of pent up rage: Listen.
A wasp under glass.

3.
The flutter of pigeon wings
Is the gentlest cry of terror
I have ever heard.

A little Robert Frost tribute

January 27, 2002 to February 26, 20002

I can’t see any stars tonight
Past all the clouds and city light
So I can’t wish upon a star
It makes a difference who you are

The street lamps say, “You’ve gone too far.
Why should you wish upon a star?
Should you not wish on what is near?
Things good for wishing are right here.”

So should I wish upon the cloud
That many bright stars does enshroud?
“Why no!” they shout, “That’s not allowed
Your wish must be on something proud.”

“You see the stars you talk about
Are ones that long ago burned out
So tell me do you have the right
To wish upon that long dead light?”

“The cloud is dumb and only wears
The light from anything that glares
You cannot wish upon a cloud
Your wish must be on something proud.”

I’m sure you’d say it isn’t sound
To wish on something on the ground.
If I were wishing what should I
Then wish upon that’s in the sky?

The street lamps say, “It’s good you ask
The orange light in which you bask
Is just the light for wishing on
And we shine well from dusk til dawn.”

”Don’t wish on dead light long delayed
Or on the clouds we have inveighed
To stay your mind on and be staid
Use light for which your taxes paid.”

Say what you will but realize
Your granting wishes is no prize
Your orange glow is still on loan
At least the star’s light is its own.

And don’t you stand upon the ground?
To wish on you would be unsound.
The wish you grant would not suffice
A wish my taxes paid for twice.

Mephistopheles by a copy machine

Mephistopheles by a Copy Machine
February 28, 2002

I wish I could photocopy your soul.
I admit it isn’t admirable
But you have a soul so worth copying.
To think I have found such a wondrous thing!
Rest assured I would give you your soul back
After I’m done copying it. In fact,
If it were possible, I’d improve it.
Two souls like yours would be even more fitting
And suppose, as some say, there is no soul?
Then there’s nothing wrong with my wish at all
Since a wrong is wrong only if it’s done.
Can there be two souls if there isn’t one?
Let me try the un-do-able for you
Let me have your soul so I can make two.

Not quite a sonnet in the strict sense but the mistakes were intentional, really. It helped underline the motiff. I was inspired to write this poem by listening to a woman sing a jazz tune. I don't remember precisely why the first line popped in my head but it seemed like a funny line for a love song. But it seemed funnier as a sales pitch from the devil and that's the theme I ran with.

this light little poem explains itself

This one is a language game, no more, no less.

Same Endings in Different Places
3.11.2002

A little old man was pushing a plow
In his garden when a strong wind did blow.
He folded his arms and stifled a cough.
He whispered: “Why has the wind got so rough?
I can’t plow the ground in this kind of wind
Season’s almost done and I’m in a bind.
Soon there’ll be rain and should I make a trough
When the rain will make my garden a slough?”
He looked down and saw a wind-beaten moth
“Didn’t notice you, the wind hates us both.
It goes to blow one way and then it rescinds
It always rescinds as much as reminds.
Bah, wasn’t what Heraclitus said nice?
You never can walk through the same river twice.”

Two poems about perception

Filling a Water Bottle 6.20.2002

The once empty bottle is quickly filled
With water that must come from somewhere else
Maybe the drinking fountain in this building

(chiming in pipes like soft-ringing bells),
Maybe the water comes from my kitchen
And whispers from far off like ocean swells.

The old plastic bottle seems to fatten
But only what I see through water grows,
Only what’s seen, not the seen itself, when

The table distorts through what water shows.
Like splinters of sunshine found in the stream
Pouring out summer’s warm garden hose

These things remind me of how things can seem,
How meaning is not what it is to mean.



Playing with a ball-point pen.
05.09.2002
Column of ink, enclosed in clear plastic,
Enclosed in another clear, plastic shell
The sight of you is clear but elastic,
Refracted. What layers of plastic tell
Is stasis and flux as my fingers turn.
The column of black widens and thins and,
In seeing this, there is something to learn,
Something almost easy to understand.

This might have been the start of a sonnet that I dropped because it seemed to get to its point in less time than that. The first poem is in terza rima, obviously. Chalk these up to my Wallace Stevens phase. :)

Don't read this if you like Pablo Neruda

He's got his moments but after reading about twenty of his poems I just got fed up with him and scribbled this.

After reading Pablo Neruda
03.01.2003
Your name is like a pony,
A pony sold for far too much!
The silent hooves of your pony name
Run quickly on the fog of sadness
And the pony of your name is rustled
By a rain of tears!

How I would drive your pony name
Into the raging sea of tears
And drown it there as I escape
To drink a few more beers!

My token attempt at imitating Denise Levertov

12.21.2002
I
Any fat robin will do
Any could feed him, hopping gracelessly in the grass
Any chickadee by the feeder would do
Provided he could catch two
Sparrows are no more than token food
For a hunter of his size and skill
As his desires drift like dandelion seeds on the windy day

II.
We are a city of clouds that rarely promise rain
We lay under blankets but do not sleep
Until we do not expect sleep
It seems all our weather men are false prophets
Meteorologists, if you prefer.
And every ology has its limits
Even the darkest cloud will promise just so much.

III.

Oil
Oil on water
What weighs on the heart
Rests lightly on what is clear
And, of course, you can see through it
What we need is so much simpler than what we want
Mixing oil and water
We stare at bubbles,
And the ghosts of our own desires
Phantoms of oil on water

And here's another poem I wrote the same day, much shorter. It's not quite really a poem, more an aphorism loaded with famous literary allusions.

12.21.2002
we are trapped by our own metaphors
the rosy –fingered dawn
an ever blooming rose
a grand inquisitor
a guard at the door

Guess where this poem was inspired.

In a house of butterflies
12.07.2002

It was so warm and damp I thought it should rain
But all the clouds were beyond the glass,
The sky covered with the hue of dark cream.
Here in the electrified tropic I stood
Surrounded by silent, flapping wings,
Facades of tree bark opened to blue or yellow
Glowing against the drab pebbled concrete at my feet.

Slow and silent,
It was only by faith I knew one landed on my hair
Like paper so thin the oil on my fingers would ruin it.
I waved my hand and felt only the zephyr I made
Until a tickle on my scalp revealed more
than my wave had made.
I turned and saw a butterfly by my knee.
Drifting through the air as a leaf floats on water

Perhaps it's cheesy and sentimental but I wanted to see if I could capture the delicacy of the moment. This is a bit unusual for me in the last few years in that this is free verse rather than structured poetry.

A poem from May 30, 2002

I wrote this after reading quite a bit of John Donne. I liked his use of medical metaphors and tried emulating that in a poem of my own.

Sonnet
05.30.2002

Like the jelly between the retina
And optic nerve, you’ve been between me and
Reality. This is no dilemma.
You have my gratitude for understanding
The limits of my eyes. You’ve helped me
Live with them. Now for some it is a crutch
To rely on a person they can’t see.
It bothers me sometimes, but not too much
Because like vitreous, unseen between
The retina and optic nerve you hold
Two unlike likes in seam, unseen and seen,
Who I am, who you’ve been. Poets, I’m told,
Mediate the world through words, so do you
For you are the Word, and vitreous, too.

blogging and Windows Vista

There's been more battles with Windows Vista on my computer than I anticipated and I just haven't gotten around to blogging like I planned. The stuff on the table to blog about is still on the table but the switch to daylight savings threw me for a loop and I saw 300 with some friends last night. It's okay, for a comic book movie about a historical event, but I sure don't remember so much sex or women in Frank Miller's comic book. The way Miller has been writing I hope he doesn't rewrite 300 to have all that junk in there. And since when did 300 get all Braveheart and have speeches about freedom. Miller recognized the irony of the least democratic Greeks fighting for democracy but the movie sure doesn't seem to grasp that particular point.

Nods to liberal critics who hate the movie for what it suggests about the current war in Iraq, yeah, I guess you guys can see connections when you want to see them but the comic book predates the election of Bush 2. Complaining about Frank Miller's story as not being great history is sort of like complaining about Peanuts not being a good representation of the ethical theories of John Stuart Mill. Since when have comic books based on history, in general, shown that much fidelity to fact. If there's a Red Baron movie out there that invents some romantic interest, some woman who supposedly opened Richtoffen's eyes to the brutality of war it's proof that film-makers and comic-book writers alike aren't that obsessed with historical accuracy There's nothing about Miller's puzzling handling of the deformed, the ugly, the weak, or the female that hasn't been fielded well enough by others.

As far as I can tell the track record Miller's work and Alan Moore's work has for being adapted to the silver screen is roughly equal, they're highly mixed at best. This is because the truth is, as I read them, both authors are pretty over-rated by comic book fans. Merely attaining the stature of literature isn't that big a deal to the literary world. For my money neither Moore nor Miller have ever attained a comic book that for literary scope and philosophical daring matches Nausicaa of the Valley of Wind. Yeah, yeah, I know I'm being totally unfair. I'll grant that The Dark Knight Returns and Batman: Year One are both great. And Watchman and The Killing Joke are both great even if too many Moore fanboys make the horrendous mistake of thinking there's anything to admire about Ozymandias. If you think anyone is the good guy in that story you're missing the point. But enough of the comic book rants.

I've finally listened to Carmina Burana and I like it. Usually I don't go out of my way to listen to secular choral music at all. Just a personal conviction of mine. If twenty to eighty people are going to be singing about something I would prefer they sing about Jesus, the Father, or the Spirit, or some passage from Scripture. Not that I actually dislike secular choral music at all but I've just heard some overwrought secular choral music that amounted to drippy love songs. I've got Lady Macbeth and Wozzeck so I can get into an opera or two. I just tend to personally feel that I don't want to WRITE secular choral music and because of my disposition as a composer I don't tend to listen to secular choral music much. But Carmina Burana is great music. I can see why it's so well represented in recordings. If you're the person who lent me this and you happen to read this blog at any point, thanks again.

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.