Hocket Love in the Uncanny Valley

You know, even with the proliferation of AI and the explosion of ideas disseminated across the World Wide Web, I feel confident I'm the first to use the blog title you see above. I have written a little before about Cantai (here, here, and here), a developing software tool which "sings" notated music from directly within a notation program like Dorico or Sibelius. There have been significant improvements in the past months which have made it a very useful tool, seemingly all of a sudden. I can now produce practice audio for my church and school choirs which allows singers to hear more closely what musical lines should sound like sung. (I have often underestimated how challenging it can be for less experienced singers to hear a part played on piano, with its sharp attack/decay feature, and imagine how that should by sung with vowels and consonants and all that.)

Mechanical Musing

 A few days ago, the winds of social media algorithms brought this video my way:

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It's not very often that a strongly worded YouTube title actually delivers on its promise, but I'd say this curiosity easily qualifies as "Ravel's strangest piece." Honestly, it's one of the strangest pieces by any well-known composer relative to that composer's general output. Frontispice was written at a dark time in 1918 amidst the devastation left by World War I. As the YouTube video above notes, the music is quite mechanical in the way its individual components seem to exist in their own independent spaces, tonally and rhythmically. 

Only 364 More Days!

Today, someone posted a cartoon (by Jeffrey Curnow) from yesterday about the concurrent birthdays of composers Anton Bruckner and Darius Milhaud on September 4. The cartoon pokes fun at AI, but I figured I could do this without AI at least as badly as AI could do.

The Upside-Down

On the night of a chamber music recital at the camp where I taught this summer, with 20-plus excited performers (ages 8-16 or so) hanging out pre-recital in a large classroom, I noticed younger students writing on the whiteboard (as students will do). When I teach music theory in the same space, I generally pull down the screen and AirPlay from my iPad to the screen; but in this case, I thought it would be a fun surprise suddenly to project something right onto the whiteboard while they were writing. 

Deconstructing Brunch

I have not yet received much feedback about my most recent post, in which I combine a serious Sondheim song with a silly song about Barbie; but on a Facebook Sondheim forum, a commenter wrote: "I don't know whether to love this or to be horrified." I suspect this comes from a point-of-view which holds Sondheim's works to be somewhat sacred. I don't even completely disagree with that notion, but I think I've proven over and over here that playing around with greatness doesn't have to diminish the greatness. Meanwhile, this kind of play can yield all sorts of discoveries.