Rites of May...

Summer is so close to being a reality - but, as has become my late-May custom, there's still grading to be done. Even though my last exam was more than a week ago and graduation was last Saturday, our school is quite generous in giving faculty until May 31 to submit grades. A thoroughly mixed blessing. So, once again my May is filled with red ink-stained exams, endless piles of papers, and rows and rows of numbers on spreadsheets. Thus, this is a more of a placeholder than a substantive post, a promise that I'll be back blogging soon...but probably not until next week.

A few scattered items:

• I blogged a couple of times about working on an article called "Rites of Spring," but never got around to posting a link when it was done. You can read it here. I have to admit I tend to prefer the long, messy, unedited world of blog posting, so it's kind of funny to me to read a more tightly constructed piece of mine, complete with tidy wrap-up, etc. I suppose it's a good discipline to submit to that kind of constraint (discipline via constraints is a subject of the piece), but I always want more words - and more multimedia.

• Although our Piano Hero series has been on hiatus for this academic year, we had a chance to do one celebratory year-end event on Monday. The short program featured mostly music we'd done before in what turned out to be a sort of Americana program: the Overture to Bernstein's Candide (arranged for two pianos by Nathan Skinner, my co-conspirator); the Saturday Night Waltz and Hoedown from Copland's Rodeo; a new hybrid composition/arrangement/mashup by me (I am an American, after all); and an eight-handed version of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, which of course was written to commemorate the 4th of July. I had always thought that the Declaration of Independence was adopted in 1776, but I guess it didn't really happen until 1812. Anyway, I'm looking forward to writing more about my little mashup arrangement soon...

• Oh, and maybe you missed that my little virtual Pierrot is now reciting in German and French - a good chance to remind you that operamission's upcoming "chamber theatre" double bill of Pierrot lunaire  and L'histoire du soldat is well worth supporting, even if you just want to kick in a little. I'm still trying to figure out a way to get to NYC for one of the performances (June 3 and 4); these iconic works of Stravinsky and Schoenberg are perfectly suited for the intimate setting of the Gershwin Hotel. As I tweeted recently: "...Iove the idea of Pierrot hallucinating and the Devil mischief-making within the Gershwin Hotel's deep red walls." (Cool. I only just noticed that, in shortening that tweet to the 140-character limit, I accidentally conflated the words "I love" into "Iove" - depending on the font, you might not even notice the difference, but love is spelled with an 'i.')

• I've also learned, via operamission's Jennifer Peterson, that probably my favorite LP ever, a Boston Symphony Chamber Players recording of L'histoire du soldat featuring John Gielgud, Ron Moody, and Tom Courtenay, has finally been released on CD. I digitized my LP years ago and had considered  posting my bootleg version online since DG didn't seem interested in releasing it; but I'm still ordering the CD and would highly recommend that you do the same. The playing by Joseph Silverstein et al. is amazing and Gielgud and Moody are unforgettable. The translation by Michael Flanders and Kitty Black is also endlessly delightful - reminiscent of Dr. Seuss at times. In fact, I'm going to to ahead and post three sample tracks (second one features Gielgud/Moody) - I can only think that they would encourage you to want to buy the whole thing:

"Ah...that seems to arouse your in-ter-est..."

That's all I've got for today... (Somehow, it still ended up being a longish post. Hmm, I wonder why my grading never seems to get done...)

Full Moon and Tipsy Charms

The good folks at operamission (who put on last summer's fabulous Così fan tutte: Some Assembly Required) are presenting an inspired double bill of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire and Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat on June 3rd and 4th at the Gerswhin Hotel in NYC. As part of the promotion, Pierrot has been tweeting his quirky, moon-drunk poetry on his own Twitter feed, so, in between exam-grading, I had the idea of getting one of those xtranormal actors to speak one of the poems. (There is a full moon tonight.) Unfortunately, there's not yet a Sprechstranormal that converts text into sprechstimme, but Schoenberg's already done that anyway.

But, if you've ever wondered what it might sound like if a BBC newsreader was handed an English translation of some Albert Giraud poetry - well, it might sound kind of like this:

The wine that one drinks with one’s eyesis poured down in waves by the moon at night,and a spring tide overflowsthe silent horizon.
Lusts thrilling and sweet floatnumberless through the waters!The wine that one drinks with one's eyesis poured down in waves by the moon at night.
The poet, urged on by his devotions,becomes intoxicated with the sacred beverage;enraptured, he turns toward heaven his head,and, staggering, sucks and sipsthe wine that one drinks with one’s eyes.
translation by Stanley Appelbaum
[UPDATE: Now available in German (what Schoenberg used) and Giraud's original French. - Also, couldn't resist changing post title from "trippy" to "tipsy." Why didn't I think of that in the first place?]

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Sample all of my xtranormal creations here.

Back to Infinity (and Beyond)

I mentioned yesterday that all the old videos I (and others) once posted on Google Video (one-time competitor to YouTube) are being taken down in the next few days. However, I've just discovered a nice little silver lining to the disappearance of this cloud storage. Whereas YouTube puts a 15-minute limit on video uploads, Google Video had no such limits. The silver lining is that Google Video has made it possible, with one click, to transfer videos over to YouTube - including the really long ones! This means I was able to sneak this 49-minute video through the back door and onto YouTube.

It's sneaky in a couple of ways as I don't really have the rights to the audio, but I haven't been able to find this audio (or the video version) available anywhere else, and I think people need to be able to hear it. (I will, of course, remove it if asked.) I lifted the audio off an old LP that was boxed with a Bernstein set I own - it's a recording of Bernstein's Omnibus lecture entitled The Infinite Variety of Music. The script for this lecture is featured in the Bernstein anthology of the same name. There are seven other such scripts featured in The Joy of Music and the live tele-versions of those have recently become available on DVD - and, of course, on YouTube. But this one, which was always my favorite, I still haven't found elsewhere.

I posted it on my blog a few years back, so here is a chance to reintroduce it. I don't mind admitting that reading this script as a teenager had a major impact on me. I read it over and over, and then listened over and over when I stumbled on the LP. As I wrote back in 2007:

In a way, it's kind of embarrassing now because I understand better the tricks that Lenny had up his sleeve, but I still think it's wonderfully done and it shows him at his inspirational best. His basic device is to take a simple four-note melodic pattern and show how many different famous melodies have been spun from it. (The fun-with-themes starts about 9 minutes in.) It's not accidental that the sol-do-re-mi pattern he chose is such a classic tonal formula, but the fun is to see how different the notes can sound according to context. 

So, here it is, complete with my own homemade score examples that are based on the ones found in the book. (It's posted under my secondary YouTube account, since I reserve the MMtube channel for multimedia I've actually created.) The heart of the talk, the "How Dry I Am" discussion, starts around 9 minutes in.



Even if you decide to skip ahead to the 9:00 mark, it's worth hearing L.B.'s basso spoken intro and the wonderful bit of Daphnis et Chloé that starts the program proper.

Peter and the Piano (and the Wolf)

Does anyone remember that there used to be a Google Video site which originally was set up to compete with YouTube? I actually chose Google Video as my upload site of choice back in those wild days when YouTube seemed kind of scary and illegal. Well, Google gave up on competing fairly quickly and simply bought YouTube instead; now, several years later, Google is removing content from users like me, so I'll be transferring stuff to YouTube that appeared on my blog via Google Video. (It may take awhile to finish that process, so it's possible that spinning the ol' Multimedia Musing Machine over in the margin will lead to a few dead links for now. But you should still spin the wheel!)

One of the advantages of Google Video over YouTube back in the day was that the Google platform allowed much longer clips to be uploaded. So, here's an 11:41 video that exceeded YouTube's old 10-minute limit, though YouTube's standard limit is now 15 minutes. It's a homemade puppet version of Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf that we performed for my daughter's 4-yr old birthday party about eight years ago. It was all thrown together the night before, using puppets we made (the party itself was puppet-themed) and a somewhat abbreviated script I typed up. My wife narrated, she and my sister (who made the fabulous wolf puppet) operated the puppets, and I slashed my way through a piano reduction of the music from behind the camera. I'd like to emphasize that I did not practice very much. (Sort of an early Piano Hero experience.)



This is actually video of an encore performance we did for my daughter after the party. (The party version went OK, but there were a few technical difficulties, and the audience was delightfully loud.) I originally blogged about it here, focusing on the whole "piano reduction" issue. As I mentioned then, it's maybe surprising that this works well on piano (if you agree that it does), given that we're all taught to listen for the flute/bird, oboe/duck, clarinet/cat, etc. connections, but Prokofiev is one of the greatest piano composers ever, and his folksy tunes are worth hearing in just about any context.

Syncing Violas

So, I've written a few substantive posts recently about Bach, Stravinsky, and Mendelssohn - but it's not all serious business here at MMmusing, not in a world where violists are still at large. I've always had a weakness for viola jokes, so when I saw a video link on Facebook about synchronizing metronomes, I reflexively commented about the need for some kind of violist synchronization system. Then, when I was driving home from work last night, the following started to take shape in my imagination, including a basic plan for how to create it as quickly as possible.



It's not as well-executed as I'd like, but it's a silly enough exercise that I promised myself not to get too carried away with it. What actually interested me the most was the task of creating a bad viola ensemble that slowly morphed into a decent-sounding group. That's more of a challenge than you might think (not just for viola-based reasons, either), and the fact that my computer was born in 2004 isn't helping matters (renders video really slowly). So, I'm not totally content with the audio portion (and there are a few video glitches as well), but it's just a joke after all. For the record, I've played around with synthesizing bad violin playing here and I played around with morphing chaos into sonic order here. Oh, and I wrote about a fantastically subtle little viola joke, hidden away in an opera libretto, here.

I've thrown out tons of viola jokes on Twitter over the years (just load this really large page and search "viola"), and sometimes people seem taken aback at their meanness, but I don't really have anything against the instrument or the poor souls who try to make something of it. And I really wouldn't want to live in a world without Brandenburg #6 or Sinfonia concertante or those wonderfully scrubby chords (4:40) in the Brahms C Minor Piano Quartet or the opening of the Agnus Dei in Faure's Requiem. So, I'm grateful for all the gifts the viola bestows on us - from the sublime to the ridiculous.