Hearing it for the first time.

Today I gave a music appreciation midterm and had one of those experiences of hearing something new in something very familiar to me. There are probably few musical works which have crossed my path more often than Dido's Lament from Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. I'm honestly not sure I've ever taken a set of comprehensive/entrance exams in which a score for this piece didn't show up for analysis; it's as if every set of examiners is saying, "Look, if you don't know anything else about analysis, at least you should be able to talk about the ground bass in Dido's Lament." It's in just about every music history/music appreciation text I can think of. Oh, and I've played it for about 3,678 mezzos.

The aria is preceded by a recitative which is on the same track on the CD-set that accompanies our textbook. When preparing the mp3 exam excerpts last night, I faded the music in right at the beginning of the aria where the ground bass is first heard, before Dido begins singing, "When I am laid in earth..." I hadn't noticed that in this recording, the final word of the recitative, "guest," lingers over the beginning of the ground bass. So, as I administered the exam, I was surprised to hear this "....est" barely audible. The funny thing is that by drawing my attention to it, I noticed for the first time ever that "guest" rhymes with the "breast" that concludes the opening phrase of the aria. So, there's a triple rhyme going back to the beginning of the recit:

RECIT: Thy hand, Belinda, darkness shades me;
On thy bosom let me rest.
More I would, but death invades me:
Death is now a welcome guest.
ARIA: When I am laid in earth,
May my wrongs create
No trouble in thy breast.
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.

I'm sure this isn't news to most people, but I hate to admit I'd never noticed it, nor had I noticed the rhyme of "create" and "fate." (At least I was aware of the rhymes in the recit.) It reminds me of movies that I first encountered as kid, such that certain more grown-up elements didn't dawn on me until decades later because, well, basically once the mind thinks it knows something, it sometimes tends to be less observant. Of course, Purcell's setting doesn't really draw attention to these rhymes. This reminds me of my experience translating all the rhyming French of Gounod's Le médecin malgé lui into rhyming English for The Doctor in Spite of Himself; I was sometimes annoyed that my hard-won rhymes were obscured by Gounod. I wonder how his librettists felt.

Anyway, as I blogged before, I always enjoy hearing these little snippets in exams and seeing which ones engage me, even though fragmented. Today, all three Bach excerpts (mvts 1 and 5 of Cantata No. 80 and mvt. 1 of Brandenburg 5) did the trick - like being suddenly hooked up to an electrical current. Interestingly, Bach was the subject of my recent musing on the effectiveness of fragments. Can't beat J.S. Bach - or J.D. Drew, for that matter.

Sleepless Times

Here's the problem with the ongoing success of the Red Sox. We're now looking at somewhere between 15 and 25 hours of baseball over a period of 7-9 days. That's a lot of extra time to extract from one's schedule; logistically it's not that hard since about half of those hours are at times I'd otherwise be sleeping. Unless it turns out that sleep deprivation is a bad thing. (I'll let you know.) Anyway, you gotta hand it to sports, that so many people are willing to turn their lives upside down to see what happens.

Good Times

It's becoming ever clearer to me that I'll need to give up sports for Lent again this year - at least if this blog is to have any chance of surviving. Still, what a weekend! I actually got to go to Game 6 on Saturday night, which was basically just a big party with the Red Sox taking an early lead and eliminating any suspense. (By the way, the friend with whom I attended can confirm that I predicted a big night for J.D. Drew. I also called Dustin Pedroia's bases-clearing double in last night's Game 7. My powers are undiminished.) The only real drama that night was whether I'd get back to my car safely since I'd ended up parking about a 25-minute walk from Fenway in a not particularly safe part of town. (I was alone since my friend had taken the T to the game.) It's not so much the money as the principle: I couldn't bear to spend $50 to park, and I always enjoy a good hunt for a free space. Usually, I can get within a 10-15 minute walk, but this time I should have just forked over the fifty.

Thankfully, I survived to get to watch the Patriots treat the Dolphins like a chew toy Sunday afternoon, then to accompany an enjoyable, but draining early evening recital, and finally to sit back and watch Boston finish off the Indians. (All this bad treatment of dolphins and indians seems politically incorrect somehow.) Performing Britten's Holy Sonnets of John Donne for the first time was quite an experience. As I remarked to several people afterwards, this is an example of music that's hard to experience outside of an actual performance. Although I have a good recording, I find these songs too intense for the recording medium. I think they really need to be experienced live (with an audience) which means I found myself discovering a lot about them as I was playing. That's not always a great thing, but it is exciting and somehow comforting to remember that there are aspects of live performance that remain irreplaceable.

In the midst of all this, The Office had one of its best episodes ever last week, after a slightly disappointing first 2-3 episodes. Episode 4 confirmed that this is a pantheon TV show, deserving of its spot in the little TV Rushmore I created over there in the right margin. I think I could easily highlight more than 50 distinctly great moments in that one hour, but the brilliance was summed up in Pam's attempt to describe her ambivalence about the Angela/Dwight/Andy triangle. She realizes both that they're all bad for each other because each is insufferable - and yet she has enough unexpected sympathy for each of them that she has to admit she cares that none of them get hurt. (I need to rewatch to get the quote right, but it pretty much summed up what makes this show work.)
[Update: OK, here's what Pam said: "Now that I think about it, Angela and Andy might actually make a good couple. But I couldn't do that to Dwight...or Angela.......or Andy."]

Meanwhile, in one bit of bad weekend news, I just discovered that the amazing IMSLP sheet music archive has been taken down - probably for good. I hope that something arises to take its place. I don't know enough about what happened, but I suspect it grew too fast and there weren't enough controls for keeping copyrighted material off the site. Now, the poor guy who ran it is overwhelmed by threatened legal action and has found it necessary to abandon ship. Still, I think that kind of free access to old music is the future.

Much more to say about all of these things, but time's up...

[UPDATE2: Here's a terrific summation of the IMSLP situation.]

Sorry, blog

Well, it hasn't been a good time for blogging. The good news is that my TV screen is still intact, even after three evenings of imagining myself throwing various objects in that direction as the Red Sox seem to be fizzing out. Maybe it will all end tomorrow night and I'll return to a saner, more contemplative state of mind, suitable for blogging. I have lots of interesting "baseball and meaning" observations to make, but they'll have to wait as I'm more tied up with practicing than sometimes is the case. Britten's John Donne Sonnets are hard and on the performing agenda for the weekend. Off I go.

Armageddon Averted

So, maybe I was silly to think that my viewing habits would affect the outcome of the Yankees-Indians series. I had feared that by abandoning the Indians on Sunday night (after helping them build a 2-0 lead), I had set in motion a chain of events that would result in another Red Sox-Yankees postseason nightmare. Well, the Yankees went down for good last night, and the world is a more orderly place. Now I've returned to the more rational understanding that my powers are only strong enough to change games in which Boston is actually participating. Just to be clear, it's not that I don't think Boston could have beaten New York, or even found them less beatable than Cleveland. It's just that a series against the Indians feels like exactly what it is: a series of games in which one team will win and the other lose. That's fine. Sox-Yankees never feels like that, even during relatively unimportant regular season games. Every game is excruciating. So, hooray for regular baseball.

The Sox-Yankees thing is a good example of something so good it becomes too good. Sports are much more fun when you care what happens - but it turns out too much caring can be not so much fun. I'm sure it says something bad about me that I almost care more about the Yankees not winning than I care about the Red Sox winning, but that's just one of many bad things that can be said about me. I can live with that.