This just in ...

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The Onion reports that there's a rising trend for parents to have their children raised at school.  It seems that child-rearing is no longer a feasible hobby for overworked American adults.

The question arises: why don't they offshore the whole thing?  Why not send the kids to the Sudan, for instance, where there are thousands of parents who have lost their kids?  Or Bangalore, where some competent young Indian fellow can babysit a couple of kids while obfuscating over the phone to some hapless caller from Michigan?  And let's not forget the Irish, who need something to take their minds off the threat from predatory pedophilic priests.  Try saying that ten times fast.  I mean, fast, ten times.

Honestly, most young parents are discovering that their parents did a sloppy job of explaining to them how to bring up kids.  It won't be long before there's remedial child-rearing being taught in 9th grade.  Some authorities believe that, like Algebra, remedial sex education may have to be taught to incoming college freshmen, for a minimal number of credits, like, say, 2.  Accrediting agencies across the USA are looking into an exit sex test for graduating seniors.  (Show us you can do it right, or no degree for you.)

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A Real Chorale-Prelude

--In contrast to the little things that I write...

This tour-de-force of the genre was written by Stephen Malinowski, whose music has been featured here earlier.  Based on the folk song popularized by Paul Simon (and recorded by Simon and Garfunkel and featured in the album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme) the tune is very familiar.

The main tune, when it appears as Itself, is in slow notes, and not the very first ones either; you can identify them because on the graph they appear in bright orange.  In this particular version, Stephen's counter-melodies are all derived from the main tune itself, often speeded up or slowed down.  This is often seen in some of the more abstract works by Bach, especially those in The Art of Fugue (Die Kunst der Fuge) or A Musical Offering (Ein Musicalische Opfer).

Nuts: Friend or Foe?

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I'm battling both weight and cholesterol, and to distract me from my craving for cheese (You too?  Amazing!) I tried to stock nuts instead.  Then it struck me: haven't I heard that nuts are a source of cholesterol?

I hate to look something up unless I can report to someone, and my buddies all happen to be either on sabbatical, or uninterested in nutrition news.  But I have a blog!  So I made a halfhearted attempt to look up the information, i.e., Google.  To get a little more perspective on the subject, you should do your own research.  Remember, a lot of the research we see on the Web has been paid for by the very folks who are being studied; in this case, you must suspect that the Nut Industry (Big Nuts) would support research that makes them come out looking good.  There is probably some government website that provides a very conservative report, and that's probably a little more trustworthy than a voluntary report from the industry itself.  It will probably lack careful explanations, unfortunately.

The data I got was from a single source: the "Fat Free Kitchen", about whom I know little or nothing.  Still, it is a starting point.  The data is shown in an image; you could always go to their site and get the html version.

My favorites are Pistachios and Cashews.  Vegetable foods do not actually contain cholesterol, which is a kind of substance found in our bloodstream which transports artery blocking material around, and dumps it where it can clog the blood passages.  (Not deliberately, of course, but as a by-product of its other functions, I suppose.)  However, saturated fats, which most certainly are found in vegetable foods, are what our own bodies manufacture cholesterol from.  So we need to cut down the amount of saturated fats we eat.  (A little saturated fat is ok.)

In contrast, unsaturated fats are actually good for you.  They are from what the body makes a variant of cholesterol that actually helps transport clogs away from where they are.  This is something I don't fully understand; e.g., where do they transport the clogs to?  Ideally, the material in the clogs will be metabolized (i.e., used up), and will not be a problem any longer.  This good cholesterol is, by all accounts so valuable that doctors are more anxious about increasing it, than decreasing the regular ("bad") cholesterol.  I think of the bad stuff as dirt, and the good stuff as detergent, but if a person who knows about these things learns that this is how I view it, I might have to do time.

By the way, I learned about ten years ago that the body uses up bad cholesterol converting Niacin into Niacinamide.  The former is a nutritional supplement readily obtainable, and the latter is one of the B-Vitamins.  (So by eating Niacin, you burn off some of your cholesterol, while simultaneously gaining a son, to mix our metaphors in the most delightful way.  I never metaphor I didn't like.)

From the chart, it looks as if Pistachios are low in the bad saturated fats.  As you can see, Walnuts are the champions (within this particular set of nuts) for unsaturated fats.  I personally don't like them, but if you do, you're in luck.  Also find out which nuts provide more fiber; I failed to do this, though I should have.  (Trivia: peanuts are technically not nuts but a bean, or legume.  They contain lots of protein.)

Cooking and fats:
As we reported sometime last year, it is regarded as better, in some circles, to do your fryings with a small amount of saturated fat.  You have to drain it well.  But the little amount you end up eating is considered worth it, because of the avoidance of certain by-products that are created when you fry with unsaturated fats.  Unsaturated fats are chemically active, and at high temperatures apparently get converted into a group of substances that cause cancer.  So cooking with unsaturated fats, e.g. Canola Oil, for many years could expose you to this carcinogenic stuff ("free radicals") that have a bad cumulative effect.  So: unsaturated fats are great, provided you do not cook with them.  What can you do without cooking with them?
Eat them as nuts, for instance.
Use them in salads.
Use them in dips.
Deep frying is a problem, because the foods get soaked in the oil, and the fat does not actually get drained away effectively.  So deep-fried foods are a nutritional liability.  And restaurants that use polyunsaturated fats for deep-frying are not doing you a favor, either, because of the free radicals.  You've got to make your own decision whether you prefer to eat foods deep-fried in a saturated fat (heart attack), or deep-fried in polyunsaturated fat (cancer), or just avoid them (no french fries).

Finally, nuts have another benefit: they're filling.  Snacking on nuts satisfy you in two ways: satisfying your need to chew, and because they fill you up.  Weight Watchers, for instance, are really big on foods that fill you up.  They encourage you to eat these filling foods as much as you want, because they provide few calories, but do satisfy your hunger.  So you get to eat tons of it: broccoli, oatmeal, nuts, whole wheat and multi-grain bread, flatbreads, etc.

HOW COULD I FORGET???

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Is it true that cutting down on the number of clicks you make lengthens the life of your mouse?  Anyway, based on that assumption, I'll save readers the trouble of looking up the trouble with Johann Sebastian Bach's birthdate, which has been addressed in detail in earlier posts.

The short version is: before we had Leap Years, we only had Crawl Years --ok, just kidding-- the Leap years prevent the calendar year being a little different from the actual planetary year; if we had a perfect calendar, the shortest day of the year would always fall on the same date, roughly December 20th.  It is the Leap Years (and leap seconds, etc etc) that keep the seasons and the calendar synchronized.  The adjustments started in the time of Julius Ceasar, but even more adjustments were needed just about the time a hundred years before Bach's birth.  The improvements were spearheaded by Rome, so of course Protestant Saxony pointedly ignored the new improved calendar.  As a consequence, the day of J. S. Bach's birth has two different dates according to the different calendars in force at the time.

The official date according to the Baptismal Register is March 21st, though by some accounts it was several weeks past the Spring Equinox.  If J.S.B were to be revived today and immediately asked for his date of birth, that's the date he would have given.  So it seems reasonable to celebrate his life on the 21st day of March every year, AND I MISSED IT!  Ah, woe is me, for I was undid.  (Ach, wehe mir, as Google would have it.)

Recently a documentary about Bach has been released: "Bach and Friends".  It appears to be something on the lines of "Why I like Bach", or "Why you should like Bach", or "Why Bach is The Greatest" by a long list of popular and talented performers who just happen not to be what I might call Bach Insiders: the performers and scholars who seem to have --at the moment-- a lock on Bach analysis and performance practice, Bach biography, and all aspects of musicology related to Bach.  (Which does not at all mean that the collaborators of "Bach & Friends" are not entitled to their opinions, and the right to try to persuade us.)

I'm not sure that we can actually put our finger on why Bach is such a great influence on us.  Music is such an intangible thing to most of us that why some music is good and other music is not so good is beyond our powers of explanation.  All I can say, personally, is that I like Bach.  Why?  The melodies, the harmonies, the counterpoint, the rhythms, the form, the structure, the instrumentation, and most of all, how he fits it all together!  I wish I had the courage to say that it would be wonderful if he were alive today, but it probably wouldn't be; some folks believed he was difficult to get along with (essentially those with whom he did not get along); and he was opinionated, and the manners of the time might have dictated behavior on his part that we would considered obnoxious.  Still, I'm just very pleased that he created such good music, and that so much of it has come down to us.

My approach in this blog has been, at least in terms of my need to increase awareness of music in general, and Bach in particular, to present music available on the Web, which should ideally speak for itself.  Bach has not only created some of the most powerful musical works we have, but also at the same time been instrumental in influencing aesthetics so that his works are indeed the most powerful.  He was an educational force, in other words.

Even Bach lovers violently disagree on why Bach is great.  They disagree on which pieces are great.  They disagree on which pieces are merely lovely and delightful, and which are serious, profound, and deeply moving.  Some would claim that all his work is equally moving and equally entertaining, and others would disagree.

Is is fascinating to conjecture what his reaction would be to our reaction to his work!  On the face of it, he was a humble man, and all his work was for the glory of god.  But the very music speaks both of humility and great pride, and amazingly this does not constitute a paradox!

I apologize for not presenting any new goodies for my readers, but just my barely articulate thoughts of Bach, and my gratitude that his work lives on!

The Life and Times of P.D.Q Bach

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I can't imagine why I have left writing about this legendary composer for so long.

P. D. Q. Bach was the last --and most certainly least-- of old J. S. Bach's sons.  He was discovered, much like Piltdown Man, by the musical paleontologist Peter Schickele, who has a reputation of his own (mostly independent of that of P.D.Q.B), and is a slightly disgruntled graduate of Juilliard.

Fortunately for us, Peter S. has made it his avocation, or mission, if you prefer, to record all of P. D. Q. Bach's opus, and it is all available on CD.  For the interested novice, there is no compendium more persuasive or telling than the first Greatest Hits collection named rather frivolously I thought, The Wurst of P. D. Q. Bach.  Once you have let the dulcet tones of the Wurst collection caress your eardrums, you too can exclaim: "Take me now, Lord," or "Beam me up, Scotty," or "Swing Low," as your temperament might dictate.  At any rate, you will most certainly be exclaiming something.

In those early recordings, which have culminated in Wurst, Schickele contributed a fair amount of musicology to the sound recording itself, introducing most pieces as if they were being performed live.  (Actually, about half of them were indeed performed live; the rest were performed most certainly dead.)  Every cut is wonderful, but I will mention just two, both vocal pieces:

Iphigenia in Brooklyn is a wonderful, wonderful piece of musical drama, in these recordings featuring a brilliant countertenor, designated Bargain Counter Tenor, John Ferrante.  (More about this phenomenon anon.)

The Seasonings, clearly ripped-off from Haydn in advance, by a baffling piece of compositional espionage, is graced by a brilliant performance by the soprano, Marlena Kleinman, specifically in the aria "Now is the season".

Much later, P. D. Q. Bach's opera The Abduction of Figaro was performed for DVD by Peter Schickele and his long-suffering team.  This is a miraculous and hilarious opera, most definitely his best dramatic work.  (There are other woks by the composer that are hardly in the same class, either in terms of finish, or seriousness of purpose.)  Abduction features, among other fabulous performers, that selfsame John Ferrante who sang in Wurst.  Brilliant!

Here is a scene from the traditional ballet scene:

Shameful Self-Promotion

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A few weeks ago, I posted a clip of a piece I had written, almost the first ever.  (An earlier effort from my teen years also exists, which has a certain youthful charm of its own.)

I'm beginning to realize just how much work goes into this; first, you have to "outline" the piece, in the sense of the way it would go in the large scale.  What would be the main tunes?  (You can't write a piece of more than a minute in length with just a single tune.)  How will the tunes be repeated, or varied?  What will be the chords we use?  And so on, and so forth.

Then you have to worry about whether there is an overall balance to the piece; whether, once you have finished tentatively putting all the tunes in the right places, whether one of them is a little too overpowering where you have placed it...!  Finally, you worry whether it sounded too much like Bach, or Mozart, or whoever!  That part was just too difficult to fix, so I left it alone.

One of my biggest problem was instrumentation.  In a fit of enthusiasm, I wrote the parts in such a way that most of them were interesting tunes, even if hidden in the lower parts.  (Many composers put in more effort into this than even I did.)  So it would help the inner parts to keep their individuality if they were assigned to highly individual tone-colors.  One of the best choices was, from high to low: Oboe, Accordion, Clarinet, Bassoon, and String bass.  (The Bass would be played bowed; a double-bass, in other words.)  The accordion was just a little too out in left field, so I settled on Oboe, Clarinet, French Horn, Bassoon, and Double-bass.

Serenade 7

[Added much, much later:]  I have been tinkering with the piece for weeks, and my principal problem was that I could not use a flute anywhere in it, since every part went down to A below Middle C.  I got the idea to transpose it higher, and now it has a more conventional instrumentation: Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, and the bass doubled by a Bass Clarinet.

It has also been speeded up, and now has a duration of just about 3 minutes.  This is just a little too fast, but some features do come across better; the triplets don't seem to be quite as annoying as they used to be.

It is a short piece, and so does not require a lengthy guided tour.  You might enjoy listening for how the flute and oboe trade the opening tune around the 8th bar (or measure).  At this speed it sounds very cute and perky.

After the repeated first tune, there is the main minor key interlude, followed by the main tune again.  Then there is a second interlude in a more boisterous vein, after which the opening tune returns to round the piece out with a small coda.

There is a texture of churning triplets throughout, which is how I envisioned the piece from the outset.  So, as far as melody is concerned, the tunes are rather simple, but I'm hoping the complex harmonies provide some appeal.  The harmonies are not that complex; it's just that they're rather dense, moving more rapidly than most people are accustomed to hearing.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it!

[P.S.: Here is the most recent version (2010/4/13).  It has been slowed back down (about 80 quarter-notes a minute), and I've taken out the bass clarinet and put in a double-bass, which works better at the slower tempo.

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Gilbert & Sullivan: The Mikado

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Hello boys and girls!

Today we're going to talk about a subject about which I know very little: the famous D'Oyly Carte operettas of William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan.  You can easily find out tons about these guys by checking out Wikipedia.  The summary for the busy executive: Gilbert wrote the words, and Sullivan supplied the tunes.  Sullivan was a brilliant composer of light melodies, and Gilbert, in my very humble opinion, wrote some of the funniest lyrics I have ever seen or heard anywhere.  I'm writing this in a hurry, as usual, and I'm going to have to clean up this stuff fairly soon, but...

The Mikado, an opera set in an oriental land that looks suspiciously like a cross between the British conception of what China and Japan were like, was a clever satire of: Victorian England.  This is the only G&S opera with which I'm moderately acquainted, and it is the funniest thing!  Of course the jokes are little on the British side of humor, which means that there's a certain amount of reference to speech patterns that are considered funny by allusion, and other jokes that are funny only if you were there, back in the day.  But yet other portions are funny in any time and place.  This was drawn to my attention by my brother Ray:

To sit in solemn silence 

In a dull, dark dock,

In a pestilential prison

With a life long lock,

Awaiting the sensation of

A short, sharp shock,

With a cheap and chippy chopper

On a Big Black Block.

This same operetta features a lovely song, by a character with the improbable name of Yum-Yum, which goes like this:

The sun, whose rays

Are all ablaze

With ever-living glory,

Does not deny

His majesty

He scorns to tell a story!

He don't exclaim,

"I blush for shame,

So kindly be indulgent."

But, fierce and bold,

In fiery gold,

He glories all effulgent!

I mean to rule the earth,

As he the sky

We really know our worth,

The sun and I!

I mean to rule the earth,

As he the sky.

We really know our worth,

The sun and I!

Observe his flame,

That placid dame,

The moon's Celestial Highness;

There's not a trace

Upon her face

Of diffidence or shyness:

She borrows light

That, through the night,

Mankind may all acclaim her!

And, truth to tell,

She lights up well,

So I, for one, don't blame her!

Ah, pray make no mistake,

We are not shy;

We're very wide awake,

The moon and I!
Ah, pray make no mistake,

We are not shy;

We're very wide awake,

The moon and I!

This particular performer (Leslie Garrett) seems not to really understand the brilliant audacity of the lyrics! Valerie Masterson's rendition of the aria, provides a nice contrast, though the sound is a little distorted.  (Ms. Masterson is retired, but still active in music education and appreciation activities.)

In the US, the Pirates of Penzance is probably more popular than The Mikado.  There are several others, all funny.  They should be all exhumed and popularized while the present wave of Monty Python appreciation lasts!

 [Parenthetical note:  I seem to remember that Gilbert and Sullivan were not on the best of terms for the majority of the period of their collaboration.  I can't cite sources, but I believe there were witnesses to this fact.  In particular, I seem to remember that Gilbert delighted in writing lyrics with impossible meters, just to make it difficult for Sullivan to set them to music.  If this was true, then the aria above could very possibly have been an instance.  Though, as it stands, it has a very ethereally beautiful effect, especially with the frequent phrases with flute and clarinet in octaves that flit through the accompaniment like moonbeams, it must be realized that those phrases serve to disguise the fact that the music really strains to accommodate the lyrics.  But what an achievement it is!

Perhaps the mischief had to do with wagers; Mr Gilbert might have wagered that he could write lyrics which Sir Arthur could not set to music, and so forth.  (It was such a time in history; Jules Verne, for instance, based his story of Around the World in Eighty Days on just such a wager.)  So, even in the absence of direct evidence, we could surmise that there was less collaboration than sabotage in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.]

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Jigs!

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As far as we know, a "jig" was a medieval dance that was so popular it survived well into the Renaissance.  The same dance was called a Gigue in France, and many of the greatest composers wrote Gigues.

I'm pretty sure I've written about jigs before, but hey, why not write about them again?  I'm going to search for jigs on YouTube, and select the jollier ones for you folks; how's that?

Here's Mischa Maisky with a gigue from Bach, played for an unaccompanied 'cello. (It was written that way.)





Here is the last movement of the Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 (made famous in Love Story):


Here is the last movement of Bach's wonderful Suite No. 3 in D major.  (The Suite No. 4 is also in D major; that was a common key to accommodate valveless trumpets of that time.)



In my own mind, the poster-boy for a Jig is "Pop Goes the Weasel", a popular nursery rhyme:


Here is a Bach organ fugue called the Jig Fugue (by English-speakers, of course).

Here is a harpsichord jig by Handel:


One of the most delightful jigs are in Handel's famous Watermusic Suites.  Here's one:


Finally, here is one of my favorites: the Gigue from Bach's French Suite No. 5 in G major.

A Tribute to "Mr. K"

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An article forwarded to the Moderated Classical Music List (MCML) describes how the author joined several generations of students in a New Jersey suburb, in a musical performance in homage to their music teacher who had just passed away.

I myself have never played in an orchestra, but I have sung in choirs (much to their regret), and know a little of the feeling.  A couple of times a year, our own choir here in Pennsylvania gives a performance for the alumni --this means, the choir alumni, now-- and at the end of it, all alums are invited on stage: potentially nearly a thousand, but not all can make it every year, obviously, and they sing some favorite, in fifty different sharps and flats.  (Actually, they sing quite well; I was just kidding.)

Making music together is a strange thing.  You don't have to be a professional to enjoy it; in fact I would venture to suggest that it is only as an amateur that one can enjoy it all the way to the soles of one's feet.  There is an ethereal moment when it all comes together, and for that instant you're taken out of your body, and you can't believe it was you.  (It is harder with singers, because when you sing it's just a tiny bit difficult to hear everyone else.)  No matter how much you may despise your fellow orchestra members, but when you meet each other again, there is that delight in shared achievement (and shared suffering), and I believe this carries over into every thing you do.

This is my inspiration for supporting music education.  It is amazing that the richest country on Earth, the most decadent society that ever existed, finds it difficult to budget funds for this most valuable of educational ideas: music education.

It doesn't matter that orchestras consist often of pretty quarrelsome individuals, poorly paid, for the most part, each one convinced that the rest of them are a bunch of no-talent nothings.  But an amateur orchestra is a place where you see glimpses of genius, and we need more than ever to be shown those glimpses of genius regularly, and so do our children.  It's worth an enormous amount of money to have children feel this good about each other, even if for just a couple of times a week.

Apropos of very little, here is a Bach Cantata being sung by the Tolzer Boy's Choir.  This is cantata no. 148, the opening chorus.  It simply radiates glee, and the kids do a great job of singing it.




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March Forth! It's National Grammar Day

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Who knew?

I thought that, since anything goes with grammar, at least around here, that it could hardly inspire too many others.  But apparently there is an organization called SPOGG (The Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar, or something on those lines) that established National Grammar Day on March 4th.  One of the leading lights there is Mignon Fogarty, who manages to make Grammarization gramorous to the ordinary reader with dozens of entertaining little tidbits (I wonder whether that needs a hyphen?) on their website.

They certainly cleared up the confusion between that/which pretty efficiently.  You too could avail yourself of this information [that/which -- select one] is so helpful.

So, better late than never

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Kim Yu-Na: Beauty Distilled!

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I've just finished watching one of Yu-na's performances, and I'm absolutely ravished!  Every once in a while I see someone doing something so breathtakingly beautiful that for a few seconds I feel life is so utterly unfair, before I console myself that beauty isn't everything.  (Yeah, right.)  In figure skating (named, as it happens, for the 'figures' they trace on the ice: figure-of-eight, for instance, rather than whether they're overweight, or whatever), the beauty of the art is so intricately and inextricably connected to the beauty of the performer that the two are almost inseparable.  I've been in love with Peggy Fleming and the oh-so-cute Dorothy Hamill, as well as the charismatic Katarina Witt.

In a sense, the Olympics as a whole does embody the willingness of many of us to put more subtle values aside, and revel in pure physical beauty, and beauty in motion.  We're willing to forgive athletes a great deal because when we appreciate them, we're doing so at rather a more primal level.  (Some athletes, unfortunately, are unable to see the difference between the occasional indulgence and perpetual license.)  I think Frank Deford said this first, or at least before I did.  I could swear he used the phrase "primal level" at least once in the last year.

In related news, there is a huge controversy over Tiger Woods's so-called sex addiction.  Bill Maher has some insightful things to say about it.  On the serious side, why couldn't he (Tiger W.) clear his hobby with his wife beforehand?  I think more understanding wives are sorely needed.  On the other hand, maybe he did, but she was too embarrassed to reveal that fact to the public.  On the third hand, maybe they had agreed to a no-disclosure clause, according to which if Tiger went public with his extramarital affairs, he would support her claim that she was taken by surprise.  Bestselling novels have been written on flimsier foundations than this.

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