i love the onion

I love The Onion. I love it so much.

i'm never gonna dance again...

Someone recently sent me an mp3 of Ben Folds and Rufus Wainwright singing a duet on "Careless Whisper" because, as this person knew, I'm a huge fan of them both. This is apparently the only song that they've ever performed together so I was psyched to hear it. I'm happy to report that it's really well done and extremely entertaining but, unfortunately, it has been lodged in my head for days and days and days.

I've had songs stuck in there before but never this long and, frankly, it's not funny anymore. J. Aaron McDermid told me once that he had Stevie Wonder's "That's What Friends Are For" running on a loop in his brain for something like 10 years and I hope that I haven't just been handed my own personal hell for the next decade.

I sat down at the piano to try and figure it out in an effort to exorcise it but that didn't work.

So then I printed out the lyrics to try and learn them to see if maybe that would do the trick. Nope.

Transposed it out of the original key. Nada.

Listened to the annoying, super-80s, dirty-sax original version by George Michael. Try again.

I need an old priest and a young priest...

the juliet letters

I went to a great production of The Juliet Letters last night at the Southern Theater. It's a song cycle that Elvis Costello wrote in collaboration with the Brodsky String Quartet and was inspired by letters people write and leave under Juliet's purported balcony in Verona, Italy. Someone began collecting them years ago and started answering them.













I am not nor have I ever been a fan of Elvis Costello (his screechy vibrato annoys the hell out of me) but this was a great find. The album itself was put out in the early 90s and is just him and the quartet. Due to this, I'm assuming it doesn't really fit in with the rest of his catalog of works and how the record company let him release it I'll never know.

The cycle itself--in my humble opinion--doesn't really work as a piece of concert music just on its own but, every now and then, there is a song that grabs your attention and holds you in. Artistic Director Jake Endres sensed this potential, I think, and went about amplifying it with various things here and there that worked really well:

• Instead of one singer/actor, he split it into 4 different parts and added harmony in just the right spots.
• There were excerpts from the Shakespeare interspersed among the songs and it was really good to hear it again: "He jests at scars that never felt a wound."
• Her balcony is represented and, at the end of the show, she finally appears. They actually included the entire balcony scene amongst the proceedings (which was powerfully acted by the guy portraying the young man). It never fails to get me every time.
• Jake wrote some really fine new music to underscore some of the dialogue scenes. I'm not certain (and I don't own the original album for comparison) but I think he also wrote an entirely new movement that takes place in India. That particular letter was dated 2003 and the cycle was released in 1993 so I'm fairly certain that's true.

It was a great show and the staging was really cool (particularly the "Romeo's Seance" movement). It's only playing another couple of days so you should get out and see it if you get the chance. Here's a video of the original lineup performing the "Jacksons, Monk and Rowe" movement 15 years ago (complete with early-90s apparel) .


I've been diligently working on the choir/oboe commission.









I've selected a modal-ish scale reminiscent of music from east Asia and the middle east and it's been interesting to try and incorporate it with my own emerging harmonic language. It's jarring sometimes to try and combine them but I'm really enjoying the challenge of that as well as the language.

unintentional(?) humor

It seems that someone at CNN.com is playing a joke on somebody else at CNN.com. Here's their front page from about 2 minutes ago. Look at the headline underneath the picture. I didn't doctor that. It's totally for real.



It was too funny not to take a screenshot for posterity. That can't be a mistake. It seems someone from The Onion may have infiltrated their ranks.

new recording

Seattle Pro Musica just put out a stunning new recording featuring their performance of winter. It may be one of my favorite performances of anything I've ever written ever. Maestra Thomas and her singers are a treasure and I'm honored they would represent themselves with something I wrote.














Aside from my piece they've got some other really great stuff on it by Bernstein, Lauridsen (his Sa Nuit D'Ete is one of my favorites), a piece by the conductor herself, Barber's Reincarnations and the world premiere recording of John Muehleisen's Da Pacem (if you don't know his Snow for choir and trumpet you are missing out on a lot).

Everybody buy it!

the english language

I recently sat down with my old college friend, Moid Alwy, to go over the Urdu texts I’m setting for my next piece. He's originally from Pakistan but currently lives in the Twin Cities with his wife, Amanda, and their hilarious 2-year-old daughter, Kiran. We drank good beer and, over the course of a few hours (and more good beer), translated a 150-year-old text by Mirza Ghalib. It wasn't easy and, at one point, he actually called his mother in Karachi to get help on a particularly antiquated word that he didn’t know but it was a lot of fun and I’m really excited to start in on this new piece.

One of the interesting things you come to find out in translating something so far removed from English is how mechanical our language can be sometimes. I’m not knocking my mother tongue by any means but there have been way too many cases of “there isn’t a literal translation” for me to ignore the fact that English can be somewhat pedestrian when trying to describe things.

I’ll put an example to you:

When he and I were translating the fifth stanza of Deeda-e-tar he hit a word that he had a really hard time explaining. This word was "weeraanee" and resulted in this exchange taking place:

Moid: “It sort of means loneliness…but more than that. Kind of an eery kind, maybe? I’m not really sure how to describe it.”

Me: “There’s no literal English translation?”

Moid: “Yeah. It’s hard to describe. When all my family had finally left the house this was the word that my grandmother used to describe how she felt.”

Now, how about that? That is incredibly descriptive of the emotional context of that particular word. Why don’t we have something like that in English?

Then I started to remember all sorts of words from other languages that I’ve had lodged in my brain over the years that had very precise emotional descriptions but no literal translation:

Schadenfreude: this one is sort of well-known but it means taking pleasure in someone else’s pain. That's 6 words in English to just 1 in German.

Weltschmerz (German): the sort of pain felt by someone who understands that physical reality (i.e. the evils of the world) can never satisfy the Utopian desires of the mind. A ratio of 21 to 1.

Han: “a feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered.” 63 letters and spaces in English to just 3 letters in the original Korean.

Do we have any words like that in English? Something that explains another thing fairly precisely in terms of a definition but then colors it just a little bit more with something else. I’ve got two at the moment:

Ubiquitous: it means that something is everywhere but in a negative way. “Starbuck’s is ubiquitous.”

Pollyanna: someone who is optimistic but in an excessive or negative way.

I’m nowhere near the end of this thought but I figured I would eject it into the blogosphere and see what I get if anything. Thoughts?