currently listening

I've been listening to Matisyahu's new album, Light, at least once a day since my brother gave it to me recently. It's an absolutely incredible achievement and certainly a departure from his last one.

I read a review of this thing somewhere in which the reviewer described trying to tell his friends who Matisyahu is. It read something like, "He's the Hasidic Jewish rapper with a reggae rock band."

And that pretty much sums up the public image he's cultivated on his last few albums, right? This new album presents him as a human being rather than a Jewish rapper; sort of like a Christian rock artist dropping the aspects of faith that are "normally" in their music and just writing about something that pertains to all of us. In fact--though I'd have to look--I suspect there isn't a reference to "god/God" in the entire thing.

So maybe he's aiming for a wider audience. Or maybe he's just evolving as an artist (not in the Darwinian sense but, rather, he's just into writing different stuff at the moment). Maybe this is why the album cover for Light has almost no trace of the traditional Hasidic garb that his previous album, Youth, did.

But that's just me waxing philosophical about how a marketing campaign might be made for someone as "out of the box" as Matisyahu. The bottom line is that Light is incredible.

The first song, "Smash Lies," is my hands-down favorite. It's got this really cool harmonic stacking on "You can listen stereo or monotone/Mega phone, mellow drone DJ with delay" that makes me enthusiastically ball up a fist every time I hear it. Then a few tracks later, in "I Will Be Light," he drops one of those amazing lyrics that just get repeated over and over again: "You got one tiny moment in time for life to shine/Burn away the darkness." It sounds a little preachy when I write it out here but I can assure you that he does it a huge amount of justice in the song.

I'm so glad he finally came out with a new album. It's been over a year since I saw him live so I hope he comes around the Twin Cities some time soon.

carlos salzedo, please allow me to introduce you to joanna newsom + soup!

I've been trying to finish this song cycle for soprano, piano and harp and am very, very close. I had a meeting with my French tutor last Wednesday (at the always-amazing Cafe Latte in Saint Paul) to get the syllabic stresses correct and talk shop about what-have-you over some food. We may have been a little loud because the gentlemen next to us stopped me on the way out to question me about what kind of music we were writing.

Composing for the harp is a very strange thing for a composer who, like myself, writes primarily for the voice. In getting to know the instrument better I've gone through all sorts of listening phases: from Debussy's Dances for Harp and Strings to some sort-of-New-Age-y music by David Michael that is really, really good (listen here!).

Then there's the folk artist, Joanna Newsom. Anyone ever heard of her? I hadn't until my sister forced her album, The Milk-Eyed Mender, on me. Her voice is...um...a "singular" instrument. Here, listen.





That voice really felt awful to listen to the first time I heard it, but the fact that she sings and plays harp at the same time was just too intriguing not to keep coming back to the songs as a curiosity...and the harp stuff that she writes is totally hypnotic. The more I listened to it the more I was able to wrap my mind around what she was doing and desensitize myself to the grating nature of her voice. She wormed her way into my heart and I think I'm a fan now. Of course, with lyrics like "I killed my dinner with karate" how can you not love it?

Aside from just listening to all sorts of harp stuff, my other major resource has been Carlos Salzedo's landmark 1921 book, Modern Study of the Harp. It's a massively important work for harpists and, aside from the études that you would assume are in a book like this, there are all sorts of reference materials for how to do certain out-of-the-box stuff on the instrument. For instance, I never knew there was a harp technique called "Aeolian Flux." How many other instruments have technical terms that sound like a dystopic Charlize Theron sci-fi movie?

And, as over-the-top as that movie reference was, it's nowhere near to how over-the-top Salzedo writes. The first page of the book has nothing but the phrase "La harpe est a la musique ce que la musique est a la vie" written on it. Translated that means, "The harp is to music what music is to life." What does that even mean?




















Throughout the book's introduction he comes off as more of a harp guru than a harp teacher. For example:

There is nothing difficult. There are only NEW things, unaccustomed things.

When one is profoundly impressed with this truth, has meditated upon it and then put it into practice, calmness and confidence will ensue; and thanks to these indispensable qualities, musical practice becomes an agreeable pastime, leading towards the purest joys.

Now some of that might be the translation out of the original French text, but it still sounds like Confucius is trying to teach me the harp. You'll hear no complaints from this composer, though. The book makes me want to write a lot more for that instrument.

In gastronomical news, I made some amazing tomato soup recently. It's sort of a Cliff's Notes version of a Giada De Laurentiis recipe called Quick and Spicy Tomato Soup. My version has a bunch more onion and garlic (some of it raw) but pretty much everything else was unchanged. It was way good.

cheating death with stephen colbert

I try to watch The Daily Show or The Colbert Report when I eat lunch every day and the first three and a half minutes of this clip may be one of the funniest things I've ever seen. It's always hilarious when he can't stay in character and Camel releasing a new smokelss tobacco product sends him off the rails in a big way. Please enjoy!

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Cheating Death - Snus & Placebo Effect
http://www.colbertnation.com/
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Michael Moore

december in october

I went to an awesome Decemberists concert last night at the State Theatre. They played the Walker Art Center's festival this summer but I was at Interlochen and had to miss one of my favorite bands ever. The show they put on featured their new album, The Hazards of Love, played in its entirety with guests Becky Stark and Shara Worden singing the roles of Margaret and the Queen of the Forest, respectively.

I can't overstate how much fun this was. How many times am I going to get a chance to see an incredible rock opera semi-staged and played this well? And to hear Shara hit that high note at the end of "The Wanting Comes In Waves/Repaid" is worth the price of admission...she is absolutely incredible. I would highly recommend her album, Bring Me the Workhorse, if you haven't heard it yet (especially "We Were Sparkling").

I blogged briefly about The Hazards of Love last March before I left for Greece but didn't really say much because I hadn't had a chance to really absorb the thing. It is easily my favorite album that The Decemberists have ever put out (Sorry Picaresque. But you put up a massive struggle before you were unseated). The music ranges from heavy metal ("The Queen's Rebuke/The Crossing") to Nashville-style country & western ("The Hazards of Love 4") to one of the best/creepiest uses of a harpsichord on a rock record I think I've ever heard ("The Hazards of Love 3"). And the motives they use to tie everything together are amazing little things that re-occur at just the right time.

And if that wasn't enough, they played another set of songs from their other albums. For the final encore they invited Becky and Shara back out for an incredible cover of Heart's "Crazy On You." I am so glad that YouTube had this...and it's even from the Rock the Garden concert here in Minneapolis that I missed last summer.

currently reading

I just finished Jeffrey Zaslow's The Girls From Ames: A Story of Women & a Forty-Year Friendship. Now, why--you might ask--would I be reading such a thing? Well, first of all, because it's a pretty decent/interesting book. But, secondly, a friend of mine is actually one of the main characters.

Which is really, really weird. But I'll get to that.





















Although the title is pretty self-explanatory, the story is about 11 girls (Jenny, Kelly, Sally, Cathy, Karen, Karla, Marilyn, Diana, Jane, Angela and Sheila) who grew up together in Ames, Iowa and how they have managed to maintain their intense friendships with each other over the past 40 years. If you'll pardon some crass definitions, it all sounds very "Oprah" or "Lifetime" when I say it out loud and, frankly, that's because it is--if you're that cynical about it. Overall, it's just a story that can be incredibly moving at times. It's not my normal cup of tea but there are some things that transcend genre in this book that are exceptionally powerful:

• Karla's daughter, Christie, has a battle with cancer that I'm not ashamed to say made me a little teary-eyed while I read it.


• Kelly says some extremely candid things about her battle with breast cancer. In particular, what she says about how it changed her body image showed me an aspect of that disease I had never thought of.


• The death--at a young age--of one in the group (I won't say who) really colored their adult perceptions of how they've lived their lives. It introduced mortality to the Ames girls a lot earlier than "the norm" and this obviously had an effect.

Zaslow is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and is co-author of The Last Lecture but this book is solely his and the reportage is thorough in the pictures it paints. Here's a decent review from The Dallas Morning News that could shed some light on it all if you're interested. And, if that weren't enough, the publisher has set up an interactive website at girlsfromames.com for people to share their own stories. Definitely cool!

The strange thing about reading this book was that one of the Ames girls is a friend of mine that I've known for going on 10 years now. Every time she popped into the narrative it made the reading a much more immediate and intimate experience that I'll probably have to wait a while before I stumble upon again. But, aside from that, it's a great book to page your way through.

Next it's on to Dave Eggers' You Shall Know Our Velocity. Aside from the kickass title, it's one of those books that has absolutely no description of itself anywhere on the jacket because, as I'm gradually finding out, it's really tough to determine what it's actually about. It's great--don't get me wrong, here--but I'm almost 20 pages in at the moment and I have no idea what I'm in store for. In fact, it kind of reminds me of the sensation of reading something by Hunter S. Thompson or Jack Kerouac; the journey being more important than the destination and whatnot.

dominick argento vs. the bear

Thanks to the Minneapolis music scene, I went to a couple of great concerts in the last week. Last Friday it was a VocalEssence show that presented the Midwestern premiere of Dominick Argento's Evensong: Of Love and Angels. He's the hometown hero 'round these parts and is beloved by pretty much every composer and conductor I know in the area. The 45-minute piece was written in memory of his late wife and is a man exposed in grief. The amount of confidence it must have taken in order to write something so personally painful is beyond me.





















The opening movement, "Threnody," was an orchestral piece with soprano Maria Jette offstage (and unseen) singing on neutral vowels and it took me a second to realize what he was doing: it was the spirit of his wife (an operatic soprano prominent in the Twin Cities community) coming to give the piece permission to exist in the first place. Very goose bump-inducing and easily the best part of the work. The rest was typical Argento (both the stuff that agrees with me and the stuff that doesn't) but, that being said, he's earned the right to say whatever he wants. The fact that he let the listener in on his own grief-stricken heart so readily makes it okay for him to say pretty much whatever he likes and, in the end, I'm profoundly grateful that I got to hear this piece with him in the audience.

Read reviews by two different writers from the Star Tribune here and here. This blog has gotten incredibly wonky as of late so, if you're game, I'll let them explain the piece in much more depth. (And you should definitely check them out...there are some things about it that are very interesting.)

This past Wednesday I headed over to First Avenue to see a Grizzly Bear show. I blogged about their latest album, Veckatimest, way back in July and they finally came to town. It was a fantastic show and, having lived with that album for the past three months, it was awesome to see it translated into a sold out live show amongst all those fans (who were packed cheek-to-jowl in the club).







One of my new favorite things about this band is that for their latest single, "While You Wait for the Others," they released a B-side with none other than Michael McDonald singing the vocal track. They just drop out the lead vocal that's normally there and have Mr. Yacht Rock himself sing it instead. And, you know what? It's really, really good...I almost prefer it to the original. Here, listen to it!

multiple solutions + currently listening

Over the last few days I've been working to get the proportions for this new movement of the French set down. It's a fairly placid piece but the piano has outbursts here and there that need measuring to make sure they don't take over the sensibility of the entire thing.

The Rilke text for this one is absolutely beautiful. Here's the English translation:

Perhaps it's no more than the fire's reflection
On some piece of gleaming furniture
That the child remembers so much later
Like a revelation.

And if, in his later life, one day
Wounds him like so many others,
It's because he mistook some risk
Or other for a promise.

Let's not forget the music, either,
That soon hauled him toward absence complicated
By an overflowing heart...

I love how he adds that ellipsis at the end. It delicately insists the entire emotional world of the thing up to somewhere you can't see. I've put one of my own at the end of the movement with the harp intoning the 5th and the 3rd of the tonic chord in succession (maybe with harmonics...haven't decided yet).

And remember that math problem I blogged about an entry ago? I came up with what I saw as two viable solutions. First is the one notated in 6/8 that I didn't end up using:








I decided against this one because notating the vocal part above it made the relatively simple line appear incredibly complicated. So I pulled up stakes on my 6/8 riff and re-notated it in 2/4.

This puts the complicated-looking-but-not-actually-that-hard music in the hands of the pianist. However, I think instrumentalists have come to expect this sort of thing so there shouldn't be a problem.

We'll see how this all fleshes out as the work continues, of course. At the moment I'm trying to bitchslap Finale into letting me notate the vocal parts in 3/8 above this 2/4 without any funny business. It's either that or I've got to figure out a way to notate that 2/4 thing in 3/8 with all sorts of weird bar crossings. Stupid Notated Music! It would be so much easier to just teach this by rote.

The Singers have been preparing the entire Rachmaninoff All-Night Vigil for their fall series (check out the Dale Warland Singers' live recording of the piece...the ninth movement is incredible) and someone called that work "the grand choral symphony" within earshot of me. I had never thought about it that way and, after stewing about it for a while, I've come to the conclusion that there really isn't another a cappella choral work with that dramatic scope and sterling reputation. Maybe Frank Martin's Mass for Double Choir but that still only clocks in at circa 25 minutes (versus Rachmaninoff's full hour). Can anyone think of any other pieces like this?

So with that in mind I'd like to make a nomination to the Grand Choral Symphony Club. How about Joby Talbot's Path of Miracles?

Haven't heard of it? Well, then rundon'twalk to iTunes or Amazon and order it right now. There's an incredible recording by the commissioning choir, Tenebrae, that you've got to listen to. Abbie Betinis gifted me the album a few years ago and insisted (like more than she usually does) that I listen to it. She felt so strongly about it that she actually went out and spent money on me.

And, as it turned out, she was completely right. It's an amazing work that serves as a musical treatment of sorts for the most enduring route of Catholic pilgrimage, the Camino Frances ("The French Way"). I won't go into too much depth about all the specifics of the piece (because--seriously--find out for yourself) other than to mention here that its four movements are named after the major staging posts of the route: Roncesvalles, Burgos, Leon and Santiago, respectively.

It's rainy and cold here in Minneapolis today and this piece is perfect for sitting down with a hot cup of coffee and some engraving to get done. For me, it cultivates the same sort of warm-and-cozy devotional aesthetic as The Rock's Vespers does. Give Sergei some company and go get it!