I've been building up a cache of good albums for my upcoming week in Spain. Since I'm a self-professed iTunes addict and tend to listen to things until I ruin them, I usually need a bunch of new stuff to fill out a soundtrack for a trip like this.
I happened on Alicia Wiley playing a small show at Barbette earlier this week and picked up her CD, Halfway Home. It reminds me of a bunch of other piano-based singer/songwriters (Norah Jones, Tori Amos, Fiona Apple, etc.) but the harmonic progressions are straight-up jazz and the subtle shifts in color on "Blind Spot" are what made me finally walk up and buy the actual CD from her. (She's a local artist so I'll feel self-congratulatory about supporting her for a few minutes before moving on to just appreciating the music on its own merit. There...done. This is such a good album.)
Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds just put out another live acoustic album; this time from a show in Las Vegas. They include a ton of tracks from DMB's last album as well as the standards but what's always interesting about these records is seeing what songs Tim decides to play solo. In this case he sets his loop pedal on fire (as you'd expect) during "Kundalini Bonfire" and shreds out an amazing instrumental version of "Kashmir."
I've been listening to Laura Veirs' new album, July Flame, since I saw her open for The Decemberists back in October and I finally have occasion to include it here. The percussive strings on "Wide-Eyed, Legless" are incredible and I love how she takes Rimbaud's "Le dormeur du val" and crafts it into something her very own.
It's been three years since The Shins released a new album and, unfortunately, it doesn't look like it'll happen any time soon. Luckily their lead singer/songwriter, James Mercer, just teamed up with Danger Mouse to cut a record under the name Broken Bells. As a vocalist and composer I feel like the sound of a band is defined by who is singing and/or writing the songs so, luckily, this sounds pretty much like a Shins record to me...and that's just fine.
The combination of a string orchestra and a Dobro isn't something you hear very often (or at all) and it was nice to discover that waiting for me on "The Mall and Misery." I also really, really enjoy "The Ghost Inside" and the spaghetti western stuff on "Mongrel Heart." (And, if there was a doubt that James Mercer isn't manning the helm of this thing, the melodic structure of the former puts any of that nonsense to rest. He has such a singular voice.)
And if you're in to listening to music critics bloviate a bit you should head over to The Detritus Review and watch Gary Panetta of the Peoria Journal Star get his ass handed to him. It's a great read and it's nice to see someone taking this guy to task for his incredibly irresponsible and asinine comments. (Props to Dan Nass for sending me this!)
So I recently sang a beautiful concert at Orchestra Hall under Craig Hella Johnson (from Conspirare) which included three movements of Cary Ratcliff's oratorio, Ode to Common Things. It was a wonderful event put on by the North Central ACDA as the keynote event of their convention and it featured The Singers, Magnum Chorum and the St. Olaf Orchestra making a huge racket. And everybody loved it, worked hard in rehearsals, it was well-received and impeccably performed, etc. etc. blah blah blah.
But I have a bone to pick with Mr. Ratcliff.
First of all, the piece is amazing. He manages to throw in all these interesting textures into the orchestral writing (which the St. Olaf Orchestra played the hell out of...they have to be the finest purely undergrad orchestra in the nation) and, after all the work I had to put in to getting my part down, it was a great piece to get to know. The only thing that I absolutely hated about it was how it was notated.
Now it should be said that I'm a bit of a Notation Queen because it irks me to no end when a composer chooses to notate their music in a difficult way. (It's a huge bone of contention betwixt myself and other musicians as to whether Dominick Argento's music is properly or improperly written down.) So what follows is a bitchy, numerical listing of things I think Cary Ratcliff (who, again, wrote a brilliant piece) could do better:
Number 1: show me everything you want me to do in my own staff. If I have to look three staves above my own to get my dynamic markings or ritardando/accelerando indications, then something is wrong. You would not do this to an instrumentalist and you should not do this to a singer. If my eyes have to dart around the page to a) find my pitch, b) find my text, c) find my dynamics and d) find anything else I'm supposed to be doing then there is too much going on. You have now put something into your music that weakens it.
Side note with regards to text placement: please please pleeeease don't do the church hymnal thing and put it only between two staves and then count it for them both. That is the most annoying thing to have to deal with.
Number 2: don't write things out by hand. You can be as neat as possible but, in the end, it will look visually jumbled. CR has impeccably clear handwriting and it was as good as it could possibly be Re: handwritten scores but there was no constant location for the bass/baritone stuff or the choral part as a whole. It's 2010 and Finale has been out for a long time. Said notation program doesn't have to be part of the writing process (although it is for me and a bunch of other composers I know) but it does need to be part of The Bridge Between Composer & Performer.
Number 3: find the easiest possible way to notate things; the lowest common denominator, as it were. Now there are those that would say that we shouldn't have to write in this way...and I would remind them that these two rhythms sound exactly the same. (I wrote about this a bit while I was in the throes of composing "Trois Méditations.")
Here's how I would notate that.
Much better, right? Why would you ever choose the first one? As a performer I would look at that and go, "What is that?" Then I would go on a mathematical journey to figure out that it's just two larger triplets and get angry at you because you could have saved me a bunch of time if you had only notated it the other way.
The second is just much clearer and with music the only important thing is how it sounds anyway, right? The Theoretical vs. Aural problem with learning music theory is not the chicken and the egg paradox. There's an actual concrete answer here: notation exists only as a means of reproducing the desired sound rather than the reason for it. But that's an entirely different post.
In order to make this a bit fairer to CR, I'd like to use another example from a composer whose music I love but, every time I have to learn a new piece of his, I feel like we get into a fight. Here's a short phrase from Dominick Argento's gorgeous piano and choir piece, "Dover Beach Revisited." (Pardon the missing key signature.) It should be noted that the eighth note is hovering somewhere near mm=54 at this point:
Every time I see something that looks like three eighth notes grouped together my brain is trained to figure it out in compound time...but that's not what it is at all. Now here's how I would notate that. (Forgive the quarter note at the end that I was too lazy to fix.)
Isn't that a whole lot easier to read? In American music education we start learning how to count using quarter notes, right? If you use that to your advantage then there will be many more happy campers in choir and orchestra who give a compelling performance and advocate for the piece to the audience.
There. Points made and that's the end of my list. Let me stress again that Ode to Common Things is wonderful. CR was in attendance for the concert and got a well-deserved round of applause. Go listen!
Okay, so that's the vindictive-sounding part of this post over and done with. On a lighter note, Allie and I snuck into the Real Group's concert at the Minneapolis Convention Center last week (shh, don't tell anyone) and, aside from some really insistent/violent head-bobbing by the guy in front of us, it was amazing. How they get so much sound out of just 5 people is beyond me and apparently I'm the only person in the world who has never heard their song, Gøta. It's gorgeous.
And I made this beautiful bleu cheese risotto with asparagus, peppers and mushrooms the other day. I think I'm starting to get the hang of this. Risotto is more time-consuming than difficult. Making sure that I've got all the necessary ingredients ready to go before I pull the trigger on the rice seems to be the best way to get it done.
My piece for the Minnesota All-State Choir is chugging along nicely. The goal is to have it done before I leave next Saturday for a week in Spain. That being said, I think that with every new piece I write I feel like I learn one specific skill that I'm able to carry with me into the other things I write. With "Trois Méditations" it was the idiosyncrasies of writing for the harp. With "Your children are not your children" it's the cross-voicings that happen when you write for 4-hands piano and mathematically figuring out who to assign the various cells to so I don't piss off the pianists. Keeping them within their own "territory" on the keyboard turns out to be an important-but-time-consuming task of checking and re-checking where their hands are going to be at all times.
I'm terrified that I'm going to let something slip by which has the potential to stop a rehearsal on the piece. I hate when rehearsal stoppage is Composer's Fault and with eight hands pounding away on two pianos there is more potential for this to happen.
It comes out of Butler County in eastern Pennsylvania and, as the article is quite short, I'll just reprint it here:
State Police report that three men got into a fight over ownership of a microwave oven shortly after midnight on Sunday.
Troopers report that John Montgomery III and William Shaw III attacked Joshua Shank at a home in Summit Township.
All three were injured in the fight.
Res ipsa loquitur. And that pretty much says it all but I would love to know the back story to this thing and maybe even craft a short operetta about it.
mir."
