the arrow & the song in river falls

I drove over to River Falls, Wisconsin on Thursday to work with the River Falls High School Symphonic SSA Choir on The Arrow and The Song. The dry erase board in their classroom informed them to be on time for their session with "Maestro Shank" so it was a classy operation all around.
















Their director, Tony Mudra, commissioned The Minstrel Boy a few years ago and I've known him for years. They performed it really, really well and we had a blast working together talking about tone, poetry, phrasing and all that good stuff.
















Here's their "wacky" picture. Go Wildcats!

fingers crossed that this didn't happen to me

I was talking with some friends recently about this new piece in Urdu and how I've had to seek the outside expertise of a person who knows that particular language. On top of that I've also asked someone knowledgeable about the International Phonetic Alphabet to write it out as a resource for the performers. During this discussion someone mentioned that these two people could totally just be messing with me and I've been writing in gibberish for the last few months.

I'm paranoid enough as it is trying to speak phrases in a language so far-removed from my own without actually knowing exactly what I'm saying 100% of the time and that notion really didn't help. I've been extremely careful in how I approached working on this commission (I'll probably write something here about the process in the future since it was so unique) but, if one of my collaborators has a sick sense of humor or a bone to pick, it's not outside the realm of possibilities that this totally could have happened.

Apparently, the reason they thought of said hypothetical situation was an episode of Frasier where he speaks at his son's Bar Mitzvah. In it, Dr. Crane asks a friend to translate his speech into Hebrew for him so he can make it more meaningful for his son as well as the congregation. Unfortunately, this particular friend is mad at him for some reason and his way of getting back at Frasier is translating the speech into Klingon instead.

Hilarity obviously ensues and, luckily, I found the clip on YouTube. It's actually pretty funny.

(p.s. The kid at the end was totally me in middle school minus the yarmulke and knowledge of Klingon culture.)

ben folds + bon iver

I've been listening to the new Ben Folds album, Way to Normal, for the past week or so and I'm pretty sure I actually like it. I think it took me a while because it's laced with even more of his biting sarcasm than usual and there are a couple of songs (The Frown Song, Errant Dog and Free Coffee) that I just skip over altogether because the amount of gratuitous invective. However, I think that has more to do with the fact that there just isn't a good melody in any of those tracks. That being said, I bet those 3 songs are a blast to pound out on the keyboard.

This isn't to say that it's a bad album. Quite the contrary in fact. Cologne is one of his strongest and most beautiful songs ever (he unbelievably manages to work Lisa Marie Nowak's story into it) and his duet with Regina Spektor, You Don't Know Me, is a perfect piece of music in any genre. If you're a Folds fan you know all of this and probably own it but, if you're not, you should sample a few of these tracks before spending the $10 on iTunes.



Also, if you haven't read about what he did to stop the Internets from getting a leaked version of it you should read this article. It's creatively ingenious. I can't believe someone else didn't think of this first.

A friend recently gave me Bon Iver's album For Emma, Forever Ago and I think I just found one of my all-time favorite albums. "Bon Iver" is Justin Vernon's current nom de plume and, apparently, he just trucked a bunch of recording equipment out to his father's cabin in the northern Wisconsin woods and stayed for the winter (the name is actually the French translation of "good winter"). He wrote and recorded the entire thing by himself over the course of three months and it is absolutely amazing. I can't put my finger on it yet but I love this album. "Flume" and "The Wolves (Act I And II)" are absolute masterpieces. This guy might be the new reigning king of the slow, compelling crescendo.

french music and some pancakes

I went to a Minnesota Orchestra concert last night and, as it's been a while since I've been to Orchestra Hall to hear them, it occurred to me that I've never gotten any pictures from inside. Aside from Walt Disney Hall, this is probably the most visually interesting orchestra hall I've been to. The architect made a concerted effort to deformalize the concert-going experience in order to make it accessible to everyone. The outside lobby has 4 different tiers to lounge around on before the show.
















The windows facing Peavey Plaza (the orchestra's outdoor venue for the summer) make an interesting picture when they're set against the dark night sky and reflecting all the colors in the interior.
















The stairs up to the third floor take you really close to these interesting (and probably expensive) light fixtures.
















The concert highlighted French music by Ravel (Alborada del gracioso), Saint-Saëns (Piano Concert No. 2), Debussy (Sacred and Profane Dances) and Messiaen (L'Ascension). My favorite by far was the Debussy piece. It's scored for harp and strings and they used it to debut a new harp that was donated to the by some über-wealthy patrons. (I looked it up and it retails for around $30,000).

It was interesting to watch Osmo Vänskä conduct for the first time. He's been in the Cities for 5 years now and I've never had a chance to see him on the podium until now. He used a baton for the first half of the concert and then left it behind for the Debussy and the Messiaen.

Aside from seeing Osmo in action I also ran into Joe Dowling outside in the plaza. Having just been in his theater a few days ago it was providence.

After the concert it was some late night pancakes at the Uptown Diner.

laura ingalls wilder + fleet foxes

I went to the Guthrie this past Tuesday to watch their world premiere production of the musical version of Little House on the Prairie. It's been sold out for months so we had to wait in the rush line for a bit. Luckily, I had a Minneapolis Star Tribune to keep me company while I took the first shift waiting on the (surprisingly comfortable) lobby floor.

The new Guthrie has only been open since 2006 and this is the first time I've been able to go in. I went to the very last show in the old building which (since it was Hamlet) was beyond amazing and I've been looking forward to seeing the new building for quite a while now. When it first opened, it was an instant architectural phenom in the Midwest. It was designed by French architect Jean Nouvel and the coolest part of the entire thing--at least in my estimation--is the enormous cantilevered bridge that sticks out over the Mississippi. You can see it in this stock picture I pulled from the Internets.















On a side note, I don't know how much this piece of real estate cost the theater but I think it's safe to say it was probably a lot. Not many new things get to be built right on the bank of the river these days. This image I found on Google shows just how close it is.












The thing jutting out of the building towards the river is nicknamed the "Endless Bridge" for some reason or another and, along the length of its interior, there are these little mirror-lined windows that frame some crazy views of the Minneapolis skyline. I didn't have time to take pictures of all of them so here's the one that overlooks Gold Medal Park. The white bridge in the background is the replacement for the 35W span that fell in August '07.
















Speaking of Gold Medal, the factory is immediately to the left of the outside observation deck on the end of the "endless" bridge. Here it is at sunset.
















After my shift in line was over I headed to the Cue restaurant attached to the theater. After all that sitting and reading it was nice to down a martini and some of the best fried crab cakes I've ever had...ever. This is the first meat I've had since going vegetarian in August and I am so glad I didn't waste an occasional meandering away from that diet on something less amazing.
















After dinner it was up to our seats in the spotlight balcony at the very, very, very back of the theater (which were surprisingly good). Despite the fact that it was a Tuesday night, the 700-seat proscenium stage theater was packed to the gills. When the tickets went on sale this summer the Guthrie apparently outsold their previous record by a whole lot. It caused such a stir that Variety even reported on it. Here's a pic I snapped at the end of intermission.









It was a decent musical. I'm not a huge fan of the genre (Andrew Lloyd Webber ruined it for everybody) and the main reason I went along was to see a student who is in the cast. Aside from his performance (which was incredible) I just felt myself getting bored with the quality of the art.

The staging, acting, lighting and set were wonderful but the music was somehow lacking and, although I will probably perjure myself in the future when it's a huge hit on Broadway, I think it was the composer's fault. Rachel Portman is the creator in question and I'm not really sure if she got the spirit of the novel. Don't get me wrong because she is an amazing composer (she is the first female composer to win an Academy Award for Best Orginal Score) but if you closed your eyes to listen you just forgot what you were looking at because the music sounded nothing like it should have in order to augment the story. In fact, aside from one short barn dance-ish thing, the score was never reminiscent of the folk music of the historical period the story was set in. (An article in the New York Times about the show confirms it when they use the phrase "largely unfamiliar with the books and television series" to describe her work on the show.)

In other words, while the staging and script and acting breathed of the time and place that the story was set, the music was just another Broadway score. Imagine if the music to Chicago sounded like the music from Wicked (one of the few modern Broadway scores I can stomach). This style of music works in the case of Wicked because the plot is set in another world but, with regards to Little House, there is a very specific cultural-musical thumbprint that has to happen in order to legitimize it all and, unfortunately, it just wasn't there.

That being said it will probably make a kajillion dollars due to the fact that Little House on the Prairie is such a successful brand (and for good reason).

This, however, speaks to how Broadway works and why I rarely enjoy modern musicals. Almost everything that has longevity is completely derivative of everything else. This helps marketability because, when the audience shows up, they essentially already know what to expect. The music (if it's good) is just an extra thing added to what should already be a decent theatrical experience. If the score isn't terrible then people will probably enjoy it. If it is terrible--as in the case of The Phantom of the Opera (which is maybe the most trite thing I've ever heard in terms of both music and a plot so diluted from the source material that it borders on the verge of ridiculous)--then the producers have to pump up the visuals in order to entertain. In this case you get an audience leaving that will probably say things like, "When that huge chandelier fell...that was so cool!" or maybe, as in the case of Les Misérables, "The rotating barricade that split apart and transformed like Optimus Prime...that was so cool!"

So then we have spectacle masquerading as substance. Perhaps if producers invested in pieces of art that didn't require such an enormous technical investment and went towards things that actually had some pathos to begin with (like Baz Luhrman's incredible production of La Bohème on Broadway), they would make money hand over fist and begin to ween theatergoers off of mediocrity.

But now I'm just starting to sound cranky. Oh well.

I just bought the new, eponymous album by Fleet Foxes and it is amazing. If you're a fan of rock bands that use a lot of vocal harmonies you've got to check these guys out. Their first release, the Sun Giant EP, was great and this new one certainly delivers. Of course the cover to the CD is a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525-1569) and any band that chooses to represent themselves with a Dutch Renaissance painting and is reminiscent of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young while still managing to sound original are okay with me.




"Oliver James" is probably the most beautiful song on the CD but the 1-2 punch of "White Winter Hymnal" and "Ragged Wood" is pretty good as well.

uh oh

You know something might be a little sideways when CNN starts a story like this:

"The National Debt Clock in New York City has run out of digits to record the growing figure. As a short-term fix, the digital dollar sign on the billboard-style clock near Times Square has been switched to a figure--the '1' in $10 trillion."

ned rorem

I finally finished Ned Rorem's Later Diaries (1961-1972). I went back to see when I had originally ordered it and it turns out that it took me 10 months to polish it off. As you might have guessed, it's not exactly light reading (the only kind I'm good at) and, looking back on it, I shouldn't have started with his third diary as he references the first two quite a bit.





















That being said I'm really, really glad I stuck with it to the end. He is an amazing composer (he won the Pulitzer in 1976 for his Air Music) and, although I don't know much of his music aside from a few random choral pieces, he is really good at articulating some of the things that I can't in terms of the experience and personal philosophy of being a composer. I ended up underlining half of the book and scrawling notes in the margin for myself and I think I'll go back and record what I highlighted so I can have it all in one place.

Here are a couple of things he said that were memorable enough to warrant a mark of some sort:

January 27, 1965

"Why do I write music? Because I want to hear it--it's as simple as that. Others may have more 'talent,' more 'sense of duty'. But I compose just from necessity, and no one else is making what I need."

September 3, 1965

"...the solitude of work, the silence of my own sounds."

January 1, 1970

"There is no immortality. Of that which we were, nothing remains. A Bach fugue is itself, it is not Bach. An equation of Einstein is itself, not Einstein. Chartres is itself, not generations of builders, nor love of the Lord, nor even that thrill of eternity small poets feel. Perfection is mute."

And lest I give the impression that the entire book is just pearl of wisdom after pearl of wisdom, I'll include this very diary-ish entry.

September 17, 1966

"Miss Marsh has come, spent the afternoon, gone. She wants more high notes. Music after all is made for instruments with practical limits. We lunched on red grapes and oatmeal cookies, spoke of her Moscow prize, walked around the lake, and agreed that Sun must be sung in a dress (a gown, as singers say) of gold chiffon. She shall have her high notes."

As good as all that is, those passages make it pretty clear why I think it took me so long to read. The thing about a published diary is that there is no plot propelling you through chapters and, because of this, it can be very easy to set the book down and forget about it for a while (i.e. almost a year). I've got his next diary sitting on the nightstand so we'll see how long it takes me to finish that.

Aside from that, the Urdu piece (which still doesn't have a title) is shaping up pretty well and I'm about to spend an afternoon tethered to my computer inputting notes: Finale, iTunes and strong coffee not far away. I wrote (what I think is) the final transition yesterday and, at the moment, it looks like I've hit the last stage of this project. There are a few notes here and there that have to be written for the oboe but the choral stuff, for the most part, is done. My original deadline is November 1 but I set a goal for myself to have it in the mail 2 weeks early so I could have some time off before this monumental French piece starts intruding on my sleep.