i heart bloggers

Peter Hoesing--an amazing musician I became friends with back in my college days--keeps a blog, The Artclectic Academic, which currently features his travels as an ethnomusicologist doing field research in Uganda. You should totally read it.

He is a fantastic writer and the pictures he throws in amplify everything even more.




















It verges on everything from really "academic":

I theorized this kind of music broadly as a clear manifestation of expressive culture common to the entire Interlacustrine or “Great Lakes” Region of East Africa. In this context, I used the term kubandwa, deriving from the proto-Bantu root -band- (something pressed or oppressed). Having read a lot of literature on so-called “cults of affliction,” I later posited kubandwa as a musical habitus (in the Maussian understanding of techniques du corps) that people in this region use to approach common health problems. In short, people in this region situate kubandwa as a set of bodily techniques within rituals that Victor Turner would call dramaturgies (basically, drama + liturgy = dramaturgy).

To the entry on drinking beer and eating bugs (my personal favorite...the entry, not the bugs).





I'm still wading my way through it but I think I'm hooked. Shine on, brother!

the adventures of pinocchio

For some reason, whenever I go to see an opera with Jocelyn Hagen (she refers to me as her "opera friend"), it always ends up being something completely crazy. Like it's nowhere near anything I would ever think to write about but it's almost always enjoyable on some level.

Take, for instance, the first opera we saw together (which I'll not name here because it was so awful we actually walked out at intermission) where the romantic leads were played by a college-sophomore-soprano and an over-40 baritone with a beard. The enjoyable part was ripping it to shreds afterwards over fried ice cream and margaritas.

Then there was this lovely one last year. Yeah, that's right, the one where two characters had sex whilst singing in each other's faces. That definitely counts as enjoyable.

So, in the latest episode of Let's Go See a Crazy, Messed-Up Opera, we went to the Minnesota Opera's amazing production of The Adventures of Pinocchio. Holy crap, it was good. And holy crap it was weird...but "good weird".

From the moment the wood cries out "make me" to where Pinocchio becomes a real boy it was a dark, psychedelic trip through Carlo Collodi's original Italian series from the 1880s. It was not Walt Disney's morals-obsessed, half-tale of the same name...and this is precisely why the piece (in its American premiere) was fresh and good.














Adriana Zabala played the title role to perfection (I know that's corny to say, but she did) and the enormous smile on her face as Pinocchio is granted his wish at the conclusion of the piece is something I won't soon forget. It literally beamed off the stage.

But that's all well and good. Bottom line: this thing was effed up. The boys getting dragged off in the Funland Express and their eventual transformation into a bunch of donkeys was one of the most unsettling and creepy things I've ever seen on stage.













It helped that the coachman taking them off in this vehicle was played by a countertenor (he also played the Fox). I rarely like how these guys sound in an opera but I was pleasantly surprised by Randal Scotting. He was awesome. (This isn't him, by the way. I snagged this photo from the British premiere a few years ago.)














Another thing I remember vividly was the guy playing the Fire Eater. He had these massive, black-and-red-striped, platform boots on that made him look like Bootsy Collins. Remember that guy? He would not have looked out of place in this production.





















Then there was the Big Green Fisherman. (Was he in the Disney movie? I can't remember.) He was played by a 10-foot-tall puppet operated by two guys and sung by the bass who worked his left hand.

I was wholly unprepared when this thing lumbered out onto the stage. He actually ordered the boy-puppet to let him nibble on his fingers so he could prove that he wasn't a fish. WTF?

All in all it was a great opera. Jonathan Dove's score was strong and didn't seem self-aggrandizing at all. It simply let the story tell itself. And, despite the fact that Alasdair Middleton's libretto seemed incredibly episodic at times (this is, I think, a result of the fact that the original 1880s story was serialized), it served the music well and stayed away from ever sounding corny.

I would imagine that The Adventures of Pinocchio will be revived often as a show that's family-friendly without pandering to slapstick nonsense. There are some great reviews by The Star Tribune here and here as well as a better-than-decent clip of the original British production here. It features the Ape Judge being lowered from the ceiling (he kind of reminds me of King Louis).

In non-opera news, someone recently gave me JJ Alberhasky's CD, Only the Bony, and I've had it on a loop ever since. The title track is mesmerizing and "Underwater" is one of those over-5-minutes songs that's so good it always feels too short.

















p.s. I saw Watchmen this weekend. Big-time cheers to using Leonard Cohen's original "Hallelujah". It's about time for LC to reclaim that one from the hands of Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright. I love both of those versions dearly, but the original is the original is the original. You know what I'm talking about. Right, Dolly Parton?

check one off the list: Fleetwood Mac

I moved to Minnesota when I was 16 years old. Prior to that I had played violin for nine years (from ages 3-12) as well as a few obligatory years in the middle school band as a second chair trumpet player. However, by the time the Shank clan pulled up its Iowa roots and headed north, I had quit pretty much any sort of involvement with music at all. (I think the first CD I ever bought was Blackstreet's Another Level. Remember "No Diggity"? You bet your ass that I do.)

All this changed when I moved to Minnesota. Fleetwoood Mac's classic Rumours-era lineup had just reunited and everybody was freaking out (my parents included). My life as a musician changed fundamentally when I saw their reunion concert, The Dance, on television. For some reason--and this is going to sound incredibly naive--I had never realized that you could play a guitar with anything other than a pick and, when I saw Lindsey Buckingham's trademark fingerpicking on the song, "Big Love", I totally lost my mind. To my untrained ear he was playing two guitar parts at the same time and I couldn't figure out how anyone would be able to do that. It became like a puzzle I had to solve and my mother's old, nylon-string guitar became the perfect vessel to find the solution.

Here's a shaky concert video of the song in question. Go to about 1'30" if you want to skip his speech. The first few bars of this piece absolutely blew my mind.


Here's the repeating figure I'm talking about. It's built out of almost nothing; just a top voice outlining a perfect fourth (with an added hammer-on to create a little syncopation) and a lower voice descending the A natural minor scale.




And that's when I became a musician. (It should be noted that I totally realize how melodramatic that all sounded. Well, too effing bad. The story tells itself better when it's romanticized.)

So what this diatribe is getting at is the fact that I went to a Fleetwood Mac concert last night at the Xcel Center with my dad and about 12,000 other people. It was sooo awesome and they let you take pictures.

A sea of people.















No wonder aged rock stars keep "reuniting" to do concert tours. This can't possibly get old.

My camera actually behaves pretty well in low light situations if you keep it still and give it enough time. This picture is a digital zoom and it still comes out halfway decent.







I think I took this when Lindsey was screaming out their 8-minute, bluesy, guitar jam "I'm So Afraid". Check out the one guy in the crowd who wore green that day. For some reason, he sticks out like a sore thumb to me.

Here's another shot with Stevie Nicks. Her rendition of "Gold Dust Woman" was off the chain.

The Star Tribune ran a great review of the concert which they titled "Fleetwood Mac outdoes itself". I couldn't agree more.

My favorite part of the review reads thus:

"...he seemed as amped as a punk-rocker half his age. The Lindsey Buckingham Show indeed."

Here's the picture they included.

I cannot believe she is 60 years old. What moisturizer do you think she uses?

After the concert it was back into the Minnesota cold. I took this from the top floor of the arena looking down on Kellogg and 7th. I like the huddled mass of blurry people near the bottom of the picture.

Here's some more shots I snapped in the dark just because the aisle lights created some interesting patterns and colors.

a trip through some iTunes purchases and a late sendoff

I made the following purchases from iTunes recently. They are on a loop and, as such, are worthy of blog inclusion.

Nico Muhly's Skip Town
Holy crap this one is good. After a cursory listen I was left wondering how he had done it. Those can't be live musicians, right? Stick with it until there's about 38" left; some lounge music (or whatever) briefly intrudes before he pounds the rest out in the previous character. Seriously. So good. He wrote the score for The Reader and his blog is infinitely better than the piece of crap you're currently reading.





















Chrisopher Theofanidis's Rainbow Body
I know this one has been making the orchestral rounds lately but it's for a damn good reason: this piece just flows like one, long, elegant idea. It makes me want to work on my transitions (plus it doesn't hurt that he has the best last name of any composer I've ever heard).





















Stephen Chatman's Nature Songs
MPR woke me up a few weeks back with "The Voice of the Rain" from this set and I've finally gotten to gettin' it. He is actually a distant relative (my mother's cousin, I think) who is vastly more successful in Canada than I will ever be. But who cares as long as he writes music this good to listen to?

















And for a non-classical example, I just got Bon Iver's new EP, Blood Bank. Seriously, folks, if I could suggest one song from this screed to spend $0.99 on it would be "Woods" from this album. It's an a cappella choral piece based on 4 lines of poetry that spins out from a single voice into a freakin' cacophony. This sucker takes 4'45" to get over and done with and, by the time it's finished, I am always weepy and introspective. It's oh-my-god good.















In sadder news, I totally had not heard that Lukas Foss died! I can't believe that. I met him briefly in 2000 when he gave a pre-concert lecture before Peter Serkin, Eiji Oue and the Minnesota Orchestra gave the world premiere of a massively-hard, serialist piece called Solo Transformed for piano and orchestra (it was so difficult that Serkin actually had to use a score and a page turner). I'm not lying when I tell you I had to be re-convinced to be a composer after I heard this. It made me feel the entirety of knowledge I had yet to learn (or still have to learn as the case may be) and totally scared the S-H-I-T out of me.




















The friend who told me about Foss's death also relayed a possibly-apocryphal-but-funny-nonetheless story about him losing his place while conducting the Milwaukee Symphony. Apparently, the maestro leaned over to the first chair cellist and earnestly asked, "Where are we?" and the bewildered answer he got back was, "Milwaukee."

His alleged response was to simply say "oh," straighten his back and continue conducting as if that was actually what he wanted to know. I hope that's true. I really, really hope that's true. Rest in peace, sir.

week in review: Mötley Crüe + Haydn

The title of this ridiculous entry says it all. I saw both Mötley Crüe and a performance of Haydn's The Creation in the space of a few days. I'm still reeling from the culture shock of seeing them in such close proximity. Here, see how your brain reacts to this:

Mötley Crüe













Franz Josef





















The Crüe
















Papa Haydn














"The Saints of Los Angeles"















"The Father of the Symphony"















See, I told you it was jarring. Now just take a deep breath, have a drink of water and realize it's going to be okay.

I am not a fan of Mötley Crüe and probably never will be but last Wednesday I fell ass-backwards into some free tickets to go see them in the Fox Sports suite at the Xcel Center. A friend of mine asked me if I wanted to go and, not being able to turn down a free $100+ ticket, I decided to go to experience the entire thing. It wasn't as good as AC/DC a month or so back but it was certainly a big production. I wasn't allowed to take any pictures (and was actually forced back into the Minnesota cold to take my camera back to the car) so I don't have anything to back up what I'm about to describe. What this means, however, is that you'll just have to take me at my word that there was some extremely risque behavior between the respective 20-foot tall, moving silhouettes of an angel and a demon as the show began...like really, really, not-even-close-to-PG-13 bad. But it's the Shout at the Devil guys, right?

It's part of the package. No problem. Next song.

This isn't to say that I had a bad time at all. In fact, I had a blast. Remember Dr. Feelgood? He's the one that makes you feel all right. I totally just bought it on iTunes.

So that was Wednesday. On Friday I hit the Ordway Center to hear the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra celebrate their 50th Anniversary by putting on an amazing performance of Haydn's The Creation. I sang a few of the arias back in college and even did a presentation on this piece for choral/orchestral lit. class so it was nice to finally hear it live. It is such a nice piece of music and, since my local orchestra of choice up to this point has been the Minnesota Orchestra, it was awesome to finally hear the SPCO in person. Dale Warland even came out of quasi-retirement to prepare the chorus for the concert.

The only downside was that the tenor who was supposed to sing the show, James Taylor (no, not that one), was unable to perform due to illness. I've loved his voice ever since I got Helmuth Rilling's recording of the Mass in B Minor a couple of years back and getting to hear him live was the part of the concert I was most excited about. Oh well, right? They got another amazing tenor on short notice whose name escapes me at the moment (this shouldn't serve as an indictment of how awesome he was, though).

So, aside from a flurry of grant writing (which I'll talk about in the future if I actually get the thing), that was my week. I was trying to think of other weird combinations like this which would be just as ironic and weird unfortunately, none of them are as funny as how it all actually went down.

...can't make this stuff up.

now, now every children

It's been a while since I wrote about what I've been listening to lately. If you get a chance head over to MySpace to listen to a band called Now, Now Every Children. They're local, amazing and their new album, Cars, gets better each time I listen to it. I should probably try to see one of their shows before they go mega-platinum.

There's something different-but-compelling about the "orchestration" (if I can use that term) of this album. I think they may have perfected saying something in the simplest possible terms but still making it stick. The melodies and the scratch of the mix are indelible and the symmetry in the pop structures is endless...like a song you've heard before but never knew.

J'ai complété les chansons françaises! Enfin!

My new set of French songs is done and finished and off to the musicians at Chapman University's Conservatory of Music to work on! That is a load off my mind and I'm really excited to hear them.















I ended up calling the set Chansons de la Vigne ("Songs from the Vine") because, for some reason, 3 of the 4 texts I selected mentioned wine in them. That wasn't an agenda I set out with when I initially chose the poetry but it 's nice to know that there is a unifying theme throughout the 5 movements other than just the language.









The entire cycle should clock in just over 11 minutes and every movement has its own sort of character.

1. Ma Bohème ("My Bohemian Life") is the only one that uses a text by Arthur Rimbaud. It's a funny little thing with flat-out jazz chords near the end and a ton of metrical switches. I've been wanting to write something in 7/8 ever since I performed Berstein's Chichester Psalms years ago and, with certain passages in this piece, I think I finally put out something I'm happy with.

2. This was the first one I wrote way back in December. I can hear some Poulenc influencing some of the harmonic gestures in it but, frankly, this is no surprise given the fact that I was reading a biography about him and listening to a lot of his music at the time. Baquet de vin translates to "Bucket of wine."

3. Pitiè de moi ("Self-pity") is the only one that doesn't mention wine by name. The choir sings an ostinato throughout with a soprano soloing over the top of the entire thing.

4. La table et les deux verre ("The table and the two glasses") introduces the piano with a single A-flat in the left hand followed by an explosion of sound from the choir. It uses the first half of Guillaume Apollinaire's "Poem for the Marriage of André Salmon".

5. Chanson de Mariage ("Marriage Song") uses the second half of the poem from the previous movement and finishes out the set with a piano part that starts up with constant 16th notes and barely lets up. This one was a lot of fun to compose and is probably one of the more melodic things I've written.

So that's that. I spent a solid 4 months getting these pieces from a blank concept in need of a text to the finished product. The only casualty was my old computer (more on that later but see the previous entry for an explanation). Rest in pieces, my friend.

And to finish this entry off with a bit of funny business, I typed "Joshua needs" into Google and came out with the following:

• Joshua needs to crawl
• Joshua needs the Kwik-E-Mart
• Joshua needs to collect information about the kinds of stress pilots undergo
• Joshua needs a haircut
• Joshua needs glasses.

My personal favorite, however, was the first entry it spit back at me:

• Joshua needs a disciple

Uh, duh. Everyone needs a disciple. I think I would make an awesome leader of some sort of band of people. Benevolent and fair. Merciful and just.