Footsteps here below

Guerrieri: Sonos in Aere (I Love to Hear the Story) (PDF, 46 Kb)

This year's Christmas carol was supposed to be one of two: I wrote a sweet one and a not-so-sweet one, but the text permission for the not-so-sweet one has yet to come through. (Coal in your stocking this year, U.S. copyright law.) So here's the sweet one, at least—it was bumped from my Christmas Eve service, so now it is yours. I have a sneaking, cynical suspicion that the not-so-sweet one will still be pertinent next year.

That said: Happy Holidays! However tenuous your relationship to the season, you can still frolic and play the Adelaide Keen way:

Something in the tune

Tangent to the day's research: Jack Berger and His Hotel Astor Dance Orchestra's 1932 performance of "Something in the Night," with a vocal refrain by Jack Pearl, who was born Joshua Perelmuth, and who later changed his name to Jan Peerce.

BONUS RELATED TANGENT TO TODAY'S RESEARCH:

Agonistes

In memoriam Jon Vickers, who forged inimitable dramatic steel from the physical and moral contests of opera.

Adventures in postdating

It is time for the quarterly ritual of keeping this space on life support by at least linking to everything I've been doing elsewhere. That's three months of old-new articles to peruse (including a new batch of columns)—along with (as per usual) a compensatory drink:

Slow Watch

Equal parts:

  lemon juice
  Cynar
  peach liqueur
  rye

plus a healthy dash of orange bitters

Shake it up with small ice, strain into a rocks glass with big ice.

Sip while reading good stuff elsewhere:

Robin James on the privilege of post-genre and Attali and neo-liberalism.

Ethan Iverson on James P. and also killer robots. (The conscious-to-subconscious progress of Doctor Who fandom described is my experience, too, although the differences between my personality and Ethan's can be pretty efficiently summed up by mentioning that my DW touchstone was not Genesis of the Daleks, but rather The Deadly Assassin.)

Peter Pesic and Axel Volmar on the musical rhetoric of string theory.

Charles Ames on the history of automated composition (including a lead sheet for "Push-Button Bertha").

Felix Arndt, "An Operatic Nightmare (Desecration no. 2)" (1916).

Hit the North

Reviewing Blair McMillen.
Boston Globe, July 1, 2015.

Met the gazes, observed the spaces

Reviewing "Song Cycle" at the Peabody Essex Museum.
Boston Globe, June 29, 2015.

Listen to me, don't listen to me

Digital to Analog: Needle and Thread.
NewMusicBox, June 24, 2015.

And let your arrow fly

Reviewing Aston Magna.
Boston Globe, June 19, 2015.

Ringmasters

Reviewing SICPP and the Callithumpian Consort.
Boston Globe, June 17, 2015.

Tying the knot

Reviewing Chorus pro Musica's Les Noces.
Boston Globe, June 1, 2015.

Behold, I build an house

Reviewing the Lorelei Ensemble.
Boston Globe, May 25, 2015.

Voice over

Reviewing Chameleon Arts Ensemble.
Boston Globe, May 19, 2015.

Ghost, writer

Reviewing Guerilla Opera and Per Bloland's Pedr Solis.
Boston Globe, May 17, 2015.

Marginal utility

Reviewing the Talea Ensemble in Georges Aperghis' Happy End.
Boston Globe, May 11, 2015.

The cinema firmament

Reviewing ALisa Weilerstein and Inon Barnatan.
Boston Globe, May 3, 2015.

A feeling that no one can ever reprise

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.
Boston Globe, April 27, 2015.

The very minute bids thee ope thine ear

Reviewing the International Contemporary Ensemble.
Boston Globe, April 20, 2015.

You can hear from far and near

Reviewing Boston Musica Viva.
Boston Globe, April 14, 2015.

So many people you can check up on

Reviewing LAN, Anne-F. Jacques, and Benjamin Nelson.
Boston Globe, April 7, 2015.

Hit parade

Reviewing Third Coast Percussion.
Boston Globe, March 23, 2015.

Déjà vu all over again

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Chamber Players and Emanuel Ax.
Boston Globe, March 17, 2015.

Hanging on the Telephone

Digital to Analog: Plug and Play. Connections, made and missed.
NewMusicBox, March 11, 2015.

When you've got worries, all the noise and the hurry

Reviewing O+A.
Boston Globe, March 8, 2015.

Scanning life through the picture window

Reviewing the Calder Quartet.
Boston Globe, February 23, 2015.

Wandle, wandle deine Bahnen; Nur betrachten deinen Schein

Reviewing Renée Fleming and Olga Kern.
Boston Globe, February 10, 2015.

Fly-By-Wire

Reviewing Paavali Jumppanen, Jeffrey Means, and Hans Tutschku.
Boston Globe, February 6, 2015.

Schematics

Digital to Analog: Poems and Histories. Andrew Pekler, Vicky Chow, and technologies evident and hidden.
NewMusicBox, February 4, 2015.

For Andrew Patner

Francis Poulenc's VIIème Improvisation en ut majeur (recorded with my phone on my out-of-tune piano):



Andrew approached culture the way Julia Child approached food: as an object of exacting yet unassuming erudition; as an avenue of elegant, unfailing generosity; and as a source of immoderate pleasure. Like everyone else who ever met him, I will miss him.

Karamu, fiesta, forever

Reviewing the Cantata Singers.
Boston Globe, February 2, 2015.

Sing a song, it'll make your day

Reviewing Anne Sofie von Otter and Angela Hewitt.
Boston Globe, January 26, 2015.

In the lane, snow is glistening

Reviewing Ian Bostridge's Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession.
Boston Globe, January 25, 2015.

All-Access

Reviewing the Green Mountain Project.
Boston Globe, January 14, 2015.

A Better Tomorrow

Reviewing the Boston Symphony Chamber Players.
Boston Globe, January 13, 2015.