December 24, 2015

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:

July 14, 2015

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:

July 11, 2015

Agonistes



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

July 10, 2015

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).

March 11, 2015

February 04, 2015

Schematics

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

February 03, 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.