juice of 1 lime juice of ½ lemon 1 tablespoon grape jelly 1 teaspoon grenadine 1½ oz. gin a decent handful of mint leaves
Shake it all with big chunks of ice until the jelly is liquefied and the mint is in confetti-like bits. Strain (keeping the mint, leaving the ice).
According to the same psychic who filled in the corners of my CV, my wife's aura is, in fact, purple. For those not inclined towards gin (like, say, my wife), this makes for a good mocktail; just replace the gin with still or (better) sparkling water.
It's less than a week until Christmas, which means it's probably time for me to get my act together and get ready for this deluge of services. It also means it's time for that Christmas prerogative of organists everywhere, the willfully perverse reharmonization of familiar carols! This year, the changes really are changes (click to enlarge):
Happy Holidays! See you in 2012—when we'll run out this thirteenth b'ak'tun in style.
To judge by the portion of the audience that stood for the "Hallelujah" chorus, Boston Baroque's audiences are far more contrarian than the Handel and Haydn Society's: whereas nearly everybody stood at H&H's performance, only about a third of the audience stood at Boston Baroque's.
Ethan was giving me a deserved hard time for letting the rag-a-month project from a couple years ago drift off into a senescent fog after a mere four installments. The lesson: be careful what you wish for! This one is reasonably classically-proportioned, it just can't decide what key it wants to be in. Equal temperament, you disorientingly large-inventoried emporium, you.
No MIDI, since my usual computer is in the shop, and I've been magically transported back in time to a golden age of slower, far less powerful operating systems. Instead, here's me playing, wrong notes and all. Be careful what you wish for, &c., &c.
The headline is a little misleading—if I did my job, the main takeaway should be as much about how much BoaC veers from hardcore minimalism while still acknowledging it. But "Timber" really does hit the same happy place that, say, Music in Contrary Motion did when I first heard it. (And, especially in the Hub, when you see that many people walking out, a comparison to Four Organs has been duly earned.)
Hey, I've been really lax on linking to stuff, haven't I?
In honor of a minor milestone, a riff on the martini that I've come to rely on:
Manuscript Submission
2 oz. dry gin ¾ oz. apricot eau-de-vie (I like Blume Marillen) ½ oz. rosé vermouth (like Martini Rosato) A couple good dashes of grapefruit bitters
Stir all ingredients with ice until really quite cold (I swirl it in a metal shaker until my fingers stick) and strain into something appropriately graceful.
Last week, the church that has provided me with much of my gainful employment for the past decade, The Presbyterian Church in Sudbury, celebrated its 50th anniversary, so I wrote an anthem for the occasion. Score below, where also, behind some ambient Presbyterian noise, you can hear the premiere (thanks to Doug Nicholls for the recording).
The words are by William Bullock, Anglican missionary to Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Numerous versions of Bullock's poem were already floating around by the end of the 19th century; I mixed and matched stanzas I liked. Supposedly, when asked why there wasn't a stanza of "We Love the Place" devoted to the church's pulpit, Bullock replied that he would have been compelled to write:
We love thy pulpit Lord, For there the word of man Lulls the worshiper to sleep As only sermons can.
I considered making an actual bumper sticker of this, until I decided that the people I'd most often end up explaining it to would be the people I'd least often want to talk to.
