Little known facts

My students have been giving their end-of-semester group presentations yesterday and today. The nugget of wisdom from yesterday: Takemitsu is the Japanese Billy Crystal.

From today's presentations: David Del Tredici has led an interesting life.

After many years of separating his musical persona from his personal life, Del Tredici's experiences with 12-Step recovery from alcohol and sex addiction, losing a lover to AIDS, and Oakland's Body Electric School (founded by Joseph Kramer), led to Del Tredici's total public embrace of his own sexual orientation. With his liberation came a virtual outburst of song. In the last five years, he has written over 50 songs, 12 of which comprise this 75-minute disc. Del Tredici accompanies all the selections in grand fashion.

At least no one gave me old-person pangs this year.

Trivium revisited

While searching for good pictures of monochords, I came across a blog called The Celestial Monochord - The Journal for the Institute of Astrophysics and the Hillbilly Blues. In its FAQ, the author answers the question:

What is "The Institute for Astrophysics and the Hillbilly Blues"?

The IAHB is a spurious think tank founded in March 2005. The Institute has one scholar on staff (me), and conducts research into private policy related to stuff like ... say, quantum washboards ... and maybe ... kazoogenic plasmas. The IAHB consistently loses an annual operating budget of a couple hundred dollars.

Why was I looking for a picture of a monochord? Mostly to confirm that the biggest instrument on the t-shirt I bought at the Amherst festival was a dragonhead monochord, though more accurately it should be called a tromba marina. And to distract me from the horror of a fried iPod. My replacement iPod won't arrive for another week, so I'll need plenty of distractions.

Can you hear me now?

My apologies about the dead air time. My plans to live blog the entire Amherst Early Music Festival were squashed by the closing of the computer lab I was using at Connecticut College. Then my darling wife decided to bring me back to the 21st century by dragging me to a tractor pull at the county fair. I had to caught up with my 20th century theory class at IU, check on my stuff moved to a new office at DePauw, empty out our old house, close the sale of said house (only took 15 months!), and get adopted by a little kitten.*

So, the Festival ended well. I performed publically on the cornetto for the first time that Saturday, with three different groups. The small groups went okay, but the best was the Saturday night concert, when I played in the orchestra for Charpentier's Mass for the Dead. My brother and his girlfriend came to that concert, which also featured the faculty in various combinations. One piece listed performers playing the fagotto, dulcian, curtal, and bajoncillo, a veritable tower of Babel orchestra. On Friday night they took me to a casino, my first and quite likely last appearance at a gambling establishment.

Today there was a great interview on the Diane Rehm Show with Daniel Levitin, a specialist in music cognition. He has written a new book, This Is Your Brain on Music, which sounds like a great introduction to the psychology of music. I plan to have the library order it, and then give you a review. He also has a website for the book, which he plans to keep updated with answers to submitted questions and new research results. Levitin has an interesting history, with experience both as a cognitive scientist and as a record producer and session musician.

So, what's new?

*My wife says, "What's up with the kitten by the pool?" I say, "What kitten?" Next thing I know, we have a second cat, an 8-week old that we've named Archie.

About 300 years of jet lag

About once or twice a year I get a really bad headache that shuts me down for at least several hours. This happened yesterday, during the last class of the day. I went back to my room and slept fitfully for 13 hours, missing a concert and a thunderstorm. And blogging. So here is what happened musically yesterday. I discovered that I need to warm up more carefully before rehearsing at 9 am, especially on a still-unfamiliar instrument. I had no focus to my sound for the first entire hour. I also discovered that I HATE G#'s on the cornetto. After two pieces that had reams of the damn note, I finally discovered a fingering that plays in tune. Unfortunately, this fingering involves manual gymnastics similar to balancing on your head while scratching your nose with your foot.

Most of the students here are amateurs that love to play early music. They invest money in all sorts of shawms, dulcians, krummhorns, etc., but many still have difficulty feeling the beat consistently. I had thought I would be learning a lot about improvisation, being given divisions to practice. But instead, everything is in ensembles, with work on tuning and balance when it isn't about getting everyone in the same measure (when there are measures). And I question some of the balance decisions made by one of the teachers. He focuses on strong roots and fifths, with weak thirds. This works with held chords, but I think it is misplaced with some of the polyphony to which he tries to apply it. Suddenly dropping the volume of a note because it is the third can make sense harmonically, but can be quite nonsensical* melodically. And everything I've learned before about polyphony emphasizes the melodic nature of each line OVER the harmonic implications.

I have some freetime, as the mass I mentioned before is rehearsing in smaller sections. I won't have to come back into rehearsal for that until Friday. This is good, especially mentally. I still need to think about fingerings for many of the notes, especially some new fingerings I've learned since I got here. Thus I can get quite exhausted thinking of the notes, the rhythms (everything is in 4/2 or 2/2, with the whole note getting the beat), the balance, and trying to keep the instrument in tune with a dime-sized mouthpiece. I think I will go swimming now.

*That word doesn't look quite right, but I'm too lazy to check.

Revenge of the double-reeds

I just finished my first day at the Amherst Early Music Festival. I am one of only two cornettists here, not counting the teacher (Douglas Kirk). Thus I am being worked hard. Today I played in two sackbut-and-cornett ensembles, two mixed "loud" ensembles (cornetto, sackbuts, curtals, and shawms), and a Charpentier mass with choir, recorder ensemble, vielle ensemble, organ, cornetto, curtal, and sackbut. The mass just about killed me, both in terms of technique during a very fast section of the Sanctus and in general endurance. A baroque violinist is supposed to join me, since the second cornettist is singing instead of playing. Hopefully the violinist will make things easier.

I also attended a great lecture by a musicologist who is teaching at the festival (I can't remember his name, I will add it laterAdam Gilbert). He talked about the progression of compositional technique in the 15th century, starting with an excellent paraphrase from The Eternal Lightness of Being. The book describes the advent of 12-tone serialism as being analogous with the demise of the monarchy system after World War I. The tonic is the king who is overthrown, allowing equal weight/vote to all notes/people. Our lecturer re-used this analogy for the 15th century, where the king was the Tenor and the Queen was the Cantus. He then showed how these royal musical features were sublimated by the end of the 15th century, just as the Medieval notion of monarchy was revised by such figures as Louis XI. The culmination of this change to the Tenor and Cantus was Heinrich Isaac. As I pointed out to Adam afterward, this made a great circle to the 12-tone quote from the beginning of the lecture, since Anton Webern was a musicologist who specialized in Isaac as well.

Well, now I must go to my room and massage my tired fingers before bed. (The post title refers to the fact that shawms are frickin' loud.)

Working those divisions

Tomorrow I am heading over to the Amherst Early Music Festival for a week of 16th and 17th century goodness. I'll try to blog about it each night, unless the keggers keep me too busy.

It has nothing to do with spaghetti!

The Guardian has an article about Grand Master Film Composer Ennio Morricone, who comes off as a bit of a sonuvabitch. But then, this is to be expected as he is also a trumpeter. He felt A Fistful of Dollars was his worst score, but I disagree. I want to hear his Grand Slam:

The soundtrack for this 1967 caper movie starring Janet Leigh and Klaus Kinski sees Morricone playing his own instrument, the trumpet, on a solo on the title track. Alongside his signature wordless vocals and moody atmospherics, he manages to find space for bossa nova and samba tunes, making this one of his most eclectic works.