Giving thanks for food

I really enjoy being with my family at Thanksgiving, but I wasn’t born into a cooking family. There were many years my parents (and alas, by that I mean my mom) didn’t cook. We went to a local restaurant in Erie, where we often got together with relatives. This became more common, after my grandmother and many of her close siblings passed away.

I often have only good things to say about the restaurants at which I eat. Whether it’s the atmosphere, the plating, the service, or the unbelievable tastes, I have started to recognize a good restaurant when I see it. (And I silently curse the folks who can’t, heh). The Thanksgiving dinner I ate at a restaurant in Erie, Pa. called the Colony wasn’t it.

Now, I count myself as fortunate to be affluent, well-fed, and overflowing with bounty…Thanks Pete for the flowery language inspiration), but since I’m trying to nourish (get it?) my inner food critic, I’ll indulgence in talking truth to mediocrity. There were two options, traditional Thanksgiving dinner (i.e. choice of turkey, ham, prime rib and side dishes), or the buffet. I’m a dabbler (and it close enough to noon that I trusted most of the food to be hot), so I got the buffet. The house salad was good enough, not bad, just plain salad with house dressing. Ok, well, it’s Erie, and middlebrow Erie at that. Next trip up I got the turkey, both white and dark meat; stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, macaroni and cheese, and some broccoli. There was also Seafood Newberg, which I got on the third trip.

Turkey: dark meat was dry. Why? There’s no reason this should be the case. Perhaps it was because it was cut off the bone and looked like a lot of shredded pork. White meat was bone dry–haven’t these people ever heard of brines, spice rubs, or flavor injections? As much as my heart seizes up even thinking about eating deep-fried turkey, you got to give it to them for making turkey moist again. My parents’ turkey was also dry, and they didn’t give my mom any gravy (she substituted a baked sweet potato for mashed potato). She was left without the little bit that other folks at the table got for their mash.

Ok, back to me…Stuffing was dry and unflavorful; like they took it right out of the Stove Top box. The sweet potato wasn’t bad. Mine was mashed, but not candied, so it wasn’t super sweet. (And it was blissfully free of marshmallows…I’ll take mine by the campfire or bathed in chocolate (later about that)). The mashed potatoes were not lumpy, but they lacked moisture. They had definitely been sitting around too long, and had some unappetizingly herbal flavors. No amount of gravy could help my dish.

Cranberry sauce looked like it came from the Ocean Spray can. Mac and cheese was good–good neutral cheese flavor, nice and creamy, spiked with pieces of hot dogs. I guess this dish was for the kids, because it wasn’t updated at all. The garlic broccoli was a little watery, but it was nice to eat a green vegetable. I had a couple of tastes of dessert–some grapes, strawberries, and other fruit. They had a chocolate fountain going. A nice touch of elegance, if a bit strained for what this meal actually was. I dipped a few marshmallows and strawberries, and enjoyed the chocolatey goodness. But dessert is a serious thing in my family, and we had pumpkin, apple, and coconut pies waiting at home for us and our guests.

Was this a memorable Thanksgiving dinner? Not in the least. I very much hope my family comes south to visit me next year and we have some culinary adventures in Virginia. The price wasn’t that bad ($12 for entrée, $15 for buffet) for this meal, but what is the limit you’d pay for food that is blah? Having experienced a gastronomic low today, I am looking to tomorrow’s meal to make up for it. I will be going to the restaurant of the next Iron Chef, Michael Symon, called Lola, and based in Cleveland.

Columbus Day vacation

Greetings infrequent readers of this blog!

I have been traveling since last Wednesday throughout New England, trying to stay as far away from I-95 as possible. I spent a night visiting my friends Matt and Jen; and then drove up to Keene, NH to visit with Jed and John, whom I know from a wonderful week I spent in Provincetown 3 years ago. Besides the fall foliage (so so in my opinion), I did a number of neat things.

1) Went to many wonderful used bookstores in Northampton, specifially Raven and Gabriel Books. You can see my library here. Definitely a good time.

2) Attended an open house at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H. This was a real highlight, as I got to tour the house where Edward and Marion MacDowell lived.

3) Saw wonderful scenery, including Route 9 through Southern Vermont (esp. Hogback Mtn.), Mount Mondanock (N.H.), and western Massachusetts. Not that eastern PA and N.Y. aren’t nice, just not as impressive in the topography realm.

Tonight’s the last night as I’m staying with college friends in Connecticut, before traveling back to Charlottesville and Culpeper. It’s been a good vacation, but not mind-blowing. I did realize that I am not meant for complete rural living, like where you have to drive 30 minutes to get to town. I think it works for New Englanders because there is real cultural life in many of the small towns throughout N.H., Vt., Mass, etc., and you can kind of state-hop and catch a lot of cool stuff. I know there are a lot of tradeoffs to small town life vs. city living (and I’m not saying I want to move back to D.C.), but some of the things I’m looking for are: a solid community of artists and progressive people; 2) decent goods and services outside of Wal Mart; and 3) affordable rentals (for now) and condos (for later). I’ve been thinking I need to get a pet soon too. Oh yeah, and the whole single vs. being in a relationship thing. I guess I have been thinking after all. I love my job, and the choir (and soon my volunteering at the local radio station), but I need more friends and people to hang out with in Charlottesville. Hopefully I’ll find some of these things this fall…as well as getting a sofa and a comfy chair. Long drive tomorrow, so I should go.

Copyright comic books: it’s a time for heroes

Duke University’s Center for the Public Domain has a brilliant graphic illustration (i.e. comic book) of the arcane, confusing and often contradictory labryinth that is the U.S. Copyright Code. It’s a dark tale of hoarders, evil corporations who wish to extend copyright into perpituity. Their enemies: Fair use and her guardians. The subject of this first installment the realistic unreal world of the documentary film world.

It’s called “Tales of the Public Domain: Bound by Law” by Keith Aoki, James Boyle, and Jennifer Jenkins. Digital copies are available and this creation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license (as is Audio Artifacts).

Bound By Law ©2006 Keith Aoki, James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins

A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the “Rocky” theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? “Eyes on the Prize,” the great civil rights documentary, was pulled from circulation because the filmmakers’ rights to music and footage had expired. What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this new comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary, and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound By Law reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture.

UPDATE:
Some older posts on the subject from the archive:
1) Eyes on the Prize: Performance and Copyright (2/1/2005)

2) Film and Copyright…Taking it into the Festivals (1/29/2005)

3) Chinese Film: Reflecting on Cultural Production (1/28/2005)

I also want to welcome of the newest members of the blogosphere, my long-time friend Jessisca [sic.] and her new virutal home, Brandy Hall, IL–yes, she’s a LOTR fan. Welcome Jessica!

Current Listening: Great Big Sea, The Hard and the Easy (Zoe, 2006)

More radio reports

From FMQB: Bridge Ratings Studies MP3 Players, Satellite Radio:

According to their study, the amount of songs on a person’s portable MP3 player varies by the amount of weekly radio listening done. Those who are below-average listeners to radio have more songs on their MP3 players.

Bridge Ratings was also doing listener studies of satellite radio listeners. According to Bridge, XM will end the year “with 8.1 million subscribers and Sirius with 6.5 million.”

I’ve been thinking that these satellite music operations represent an incredibly rich area for academic study. The music librarian in me worries that their logs and playlists will be dumped after a certain amount of time (6 months to a year), but I just don’t know. I don’t even know if you can call them and find out what was playing. Because they show the song/artist/album on the radios, they must have metadata somewhere.

Unlike classical stations (or even many Web radio stations), they don’t post their playlists online. And what sort of cultural treasures in the form of live concert recordings and studio sessions are going on in XM and Sirius studios that aren’t being released for sale?! The only way I’ll know is to buy one and try it out for myself. Oh well, it’s for science.

In so many words…musicians aren’t just talented, they’re committed

This article from Business Week explains better than I ever could why classical musicians are the way they are.

Expect the lemmings to follow

The Current editors Mike Janssen and Steve Behrens recently interviewed public radio researchers George Bailey and David Giovannoni “who are wrapping up their Audience 2010 inquiry commissioned by pubradio’s Radio Research Consortium.” The study was done to probe for a recent decline in public radio listening (more specifically AQH share) during the last two years.

There’s a lot to digest here, so I’ll respond later. I just wanted to leave these quotes for all to ponder:

“Nearly half of listening to pubradio stations last year was to stations that lost loyalty over the previous year.”

“Being so highly invested [in it], many broadcasters resist the fact that listeners tend to value local programming less than they value national programming.”

Bailey: “The fact that some of the NPR news stations are doing well and some are not, and the same with the other formats, indicates that public radio really can support a variety of formats and maybe even serve a variety of audiences with those different formats, but that within any one of those formats there’s a variety of right and wrong ways to do it. So I think it’s positive that there’s a lot of opportunity for a range of formats in public radio.”

Little heard American opera

I am really enjoying the tapes I have been working with in the last couple of days from the VOA collection. These include close to two dozen 30-minute programs called “American Opera”, which featured excerpts and extended scenes from operas by American composers. There are some dogs in the lot, but overall I was quite impressed by the lyricism, integrity, and genuine beauty of some the operas I was able to hear.

Portrait of Virgil Thomson (1896-1989)

“I’ve never known a musician who regretted being one. Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down”–Virgil Thomson

Frankly I was surprised to hear such inspiration from opera by American composers, even knowing what I do. (I did a junior independent study thesis on Virgil Thomson and American opera before 1947). It was nice to be reminded of that. The themes (on which these operas are based) can be touching and relevant with a solid librettist and the lyrics unstilted.

Listening to Four Saints again reminded me of the experience of hearing Italian opera. The music fits the text logically, and the syllables fall where they are supposed to. Does that mean Thomson’s (and Gertrude Stein’s) libretto is not a literary experiment that challenges meaning, rhetoric, and comprehension? No, but the text is not really the point me thinks. I have to step back and look at the tapestry they are trying to weave within the episodes, rather than blindly being led along on a narrative (especially in the Floyd).

The crime is that several of these have never been released on CD–some have never been commercially released. Some of the obvious favorites include Aaron Copland’s The Tender Land, Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Medium and Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah. It was nice to finally hear works by Robert Ward (The Crucible) and Deems Taylor (The King’s Henchman) which are considered important, but who has heard them let alone seen them?! Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti is a witty and entertaining set piece, which cooks with all the energy and rhythmic vitality that is Lenny. All of my soprano friends love doing “What a Movie!”

My new favorite? An operatic re-telling of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew by Italian-American composer Vittorio Giannini.

This is a good job.

More radio news from Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and high above the Earth

Classical music on radio-try it, it just might work!

Four pieces on radio…two classical, two public, one private, one satellite (they overlap)

1) Changes at WQED-FM affirm its classical music commitment (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

More music, less talk–that’s the premise of the changes in store for Pittsburgh’s classical music station. The station’s veteran hosts Jim Cunningham, Anna Singer and Ted Sohier will continue their programming. WQED will pick-up one of the overnight classical music services which many public broadcasting stations run during overnight shifts. The weekend request program will move from Saturday morning to Saturday evening, after Prairie Home Companion.

WQED has always been one of my favorite classical stations. As I’m driving home to my parents, I usually catch an interesting piece, or interview with an important person in the arts which catches my ear. The trend among many all-classical stations has been away from broadcasting concerts. As long as the quality and variety of repertoire continues on WQED, I’m all for this expansion.

2) New owner wants to take WCRB-FM national (Boston Globe).

For months there has been speculation that Nassau Broadcasting (who bought WCRB)would drop classical music. That wasn’t the case. In this news item, Nasssau’s president and CEO, Louis F. Mercatanti proposes syndicating WCRB’s programming and taking it national. He calls classical music a “niche format with wide appeal” with listeners who are “extremely loyal” and have longer periods of TSL (Time Spent Listening) than “fans of rock or talk radio.” While I’m all for more classical programming in all markets, the effect of this move could provoke more dual-format public radio stations that carry classical music to drop it altogether, so as not to compete for listeners.

3) Making waves
The people at Chicago Public Radio want to put you on the air. Their radical plan to reinvent radio could fail—or it just might revolutionize broadcast media. (Time Out Chicago)

I think this could be a great experiment as I love what this station has done with This American Life, but I worry about the reality-TV-ization of all media. It does give people an important to “play” radio though, and that could be a good thing. Chicago Public Radio will still serve as a gatekeeper to select audio that is good. Now if only someone would do that for music.

4) Marc Fischer has an article comparing programming on XM and Sirius (Washington Post).

The winners:
CLASSICAL- Sirius (Performance Today and other NPR shows, edgier selections; but XM has Martin Goldsmith, Millennium of Music, and programs from PRI)
BASEBALL- XM (every Major League Baseball game all season long)
NEWS- Sirius (but neither have their own news operations, mostly audio from TV)
PUBLIC RADIO- Sirius (but XM has Bob Edwards)
TALK- The new home of raunch radio (Sirius has Howard Stern and OutQ, the all-gay channel; but XM has Jerry Springer, Al Franken, Bill Bennett, Dr. Laura, etc.) The Post picks XM.

New Future of Music report on effects of radio consolidation

On August 9, 2006 the Future of Music Coalition published a study by Peter DiCola which finds “that the vast majority of major U.S. cities has experienced both layoffs and lower wage growth within the radio profession, associated with the unprecedented consolidation of radio station ownership over the last decade. The study also shows that the job losses in radio impede federal policy mandates to promote localism and diversity in media.”

Some findings include:

* The combined market share of the top four radio companies in each local market increased by an average of 14.3 percent between 1993 and 2004 across 265 markets.

* Cities with higher degrees of radio consolidation had greater job losses among news reporters and broadcast technicians from 1996 to 2003.

* Cities with higher degrees of radio consolidation experienced smaller wage growth for DJs and news reporters from 1996 to 2003.

The full study is available for download as a PDF (30 pages).

Relaxing in Bloomington

Yes, I’m still alive.

After an exhausting and exhilirating month of rehearsals and performances of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem and a discographic essay for the Music Library Association’s quarterly journal Notes, I took a couple of days off and headed to Bloomington, Indiana to 1) get away from DC, 2) relax, 3) do a little bit of research, 4) catch up with old friends, and 5) relax. All goals were pretty much met, save for #3, but that’s what vacations are for. Got my hairs cut too.

Being a relatively late adopter when it comes to games, I learned how to play Sudoku. With a beverage in hand and some good music playing, it is truly an excellent way to spend a relaxing Memorial Day weekend.

Here’s a shout out to Adam, Em, Mo, Randy, Eve, Tahira, and Bradley for some great times back in B-town. It’s like I never left. (Seriously, I walk around campus and it’s pretty much the same, including many of the people). For all of the complaints about living in Indiana, IU and Bloomington remain an academic oasis of trees and knowledge removed from the fast-paced hubbub of East Coast life. I met some wonderful people from all across the country, and I try to keep in touch to extent I can.

Oh yeah, and according to Pete and Sarah my nickname is now “T-Rock.” Heh.

We don’t need no stinkin’ music

Insider Radio reports that WBEZ in Chicago will “drop all its music and non-information programming” by early 2007. This will include jazz, blues, and world music programs. How will this affect This American Life?

They’re not hard news, but they’re more than just entertainment. Well, the shows is moving to New York City while they’re filming a television version for Showtime. When TAL made the announcement, the Chicago Reader reported that they would still be a production of WBEZ. So, where does that leave them?

There’s a meatier article on the format shift in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Dancing to the sound of the earth

Here’s something interesting from the dance world.

Wired reports on a new eight-minute ballet called Ballet Mori with the San Francisco Ballet in which dancers perform to a score by composer Randall Packer which samples the sounds of landslides and volcanic explosions against the backdrop of sesimic data projected against a backdrop. UC Berkeley engineer Ken Goldberg says that dancers will interact with the sounds, but since the score will be indeterminate every performance will be different.

Packer continues to say:

“For the installation,” Packer recalls, “there was an algorithm that used Earth’s activity to modulate sounds of landslides and volcanic eruptions. While the sounds are preprogrammed, their order is totally indeterminate.” Yet a ballet isn’t like an installation, where people are constantly walking in and out. “You have a beginning and an end,” he says. “The piece needed to evolve.” His solution was to change the library of sounds minute by minute, controlling the overall structure while leaving the details to chance.

Now this is a creative use of datasets. It was performed by the San Francisco Ballet on Tuesday, April 4, 2006 to commemorate the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. Tempting fate, perhaps?

Resources for hip hop scholarship

A new resource has just been brought to my attention, namely the Hip Hop Research Portal, which is a “communication mechanism for people collecting, researching, and preserving Hip Hop culture.” The site includes a citation database of books, periodicals, dissertations, and sound and audiovisual materials. The scope notes for the collection being collected and documented can be found here.

Librarian Tiffeni Fontno states that the objectives of this site are:

1) To build a community which fosters support & collaboration of Hip Hop Research & Scholarship.
2) To work together to create a network to promote,preserve, facilitate, and disseminate information about Hip Hop Research & Scholarship.
3) To support the research, study, and preservation of Hip Hop culture in schools, colleges, libraries, museums, and organizations.

There is an accompanying Yahoo Group. Those interested can subscribe at hiphop_rands-subscribe AT yahoogroups.com.

What classical music services need

Amanda Holloway hits the nail on the head with what classical music listeners want from digital downloading services in her piece for the Times Online (U.K.). Personally, I want a site that apes the experience I got from going into the old Tower Classical store down on South St. in Philadelphia. That was heaven!

She made lots of good points, some of the best include:

1) Meaningful metadata for name, name-title searching/browsing. Roles are so important. A composer is not a performer is not an orchestra.

2) The track’s not the thing, it’s the whole work. The track-oriented structure of the whole market really does a number on classical. Think how many arias, recitatives, and choruses make up an opera! They need to be linked hierarchially: movements, scenes, parts, acts, etc.

3) We care about audio quality. At least CD-quality sound (44/16), esp. for live recordings.

4) Back catalog material is just as important as the newest recordings. Keep on re-releasing all those forgotten 78s and vinyl LPs!

College radio or shall I say, pure student radio

News story from today’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Turning Campus Radio on Its Head
Podcasts and Web streaming widen college radio’s reach, but some stations worry about becoming too mainstream

Brock Read profiles the world of college student radio, where independent music still lives and wackiness usually ensues. He writes about the new technological developments of podcasting and streaming which have help spread its programming far away from the campus from which it originated. Interaction now happens at a scary pace, especially with our AOL Instant Messenger window. Imagine a window popping up on the computer screen saying, “You guys suck” five seconds before you have to go on-air. I developed a pretty tough skin very quickly. And no, I’m not going to play Nick Drake for you again. LOL.

Student radio…ah, good times. I remember the two years I had on air at WIUS with my roots show, The Kitchen Party.
I found volunteering at the station to be a good overall experience. We were required to be on one committee, which only took up an hour or two a week in addition to prepping and hosting my show. Most of the time I spent on the Production Committee where we wrote, voiced, recorded, and edited public service announcements, imaginary commercials, and some underwriting credits. It was fun, because I got to use my creativity and write what a college student might find entertaining. Sometimes it was long-form, sometimes pithy. These announcements were usually written for particular voices on the committee in mind. People wrote for me when they had a public radio voice in mind–it’s close and untrained, but that’s the cadences and tone I’ve picked up most. We had some funny people writing and voicing those announcements: some natural comedians and others that needed to come out of their shell a bit more.

One semester I volunteered for the Engineering Committee. It was a valuable experience. I learned a lot about gear: mixing boards, cables, microphones, and fixing stuff. I had nightmares about industrial arts class when I was told we’d be soldering cable at one of our meetings (cable to RCA connectors). Most of the volunteers were in the Audio program at IU, but our committee head was gracious and helpful enough to teach me about radio and equipment.

Being on-air gave me experience about being “natural” on-air. You learn how to think on your feet (or on your seat, in most cases). You also learn about the pressures of time and the clock. We were required to play announcements and give a weather reading at certain points of an hour. According to Wikipedia, a format clock is “a diagram produced by a programme director or a producer to illustrate where each programming element appears in a typical hour.” Our clock was pretty loose. We were required to play one promo around 20 minutes, one underwriting credit about 30 minutes, and weather on the 40. This was not absolute, but I tried to stick to the requirements as much as I could. You had to remember to play these from another computer which was tied into the board.

The first year I broadcast I structured my shows very tight. Since I was only one of two folk DJs, I had to make sure that product was coming into the station for me to play. I had to review CDs, do cold-call e-mails to artists and labels, and report back what I played (or at least put my playlists on the FOLK-DJ listserve).

Volunteering for WIUS was quite different from my work at WETA and WFIU. At the public radio stations I was a staff member, and it was almost all behind-the-scenes. I had assigned duties and I stuck to them, while being occassionally asked to voice something special. I like being behind-the-scenes: whether it’s cataloging, acquiring new CDs, or researching for producers or announcers; but it really drove home to me that these tasks have to be for the benefit of the people who are on-air. Radio stations are not libraries. Yes, they should be paying attention to their historical archival material, but often they are no-frills operations.

Filed under: radio

Public radio websites: One site to rule them all?

A not-so-recent commentary (Feb. 21, 2005) by Mark Fuerst in the public broadcasting newsletter, Current talks about the failings of public stations to create appealing websites in an economic manner. If a goal of the system was to create a website for each one of the 500 public stations, they’ve very nearly succeeded: only a few rural stations lack one, he states. What is being wasted is the opportunity for true collaboration between public radio stations and their major content provider, NPR. His answer is to look at people who are doing this well. His model is Major League Baseball’s website. They provide a portal/co-branding solution through their common interface and integrated back-end system. He outlined what is needed to be considered in creation of a multi-station integrated platform:

1) A clear articulated vision of online service.
2) Consistent traffic metrics
3) A “unified back-end solution”
4) CPB’s leadership.

This will not be easy. NPR is not the only game in town. There are independent producers, stations which syndicate independently of NPR, other distributors like PRI and American Public Media, as well as international ones. There are also many stations that are not part of the traditional public broadcasting community–i.e. NPR affiliates–that are essentially community broadcasters. Many of these take some network programming, but serve their communities in a non-profit function. Many questions: Will they be invited to the table? How will all these parties play together?

If NPR won’t (or isn’t allowed to) produce for all stations, who will do it? (I was going to say “step up to the plate” to further the baseball metaphor, but I’ll refrain). What system will they use? Probably something which incorporates Content Depot which is gaining more traction as a content management system for the public broadcasting community. How will PubCore and other digital asset management systems fit into all of this? And what about music with its rich and complex relationships between contents, carriers, participants (with many roles), mediums, forms and genres. Stay tuned, more to come.

Tags: public radio metadata

New CLIR report on digitization of analog material

Capturing Analog Sound for Digital Preservation: Report of a Roundtable Discussion of Best Practices for Transferring Analog Discs and Tapes

Abstract (http://www.clir.org/pubs/abstract/pub137abst.html):

“This report investigates procedures to reformat sound on analog carriers to digital media or files. It summarizes discussions and recommendations emerging from a meeting of leading audio preservation engineers held January 29–30, 2004, to assess the present state of standards and best practices for capturing sound from analog discs and tapes.

This report is one of several studies that CLIR is undertaking on behalf of the Library of Congress and the National Recording Preservation Board.”

There is an online executive summary.

It is available for download as a PDF or can be purchased through CLIR

The next report (the engineers’ second meeting) on how to preserve files in the digital domain will be coming out shortly.

Great quote

I was amused and delighted to hear a comment by conductor Antal Dorati in a panel discussion from the early 1970s he did with three American composers. The question asked was: “How do you feel about the ever changing reproduction system” [for audio recordings]?

He replied:

I think as the systems of reproduction constantly get better, maybe we’ll arrive at the point where real people will make real music.

The Poetry is in the Pity

Last night my choir started rehearsal on Benjamin Britten’s opus magnum, his War Requiem. It is a work of grand scope utilizing a full-size symphonic chorus and orchestra, a chamber orchestra, organ, children’s chorus, soprano, tenor and bass soloists. We sightread the piece last night, woodshedding as we went along. I know from listening to it (and writing about it in a term paper in college) that it is a profound work; indeed, a meditation on the nature of war itself. English poet and World War I soldier Wilfred Owen wrote, “My subject is War, and the pity of War…the Poetry is in the Pity.” Britten interposes the traditional Latin text of the Mass for the Dead with the war poems of Owen.

Here are the first lines of the poems which Britten brought into the Requiem, followed by the title of the poems:

What passing bells for those who die as cattle? (Anthem for Doomed Youth)
Bugles sang, sadd’ning the evening air (Voices, The Next War, Sonnet On Seeing a Piece of Our Artillery Brought Into Action, and Futility)
So Abram rose, and clave the wood (The Parable of the Old Man and the Young)
After the blast of lightning from the East (The End)
One ever hangs where shilled roads part (At a Calvary Near the Ancre)
It seemed that out of battle I escaped (Strange Meeting)

Here’s a website I found which talks about the War Requiem.

It takes a space as large as a Cathedral to enter into the mysticism of the work. One of the reasons I sing with the Cathedral Choral Society, instead of Choral Arts or any one of the other fine symphonic choirs in town, is the chance to make music in this grand space. It’s not only that the space is grand, it’s that the Cathedral itself is a place to escape the noise of everyday life and enter into one’s thoughts. Maybe that’s a little too philosophical. The Cathedral itself acts as a musical instrument: its architecture resonates with certain types of music, especially that of choir, and organ (and surprisingly, bagpipes).

In the coming months, I’ll talk each Tuesday about our rehearsal process and the music that Britten wrote. I think that talking about the process of making music will underscore the value of the artifacts that audio archivists and music librarians aim to preserve and give access to.

Relaxing to a transistor radio

It’s always nice to get away from the city on the weekend. Today a friend and I went to Front Royal. There are some wonderful antique shops in that town, as well as a great vintage store.

I was particularly impressed with this one which had all sorts of kitchenware, clothes, period telephones, and other curiosities. They had a lot of old photograph equipment, including old Polaroid cameras, an 8-mm film camera and projector. I indulged in a bit of nostalgia by picking up some old Great Muppet Caper glasses from the 80s. I also picked up a radio. Not a stereo system, not a satellite radio system, not a boom box…a portable GE AM/FM 15 transistor radio receiver from the 1970s.

Here’s a picture:

It’s got a strap on the top of it, so I can carry it into the garden and enjoy a good baseball game this summer.

If you open the back, there’s a mess of wires and transistors plus space for 4 double-A batteries. If you think hacking is a recent phenomenon, think again. Ham radio enthusiasts have been doing since the early part of the 20th century with their crystal sets, and then later with vacuum tubes. My next goal is to procure a shortwave set.

Current listening: “Traditions with Mary Cliff,” WETA-FM 90.9 (broadcast)