Sing for your Supper Available to Download

Instead of burning CDs on demand for folks (unless there is a huge outcry for them), I’m publishing the mp3 files from Sing for your Supper as a podcast. You can download the mp3 files at your leisure and burn any CD you want. If you think some of the acts would sound really nice next to your other favorite artists, you can burn your own mix CDs. If you have a digital music player, you can easily load these onto it (they already have album and track information encoded for you to make it a bit easier, assuming your audio software recognizes it).

I request that you please download and save these files only once as my hosting provider does put a limit on the amount of data transferred. Feel free to pick and choose as well, you don’t have to download all of them or even all at once.

To see the files in performance order, visit http://feeds.feedburner.com/SingForYourSupper2006. Just right-click on the “Play Now” links and save the file to your computer.

To download these as a podcast in iTunes, visit itpc://feeds.feedburner.com/SingForYourSupper2006. You may need to do some creative trickery to get the files unlabeled as podcasts, though, unless you want them to stay like that.

If you have trouble at any point, feel free to contact me via email at rcymozart at gmail with the obligatory dot com at the end.

Hebrew Love Song 5x

The third song in this Sunday’s concert is my favorite of the pack and so I’ve saved it for last to talk about. Five Hebrew Love Songs composed by Eric Whitacre, songs by Hila Plitmann.

First off, the melodies and harmonies in this piece are both pleasant and haunting at the same time. A small string orchestra accompanies the choir. While the piece is modern, it isn’t so modern as to be completely insane. This piece tells a story from movement to movement, bookended by a simple melody that eloquently captures the emotions of the lovers who wrote it.

And that brings me to the other reason I love this piece. The story behind it is beautiful. Eric and Hila are married. This song was born while they were dating. Each movement/song is a snapshot of their relationship. The words of the fourth song speak of snow falling and the choir becomes both the snow and the tones of the bells that woke this couple during a stay in Germany. The third song is incredibly romantic and a snapshot of the kind of love I think we all strive for on some level. The fifth song is yet another look at this love, but more so, I think, a rich and deep expression of healing and care and compassion.

The words of the second song are

Light bride
She is all mine,
And lightly
She will kiss me!

and the music that brings the Hebrew to life begs to be danced to. I remarked with another choir member during a rehearsal once that you can’t help but want to take a woman in your arms and dance around the room with her while singing this song.

I won’t reprint the entire translation here, but hope they are included in the program (if they aren’t, I have them in my music). They are very much worth reading before the song is sung, as with Magnificat. And while you won’t be able to follow along with the choir by the translation alone, let the texture of the poem for each song sink into you while the music plays over your senses. I think then you’ll know why I speak of this music with such joy.

Technorati Tags: redlands, concert, music, eric whitacre, hila plitmann, hebrew, love songs

Serenading Music

The second piece I’d like to mention for the concert on Sunday is Serenade to Music by Vaughan Williams. I’ve been putting this one off merely because out of the three, it is my least favorite. So, as I have little praise to give it, I’ll just give some facts and move on.

This is a setting of Act V, Scene I of The Merchant of Venice. Vaughan Williams actually notes the names of people he wrote to sing each part in the printed copy and when they sing is noted by their initials throughout the piece (leading many choir folk who don’t read the copy wondering what musicaly notation “W.W.” means).

There are a plethora of soloists throughout this, with the whole chorus singing at appropriate places, but that can be chosen arbitrarily by the conductor. In this case, I think he has chosen wisely. I also think a great many folks will enjoy this song if for nothing else than the text it derives inspiration from.

Technorati Tags: redlands, vaughan williams, shakespeare

The Hass Strikes…Again

I have no idea how old or new this is, but it still something I would go far not to be associated with, unless I were blogging about how…interesting…it was. This one was worth it’s own post, by far.

Technorati Tags: hasselhoff, hooked on a feeling, you tube, music, bad

Listening to Music = A Happier Robert

You know, it’s pretty amazing what difference a few songs can make in your mood. I wasn’t depressed today, but I was definitely low energy. Turn on my iPod and listen to some Caedman’s Call and suddenly the entire world is different.

I spent a lot of my day wondering why I was stuck in neutral. It never occurred to me that I have great days during the week when I walk to and from work listening to great music on my iPod. Bookending my work day with a highly positive note must count for something, so why not my weekend as well?

Even twenty minutes of music I really enjoy has turned my mood around and gotten me to look forward to the rest of my weekend with my friends even more than I was already. Food for thought, me thinks.

Technorati Tags: music, mood, friends, hope

Magnifi-what?

For anyone who doesn’t know or never cared to know about this part of my life, I sing with the Community Chorus of Redlands (who does not have a web site, unfortunately). We do free concerts around town and help augment the University of Redlands Choir for the annual Feast of Lights each December. It so happens we have a concert on March 26 (a notable day in two marriages close to me and a birthday of a long-time friend as well). We’re performing three pieces and I’ll be writing about each of them here in the weeks going up to the concert. First off, the Bach masterpiece Magnificat.

If ever there were a piece of music that is deceptively hard and deceptively easy at the same time, it would be this one. You absolutely must approach this music with a healthy level of self-confidence as well as respect for the music. The fact is, Bach didn’t compose this so much as pull it out of the fabric of the cosmos, so there is a kind of free will in the notes that makes the One Ring look like a whiny two-year old.

If you don’t have any confidence in yourself or your abilities to sing any sort of music, Magnificat will remove the bones from your legs and use them to beat you into a mushy pulp. But, if you come at it thinking it’s just another piece of music, it will suck your brain out through your tear ducts and replace it with a quiggly mass of jello. It is difficult, but not too difficult. It is also easy, but not too easy. I’ve now seen people think this was easy and walk away humbled, but also people think it was hard and never sing it well enough. It’s all in your perception of the music, though, and once you get to the right place, it’s just a good challenge that you find you can accomplish. To play on some old words, you don’t sing the Magnificat; it let’s you open your mouth so it can spring out into the world again.

The music itself is a setting of Mary’s song in response to finding out that she was going to bear a son without having sex (it’s in the Gospel of Luke for those keeping score). More so, the son’s father happens to be God, creator of…everything. (If an angel told me that (and I was a woman), I’d probably freak out before singing a song, but that’s probably why it wasn’t me.)

Magnificat has a structure to it. The keys of the movements, whether they are solos or full ensembles, and so on have a pattern to them that arcs from the beginning to the end. More so than other pieces of music, there is a purpose not just in the words and movements, but in the motion between movements and the sound that is created. Bach uses the music to paint the words onto the canvas of your mind and say something meaningful. The words and notes and harmonies weave together in a complex tapestry about the Story that is beginning in these words.

If you are coming to this concert, I hope you enjoy the performance. Things are coming along nicely and I’m looking forward to hearing it with the orchestra in two weeks at our rehearsal with them. I think you’ll be in for a treat. If you aren’t coming, grab a CD of this and take a listen. You won’t be disappointed.

Technorati Tags: bach, magnificat, choir, redlands, concert, music

Naming Conventions (or Why Are CDs Named Strangely?)

I’m taking this evening to import the last of my CD collection into iTunes and am running into the strangest things. I have several two disc sets; mostly Star Wars soundtracks and various symphony recordings. In those, the first CD will automatically grab a set of titles, artists, composer, etc from the CD title central database on the web. When I stick in the second disc, it will pull the same information, but there are almost always variations which causes iTunes (and probably every other music playback program) to file the music in an entirely different folder and sort the songs differently. What is really one albums across two discs is now two albums.

As an example, one disc will have the composer as John Williams while the next has Williams, John. For the classical variety, those who created the data in the first place feel the need to include birth and death dates with the composer’s name. However, they don’t agree on how to do that. On top of the first and last name issue, some dates are (1750-1791) while others are [1750-1791] and that’s not starting on whether the inner dash is surrounded by spaces or not. Naturally, these are different values in the iTunes database and so are stored as separate entities when really they are the same. If I sync with my iPod and search for composers, there is a listing for both John Williams and Williams, John who are, in fact, the same person (unless there’s something I haven’t been told).

This is easily remedied, of course, by simply changing the titles to match. However, I’m disappointed to see a database that simply sucks as much as this does.

I don’t know who is in charge of the CDDB, if anyone. If they are listening, can we please get some naming conventions together? It doesn’t seem like it would be hard to implement moving forward and slowly rebuild the existing data. It would take time, it must be a huge database, but not impossible.

Technorati Tags: cddb, itunes, music, importing, standards

Market Night in Redlands

This was an odd Thursday evening as we didn’t have worship rehearsal (a good chunk of the worship team is out of town this weekend by chance, so we all got this Sunday off). I decided to take my iPod and walk up and down State St. a bit to take in the sights and scents of Market Night.

The first thing I noticed, nearly all of the teens are doing the goth thing. I remember that being a thing to do over ten years ago. Will it ever get old?

I also heard a musician by name of Marianne Keith who does acoustic guitar, mostly. She was performing and the music was fabulous! I decided to stop and listen along with the now forming crowd (I’m a trend-setter, what can I say) and found myself talking to one of her entourage. Turns out that everyone there helping this 18 year old singer and songwriter were her family; parents and grandparents. They were selling CDs for $10. Her sound was getting to me, but the fact that her family was there supporting her sold me, so I bought the first CD I’ve bought in years. I later downloaded U2’s How to Disarm an Atomic Bomb as my first iTunes purchase, incidentally.

The best part of Market Night, though, was listening to Van Morrison while walking through downtown Redlands with the people mulling around you. It’s a taste of heaven, my friends.

Technorati Tags: redlands, van morrison, ipod, market night

Those Guys! Gems

Turns out Chris Chardi has been busy with some Those Guys! stuff in 2006. He’s got some songs we recorded that never made it on an album up at the (horribly wrong looking and I can say so because I had a hand in designing it way back when) Those Guys! web site.

I couldn’t hear my voice very well, but I’m in all of these. But you really want to visit to hear the best version of Santeria ever disembowled.

Technorati Tags: those guys!, music, a capella

Spring in Appalachia

I’m listening to Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring right now. I’ve forgotten how beautiful a piece of music it is, and the recording I’m listening to is sub-par at best complete with the sounds of a page turning about two-thirds of the way through. I think that says something, though not about my ability to find a good recording of something. A good recording of this will have strings of silk backing up woodwinds played as though by the trees themselves.

The whole piece just feels like a day in the life somewhere, or even here. It starts quiet and slow, very serene. Then builds to some busy-ness that again evens out a little. Then the theme of serenity has it’s own disparity of a minor turn. All of it building to the now legendary Shaker melody in the clarinet, ending with a return to the beginning.

Where Western music as we know it relies mostly on triads built on major and minor thirds to form chords, Copland played in the realm of perfect fourths and fifths (though the thirds are fairly unavoidable for anyone from the West). As such, his music has the flavor of an Otherworld or mysticism hidden within the ordinary sounds of the orchestra.

It’s quite spectacular. If you have the chance to hear it, I suggest taking it.