Sigh...

Looks like I really bet on the wrong horse.

Start your day with serialism

I had a lot of fun co-hosting this morning's edition of "Where's the Beat?" for CKUT. Compared to other editions of the show I've heard, today's wasn't too crazy. In fact, most of it was pretty tame, except for the three and a half minutes of high-pitched experimental sine wave synthesizer. I had a pretty good spiritual-ish Ash Wednesday mix going in the middle, with some Pärt and Hildegard and Messiaen.

You can download today's broadcast here. (FYI: the first nine minutes are a spillover from the morning show of someone reading erotic poetry. College radio is really a medium of its own.)

I'll be back on the air in two weeks. And yes, I take requests.

The girlfriend and I went to Lakmé on Wednesday as a Valentine's-y date, and we came away very disappointed. Bored, to be precise. So much so that we were nodding off from time to time (though not as bad as the guy next to us who would start to snore and then jerk back awake from his own noise).

Now, operatic scenarios are a narrative genre unto themselves, what with the weighty issues and melodramatics and whatnot (almost like Degrassi Junior High in that sense). And I was well aware that this one would be full of 19th-century exoticist fantasies and a loosely defined Otherness that was an excuse to toss in some sensuous and dangerously chromatic musical language. But a few coloratura passages and a forbidden love affair alone do not an interesting opera make. The Flower Duet is still exceptional--it was pretty much the reason we bought tickets in the first place--and well done, and the soprano who played Lakmé brought a lot of life to her own arias, but otherwise things came across as a Carmen or Madama Butterfly that got lost in translation to "India".

It seems some biting parody of this operatic genre of interracial passion should exist somewhere. Something that mocks all the conventions of the forbidding father of the irresistible ethnic chick who swears to defend her honor against the smitten White officer who spurns his bland fiancée and his duty. If one doesn't already exist, I'm pitching the idea to Woody Allen.

Eighty years ago

"Approximately 8,000,000 pianos are out of tune in this country as a result of efforts by jazz musicians to bang out modern melodies, according to Charles Deutschmann, president of the National Association of Piano Tuners, who adds that about 4,000,000 of these same pianos are in no condition to be classed as musical instruments."
--The Billboard, March 12, 1927


Other recent highlights of my Billboard research include: an editorial praising--seriously--the wholesome entertainment in minstrelsy; ads that say, "Wanted: Fat People" and then go on to list every other genre of circus freak desired for a sideshow; and references to novelty song titles like "Yes, We Have No Bananas" and lesser hits like "Don't Make a Monkey Out of Me (The Evolution Blues)." I'd say that novelty songs as a genre have all but died out, but that's a hard claim to make since "My Humps" won a Grammy.

But did the Arcade Fire concert have four marimbas?

doodoodoodoodoodoodoodoodooDOOdoodoodoodoodoodoodoodoodoo...

The Steve Reich concert at UdeM last night was good clean minimalist fun before a pretty impressively sized crowd. The first half of the program had some smaller works (Music for Pieces of Wood, New York Counterpoint, Nagoya Marimbas) that were obviously not easy to perform, but the students hung with it and did a fair job. There were some tense moments in between grooves, but that's often expected when amateur musicians play this music.

Music for 18 Musicians was excellent. The pulses stayed consistent and the group brought out a lot of the music's layered dynamic effects. At over an hour in length, it's an endurance test for musicians and listeners alike, but judging from the audience's noddings and rapt attention and subsequent standing ovation, they were into it for the whole way.

I'm still in a bit of a minimalist stupor this morning, especially since CKUT is broadcasting all of 18 right now. Once again, yay for college radio.

Finally, I still think this is really cool, and not simply because of its creative use of Pez dispensers.

recent reads

I gave up on The Brothers Karamazov after about 60 pages. I had thought it would make a good way to do something enriching during my unemployment and the long Canadian winter, but I just couldn't hack it anymore. I generally have trouble with novels where the characters speak in full paragraphs, and this one had pages and pages of dialogue without enough of a narrative voice to keep my interest. So now it sits on my bookshelf and makes me feel like a Russian literature poseur.

Barbara Ehrenreich's non-fictional Bait and Switch, however, was very engaging and very well written. I had read one of her early books for a research project, and had come across a short feature she wrote on trying to survive on minimum wage in one of those liberal magazines (Utne?) a while back. This time she went "undercover" as an experienced white-collar unemployed PR person who is trying to land a decent corporate job. Over the course of about eight months, she meets career counselors who throw schlocky personality tests at her and charge her outrageous fees for resume polishing, fellow middle-age job-hunters who have absorbed a blame-the-victim mentality that excuses businesses for downsizing and the trend toward contract work, and organizers of networking events who have an ulterior agenda to proselytize the unemployed. What she describes is pretty appalling, especially since she comes no closer to getting a job after eight months than she did when she started. There's a surreal, Kafka-esque element to devoting full-time hours to a futile search for a job that doesn't offer much security now anyway. For some reason, though, I like reading books like this (and No Logo and Generation Debt) that tell the awful truth without the kind of sugarcoating you find in career manuals like What Color Is Your Parachute? that want to reassure you that you'll be okay if you follow some advice and have lots of faith in the divine plan. It allows me to despair of my own chances of finding a decent job without actually taking more action to improve my own situation. But in all seriousness, these books have been helpful in how they have made me want to work on constructing my own "brand identity." Really. I need to define myself with the right mix of professional buzzwords and distinctive characteristics.

Also, I just finished a short tutorial book on chess by Bobby Fisher that goes through a lot of examples and asks the student whether the white side has a possible "mating combination." I still titter like a schoolgirl when I read that.

more operae

For whatever reason, I didn't dig Siegfried as much as Die Walküre. The dramatic pacing felt even more glacial this time, and I think I nodded off for a bit when Mime was rambling on about something or other. I was all too aware of how many hours it was taking to get through such mythological business and became rather impatient in the final scene. Still, the Met production was well done, especially in its tentacle-y blob-like Fafner. The dude cast as Wotan looks like he was practically born into that eyepatch; plus, the guy playing Siegfried was actually named Siegfried.

Ravel's L'Enfant et les Sortilèges: a strange, almost trippy little piece. There's not much of a plot, just a bunch of episodes involving dancing armchairs and amorous cats and a personification of Arithmetic itself. The patchwork allows Ravel to use a lot of different sounds and styles, some of which come off more successfully than others. The fox-trot for teapot and cup was very cool, as were a few other moments, but generally the piece is head-scratcher. McGill pulled off a fair performance, but there were moments where some of the less professional-sounding voices were left exposed. I generally love Ravel, but this piece doesn't measure up to L'Heure Espagnole with cheeky Spanishisms and its slightly raunchy sound effects, like descending chromatic scales to represent Concepcion's inadequate lovers. But L'Enfant did have a slide whistle.

Puccini's Gianni Schicchi, on the other hand, was great. Very well cast and staged by McGill. They updated the setting from Renaissance to ca. 1920, with an Art Deco set and some elegant costumes, and it was very effective. This too is odd piece because of its dark humor and how it's so clearly written by a composer who rarely dabbled in comedy. Of course the sentimental duets of the two lovers seem a little bit tacked on as an excuse to work in the more typically Puccinian emotions... but that's also the music that you remember most when it's over. A very pleasant one-acter.

And Canadian Super Bowl ads are lame, but not nearly as lame as Deal or No Deal: Canada, with its "loonie" and "toonie" briefcases.