Monica

In response to my last entry, I've received a few questions:

Do you think it constitutes observance to sing Christian music? If so, how do you feel about Christians singing/playing music of the Judaic tradition?

Also, at what point did you start feeling uncomfortable about singing Christian music? Did you ever discuss this with your rabbi?

These questions deserve an answer that isn't buried in comments. (And anyway, it may get too long for that. Err, who am I kidding -- it will get too long for that. :-) )

( Read more... )

Hey look -- the interview meme is back. :-)

( life update, On the Mark, SCA topics )

1. If you want to be interviewed, leave a comment saying so.
2. I will respond, asking you five questions.
3. You'll update your journal with my five questions and your five answers.
4. You'll include this explanation.
5. You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

ohiblather asked how people feel about instrumental music (playing or listening). (Yes, voice is an instrument too, and probably my best, but that's not the focus here.) Sure, get me going. :-)

I enjoy playing instrumental music, and have composed some and arranged a bunch more. My primary instrument is hammer dulcimer, with which I'm competent. But what I lack in skill I try to make up for in spirit. :-)

For listening, it depends on context. For "attentive listening", such as at a performance, I connect best if I can perceive that the musicians are connecting with it. A great example of this is Homespun Celeidh Band, dglenn's group, but performers don't have to be as physically active as they are to convey that they are into the music, either. I also enjoy music where the sheer intensity comes through, which requires a different performance style. Either way, though, I find it harder to perceive this connection between the performer and the music (even though it may well be there) in larger groups, like orchestras, so I don't generally enjoy performances of classical music. As background music to listen to on a CD, though, I do enjoy it.

And against all my predictions based on the preceeding, I find that I enjoy some modern electronic music even if, for all I know, it's purely computer-programmed or something. I enjoy the works of Christopher Franke, for example, though I have no clue how he produces them. Every now and then I noodle around with my computer in that musical space, but I don't know what I'm doing and I've never produced anything worth preserving.

When On the Mark started we were uncertain if people would sit still for instrumental music at performances, particularly at cons. (In the SCA, sure (somewhat). Cons? Not so much.) We tend to be fairly conservative -- one instrumental piece for about every 3-4 songs, and songs are on average a little longer. We've gotten mixed responses, but some people very much enjoy the instrumental music. I think mixing instrumental and vocal pieces in a concert (or on a recording) works best if your vocal pieces tend to also have rich instrumentation, so it's not as much of a change. We strive for that -- don't always succeed, but we try. This means we're doing less with vocal harmonies because people are busy playing instruments, though, so there are definitely trade-offs.

Shabbat went pretty well. Friday night my committee led services; I did most of the music, and we had several readers (one per section of the service), lay torah readers (two), and a sermon by a lay member. All of them did good jobs, and I think most of them enjoyed it. Walter, another member of the committee, sang the opening song and the anthem (the latter goes after the sermon). He has a wonderful voice and is a good orator (with speech and song).

My music mostly went well, and I received many compliments. Our cantorial soloist was there (with her two-week-old child), and she complimented me too. That felt nice! There were some glitches, all of which can be chalked up to "Monica is not used to working with an accompanist", and sadly, some of them were obvious to the congregation. One was not, because the aforementioned accompanist is very good. (There are a bunch of different settings of one song out there, and we had discussed which one to do. He played an intro that sounded to me like one of the others, I concluded that he had goofed and started to sing that one, and he concluded that I had goofed and followed me -- without music in front of him and while tranposing into a different key. As it turns out, the intros really are that similar but we hadn't noticed.)

The committee as a whole received a bunch of compliments; we were widely perceived as relaxed, comfortable, and competent, and a couple people told me they found the service to be moving because the leaders were obviously engaged -- praying and not just reciting. I hope some of them tell these things to the rabbi. :-)

My rabbi had asked me to lead torah study Saturday morning with some materials he had prepared, so I got an advance copy to review and scribble on. (I was trying to plan the conversation -- where to pause for discussion, what points to try to tease out of the group, and so on.) We usually have 10-20 people for study; today we had four. I expected the group to be smaller, but not that much smaller. Fortunately, the other three participated rather than just sitting and listening, and they were generally supportive, and things went fine.

The low turnout was foreshadowing, alas. This is only the second time I have seen this group not get a minyan. (The other time was on a cold, snowy winter day with hazardous roads.) We had eight people. I did a good job of leading the service, I think (many of the people who showed up thanked me later). We couldn't read torah without a minyan, but the two people who had prepared the portion (the same ones who read Friday night -- re-use is good) read it out of a chumash (that's allowed) and led a discussion of the parsha, which most people participated in. So that worked out. We read haftarah without the blessing, which I think was correct. (Reading it is fine, as reading the torah text was fine. What I'm not sure of is whether the blessing requires a minyan, so I erred on the side of caution, and for parity with the torah reading.)

Noted in passing: there is one prayer (kedusha) where if you don't have a minyan you say a different version. (Other things you just omit in the absence of a minyan.) Our siddur doesn't have the alternate text; it assumes a minyan. It turns out I have it memorized, though, so no biggie.

There are a few reasons for the low turnout. A lot of people are out of town for various reasons; I knew that. Attendance is always a little lower (but still higher than this!) when it is known that my rabbi won't be there but the associate rabbi will. (My rabbi built this service and is very strongly connected with it.) It's clear, though, that at least some people who will come for the associate rabbi won't come for a layperson, even a layperson who is a regular who knows the service inside and out. That attitude could be a hurdle if we try to increase lay involvement in our services more generally -- it's the whole "no one but the rabbi is good enough" problem. We need to figure out how widespread that attitude is and what to do about it.

(For those who've asked, "random bits" are longer than "short takes".)

Last night I adapted a piece of music for (folk) harp for the first time. Mind, I don't play harp -- but I've been around those who have enough to have some basic clues, so when a friend asked me if I could render a four-part a-capella piece for harp and singer for her wedding, I agreed to give it a shot. It was an interesting exercise; harp is kind of like piano in terms of how you think about the hands, but has the twist of also having to plan for when to flip the sharping levers for accidentals. (Doing so requires that you take one hand off the strings, so right after a long note is a good time to do this.)

After I completed my first draft I talked with the harpist. She says she doesn't have sharping levers. Oops; how did I miss that? So I'll see if I can arrange around them. At which point we move from "music that is a subset of the original" to "music that is slightly different from the original". Fortunately, it's rennaissance music and I know how not to do anything egregious there. Still, it's a fun challenge.

One of my cats (Baldur) has taken to meowing persistently in the early mornings (around 6am), almost every day, for minutes at a time. He's 11 years old and this is a recent change (last couple months). I have been unable to correlate it with anything else going on in the house. His last physical was in January and he was fine, and he doesn't do this at other times. Do the kitty psychologists in my reading audience have any theories?

Today my shell-account provider had a scheduled OS upgrade. When they came back online, SSH was behaving oddly for me. It told me the host key had changed (not surprising), and I chose the "accept for this session only" option. (Hey, I'm paranoid -- even though I know that should be ok, I want to see the right things happen before making the permanent change.) At that point SSH bounced me on a permission error (I never got to the password) -- repeatedly. On a whim, I said to just accept the key -- and everything was fine. What the heck? Now that I think about it, though, I'm pretty sure the same thing happened to me a few years ago -- so maybe if I write it down this time I'll actually remember next time.

Asian restaurants tend toward the "spiciness on a scale of 1 to 10" meme. Of course, one restaurant's "7" might not resemble another one's "7" -- or even its own on a different day. But there's a bigger issue: is this supposed to depend on the dish you order? What does it mean to order Moo Goo Gai Pan to a spiciness of 9, or Kung Pao Chicken to a spiciness of 1? If you do that, does the cook just shrug and make the dish normally, or what? (Mind, I have little personal experience with numbers in the bottom two-thirds of the scale...) This thought brought to you by the data-collection effort going on at my place of employment to attempt to determine the pattern, if any, of spice levels at the nearby Thai restaurant.

I enjoyed this entry on the dynamics of ladies' nights at bars.

Why can't people who use auto-reply systems when they're on vacation learn to configure them to not send such messages to posters on mailing lists? Sheesh. For mail that was sent directly to you, go wild -- but if I post to a mailing list with several hundred subscribers, I really don't need to be told about the ten specific subscribers who are on vacation this week.

1. How did you get into SF fandom? ( Read more... )

2. What made you decide to convert to Judaism? ( Read more... )

3. What made you decide to keep Kosher?( Read more... )

4. When you're not listening to filk, what kinds of music do you listen to?( Read more... )

5. If you were stranded on a desert island with only the essentials and were told you could only have one musical instrument or device, what would that be, and why? ( Read more... )

1. Why did you pick the hammer dulcimer? ( Read more... )

2. What foods, if any, do you particularly miss from your pre-kosher days? ( Read more... )

3. What's the scariest experience you're willing to talk about in this forum? ( Read more... )

4. What technological advance do you most look forward to in the next ten to twenty years? ( Read more... )

5. I'll return the question, but more broadly: what would you like to get in your next RPG experience? This might include whether you'd be a player or GM, ruleset, genre, tone, character type, whatever. ( Read more... )

Our choir is going to be doing a Salamone Rossi piece ("Hashkiveinu"). I have a modern edition of the music, but it has some problems:

• It's a French edition. Hebrew transliterated into French vowels is not very intuitive for our English-speaking choir.
• There are several errors in the transliteration.
• It's somewhat below the norms of legibility to which we have become accustomed.

So I've re-typeset the piece, but I don't have access to a facsimile of Rossi's manuscript. I'm using the modern edition as my primary guide, and consulting siddurim and a dictionary to resolve the occasional text question. (This process was greatly aided by lefkowitzga, who is rather more fluent in Hebrew than I am.)

I have one issue remaining. There is a place where the French edition says "ushvor satan mil'faneinu" [1]. "Ushvor" is in the verb position; the rest of the phrase is (loosely) "...impediment [or temptation] from before us". So you would expect a word like "remove".

"Ushvor" isn't a word, near as we can tell. The word "ushmor" is "guard"; if that's the intended word, then there's a word missing or something, because "guard impediment from before us" doesn't make sense. The siddur uses the word "[v']haseir", which does in fact mean "remove".

So I have three choices: (1) assume that "ushvor" really is what Rossi wrote and I just don't know what he meant; (2) assume the French transcriber made a one-character mistake, but with a word that doesn't really fit; or (3) assume that the transcriber just wrote the wrong word somehow and that Rossi really wrote "haseir".

I guess I will do what any good academic would do: choose my favorite (#3), and footnote it.

I'd love to find a facsimile of Rossi's manuscript! Failing that, I'd love to find a 16th-century Italian siddur, to at least see what text was commonly in use in his time. So far, though, I haven't been able to turn up either through the library.

[1] Actually, it says "...mil'fanecha" (from before you). This is one of those errors I was referring to.

I am currently listening to the new CD re-issue of Julia Ecklar's "Divine Intervention", which came in today's mail. Wow!

DI was a cassette that was published back in 1986. I bought it, of course -- I was buying lots of filk, and I loved Julia's voice. And this album was like nothing I had ever heard in fandom before. Filk was about voice (not always high-quality) and guitar, and maybe the occasional cough from the audience (most of what I had was live recordings, from cons). The first filk I bought was probably "Minus Ten and Counting", so I knew that studio recordings did sometimes happen. They weren't up to the level of "professional" studio recordings; filk tapes sold a few hundred copies, so who could afford that?

But someone raised money to produce a "real" tape -- with a kick-butt engineer, orchestral musicians, stunning arrangements (sometimes overdone), and Julia's voice. It was a wonderful, ground-breaking recording (with no real followers, though).

But cassettes rot over time, and it's been out of print for years. Fairly early on I made myself a copy and played that into the ground, so my cassette is probably in ok shape today -- aside from being 16 years old. I mean, it's not like I had the forethought to really protect it or anything.

But now, Eli Goldberg has worked miracles and it's out on CD. The notes in the booklet suggest that a fair amount of digital excavation was involved; he had an analog tape master to work with, and first he had to clean the mold off of it. The resulting CD is very pleasant, and far ahead of what the cassette could do. (And I see that there are bonus tracks, newly-recorded, coming up in a few minutes.)

So Eli, when are Julia and Mike and the gang going to do a new album? If this is what 16-year-old salvage can sound like, I can't wait for new material. :-)

More info: http://www.prometheus-music.com .

amergina: Yes, somewhat, though it's hard to characterize. In some areas (sometimes loosely called "social justice") the trend has been slightly more liberal/compassionate; in other areas there has been no change despite prevailing opinions in the community; and in other cases complete disinterest has turned into interest. But this question both requires and deserves a much better answer than that, so I will endeavor to address this separately within the next week.

celebrin: For the first part, I think you must have me confused with someone else, and I'm sorry that I don't know how to help you. For the second part: to use the tools we are given to the best of our ability and for good.

steven: It's taken a while, and it's not a solitary process. Grounding in meaningful ethical sources (regardless of where they come from) is essential. Succinct guiding principles don't hurt either: "What is hateful to you, do not do to others. That is the whole law; all the rest is commentary. Go and study." (Oh, and thank you.)

alienor: Like the musical instrument with one more syllable ("ee"), emphasis on the first syllable.

dvarin: Accessories: currently Encore, a generic computer, and generic speakers for playback. Previously, staff paper, a pencil, and a piano. Processes: If I'm starting from scratch, start by drafting a melody -- which usually takes life with singing, not with noodling around on an instrument -- and then add a bass line, tweaking both as necessary to make them happy together. Then I fill in other parts (simultaneously) to complement. Alternatively, I enjoy imitative counterpoint and sometimes compose an entire piece in parallel, a few measures at a time, but this is both harder and less in demand so it's not the norm. Mostly I do renaissance-style dance music, but also arrange some stuff for my folk-music group and the very occasional "art" piece just for the fun of it. These last were mostly a product of one semester of private composition lessons, though I'm going to try to retrofit a Psalm setting I once did in Latin into Hebrew and then give it to our cantor for evaluation. I have never done anything symphonic, and rarely done scoring for specific instruments.

ksnell: It's the way I learned the meme; I didn't think much about it. Having promised that kind of privacy I can't change it now, though if I ever do this again perhaps I'll do it differently. Writing the answers to imply but not outright state the questions has been interesting, and maybe at some point the right question and the right creative streak will come together for something entertaining.

Yesterday was the music & dance event. I had lots of fun, and I think things went really well in general.

My class (actually a group-teach with lrstrobel and Alaric) was in the first time slot and only got one student, but we had a decent discussion. (The topic was organizing/leading music groups -- basically, how to go from "we'd kind of like to do this" to a functional group that performs at events and stuff.) I took several other neat classes, including one on Ars Antiqua vocal music, which is early (medieval, not renaissance) music that sounds really neat. I came away with copies of music that would be suitable for our choir; must remember to make copies for Ray. Ray taught a class on medieval trumpets that was interesting, and at the end he let us try to play the ones he had there. I do not have clues about brass, so it took a while before I could get random things that almost sounded like notes, and none of it was controlled. I was actually doing something different with my lips than I do when I blow a shofar, though the person who explained shofar to me described it as "like brass", so I'm probably doing something wrong there. I can get notes out of a shofar, though. Beginner's luck, I'd bet.

I watched the Caroso-style ball, which is performance-oriented, and enjoyed it. There were some very good dancers there. I especially enjoyed watching Lyev, who does well with flirting and the "story-telling" dances like Gelosia (Jealousy). I bet he'd be a good actor, too. There was a real imbalance of genders, with many more women than men dancing, which is part of why I sat out. There was also some imbalance in who was getting asked to dance and who wasn't, with some people dancing half a dozen times and others dancing once. This might need to be managed more closely when there are significant numbers of non-local dancers. Lia and Fiddle observed that kids are an impediment here; neither of them got asked to dance at all, though at any given point one of them could have easily danced while the other paid attention to the kids (who were behaving).

I thought the choir's performance went pretty well. Most of the pieces went very well; a couple suffered from warts of various degrees of severity. I don't know if the other tenors rely on being able to hear me (I'm in the front row during performances and they're not); there were glitches in places where I'm not used to there being glitches. Of the three of us who were at this performance, I'm probably the strongest on this repertoire currently. Brandon is a strong singer who's still learning the material (he's new to the choir), and Degan lacks both volume and confidence.

After the performance someone in the audience (non-local, and I don't know his name) complimented me on my expression (facial expression, eye contact, mood, whatever). I was glad to hear that, as in the past we've gotten feedback that we don't do well in this area. There was a Pennsic performance where, according to Arianna, the only person seen to be doing this was Roxane, which I found odd as I thought I was doing a good job at that time. So I do what I sometimes worry is too much, but I guess it's ok. And I've learned how to fake eye contact; it's an essential skill for job interviews. :-) (The way my eyes work, if I'm really making eye contact with you you'll see me as staring off into space behind you.)

The food was good. I especially liked the spinach balls, the grape leaves, and the mango lassi (not all at the same time). It turned out that I was unable to shield Dani from the eggplant by eating it all before he got there, because they cooked the eggplant with meat. Oh well.

Robert and Kathy had a post-revel and I got to spend more time talking with some of the out-of-town folks. Avatar came in from Texas with a bunch of instruments. I also got to talk with Phillipia, Mairi, and the Carolingians. Unfortunately I didn't get to talk with Rufina, who drove in from New Jersey. (She taught the Ars Antiqua class.)

Stolen from chite:

Recommend me...
1. A movie
2. A book
3. A CD
4. An LJ user not on my friends list
5. A website
6. Something to do in the next two months

I'm pretty much a self-taught musician. I had one semester of private composition lessons at CMU before the job I had there ended prematurely and that became impractical to continue. But mostly I've learned on my own. I think I'm pretty decent at composing and arranging certain types and styles of music (hey, 16th-century counterpoint is fun), but other, often-basic, stuff has just never made it onto my radar.

Sometimes when I arrange modern folk music for On the Mark I get a "WTF? but ok, this works" kind of reaction from the group member who actually knows something about harmony. And sometimes, I do the expected thing, but not necessarily intentionally. (Often, I wuss and have Kathy feed me the chords before I go off and write bass and descant lines.)

My friend Yaakov wrote a song this summer and I offered to write down the melody for him, because he doesn't read/write music and he'd like to be able to share it around. So he recorded himself singing it and I've been working from that. It's not that complicated or long (think your basic 16-bar folk song), and with the exception of one passing note that is inconsistently-sung from verse to verse, it's done.

I should have stopped there, but it occurred to me that one of the ways he'll probably use this is to put this in front of people who play guitar and ask for accompaniment when he sings in bardic circles. (He doesn't play any instruments.) So I figured I should add in some guitar chords for him; after all, how hard could that be? And if he doesn't like them he's free to dump them.

Well, the problem is that he wrote a mixolydian melody, and I never learned how to harmonize modal music. (I did arrange a locrian piece once, but I cheated and did a 2-part arrangement and avoided many obstacles rather than confronting them. It's hard to work with a scale that has a tritone where the fifth should be.) I can write counterpoint against modal melodies with no problem, but I don't know how to harmonize 'em. Just playing around on the computer, I couldn't come up with a set of chords that sounded right, but I can't articulate why the ones I tried sound wrong, either. What I really need is a cheatsheet of some sort where I can look up the standard configurations, to use as a starting point. (E.g. major/ionian probably means 1, 4, and 5 all major, and maybe nothing else, but that pattern (well, 5 minor because of the diminished 7th in the scale) is definitely wrong in this case.)