cellio | Entries tagged with music

Last night we saw the Broadway tour of Hadestown, a musical retelling of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (and Hades and Persephone). I'll assume my readers know (or will Google) the Greek myths, so in that sense there are no spoilers, but this show puts an interesting spin on it. Narrated by Hermes and with active participation by the Fates, we see both Orpheus and Eurydice "up above" and Hades' realm "down below", which is reached by a train. The train motif shows up in the music, the staging, and (I kid you not) the lighting. The company is smaller than many musicals and put to effective use. I enjoyed the music and don't have a good way to describe it.

Eurydice's and Oprheus's world is harsh from climate change, the program notes, though I might have missed that specific angle otherwise. Orpheus is focused on writing a song that will bring the world back into balance, but it's slow going. In this version Eurydice isn't bitten by a poisonous snake; starving and cold in the midst of winter and unable to find work, she is lured to Hadestown by promises of work and shelter. But the workers there toil away in misery in a factory, building fortifications for Hades' domain. ("Why We Build the Wall" resonates well beyond this show, I assume by design.) When Orpheus shows up to rescue Eurydice, the other workers are taking note too. Meanwhile, Persephone, whose marriage with Hades is rather rocky (shall we say), is also taking note of the power of love.

The story is a tragedy; we know it from the myth and we're told so by Hermes in the introductory stanzas of the show. But it has a positive vibe, too. I don't want to say more about that for people who haven't seen it yet.

Orpheus's music calls for falsetto in some key places -- whole passages, not just a note or two -- and the actor in this production pulled it off very smoothly. At the other end of that, uh, scale, I find myself wanting to catch a glimpse of the score, because Hades has some very low bass notes, also performed well in this production. C2 maybe???

I don't see a lot of Broadway-class shows so maybe this is normal, but I was very impressed by the staging and especially the lighting. There's one set, used throughout, that evokes the different settings just through the movements of small items (by cast members, not gophers) and changes of lighting. The lighting in this show is very active; I commented to Dani that the lighting operators deserved cast credit. It's that integral to the show, and it's not a small effort. One warning, though: there are strobe effects, and there were times when lights were pointed at the audience for brief periods.

There were some sound problems in the show we saw -- engineering problems, not cast problems. When things got loud, they spiked the levels and we got some distortion, making it hard to hear the lyrics in a few places. I'm told by somebody who sees a lot of shows there that this is not uncommon in that venue (Benedum Center), alas.

I enjoyed the show, even with those sound issues. I wasn't familiar with the show and hadn't heard the soundtrack before seeing it; this was very much an "I've heard good things about it" outing.

I have a new Mac Mini (yay!). My old one was running OS 10.12 (Sierra); the new one is running 11.6 (Big Sur). Some things are different and some parts of the transition were just bizarre,¹ but it wasn't as jarring as I thought it would be.

Except for installed applications. Back in Catalina (what was that, 10.15?), 32-bit applications stopped working. I don't know of a way to take inventory (one of several reasons I didn't update the OS on that machine). I used Migration Assistant to bring my existing stuff over to the new machine and then walked through the applications to see which ones would still run. Some, like Emacs and Paintbrush, I needed to download new copies of. Some I would need to buy new copies of (but nothing important enough to do so). Some are just plain dead -- no 64-bit version is available. In this last category are Trope Trainer, which I already had reasons to abandon that I should write about separately, and Encore, the music-typesetting program I use(d). The latter came as a surprise.

Solving the Encore problem isn't urgent but it is important. I'm not doing a lot of music composition and arrangement these days, but I have years' worth of files in Encore's native binary format, or in that of its predecessor, Rhapsody. (Encore reads both.) I would like to not lose those source files. Encore can export MIDI, but exporting MIDI and then importing it into something else produces poor results, plus you lose all the typesetting cleanup and text.

This is the problem with closed file formats. If only one program (or suite) can read a format and that product line goes away, you're stuck.

I already re-bought Encore once, when I moved from Windows to Mac ages ago. I reluctantly checked their site to see what it would cost to get a modern version, and found that they punted with Catalina -- their site says "don't upgrade to Catalina if you want to run our software", which was practical advice a few years ago but isn't now. So Encore is dead, it looks like.

(And this is one of the reasons I don't make major OS updates on machines I care about. Had I updated the old machine to Catalina back when everybody was pushed to do so, I'd have been left hanging with no rollback option short of a brute-force recovery from backup.)

I don't know what my recovery options are for not having to do a lot of typesetting by hand again. I will of course export those MIDI files on the old machine (better than nothing), but I hope I can find something else that reads Encore format and can then be saved as something more portable (MusicXML?).

I can, of course, continue to use the old machine. As with the last time I migrated to a new machine, I've set up the old one with remote desktop. As with the last time, I suspect that will work for a while but not forever.

Edited to add: I was wrong; Encore does export MusicXML, so that should give me a path forward. (I was looking in the wrong place.)

¹ For example, my browsers retained their state, including tabs, but Chrome-based browsers (Chrome and Brave) lost their extensions. I had to look them up and reinstall them and then reconfigure them (and reauthorize all my userscripts). Firefox, on the other hand, brought its extensions over with no problems. All of this is data on disk; does Chrome actively disable migrating with extensions?

Master Remus Fletcher, who was an instigating force in music in the Debatable Lands and at events across the kingdom and beyond, died on Friday. The obituary talks some about his SCA participation, and there'll be an AEthelmearc Gazette post.

This is such sad news. Remus encouraged music and was sometimes a one-person source of ambience. During events, if there was no other entertainment happening, he would sit in a corner and play. He was happy to put instruments in curious people's hands and teach. Some of the people he drew in went on to surpass him musically, but I never got the sense that he felt threatened by that -- he just wanted there to be more music. Before there was a Debatable Consort, Remus showed up at fighting practice every week with packets of photocopied music and a bag of recorders and the Consort grew from that. He was part of the Debatable Choir during its early days, and sang individually at events frequently.

Remus was friendly and welcoming to all. He encouraged people he knew to reach higher, to stretch, but he didn't judge -- he invited, never criticized. I will miss him.

This past weekend I had the chance to participate in something really spiffy -- a recreation of a historic coronation ceremony. Most SCA ceremony is fundamentally modern, dressed up in renaissance trappings; the chance to do more-serious recreation is pretty special.

Of course, there are some special considerations -- historically, ceremonies like this would have been Christian religious services (part of a mass, I think), which in addition to being problematic for some participants (ahem) also would be a violation of SCA rules. So some work needed to be done on that, but I'm impressed by how real it felt nonetheless.

baron_steffan wrote/adapted the ceremony based on the Coronation service of Maximilian I (1486). Music was a central part (rather than being incidental as is sometimes the case), and we had about 20 singers from across the kingdom (about half from the Debatable Choir), organized and led by

ariannawyn. We sang four songs: "Te Regem Laudamus" (adapted from a "Te Deum"), Non Nobis Domine, the roll of kings and queens (more on that below), and "Da Pacem Domine", which we'll be using throughout the reign as processional music.

By ancient custom, the coronation ceremony includes the reading of the roll of all the past kings and queens. Usually this is read by a herald; we chanted it (adapting the Te Regem). One thing that was fun about this was that, to make it not clash, we sang Latinized versions of all the names (thanks Steffan!), and "collapsed" different rulers with the same names. So if you listen to the chant you'll hear Christophers 1 through 6, but that's really two different people each ruling three times. Some names underwent more transformation than others; I think the biggest change was "Rurik" to "Rodericus". I wonder how many of them were startled by hearing their names this time. :-)

dagonell has collected the ceremony, its documentation, the sheet music, and recordings (and other stuff from the event). Check it out! (The recordings here are of the music parts; I do hope somebody was recording the rest of the ceremony and that it'll make its way to that page.)

I don't go to a lot of SCA events any more, and almost never ones not in my local group, but this was totally worth the effort.

I've been accumulating browser tabs for a while, so here's a "misc" dump. (Aside: this new LJ "choose your icon by browsing pictures, and by the way we won't put them in alphabetical order or anything nice like that" interface really stinks. Grr.)

siderea posted The Music Theory Song: Intervals (YouTube). For anyone who's trying to work on ear training to hear intervals, and for those of you who already grok that, this video's for you. Really.

12 letters that didn't make the (English) alphabet. I forget where this link came from.

thnidu over on Dreamwidth posted a link to "Earth as Art", which looks to be a nifty photo collection. The link isn't currently working for me, so I'm linking his entry instead of there for now.

More beautiful photography, from a locked post. Warning: gravity alert -- it wouldn't be hard to get sucked in.

Some time back I noticed that one of the regulars in the Mi Yodeya weekly parsha chat drew a lot on Abarbanel and that it sounded interesting. I asked him if he knew of an English translation and at the time he didn't, but more recently someone else who remembered my question pointed me at this adaptation (not translation). This sounds like something I should check out. (And it's kind of cool that, months later, somebody remembered my asking and followed up.)

When atheism is good: a chassidic story, linked by thnidu on DW again.

From XKCD: an exploration of wise men, stars, and paths. What would the trip look like, depending on what star you were following when? I can't confirm the math, but I found it an interesting read. (I don't know why he has the journey starting in Jerusalem, though.)

A map of every grocery store ever. Interestingly, my regular "big shopping trip" store (as opposed to the "grab a few things on the way home from work" store) recently remodelled and deviated from the norms. Now I can't find anything without effort.

And a funny cartoon from gnomi:( Read more... )

One of the finer examples of the form I've seen, courtesy of

thnidu:

More from that parlor game: Comment to this post and say you want a set, and I will pick seven things I would like you to talk about. They might make sense or be totally random. Then post that list, with your commentary, to your journal. Other people can get lists from you, and the meme merrily perpetuates itself.

jducoeur gave me: Faith. Family. Communication. Study. Music. Language. Service.

( Read more... )

alaricmacconnal gave me: Pittsburgh, writing, your favorite song, chicken, D&D, knowledge, and al-Andaluz.

( Read more... )

Thanks to

woodwindy and someone who posted this under a lock for this lovely piece of Ars Subtilior music:

From the Chantilly Codex (Musée Condé MS 564), ca. 1350-1400: Baude Cordier's song "Belle, Bonne, Sage":

"Lovely, good, wise, gentle and noble one,
On this day that the year becomes new
I make you a gift of a new song
Within my heart, which presents itself to you."

I haven't tried playing it yet.

The baron of our local SCA group runs an occasional open-mic night at a local club, so he asked our choir to perform tonight. We said "renaissance choral music? really?" and he said yes, so we went and sang five short songs (two in English, three not). I couldn't actually see the audience very well (dark club), so I don't know how much of the enthusiastic response we got was due to local shills and how much due to the regular crowd liking this change of pace. But either way, that was fun.

There are some unwritten rules of these sorts of things. One is to support the other performers -- stick around, applaud, consider buying a CD (especially if they bought yours). When we walked in the act then on stage was not at all to my taste and I wondered how typical that would be, but it turned out there was a wide variety and many of the performers were very good. I've forgotten most of their names (I need to ask the baron for a list), but one of the surprises of the night for me was Double Shot. I don't even know the name of that genre and it's not something I would normally listen to, but the singing was good and their stage presence was excellent. Cool. There were also a few singers with guitar (one reminded me, stylistically, of Michael Spiro in his college-circuit days), a band with guitar, bass, and drums, an a-capella singer doing folk songs, and others. (We heard people call it "a-capella night", though as noted there were instruments.)

During the show I found myself thinking of songs I'd like to perform there and wondering about standing up a group (On the Mark or otherwise) for the occasional night like this, but it'll probably never happen. The performers there were mostly regular performers doing a circuit or with other gigs, while what I'm thinking of would be targetted -- get good musicians together on a Sunday, learn three songs or so, and perform them the next night; that sort of thing. I don't know if that could get traction with either other musicians or the people who run open-mic nights.

I also realized belatedly that attending this sort of thing has only become really feasible for me in the last several years, since Pittsburgh banned smoking in restaurants. On the Mark did a few coffeehouses/clubs/etc back in the day, and while the music was good the environment was sometimes toxic. I love music, but not enough to sit in a cloud of smoke for a night.

This was a good year for performances. I participated in one and attended several others, including two that exceeded all my expectations.

( music and commedia )

Via

tangerinpenguin: List thirteen things that are going well for you this Friday the 13th:

1. The customer who sounded like he wanted Big Complicated Things (In A Hurry) thought my first draft was about 80% while I was assuming 25%.

2. Two significant projects (and some lesser ones) at work want me and my manager will support whatever I want to do. Cool!

3. I read a letter on the eye chart this week that I don't usually get.

4. Some more e-books that I want to read are available as free downloads.

5. Good conversation with my rabbi last night.

6. Bought gas for $3.09/gallon (loyalty card) and it should hold me for a month.

7. Cirque du Soleil is coming to Pittsburgh and this time their web site allowed us to buy tickets. (Totem -- not interested in the Michael Jackson thingy.)

8. Waking up to a cat on my feet every morning still, even though the weather has gotten warm.

9. Baldur is eating better.

10. Mesura et Arte del Danzare -- lovely recording!

11. Neighbors taking care of things along the property line that they might have been able to get away with not doing.

12. The rain seems to have ended before I have to leave for Shabbat.

13. Dani makes me happy. (Why yes, that is redacted. :-) )

Yesterday's music & dance event was a lot of fun. We knew we wouldn't get the usual contingent from the East Kingdom because of a dance event there (that we didn't know about in time), but a bunch of people from the Cleftlands came from Ohio and that allowed us to have some good cross-fertilization. It's nice when you don't know all the people in your classes, after all.

I taught "Reconstruction 201: Balli". 201 because it's more complex than Arbeau and Playford, but only 201 because it's not ultra-advanced either. Ordinary people can do this, and I was pleased to see people who had never tried to work out a ballo from the sources do so in the class.

There were seven students, including alaricmacconnal who I had specifically asked to come with a recorder. (The class was advertised for dancers and musicians, and I wanted to make sure there would be at least one non-me musician there prepared to play from the original manuscript.) There are some ambiguities in the notation for the dance I chose (Marchesana), which is one of the reasons I chose it, and Alaric picked up on one I hadn't seen and made it work. Cool! I don't know if his interpretation is right, but it works well with the dance steps so I'd say it's a keeper. (And because the students were mostly dancers and not musicians, we just breezed past some of the music-specific ambiguities like use of accidentals. At a basic level dancers don't care what notes you play if the timing works.)

I taught the technique that Rosina and I used when we reconstructed the balli for Joy and Jealousy: start by independently counting up how many tempi (measures, in modern parlance) of what misure (think time signatures, sort of) you think the dance and the music call for. Then compare and start reconciling, drawing on other manuscripts and translations as needed. We did not get all the way through the dance -- I find workshops really hard to plan, timing-wise, and I talked too long at the beginning before diving in -- but we got far enough that people seemed to be getting it and enjoying themselves. Several of the students were non-local and I failed to get contact information, alas, so I don't know if I'll ever hear about reconstructions they end up doing. I hope I do.

One of the visitors from Cleftlands, whose name I asked and have failed to retain (sigh), was amazing to watch on the dance floor. She had excellent posture, made eye contact, knew what to do with her hands, and seemed to always be aware of the room around her. I asked: she's a professional dance teacher. :-) Maybe next time she'll teach a class on these things!

(A class I would like to see, but don't know how to structure, would be something like "beyond the specific dance" and would cover things like that, using the space (constraints and opportunities), and adjusting your styling based on the instruments providing the music. This last is something that the Italian sources specifically call out as something to strive for, and I have only the basics of it.)

The choir performed a subset of our Pennsic concert and I thought it went well. There was somebody in the audience who was the perfect magnet for making eye contact; I hope we didn't all pick him. :-) (Ok, I did move around the room, but not necessarily with an even distribution...) The consort also performed, and the students in a choral class sang three songs. It was a good set of performances.

The food was tasty and there were more vegetarian-friendly dishes than I'm used to (yay!). The assorted sauteed veggies in which ginger and garlic (separately) were treated as full-fledged components rather than scant additions were particularly nice. :-)

It turned out that this was lefkowitzga's 30th anniversary of autocratting her first event, and her co-autocrat was a first-timer. Nice blend of seasoned and new there.

I've owed these answers for, um, a while. Sorry about that!

( Read more... )

I was surprised and a little weirded out, the other night, when I typed "parme" into Google and it offered to auto-complete to "parmesan crusted tilapia recipe". That was in fact what I was searching for, though I was going to just say "fish", but I hadn't realized Google's mind-reading was that good. :-) I didn't remember to follow up at first opportunity from a different IP address, though, so I don't know if profiling was involved.

(My question, still not satisfyingly answered as this recipe didn't do it so well, was: how do you get the cheese to stay on the fish? I was speculating about egg, as you often do for breading, but this recipe called for olive oil. I ended up with fish and cheese in proximity to each other, which was tasty but not what I was going for.)

Larry Osterman passed along this video showing upgrades from Windows 1.0 through to Windows 7 with all intermediate steps (except Windows ME, which doesn't play the upgrade game well, it appears). It was amusing to see what did and didn't survive upgrade (Doom almost hit 100%!), and amazing that it actually worked.

Bohemian Rhapsody on ukelele (video), from siderea. I didn't think I could imagine it, and I was right. Nifty!

Cool bedroom, and not just for kids! Link from talvinamarich.

The internet is for cats. Cats in sinks. Be careful; this is like TV Tropes on four legs. Don't say I didn't warn you.

And finishing up with another one from siderea: this funny ad for milk (involves cats).

Ah. Sometimes a piece of music just clicks.

My congregation is having a talent show at the end of this month (for the second time). Last year I wrote a song (with piano accompaniment) for it and that went well so I was planning to do the same again this year, but the muse does not always work to deadline and what I was coming up with just wasn't working. So, a little disappointed in myself, I fell back on doing a song written by somebody else. But there was a problem: I didn't have sheet music. I didn't need it for my part, but I needed something to give the pianist.

Several attempts to reach the author produced no results and I was about to hire somebody to transcribe the music from a recording (it was beyond my skills) when I got a message from her. She put me in touch with her pianist, who provided music and transposed it into a couple adjacent keys for me after we sang/played it via phone to get candidates. (For the record, F# minor is a happy key for me. F minor is pretty good too. Nothing is ever easy.)

Tonight I met with our pianist, who sight-read a reasonably complex piano score while I sang. And we both felt really good about it. Imagine what some actual practice will do! :-) (I've been practicing on my own against an mp3 the first pianist provided, which helps me but of course doesn't do squat for our pianist.) Our pianist would also like to do more with me, and would like to play more music that I've written (once I actually, y'know, do that). Nice.

This is going to be fun!

I discovered two differently-embarrassing things while processing some old audio cassette tapes today.

Item the first:

I had completely forgotten, until I came across the evidence, that early in On the Mark's existence we had booked a concert hall at CMU to record a demo tape (so we could apply to arts festivals, I believe). I know we used connections and not money but I've forgotten the details. (This wasn't a concert; it was just us, the good acoustics of the hall, recording equipment, and an engineer who knew how to drive it.) The technical quality of the tape is very good (I wonder who the engineer was); the content is, well, what you would expect from a young, not-yet-seasoned amateur group, but some of it is pretty good, good enough that I'm certainly keeping it.

This tape, which has long since become separated from its J-card, contains an instrumental piece, renaissance by the feel of it, that I cannot identify -- even though I performed and recorded it! It is not among the instrumental pieces that we ever published on our CDs, so that's no help. It is not among the pieces that the Debatable Consort published on its CD tracks (from the Tape of Dance project). And at that point in OTM's lifespan I was not keeping historical notes about repertoire, so if we dropped a song I deleted its entry from the master cheat sheet. If the other group members can't identify it I will have to resort to digging through piles of sheet music, no small task. Or settle for "Unknown" as the title among my mp3s. Or post it and ask y'all to take a crack at it. Oops.

Item the second:

I was in a short-lived folk-music group before On the Mark. We performed at exactly one SF con. And in listening to that tape now, it's clear that a polite audience could not possibly have made it any clearer that we should stop singing and just play the instrumentals, but we didn't pick up on that during the concert. We figured we were taking a risk by doing instrumental pieces at a con in the first place -- not only weren't we doing filk but we weren't even doing words? How crazy is that? And in reality, that was our best, and best-received, stuff and we should have done more of it.

The interview meme is going around again, and in starting to respond to my questions from

hrj I stumbled upon a way-overdue set from

ichur72. Oops! And, ironically, there's some overlap. :-)

( hrj's questions )

( ichur72's questions )

The conventions ("rules" is such a strong word :-) ):

Leave a comment asking for questions.
I'll respond by asking you five questions to satisfy my curiosity.
Update your journal with the answers to your questions.
Include this explanation and offer to ask other people questions.

Fair warning: you might not get your questions from me until after Pennsic, so turn on that notification email or check back here.

The latest batch of music to be digitized came with challenges. This was a pile of tapes, most of which were copies of tapes that in turn were recorded from various albums and tapes, not always in pristine condition. I'm pretty pleased with the job I've done in cleaning them up, which I have mostly done with judicious use of Amadeus Pro's wave-cancelling function. (Sample pure noise, then use that to cancel that noise from the track.) On one hand it's basic acoustic physics; on the other hand, it can be pretty impressive. (Not all noise is kind enough to be cleanly samplable, though.)

This reminded me of the first time I saw that trick in action:

On the Mark was privileged to work with several excellent sound engineers over the years. Mike, who recorded our later CDs, had built his studio in his home. We learned through trial and error that, especially for instrumental tracks, we made our best music by all playing (and listening) concurrently, rather than laying the tracks down one at a time with headphones. (We found it especially difficult to do the one-track-and-headphones trick for wind instruments, including voice -- being able to hear the sound you are making in the room, and not just back through the system, was critical for some of us.)

So we were recording some instrumental pieces, I no longer remember which, with everyone miked individually but not completely in isolation. Yes it limits what you can do in post-processing, but we'd done this before and it had worked out well. We knew not to mix or post-process on the day we record; for me at least, the ears are tired by then and the brain is still full of what you just heard live. Mix-down was always on a separate day and without most of the band there.

So, we had this great recording session, and some days or weeks later Mike and I sat down to refine it. And on one song, so faintly we didn't notice it at first, there was a strange sound. One by one we isolated the tracks until we found it on a recorder track recorded by

alaricmacconnal.

What was that? It didn't sound like it was coming from the recorder or its player. It was not, in fact, coming from inside the room. The studio had pretty good sound insulation, but some things you just can't plan for: the sound was a helicopter that had been passing overhead and had managed to bounce sound into the house just so.

The recording was otherwise very good, so I wanted to try to save it. My first thought was to replace the recorder track (the helicopter was not audible on any of the other tracks), but Mike pointed out that this would alter the sound of the whole because of the way we'd recorded it. But he had a related solution.

So we brought

alaricmacconnal back in to record that track again as precisely as he could (listening in headphones). He nailed it. And then Mike did the following: he used that recording to remove the recorder from the original track, used the rest of the mix to remove all other music from the original track, and used the result -- which was now helicopter and nothing else -- to then remove the helicopter from the original track. Ha!

It's entertaining when malware distributors are both bold and stupid, like with this email I got today: "Dear customer, we have disabled your email account because we believe it has been compromised. To restore, run the attached executable and use the following password: 12345". (Yes, it was sent in the clear.) How many things are wrong with that ploy? Sheesh.

Serendipitiously, 15 minutes after seeing that scam I saw this excellent tutorial on password management by vonstrassburg. No, not the "how to choose a good password" hints you already know, but, rather, how to deal with the fact that that doesn't really work. I particularly like his suggestions for managing the database file.

From browngirl: Mordor or Iceland? Match the pictures to the source.

I have recently been participating in a small discussion of renaissance music notation... on a mailing list for Jewish worship. No, I didn't start it, but I could hardly let those comments just sit there... And now I have pointers to other editions of Salamone Rossi's music that seem worth investigating (Don Harran in particular). The edition I have is funky; the music is fine, but it's a transcription of a 19th-century French edition and Hebrew transliterated into French phonemes breaks my brain. I transcribe pieces from this book if our choir is going to do them. (What I really want to see is a facsimile edition...)

This tiny horse (link from anastasiav) gave me a serious case of the "aww, cute!"s.

Some iGoogle plug-in served me this cat picture, and all I could think was "yeah, I've had days like that". It's tempting to turn it into a userpic, but I don't know whose property it is.

Erik sometimes makes a squeaking sound now where I would have expected a meow to come out. He still has a full-voiced meow, so it's not like he's caught kitty laryngitis or something, but it's still odd. Embla's normal mode is a sort of chirp (I've only heard her actually meow two or three times), but this sort of thing is new for Erik. Weird.

Pesach has been going well. Tonight/tomorrow is the last day, which is a holiday like the first day was. Yesterday Rabbi Symons led a beit midrash on the "pour out your wrath" part of the haggadah; more about that later, but it led me to a new-to-me haggadah that so far I'm liking a lot. (I borrowed a copy after the beit midrash.) When I lead my own seder (two years from mow, I'm guessing?) the odds are good that it will be with this one.

Tangentially-related: a short discussion of overly-pediatric seders.

Same season, different religion: researchers have found that portion sizes in depictions of the last supper have been rising for a millennium, though I note the absence of an art historian on the research team.

Same season, no religion: I won't repeat most of the links that were circulating on April 1, but I haven't seen these new Java annotations around much. Probably only amusing to programmers, but very amusing to this one.

Not an April-fool's prank: xiphias is planning a response to the Tea Party rally on Boston Common on April 14: he's holding a tea party. You know, with fine china and actual tea and people wearing their Sunday (well, Wednesday) best. It sounds like fun.

Edit (almost forgot!): things I learned from British folk songs.

From nancylebov: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality looks like it'll be a good read. Or, as siderea put it, Richard Feynman goes to Hogwarts.

Real Live Preacher's account of a Quaker meeting.

Thanks to jducoeur for a pointer to this meta community over on Dreamwidth.

I remember reading a blog post somewhere about someone who rigged up a camera to find out what his cat did all day. Now someone is selling that. Tempting!

In case you're being too productive, let me help with this cute flash game (link from Dani).

MP3s ripped from CDs or bought digitally (usually) come pre-tagged, including "genre". "Genre" has an eclectic set of options including folk, rock, soundtrack, children's, Christmas, gospel, international, electronic, and electronica/dance, to name just a few. Some CDs of Jewish music came tagged as Christian (!) or gospel, and I changed those to Jewish (a new category) at the time. An MP3 can have at most one genre (hence options like folk-rock, I guess).

Some of these genres are orthogonal to each other. Jeff Wayne's "War of the Worlds", "Pirates of Penzance", and "West Side Story" are all soundtracks, but they are not similar musically. Children's isn't a genre; it's an audience or application. "Nowell Sing We" and "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer" are both Christmas songs, but they're not the same at all (I would sort the former with "early", another category I had to invent because "classical" just doesn't fit the middle ages and renaissance). (Ok, I wouldn't have the latter in my collection, but work with me here...) I have no idea what the difference between "electronic" and "electronica/dance" might be, and how the latter differs from "dance".

I think the makers of the tagging system conflated style and purpose. We're running into this a lot with international dance music (often dances are set to folk songs), or with everything from folk to blues to rock ending up together because they're "Jewish", or SCA dance music being scattered across "SCA" (this must have been a custom category for someone), "dance", "classical", "folk" (?), and probably others. And I'd like to be able to tag the subset of folk music that is children's music (for selective exclusion), without losing its folk-ness.

I'm coming to the conclusion that the correct way to do this is to use "genre" for what it is musically and some other tag for usage (if it has a primary usage). Looking at the tags available to me in iTunes, it looks like I should use "grouping" for this. (I've never seen this field filled in, so I don't know what conventions surround it.) So early music is early music and some of it might be grouped as "dance", folk is folk and rock is rock and some of each might be grouped as "Jewish" (or perhaps "Jewish liturgical", since that's what I'm really after), and the Hebrew folk songs that are used for Israeli dances would "folk" (genre) and grouped as "dance", and so on. (Maybe we want to distinguish SCA dance and international folk dance; that's an implementation detail.) But before I try to do anything along these lines I'd like input: how do you capture multiple dimensions of your music? (Another option, just to throw it out there, is to use playlists as buckets. We're doing some of that but it doesn't feel sustainable to me.) I want to be able to find music by genre or by purpose, which says to me I want two searchable fields.

We are currently using the comments field to support tags iTunes doesn't give us. For example, there's no off-the-shelf way to tag the language of a song! So for the languages we care about we have entries in the comments field like LANG_HEBREW. We're also doing something similar to tag the Child ballads (TAG_CHILD_#_) so we can easily find the dozen variations on "Maddy Groves" scattered through the library. (Child ballads are a special interest of Dani's.) We're also using this field for meta-data about our own recordings (e.g. TAG_WEAK); "comments" probably isn't a good place for that but those were the first tags we added so we grabbed the obvious field and now we're kind of stuck unless we want to do a lot of work.

A problem with using "comments" is that you can't systematically add to a comment field, only replace it. So if we wanted to use it for other tags (like usage) and wanted to apply those in bulk, we couldn't without stomping some of our existing tags. Well, we could write a perl script, I guess, but I looking for something a little closer to the GUI.

So how do the rest of you track extra information? Or are we the most finicky among our circle of friends? :-)

Purim was this past weekend. We continued the tradition started last year of having "Esther's banquet" after the evening megillah reading and Purimspiel -- adults-only, food, alcohol, study/discussion. This year we had about 50 people, I think, up from last year, which is good to see. Last year I had brought some homebrew along. I hadn't planned to repeat that this year because there hadn't been a lot of takers -- but then one of the rabbis, in announcing the event to the morning minyan, said "and Monica's going to bring her homebrew, right?", so I shrugged and did. I brought 12-year-old horilka (made with spiced brandy) and some mead, and both were very popular. (They polished off most of a liter of horilka! Last year they drank maybe a cup.) I haven't actually been making stuff for the last decade or so; I guess I should queue up some more horilka in the fall when cider is in season again. (The ingredients in horilka are unprocessed cider, honey, brandy or vodka, spices, and time. Thanks,

hlinspjalda!)

I talked with the vet today. The test of Baldur's liver function came back normal. As we were discussing next steps (the ones that could produce answers are dangerous), she asked me just what he eats. There's dry food out all the time and its rate of consumption hasn't markedly changed in recent months, but of course I don't know who eats how much. Baldur has ready access, though. He gets tiny amounts of tuna and canned food; basically he gets to lick the spoon when I feed such to Erik. Baldur wolfed down half a can of food in about 15 minutes at the vet's on Thursday, so my vet suggested giving him real amounts of canned food. I've generally avoided that because it's unhealthy, but y'know, he's 17 years old now -- am I really worried about him picking up bad dietary habits at this point? So I'll give that a try; he enthusiastically ate most of a can of food today (between morning and evening), so we're off and running.

I see that the post office wants to cut a day of mail delivery to save costs. I don't mind the cut, but I think it would be much better for us customers/taxpayers if they chose a day in the middle of the week, say, Thursday, instead of choosing a schedule that sometimes means four days between mail deliveries. I assume that giving up all their Monday holidays isn't on the table. (There actually is a segue from the previous item to this one: this morning I refilled a mail-order prescription for Baldur.)

Dani recently ordered some Israeli CDs, and the MP3 tagging has been strange. Two or three different two-disc sets tagged one disc in English (transliteration) and one in Hebrew, for instance. Sometimes song titles will be one way and performers the other. In one case we got gibberish, presumably a unicode failure or something, and Dani typed stuff in by hand. Any one of those cases wouldn't have surprised me, but mixing it up on the same recording is bizarre.

My congregation's talent show was last night, and I thought it went really well. We had 14 performers (some individuals, some groups), three of them kids (two piano players, one violinist). A trophy was awarded by audience vote, and the ten-year-old violinist, who played really well, got it. I'm glad. Populace-vote systems have all sorts of problems, but fortunately, no one was really treating this as a competition and the winner performed very well, so it wasn't just that he was a kid. I'd estimate that there were about 200 people there, which is more than they were expecting. This was announced as our "first annual" talent show and the organizer confirmed later that yes, she has been asked to do this again next year. Yay! Maybe next year I'll get that Rossi quartet together. Or compose another song. Or both.

Material covered a pretty broad range -- show tunes, Yiddish songs, blues, jazz piano, baroque, old-timey banjo, and original poetry. One performer is a pro (someone said he sings with the Pittsburgh opera) and it showed. He didn't do operatic style (which I loathe -- can't understand the words and the vocal qualities are grating, though less so with basses I guess). He sang a couple of Frank Sinatra songs, very well.

My performance was very well-received; lots of people praised my singing, and I got lots of positive feedback for composing the song myself. ("I didn't know you composed music, too!" "Well, it's been mostly renaissance dance music and the like until now." "Um, ok." :-) ) The pianist told me he would like to play this again. I said that he is much, much closer to the decisions about what music gets done for services than I am and I hope he understands that it would be awkward for me to push at all. So we'll see. I also made sure he knows that transposition is a matter of a few keystrokes. (I'm betting that our cantorial soloist would want a different key.) The pianist also agreed to (later) give me some feedback on a few parts he found a little awkward to play, which I would definitely like to get. I had sent the music in advance with an invitation to do that, but he and his wife had their first child a few months ago so I don't imagine he's had any cycles to spare for that. (I asked if he is getting to sleep through the night yet and he said heck no.)

The pianist described the style of the song as "American" and "Reform" (he didn't elaborate), while a fellow congregant thought it sounded "renaissance". I'm not sure what it is, but not that last. :-) I would enjoy doing renaissance-style Jewish music, but that pretty much means choral works, not soloist stuff, so there are additional hurdles there. (We have a choir, but would they do work written by a congregant, or would that be all kinds of awkward if people didn't like it?) I wrote a singable (not "artistic") piece for solo voice and piano because (1) I could perform that in this show (I wrote the piece for the show) and (2) it has the best chance of future adoption. If it never gets used again well that's life, but I wanted to at least have the chance. The opportunities for a regular congregant like me to sing on the bimah are practically nil, so writing material that others sing on the bimah is as close as I'm going to get to sharing my work beyond one-offs like this talent show.

I understand that the show was being recorded; I hope to get a copy of that. Meanwhile, if anyone can point me to a summary "idiot's guide" to Garage Band or Logic Express toward the end of combining a MIDI piano track and my voice, I'll see what I can do. (I've played through the tutorial videos that Garage Band offers and worked through some Logic Express exercises from a book, but I'm not really getting it yet, and nothing has talked about real-time recording as opposed to just using samples.) I don't have good equipment, mind, but my USB headphones also have a mic that's at least Skype-grade. This would be so you could hear what it sounds like with the words as opposed to just MIDI instruments.

My synagogue is having a talent show on Saturday night, in which I'm performing. (7:00, show + desserts, $10 adults/$5 kids, all welcome; write before Shabbat if you need more info.) We were supposed to have a rehearsal tonight -- blocking/coordination, sound check, and all that stuff. I had hoped to be able to post tonight saying how good all the other performances sounded. (I heard about half of them at the try-out session I attended and that all sounded quite promising.)

But it's been snowing today. It didn't snow a lot, though it's been steady. But it's been snowing a little but steadily for a few days, and tonight the roads are a little slick. So, no rehearsal. We'll take care of sound/logistics stuff right before the show instead. I don't think they would cancel the show on account of weather.

I'll be performing a new composition of mine, a setting of Psalm 113 (the first psalm in Hallel) for voice and piano. Well, I'm not playing the piano (for which you should be grateful); our excellent pianist will be accompanying people who want him to. I'll be singing. This is the song's first public exposure. (Opportunities for a second seem limited, but who can say?)

Monica

Hadestown

Sierra to Big Sur in one step

[SCA] sad news from AEthelmearc

fun with ceremony (Coronation)

link round-up

flash "mob"

"7 things" again

"7 things" #3

music for the day

that was fun!

Pennsic: performances

triskaidekaphilia

[SCA] music & dance event

interviewed by metahacker

short takes

musical happiness

old cassette tapes and the secrets they hold

interviewed by hrj and (oops) <user site="livejournal.com" user

sound-editing

random bits

short takes (link round-up, mostly)

how do you tag your MP3s?

random bits

talent show

I guess "it's only snowing a little" adds up eventually

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