This past weekend, Daniel and I sat in the front row of Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas production of LOVE – an acrobatic fantasy based around the music of the Beatles. I was in heaven: I sang along with every shred of music that went by. The 50-something guy sitting next to me drank Scotch out of a large paper cup and sang along blissfully from time to time. I looked over at the section to our left: no one was singing, but all were in a trance, looking completely happy. I could identify every shred with the exception of two quasi-orchestral connector cues. My guess is that they might have been rejects from the orchestral score to YELLOW SUBMARINE. Songs from all time points of their oevre were mixed and mashed together — there was a few places where three songs were piled on top of each other. The music was loud without being deafening.
There was another element to the wall-to-wall music that made me think: the music was prerecorded. There may have been performers somewhere doing transitions, but it seemed like performer-less music: a collage of Beatles music — not about performance per se. The performance component was Cirque du Soleil. They paralleled the music beautifully. No scene ever seemed to go on too long. They are brilliant athletic artists.
If you ever need an excuse to go to Las Vegas, this is one. Tourism is down there, so if you decide you want to go somewhere and get some good deals, go see and hear LOVE. If you are truly a Beatles fan, you can’t miss this.
Here is an ad, so if you decide you want to go, the number to call is at the end of the clip.
This past week, composer, Bright Sheng was in residence at UCLA. He was indefatigable: he went from 10 to 7 with barely a break, going from master class, to lecture, to conducting his work for orchestra.
Afterwards, Paul Chihara tooks us out for a Japanese dinner in West LA. Bright sat across from me during dinner, so we were able to have a whole range of discussions, with a bottle of sake between us.
One topic of discussion was Anton Bruckner. I related my memories of my teacher, Leon Kirchner’s obsession with Bruckner; Bright shared Lenny’s late love of Bruckner. He then told me a remarkable story about this rather difficult-to-love composer.
It turns out that neither of Mr Bruckner testicles ever descended. He supposedly had a very high squeaky voice, and — now how would anyone really ever know this? — allegedly never had an orgasm. I had an “a ha” moment, realizing the correspondence between Bruckner’s sense of form, and his physical inability to have orgasms. Does his music ever have an orgasm? To be honest, I’ve never really asked myself that question — the answer is YES.
The gal who has been cutting my hair for the past few years has never had regular hours and is now attending Chinese Medicine school. So, I’ve had to go from salon to barber, settling on mediocre cuts from SuperCuts and such.
Yesterday I went onto Yelp, determined to find a place between my home and UCLA. I found a place on the Sunset Strip: a guy who seems to cut hair for old punk-rockers from the 80s and 90s; there were wild, gawdy pictures on the walls. Looking at his cut, I feared that I would walk out looking like Ric Ocasek of the Cars (see above), but no — he did a great job, and I plan to stay with him.
I asked whether he is still cutting rockers’ hair: “I got a call to do someone’s hair yesterday and was driven out to the hotel where he was staying. James someone. I thought he was a soul artist. When I arrived I saw this guy, bald on top, not black. It was James Taylor (see below).”
This quarter, I am able to provide all the “required books” from online sources. The students don’t have to pay a cent. (Actually, with the California state budget crisis, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were not an internet access fee, or some such fee, assessed.)
The prices publishers are charging for slim music theory text books is beyond rationalization. I am thrilled to see more and more public domain scans of traditional music, and professorial blogs and websites and webpages available on the internet that explain the issues perfectly well, and are free, or sometimes for a reasonable subscription fee.
Many of our students are “digital natives” and would really prefer their music library to be available on their laptops as PDFs. Many of the resources have music available as not only PDFs, but mp3s of General MIDI playback; mp3s of historic performances; and files that can be imported into Finale or Sibelius that can be printed as a score, or reorchestrated, or played back as MIDI files.
I still encourage students who are serious about building a (paper) music library, to not settle for these ancient editions, but to buy newer, better edited versions for their own libraries.
My composers colleagues may remember the famous COMPOSERS IN RED SNEAKERS from Boston. (They are still in existence I hear.) One of the founding members was Christopher Stowens, famous for doing the taped introductions to the concerts. He left New England a few years back and is living happily in Oaxaca, Mexico. I can’t recommend highly enough, his blog called Oaxaca – The Year After. He has had access to many of the great artists and chefs of this region. I can’t wait to visit him.
Here is a video he made of his visits. I especially love the incidental music he has cut in. What is it Chris?? You’re driving me crazy! Especially, the ending music.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
Sopa de Hongos – Cuajimoloya, Oaxaca
I have a series of videos of the cooks of Oaxaca and here is a special one. Normally, I filmed the most famous cooks from the best restaurants. I would spend all day with them, from early in the morning, when we would go to various markets, through a day of cooking and then, at the end of the day, eating everything they had cooked. I know, it’s tough work, but….
This is a restaurant up in the mountains in a village called Cuajimoloya, which is famous for its mushrooms. All kinds of mushrooms. The village is about 40k northeast of the city and is 25k up from the weaving village of Teotitlan del Vaille. The food was very simple, but absolutely delicious. It was a blast to film this woman just like the cooks from all those five star places.
This term, I will be starting each class with a folk song. We will sing, say, four verses; and with each repetition, I will expect the harmony to be richer and richer. I will give them pointers of how to learn to harmonize to any song. My fantasy is that by the end of the year, every student will have the courage to and knowledge of how to harmonize by ear.
This week we will be singing: “Skip to My Lou”, “Joshua”, “Tom Dooley”, and “Drunken Sailor”.
[Punctuation note: I have officially abandoned the homely American habit of having the comma or period inside the quote of song titles. To me, it just looks bad, and detracts from the integrity of the title. The title should be cited as "Skip to My Lou" and not "Skip to My Lou,".]
We spent a week in North Andover, MA last week. The day before we left we got socked by a big snow storm. As the snow began falling, I raced out and snapped this Christmas card picture of the back yard. The beauty of the snow was beautiful. I don’t miss the 2 degree weather.
I have just read (finally!) Lynne Truss’s terrific Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. This book is a must-read to anyone who wants to understand punctuation.
In it, Ms Truss discusses an old punctuation source that tries to differentiate how commas, semicolons, colons and periods (full stops) are different. This particular writer had a rather musical approach to the difference: a comma is a one-count pause; a semicolon is a two-count pause; the colon, three; and the period, four. She points out how ridiculous this really is, and that who in their right mind would really do this. Later she admits that the gist of it might hold some truth. Punctuation, after all, was originally created to aid actors in their presentation of texts.
My composer buddies all remember how Karlheinz Stockhousen, at various points in his life, serialized rests (of course). George Crumb and many other ’70s new-music-notation-revisionists created various sizes of fermati (so-called “birdeye”), and hybrid symbols that all indicated various degrees of pausing. Most of those symbols have faded away and we are back to a traditions fermata, a comma, and the double-slash “railroad tracks” sign. I would bet that if composers expanded the comma line to include semicolons and and colons, performers would understand them. On second thought, fermati give performers more flexibility.
In the book, she continues to point out what a hopeless party-pooper Gertrude Stein was with regards to punctuation: she considered all but the period to be useless – which reminds me of a joke:
How many lesbians does it take to change a light bulb?
Only one, and it’s not funny. (Told to me by a lesbian btw.)
Yesterday, after referring to Daniel as “my husband”, a family member asked me “does that mean you are the wife” to which I assured them that I was also a husband, not a wife. He then said that he was confused when he referred to his (female) friend and her friends as “girls” because she insisted she was “a woman”. I explained: “Girls are either ages 0-12, and 75-100. All the rest are women.” He replied: “Yeah, but she is 76.” Without losing a beat I explained: “…and a lesbian: ALL lesbians are women, and only lesbians can call each other “girls”. He now understood feminine appellation.
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