Stop, said God, holding his head
Then I flip the tape to side A. The Glee Club set that fall opened with a four-part meditation on the death of Absalom: Josquin’s “Absalon, fili mi,” the Sacred Harp tune “David the King,” Tomkin’s “When David Heard,” and our premiere of Benjamin Broening’s setting of “When David Heard.” In other words, a fine uplifting set. Then I heard—a hum. Some multi-tonal stuff going on. I go over and look at the tape liner notes. It’s “Time Piece.”
“Time Piece“! Written for the King’s Singers in 1972, it goes from polytonal to high comedy to low comedy. After a while, there are cuckoo clocks, roosters, and other vocal effects, and then C. J. Higley, bless him, as the voice of God, yells “STOP!” The chorus intones, “‘Stop’, said God, holding his head…” and then continues for another five minutes more. Total run time: about 15 minutes. The Smith chorus (and audience) were moved to laughter at more than a few points.
And then we wrapped up with another three song set of spirituals.
I can’t imagine doing such a long guest set today. I also can’t believe that we only performed “Time Piece” twice (once during the Kickoff Concert that fall, once at Smith). But by springtime we were on to Young T.J. and a totally different repertoire.
links for 2010-03-18
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Today's daily WTF: a draft spec web API for zero-polling two-way communication in HTML and JavaScript. Because nothing says "cool" like having some server be able to ram data down to your browser unrequested. … Actually, scratch that. Nothing says "insecure" like having some server be able to ram data down to your browser unrequested.
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Executable file format hacking for fun and … profit? Seriously, if you've ever wondered how it's possible to get self replicating code to be small enough to fit inside a single UDP packet (SQL Slammer, e.g.), now you know what some of the tricks are.
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Best Alex Chilton anecdote of all time.
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Memories of Alex Chilton.
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Great post and series of photos of the Massachusetts March flood.
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Another good voice is gone. I had hoped that there would be a day before he died that Big Star would be playing on everyone's iPod. I guess that day is going to be tomorrow.
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A brilliant media put-on from Devo that reads like a lot of posts I've read on Pho recently.
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I find it interesting that very few of the anti-health-care folks I hear from online address the effects of the exchanges, or the tax cuts.
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Thought provoking survey of Eastwood's career on the cusp of 80.
Alex Chilton RIP
It’s hard to believe he’s gone. I know he was a completely different artist after the first two albums–hell, even their third album is a completely different experience–but listening to “Give Me Another Chance” he seems like he should be immortal.
Other posts: Joe Gross on Alex Chilton’s passing; another link to an article about the recording of the classic Radio City album.
Eastwood at 80
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Thought provoking survey of Eastwood’s career on the cusp of 80.
New mix: Happy time
Track list:
- Finest Worksong (Mutual Drum Horn Mix) – R.E.M. (Eponymous)
- Reena – Sonic Youth (Rather Ripped)
- Moby Octopad – Yo La Tengo (I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One)
- Scared Straight – The Long Winters (When I Pretend To Fall)
- Hot Pants Road – The J.B.’s (Pass the Peas: The Best of the J.B.’s)
- I’ll Take You There – The Staple Singers (Best of the Staple Singers)
- Helicopter – M. Ward (Transfiguration Of Vincent)
- Beautiful – Paul Simon (Surprise)
- Cello Song – Nick Drake (Five Leaves Left)
- It’s Not the Only Way to Feel Happy – Field Music (Field Music)
- Thirteen – Big Star (#1 Record – Radio City)
- Hopefully – My Morning Jacket (At Dawn)
- Fistful Of Love – Antony and the Johnsons (I Am A Bird Now)
- No Man in the World – Tindersticks (Can Our Love…)
- Happy Time – Tim Buckley (Morning Glory: The Tim Buckley Anthology)
- People Got a Lotta Nerve – Neko Case (Middle Cyclone (Bonus Track Version))
- Sweet Thing – Van Morrison (Astral Weeks)
- Number Two – Pernice Brothers (Yours, Mine and Ours)
Commentary: Did R.E.M. record “Finest Worksong” with the horns in mind, or was it a cynical touch by some producer when it was time to release the single? It reads as a brilliant move, though, 22 years later. I’m of two minds about “Reena”–such a simple song for Sonic Youth–but the fact that I can’t get it out of my head two years on settles it for me. Ditto “Moby Octopad”, which is less a song than an extended riff, but no less brilliant for that.
“Scared Straight,” on the other hand, is a song, and a flipping brilliant one. And the horns alone are worth the price of admission. The horns also provide a great segue into “Hot Pants Road,” which makes a very nice segue into “I’ll Take You There.” A nice little singer songwriter set–”Helicopter,” Paul Simon’s “Beautiful,” “Cello Song”–follows, before we get into the psychosexual set of “Thirteen,” “It’s Not the Only Way To Feel Happy,” “Hopefully,” and “Fistful of Love” (and only Lou Reed could set up that song).
And then the last set. I won’t say anything about it, except that “Sweet Thing” may be the greatest single song ever. How was it that I missed out on Astral Weeks for all this time?
(Update: now on Art of the Mix.)
Flood time again
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It's been a wet day in the Boston area.
Here comes the rain again
Well, it’s been almost four years since our first big flood took out our basement in May 2006, three years since we installed our sump pump. So I guess we were due for a big one. But I don’t think I was ready for this.
The problem started two weeks ago, while the snow was still on the ground. We got heavy rain while the ground was still mostly frozen, and the water level came up in the drywells until it threatened the finished bedroom, and actually flooded the garage and came a little into the utility room. We bought about $400 worth of pumps, got everything pumped out, and thought we were set.
And then we had a statewide flood emergency. I woke up at 5 am on Sunday to find the garage flooded. Deployed the pumps, and over the next day just barely kept up. But by last night I figured that we had it licked. The rain was supposed to slowly slacken over the next day and the levels were already going down.
And then that three year old sump pump failed sometime overnight last night, and the water table came up and flooded a corner of the basement, and showed every sign of coming further. I knew from the town email list that neighbors down the street already had two inches of water in their basements. I was able to scramble and get the pumps redeployed, got the sump pumping out again. Our contractor came and lowered our big sump pumps to the bottom of the cisterns, where they could take all the floodwater and redirect it out and away. And we’re finally catching our breath. For now.
Visualizing Listening
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Cool visualizations of years of listening habits. Of course, it might take a year or more to pull the data stream down; I’ve been a Last.fm user since 2005.
A visit from the Virginia Glee Club
I was going to write up Monday night’s Virginia Glee Club concert yesterday, but a couple busy days at work and a rehearsal last night ensured that I would get beaten to it (see the Tin Man’s writeup of the New York concert here). So I’ll just give a few thoughts about my experience at Monday night’s concert at Wellesley College.
First: I had not been back to visit Wellesley since our spring trip with Club in the spring of 1991. I saw an old friend (now the editor in chief at Rosetta Stone–time flies) there, but don’t remember much else except the beauty of the campus and of Houghton Chapel. On Monday night, it was a different story, largely because I arrived after dusk and had to scramble to get to the concert on time. Parking in the dark, I found my way back to the chapel via a brisk walk and got there in time to catch a little pre-concert warmup by the Boston Saengerfest singers. As I oriented myself, I saw a tall goateed man in a tux with a Virginia bow tie coming my way, and was delighted to finally meet Frank Albinder after various conference calls and emails. As we were chatting, up came another familiar face–Alex Cohn (Club ‘97), now writer and photographer at the Concord (NH) Monitor. It was starting to feel a little like old home week.
Then the concert started. The Wellesley College Choir were lovely (vocally), performing many numbers from memory, and their conductor Lisa Graham was energetic and brilliant. Their performance was followed by a four-number set by the Boston Saengerfest Men’s Chorus. It was observed near me that the average age of the men in the chorus must have been about 70, but their energy through their numbers was unmistakable, and the tenor soloist in the third number had a brilliant voice. And then there was their performance of “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady,” which had the entire Wellesley Choir in giggles.
Afterwards, the Glee Club joined Saengerfest for a joint performance of a few songs, then went through their own set—beginning with “Alle Psallite Cum Luja,” continuing through a set of more modern works (“Embraceable You,” an hysterical song about the real meaning of “Glee”), and then an alumni sing-along section. I had forgotten more than I remembered of Frederic Field Bullard’s “Winter Song,” but “Ten Thousand Voices” and the “Good Old Song” were permanently embedded in my brain. And the joint performance of the Biebl ”Ave Maria” with the Wellesley Choir was something else again too–not an SATB arrangement, but the two choirs traded verses before performing as a double chorus at the end.
If I had a tear near my eye by the end of “Ten Thousand Voices,” I had more from laughter after the show talking with Frank and the Club guys about past tours and their current endeavors (and seeing Frank and Lisa Graham exchange hats, above). I hope that all continues well for them on the road and that their crowds in DC and Virginia are full to overflowing.
Grab bag: Stones, Matasano
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Guess I’ll be paying money for another reissue. Lost “Exile”-era tracks are like lost “Pet Sounds”-era tracks.
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Today’s clever marketing award goes to firewall management vendor Matasano, who provide a hysterically funny “FCR-1″ form on the back of their marketing literature.
Grab bag: Changeling and Energizer
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Strong interview with Joanna Newsom.
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Backdoored battery chargers: They just keep going and going…
Glee Club tour underway and blogging
Grab bag: Goodnight Forest Moon
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Indeed. “Goodnight Force.”
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I, too, have been long interested in automatically synchronizing cardinal grammeters. But the Turbo-Encabulator’s use of the drawn reciprocating dingle arm to reduce sinusoidal depleneration is nothing short of brilliant.
Glee Club history: David Davis
David Davis, to the extent that he is remembered today, is best known for his arrangements and compositions for the Glee Club (“Summer Songs,” “Broken Glass”), but he had a long career in music of both a more serious and lucrative kind … though not at the same time. Originally from New Orleans, he came to the University with degrees from Peabody College, Vanderbilt University and Harvard. He made his name as a serialist composer, and got the sort of reception that serialists usually got (a 1964 New York Times review of a concert of his works noted of his Sonata for Trumpet that the piece “showed more manipulative ability than imagination” and that his Three Canzone for violin, clarinet, saxophone, and piano “went on too long with too few strong ideas to maintain its flow”).
In Glee Club history he is noted as a co-conductor of the Glee Club alongside Donald MacInnis, but that may be simply due to unclear chronology and poor record keeping. Certainly he was the sole conductor of the group in 1961, as attested in Corks and Curls of that year. Whatever the case, as a University professor he rose through the ranks fairly quickly. By 1964 he had been promoted to Chairman of the Department, having made associate professor in 1962, four years after arriving at the university. (This might explain Donald Loach’s transition to Club director in that year.)
Then in 1966, with one year left to go on his chairmanship, he resigned from the University “for personal reasons” and headed out West, to Hollywood. While subsequent student newspaper articles that discussed Davis (in the context of his compositions for Club) generally breathlessly reported that he was “now a Hollywood theme writer,” the extent of his career there is unknown. IMDB records only four credits for him, including one TV series (“Thrill Seekers”) and three films; the aforementioned H.O.T.S., a T&A film, was his last credit in 1979.
How does one follow a career in music and years in Hollywood? Why, by becoming director of a sanitary district in Oregon, of course! Davis retired there and was elected director of the Roads End Sanitary District in Lincoln County, Oregon, in 1994, a position he still held as of 2005.
