Author: Laura Conrad

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead

I read Tom Stoppard’s play in college, and had never had a
chance to see it, so I put this
movie on my Netflix Watch Now queue when I noticed it. It’s
directed by Stoppard himself, and has a cast with some notable
stars in it.

It was one of the high points of that course in college — we
read a lot of good literature but most of it was stuff I’d read
already — this was an example of something I wouldn’t have read
on my own but really enjoyed.

The memorable scenes are all really good. There’s some less
memorable stuff that doesn’t get too tedious in between. As you
would expect, the parts that Shakespeare wrote are pretty
conventionally acted, except for bringing out the conceit that
nobody, including the two characters themselves, can remember
which is which. I gave it 3 stars.

If you don’t know the play and want to know whether you want
to, here are the parts I remembered fondly from reading it:

  • R. and G. play a game of “Questions”, where you have to
    always ask a question and it can’t be a non-sequitur or a
    rhetorical question. Then after their first encounter with
    Hamlet they score it by those rules.
  • They try to decide whether Hamlet is mad today based on his
    “when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw,”
    speech, and fail to determine the direction of the wind, where
    North is, or the time of day.
  • The statement that toenails never grow.

You can see some of these quotes out of context at imdb.com,
but it really isn’t one-liner humor.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000777I88&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Kombucha


[kombucha]

I talked to someone yesterday who’s been brewing Kombucha. I’d
heard of it but never tasted any, so I picked up a bottle at the
grocery store last night.

I just had some, and enjoyed it. It’s a pleasantly sour
taste. The bottle I bought is a bit sweeter than I would aim for
if I were brewing my own.

So I might just try brewing some. Brewing beer is really a bit
strenuous and space intensive for my current way of life, but I do
like having living things to watch in my kitchen.

Lohengrin at Bayreuth

I enjoyed this
DVD quite a lot, although it’s probably a bit long to be a
good introduction to Wagner if you don’t already know you want
to watch him.

With my memory refreshed on my previous viewing of the opera by
my post
last Monday, I could see that the Bayreuth organization
and Werner Herzog (who did the stage direction) had to struggle
with many of the same problems that the Met touring company so
flagrantly failed to overcome.

Of course, the DVD had electronic means of overcoming any
imbalance between the singers and the orchestra, but probably
they hire singers to sing live at Bayreuth who have the right
vocal equipment. This is less rare than the right vocal
equipment for Hynes Auditorium, since Wagner designed his
theater very carefully for exactly that kind of production,
whereas Hynes Auditorium was designed for something else. (I’m
not really sure what, but it wasn’t Wagnerian opera.)

They coped with the problem of opera singers not always
grabbing the right end of the sword in the heat of all the other
things they have to think about by giving them “swords” that were
like wiggly light-sabers, which could be held anywhere along the
length of the weapon. The sword fights weren’t particularly
elaborately staged, but they did always seem to attack with the
“point”. The light-sabre conceit made some good lighting
effects possible.

The Swan was a stuffed Swan head and wings on the actor playing
the non-singing
role of Gottfried. And lots of lighting. As I remember the
Hynes Auditorium production, it wasn’t at all clear where the
dopy looking boy came from at the end. In this production, you
wonder why you can see the boy with the stuffed swan on his head
when none of the characters can. It’s one of the places where
I’m sure Wagner would have loved Hollywood special effects.

I thought all the singing was quite good. The acting was a
little more variable — Elsa was very good; Ortrud was
monochromatically angry; the men all verged on being a bit
wooden, with Lohengrin the best of the bunch. In general,
we shouldn’t expect opera singers who have been trained to act so that the
third balcony can see what they’re feeling to suddenly be subtle
in a film closeup. And I’m not sure we have the cultural
training to reproduce 19th century depictions of ancient
cultural figures in their public personas. We might well have
thought King Henry was wooden when he was addressing his
people if we had seen the real thing.

The scenery, lighting, and camera work were all quite good,
which you’d expect with a famous film director in charge. The
costumes were what I’ve seen in other Bayreuth-produced DVD’s —
nightgowns in attractive colors. This is one of the areas where
the production ignores explicit text in the libretto —
Lohengrin should have been wearing shining armor instead of a
vaguely steel-colored nightgown.

In general, I don’t believe people staging an opera from a
century and a half ago should feel compelled to follow all the
stage directions, or even all the staging explicitly called for
in the libretto. But I do wonder why they don’t change the
libretto when they’re changing the staging. Another place where
this production ignored Wagner’s writing was in the final scene when Lohengrin is
leaving his Sword, his Horn and his Ring for Gottfried when he
comes back. He does leave the light-sabre, but his costume
doesn’t have a horn, so he just sings about it without actually
putting anything down. This isn’t as irritating as when Brünhilde
is calling for her horse, and then talking to it for several
minutes and there isn’t anything remotely resembling a horse on
stage. But I do think they should address the problem when they
change something.

I spent a good part of the third act thinking what lousy wife
material Elsa was, aside from being able to deliver the Duchy of
Brabant. Before the wedding, she goes on and on about falling at
his feet and worshipping him. Then as soon as the ceremony is
over, she starts nagging him about telling her his name, which
is the one thing he’s asked her not to do. The marital
relationship between Ortrud and Friedrich is actually fairly
well-drawn, but virtuous women weren’t really Wagner’s strong
point.

There are other reviews: of this DVD at wagneropera.net,
and of the production as seen live (with a different cast) in The
New York Times. I don’t disagree with much that they say,
but I think the wagneropera.net reviewer was a little harsh on
the acting.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000YD7S2Q&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Semolina and Fennel bread

I originally got this recipe from the Cuisinart Bread Machine
cookbook. The bread machine died, but the cookbook is much
better than the one that came with the cheaper machine I
replaced it with.

I made it last night for the band, and everyone really liked
it. I’m including the original proportions, but last night I
only had 2 cups of Semolina flower (so I used an extra cup of
bread flour), and I used dried cranberries
instead of golden raisins.

Water, room temperature 1 2/3 cups
Sea salt 2 teaspoons
Fennel seed 2 teaspoons
Granulated sugar 1 teaspoon
Semolina flour 3 cups
Bread flour 1 cup
Yeast 2 teaspoons
Golden raisins 3/4 cup

Place water, salt, fennel seed, sugar, semolina flour, bread flour and yeast, in order
listed, in the bread pan.
When the mix-in tone sounds, add the
raisins.

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Report on the January 5, 2009, meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will meet as usual next week, January 12, at 7:45 PM at my place.

On Tuesday, January 19, I will be officiating at the election,
so we either won’t meet, or we’ll have to make some different arrangement.

The Lost Chord

Sunny and I walked by The Lost Sock Laundromat
this morning, and I started thinking about Arthur Sullivan’s
The
Lost Chord.

Of course, I first started composing a parody about a lost
sock, but I didn’t get very far, and I think if I had
managed to get something to scan properly it wouldn’t have been a
very good parody.

But then I started thinking about the frequently expressed
criticism that a “Great Amen” is two chords, not one.

My guess is that Arthur Sullivan, who was one of the best-known
composers of his era, knew at least as much music theory as these
critics, and if he found that the poem spoke to him anyway, we
should at least give it a chance to speak to us.

Certainly we’ve all had the experience of remembering having
been inspired by an idea, but not remembering the idea. I have
it several times a week with this blog — I sit down and
remember that I’d had a really good idea on last night’s walk,
but not what the idea was. I don’t personally feel particularly
inspired by the idea that the angel of death will bring back all
my lost blog post ideas on my deathbed. But of course, my blog
post ideas may well be less inspiring than Arthur Sullivan’s
organ improvisations, or even Adelaide Proctor’s.

It’s not a particularly easy song to sing, even with the music
in front of you and an accompaniment, but Sunny and I managed to
remember most of the words and stumble through some approximation
of the notes in the half mile walk home. It’s really not a bad song at all.

There’s an arrangement (I think by Clifford Bevan) for Serpent
Ensemble. If you have serpent players who can possibly do
something like tuning the chords, it’s probably fun to play,
although like most serpent ensemble arrangements, it probably
involves the top voice squeaking too high and the bottom voice
grumbling too low and only the middle two voices actually have the
kind of
fun that people go into playing serpent for.

Lohengrin at Hynes Auditorium

I notice that Netflix is finally shipping me Lohengrin as
directed by Werner Herzog, so I’ll tell you about the only live
performance I’ve ever seen, to explain why I wanted one with a
real director.

It was sometime in the 70’s; I remember discussing it with
people I worked with in 1976, so probably then, although I did
stay in touch with those people for a while afterwards.

I thought the idea of Wagnerian opera was wonderful, but I’d
never had a chance to see one. I didn’t have an operagoers
income, but I decided that when the Metropolitan Opera was going
to do Lohengrin in Boston, I should buy a ticket
anyway. My sister wanted to come too, although for her it was both more
money than she really had and a fairly long drive into Boston.

We didn’t get the top price tickets, but they were fairly good
seats — pretty close to the front, with a pillar you had to
move your neck to see around occasionally.

James Levine had just become music director of the Met, and had
a fine reputation as a conductor. The orchestra in this
performance was wonderful.

The minor roles were also well-cast. I particularly remember
Mignon Dunne (Ortrud) fondly — I had previously seen her as a
magnificent Carmen who threw things. In this, she was a
magnificent Ortrud who threw things. I don’t know whether he
has a wider acting range than this, but it’s a pretty good skill
for a mezzo-soprano. In any case, the fact that we had no trouble
hearing either the mezzo or the baritone or the bass indicates
that a properly selected soprano and tenor should have been
audible.

They weren’t. James Alexander played Lohengrin. In addition
to being largely inaudible, even as close to the stage as we
were (probably closer than 80 or maybe even 90 percent of the
audience), his stagecraft left one wondering whether he knew
which end of the sword to hold on to.

Elsa was played by a singer whose name I’ve forgotten, but at
the time I was excited about hearing her because she had been a
good Countess in a recording of The Marriage of
Figaro that I’d heard. I probably would have still
been excited if I could have heard her, but her Mozart soprano
voice was completely inadequate to the demands of singing over a
full Wagner orchestra in Hynes Auditorium.

The staging in general was pretty ludicrous. In the scene
where armed men break into Lohengrin and Elsa’s bedroom, and
Lohengrin needs to get his sword out of the chest, Wagner’s
stage directions say that Elsa hands it to him. They don’t say
anything about her needing to run around him to get to the chest
first so that she can obey the stage direction to hand it to him.
The staging of the subsequent sword fight would have embarrassed
any decent high school theater production.

The Chorus sang well enough, but stood in sections facing the
conductor, even when they were allegedly imitating a bunch of
happy guests at a wedding.

The first thing most reviewers mentioned about this production
was that there was no swan. It was just a spotlight in the
reeds at stage rear. I suppose better acting could have made
you believe that the characters were seeing something
transcendant in that spot of light, but I didn’t.

I had studied the libretto carefully before going to see my
first Wagner opera, and it reminded me that the chapter that in
literature and music textbooks is called “Romanticism”, in
history books is often titled “The Rise of European
Nationalism”. In Lohengrin’s farewell speech, he says:

Deutschland sollen noch in fernsten Tagen
des Ostens Horden siegreich nimmer ziehn!

Never, not even in the most distant future,
shall the hordes from the East rise up in victory against Germany!

I thought it would be appropriate for a modern audience to hiss
and boo at that point, but I couldn’t hear the words well enough
to know when it came. I don’t know a lot of German, but both
Deutchland and Horden are in my vocabulary.

So in conclusion, when the Met decided a couple of years later
to discontinue touring to Hynes Auditorium, I wasn’t
disappointed, and I had the impression that a lot of the people
who said they were hadn’t actually ever attended a performance
there. If you search the Times Archive, you will find
complimentary reviews of this production, but they all have
bigger names in the star roles. If the Met touring company had
put enough energy into casting and staging it would probably
have been more successful, although I doubt that Hynes
Auditorium would have ever made anyone’s list of the great opera
houses of the world.

The Addams Family (original series)

I’ve had this
series on my Neflix Watch Now Queue for a while, but I
noticed it’s going away this week, so I started watching it
yesterday.

It holds up pretty well for something almost half a century
old. It’s amusing to note that the “normal” people brought in
as foils for the wierdness of the Addamses seem almost stranger
than the regulars.

For instance, the truant officer who comes to tell the Addams’s
that they have to send their children to school, holds his Fedora
hat in his hand the whole time he’s inside, and fiddles with it
when things get tense. The school principal, on the other hand,
ghoulishly participates in Morticia and Gomes’ game of inventing
tortures for the Superintendant.

Thing is as good as ever, and the harpsichord playing seems
really good, although of course the instrument isn’t in a class
with the best modern examples. One assumes they had heard the “skeletons copulating on a tin roof” description of the sound before they used it.

If you have Watch Now, and want to see if you’d enjoy the old
series, you should check it out before it goes away on January 7.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B000V3JGIS&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

The Elizabethans were doing ASCII sorting

One of the oddities of Elizabethan publishing, which I have
retained in my transcriptions of Elizabethan music, is that they
write roman numerals differently from the way your clock does.

Specifically, your clock writes “4” as “IV”, that is, one
subtracted from 5. The Elizabethans didn’t do that — they
wrote “IIII”, and similarly “VIIII” for “9” and “XVIIII” for
“19”.

There turns out to be a major advantage to this for computer
sorting — if you don’t go up past 50, the ascii roman numeral
sort ends up in numeric order. If you were to sort the digits
on a clock in ascii, you would end up with “IX” coming before
“VIII”, but in the Elizabethan coding, “VIII”, “VIIII”, and “X”
come out in the right order (unlike “8”, “9”, and “10”).

I was thinking I might have to write some code to get the
pieces in the right order, but a typical Elizabethan music book
has 20 or 21 pieces in it, so using their roman numerals, I can
just tell mysql to “order by” and everything just works!

Urban snow architecture

We had about three inches of snow yesterday. It was just
enough to need to plow and shovel, but building a snowman of any
size would have been hard work.

[snow cave]

This snow cave was hollowed out of the pile of snow shoveled
from a sidewalk in front of a convenience store, and plowed from
a fairly wide street. I tried to get Sunny to investigate it so
you could get a better idea of size, but he was more interested
in investigating a nearby candy wrapper. Those are fairly large
dog footprints you see inside it.

It’s the kind of convenience store where people sometimes leave
their dogs tied up in front so they can run in and get
something. (Not Sunny; he gets uncomfortable and when he’s
uncomfortable, he makes the people around him uncomfortable.) So
this cave might have been shelter for a small dog.

I’ll either take up taking my camera on walks more often, or
get a better camera on my next cell phone.