59’th year – Page 6

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.

New Year’s Resolutions

First, a couple of resolutions I’m not making:

It’s silly to claim you’re all of a sudden going to start
working on something you’ve been doing no work on for years. So
I’m not going to resolve to learn a language or run a
marathon.
While there are lots of reasons why weighing 20 pounds less
would be a good thing, I’m not going to resolve to lose weight.
All the sensible things to do that lose weight have other good
effects, and the obvious ones that work and aren’t sensible
aren’t what you want to resolve to do. (E.g., I lost 15 pounds
in the hospital with my hip surgery, but if I can, I want to
avoid doing that again.)

So here are the things I’ve been working on some, but want to
work on more effectively in the New Year:

Housecleaning.: Cleaning out Bonnie’s house was an
experience I wouldn’t want to wish on *my* executrix, and
anyway, I enjoy being in my house more when it’s uncluttered and
reasonably free of dust, grime, and dog hair. I’ve made
progress on the public rooms in the last year, and I’m getting
better at doing the maintenance in small doses rather than
waiting until I’ve scheduled an hour or more. I have some ideas
for spending a little money on furniture that will contribute to
the uncluttered look in the living room, and I’m doing well on
throwing out a couple of things from the currently hopeless
rooms every Wednesday. So we’ll see if I make even more
progress this year.
Exercise.: I’ve probably gone backwards this year, because
the dog-walking is less aerobic with an elderly, arthritic dog
than with a young, vigorous one. So what I’m going to work on
is running more errands on foot by myself, and maybe figuring
out a yoga routine I can do with the hip restrictions that I
enjoy as much as I did the one I had before the arthritis made
me stop doing it.
Blogging.: I think I’ve made progress on making the blog
interesting over the last year. I’d like to be more consistent
about taking pictures to illustrate it, and maybe finding a
better focus.

A good story about the health care system

The health care system gets a lot of bad publicity these days,
including some on this blog. Most of it is deservered, but I
have a short story to tell about the system actually working the
way it’s supposed to.

[rash on foot]

Over the weekend while I was in Fall River, I started waking up
at night with an itch on my right buttock. As far as I could
feel, there was a fairly large area with itchy bumps.

On Monday morning, there was an area of rash on my foot, (Picture above. All these places where I have this rash are difficult to photograph.)
including one on the sole that was uncomfortable to walk on.
Monday evening, I noticed a similar patch on my right calf.

I woke up in the middle of the night that night sure I had Shingles.

So yesterday morning, I called the clinic where I get my health
care and asked to talk to a nurse. She said she thought I
should be seen and made an appointment for yesterday
afternoon.

The doctor listened to the story and looked at the rash.
He said he had no idea what it was, but he didn’t believe it was
shingles. He says shingles usually happens all the way down the
nerve path, so that there would be some rash in between the
buttock and the calf. And he also says that people have usually
felt some pain in the area before the rash appears. So he said
if it gets worse, I should come back, and he gave me some
cortisone cream to put on it for the itching.

So although I didn’t get much treatment (I’d already been using
cortisone cream), I feel much better. I slept much better last night. I’ve heard lots of
stories of people suffering for months with shingles. Of
course, there are also apparently stories of people itching for
a few weeks and then being fine, but those aren’t the ones
anyone tells you. So I’ll probably itch for a couple of weeks
and be fine. If I’m not, I’ll go back and see the doctor.

Pictures from Christmas in Fall River

They had a tree:

[Christmas Tree]

And a crêche:

[crêche]

They put more energy into decorating than I do, so there are
also things like this mobile:

[mobile of illuminated birds]

They also do a lot of baking. Here’s the baba after its
second rising:

[baba sponge]

I wasn’t in a good position to take pictures at the party when
all 40 people were trying to cram into the living room, so I
don’t have one of Judy
playing Chopin, but here’s one of our friend Harold playing
Christmas carols:

[Harold]

And here are a bunch of everybody being zonked after the
party. Judy had the best reason to be zonked:

[Judy after party]

Monte didn’t have as good a reason, but if you’d barked as
strenuously as he did at the beginning of the party to make sure
all 40 people knew it was his house, you’d be zonked
too:

Monte zonked

Sunny doesn’t look so zonked, but he is anxious:

[Sunny]

My mother, with 80 years of experience throwing parties, hardly looks zonked at
all:

[Helen]

We don’t know why Teddy was zonked:

[Teddy zonked]

Chopin Preludes

My sister’s party yesterday was a success. She starts it by
playing about an hour of piano music. This year the big piece
was a selection of Chopin Preludes.

I knew there were 24 of them, in all the major and minor keys.
I hadn’t realized he had arranged them in the Circle of
Fifths. The book starts with C major and A minor, and goes
around until the end is F major and d minor.

This March is Chopin’s 200th birthday, and she’s planning a big
all-Chopin concert for February 21, which may feature a
performance of all 24 preludes, but she hasn’t learned them all
yet, and in any case, she had other music she wanted to play for
her one hour. But she played a good chunk, and some of the ones
she skipped, she played the beginning and end of so that we
could hear how they fit with the ones before and after.

People who experience music or literature as excerpts from an
anthology often don’t get the idea of many short works being
part of a larger whole. I’d never realized that before about the
Chopin Preludes, and I know lots of people who never saw it
about the Morley Canzonets.

Phone and electric outlets

My mother’s house, where I’m staying until tomorrow morning, was buit in 1948. At that time, phones came from the phone company and ran on power that came down the phone line.
So nobody thought it was necessary to put a power outlet next to the telephone connection.
This started being a problem when my mother decided she wanted a cordless phone, which needed its base plugged in.
It’s now more of a problem now that they have DSL, and would like both the DSL modem and the wirless router plugged in.
I’m thinking about this problem because the current solution isn’t going to work this afternoon when 30-40 people come over for my sister’s Christmas party.
The right answer would have been to install an electric outlet where the original phone was, which is a corner of the hall central to the first floor of the house, with a smal table quite resonable for holding the mobile phone base, the DSL modem, and the wirless router. But instead of doing something that reasonable, they’ve been stringing electric cables around the corner to the kitchen and through the bathroom door, as well as an ethernet cable across the hall and into the guest bedroom.
They have of course also strung phone cables to various other places in the house, so I’m about to go see if any of those places have enough electric outlets that I can move the DSL stuff there.
If not, we’ll be off the internet from whenever we take things down until whenever we put them back, or in my case, whenever I get back to Cambridge.