In Case You Want to Throw a Sibelius Party

Jean Sibelius is popping up everywhere recently, as more and more people become interested in his music. If you are one of those people (you know you who are) and you're tempted to throw a Sibelius party, you'll of course need his punch recipe. I think this should become a staple at our musicology gatherings around here.

In fact, Sibelius would probably be the life of any party as he was known during his lifetime (and after) as a man with a huge passion for drink and cigars. So in case you're curious, you can also find his personal choices in alcohol and in cigars. Is there nothing the internet cannot tell us these days about the lives of composers?

Henry Brant (1913-2008)

Although I've known about it for two days, I'm only now blogging about the passing of Henry Brant, one of Canada's greatest composers who often gets lumped in with all us Americans because, like so many composers, he was influenced deeply by the legacy of Charles Ives.

Brant took different lessons from Ives than most composers. In works like The Unanswered Question, Ives separated his musicians in space to create a different feeling than a closely spaced ensemble. Brant took that notion of spatial music to its logical extreme. So, for instance, in 1984 he wrote a work called Fire in the Amstel for four boatloads of 25 flutes each, four jazz drummers, four church carillons, three brass bands, and four street organs. That's right, 100 flutes, all floating along. Music sounds different over the water, and that was the sound he wanted.

I first became aware of Brant when I started my dissertation research. Brant actually played in Harry Partch's concerts sponsored by the League of Composers at Carnegie Hall in 1944. In fact, Brant had a double flageolet, so Partch even wrote two settings from Joyce's Finnegan's Wake for a second concert at Columbia that used the instrument (or two flutes if you don't have a double flageolet). So I decided to contact him as he was only 87 years old and interview him about his experiences with Partch. He remains the only composer who wouldn't consent to an interview, but I can't blame him; who would want to be interviewed about someone else's music. by all accounts he was a bit crusty in character and always wore his signature visor in public, but created an enormous body of fascinating music that eventually someone will attempt to tackle. for now, you can get recordings of the works, but I'm sure nothing matches them in live performance.

Sam's New Trick

I sometimes think Sam reads this blog regularly. He often jumps on the computer, clicks away with the mouse, and looks chagrined when we catch him, but I always assumed he was trying to play more Thomas games. Now I know that he's actually trying to read the blog.

I make this statement because last Friday, I posted about his sleeping. And sure enough, Friday night he decided to try a new trick. It used to be that when Sam woke up, he would lounge in bed, talking to himself and rolling around. Friday night, though, he woke up at 2:00 in the morning with a loud cry. I woke up at the sound of his voice and decided to wait and see if he was waking up or just crying out in his sleep. Then I hear the doorknob on his door click open, a quiet "pad, pad, pad" as he walked across the hall, and then the click of my door closing. Suddenly I feel Sam climbing over me, proclaiming that he needed to sleep with me.

I asked him if he were alright, but he just repeated his statement and snuggled down under the covers.

Cute, right? Well, Sunday morning at 6:00 he woke up again. Same clicking, same pad, pad, padding. But this time he wanted to play instead of sleep. He did it again this morning, only instead of coming to see me, he headed downstairs where Joy is sleeping in a recliner, wormed his way into the chair next to her, and asked if he could watch TV.

Next thing we know, he'll go out and get the paper and make us breakfast without waking us up to ask if we like our eggs over easy or scrambled.

Little Orphan Boy

You would think that, being over 2 1/2 years old, Sam would have finally settled down and become a good sleeper. If you put that logic into a paper and turned it into me next week, I would probably agree and put a blue smiley face next to your fine use of evidence to extrapolate a reasoned guess.

And we both would be horribly wrong.

Sam does sleep better. Most nights he sleeps through the night. He's learned how to settle himself down and drift on off to sleep. It just takes about an hour for him to settle down. So we shudder as feet kick against the window pane (since his bed is right up under his room's window), we listen in amusement to random stories about trucks and pumpkin patches that he tells himself to stay awake, and we feel the house shake as he stands up on the bed and throws himself into his pillows. We try to calm him down with soothing music and stories and cuddles and it sometimes works, but often does not.

And then there is the little orphan boy. On nights one of us returns late from a concert or from practice or from work, neither Joy or I pull into our garage. Sam's bedroom is right over the garage, and if he is halfway asleep, the knowledge that someone has returned to the house wakes him back up as he demands new hugs from whomever has arrived. So we park in the driveway. Since our lights will shine in his bedroom (since the curtains aren't finished yet), we even often even turn off our headlights as we pull in the driveway. But by the light of our parking lights, we sometimes see Sam peering out his window at us, as if begging to be released. You know those films where the hungry orphan gazes wistfully out his window, his gaunt cheeks illuminated by the moon? That's Sam. That's our little orphan boy. It is such a funny sight, that I'm sad when I don't see it, even though it means I'll have to go in and try to help him get to sleep. So tonight, when you pull in your driveway, look in the windows of your house and imagine our little orphan boy. And then go inside and get the sleep since the little orphan boy will wake you up at 5:45.

We All Need a Little Poetry

Someone has recently decided to pepper my campus with small sections of poems pasted to red construction paper. These poems have bloomed more reliably than our tulips and have provided, for me at least, a small mental oasis as I stop and take time to read the poetry.

As a result, I thought I would share a few poems from Ron Padgett, a poet with a delicious sense of whimsy and irony. Who else would write a poem like this one:

"Haiku"

First: five syllables
Second: seven syllables
Third: five syllables


Or another favorite:

"You Never Know"

1) What might happen.
2) How people will behave.
3) Oh anything.

Three rules that live
in the house next door.

Along comes the big bad philosopher,
and at their door
he hurls the mighty bolts
of lightning
from his brain.

The door is unimpressed.
Behind it the rules
are chuckling.

I witness this scene
through the kitchen curtains
as I rinse the dishes.

Obsolete Skills - Vinyl Music in a Digital Age

This afternoon, I'm giving a lecture at the National World War I Museum as part of an interdisciplinary class on the Great War. Coming at the end of the semester, my lecture deals with the cultural impact of the war, specifically on music, while another professor is speaking of its legacy in drama and poetry.

To prepare for the lecture, I began gathering recordings. As far as I know, none of the students (who range in age from typical college-age to retired and interested in WWI) are musicians so I'm assuming no musical training on their part. That means I need many recordings to illustrate what I mean; no shortcut to understanding as with my normal students. And since we are at the museum, we were encouraged to use artifacts from the period, either in the museum's holdings or in other area libraries. What better artifact than recordings of songs and bands from the era? Talking about the type of jazz that went over to Europe with American troops is one thing, playing them a recording from 1919 makes it come alive in a new way.

There's only one problem. Most of those recordings are on vinyl. The brand new, state-of-the-art museum's education room has all manner of digital toys, but not a record player to be seen. I could have taken my own, but I'm not even sure they have the set-up to plug in my player. More likely than not, the CD player I've been promised is part of a computer system.

The knowledge that so much of our recorded history is disappearing has long been at the edge of my consciousness - after all, so many of the works I want to play my Music Since 1945 class exist only on vinyl - but I hadn't realized what an obsolete skill even using a record player had become. Most of my undergraduates have no idea how to operate the turntable in my classroom. Many have never even heard a record. The CD was introduced in 1982 and successful sales of CDs were begun in 1985. My undergraduates were born in 1988.

This sobering thought (at least for me; many could care less), led me to a wonderful new website that I cannot stop exploring called, fittingly, Obsolete Skills. It collects and catalogs all those skills once necessary for contemporary life but now left behind as technology marches on. Skills like knowing to blow the dust out of your Nintendo cartridge before putting it in the player, formating a floppy drive, making a mix tape for that special someone, filling a fountain pen, and memorizing telephone numbers. Some of the list is silly, some bizarre, but all of it thought provoking. Any obsolete skills of your own?

So, How Did You Spend Your Weekend

I haven't been writing much recently because I've been a bit too sore. "Too sore to write?" you may be thinking. "Indeed," I think in return. The reason I'm so sore is the same reason Sam is sitting there to the right of these words, smirking as though he owned the world - after five months in our garage, his swingset is finally built.

The instructions on the swingset proudly declare "Can Be Put Together in a Day!" That statement is surely true, if there were not mitigating factors. Such as it being 34 degrees on a Saturday in April. And it snowing. Fingers crippled by cold make it a bit hard to properly put nuts on bolts and hold a wooden roof aloft over your head for any time at all.

But even with those factors, I did have all the right tools to get it done. Saturday morning, I unloaded the boxes, found the instructions, and went through the list of necessary tools. Socket wrench? Check. Hammer? Check. Tape measure? Check? Adult helper? Check. That's right, the instructions declare you need an adult helper and I had one in Joy's Dad. I truly could not have gotten the swingset together without his help. And because of his help, I'm living with one happy little boy. Last night at dinner, Sam would eat a bite of food, then stand up in his chair to look out the window and gaze wistfully at his swingset. Then he'd reach down for another morsel before hopping up to make sure the swingset was still there.

That look was worth all the cold and all the time.