Addendum to the Litany for October 31st

From ghoulies and ghosties

And long-legged beasties

And things that go bump in the night.

Good Lord, Deliver us.

Borrowed from a facebook posting in the group "You Know You're An Episcopalian When ..."

The phone interview

One of the jobs of the Artistic Director of a choir, from time to time, is to be ready to give an interview over the phone to help in the promotion and advertisement of an upcoming concert.  This morning, that was my job.  The nice thing about this particular paper, albeit a small publication from a neighbouring town, is that I did receive forewarning about the interview.  The interviewer called last night to ask if she could call this morning at 9:30 am ... and within two minutes of 9:30, the phone rang!

In Edmonton, for the last fiver years or so, we have lost all our specialized music reviewers.  Our major paper did have one when I first moved here, but now they rely on freelance writers, or to have someone from their vast "Arts and Culture" department to do these interviews, if they feel so moved to do so.  So the same person who might be reviewing a new restaurant one day, is now in charge of previewing a classical choral music concert.

The challenge then lies with both parties.  The interviewer must be ready to ask the right questions, and the interviewee will have to be able to phrase the answers in such a way that a) the interviewer will understand, and b) the general public will also understand, and be interested enough in knowing more about the concert.  So when the question arose as to why I chose a work by Clemens Non Papa, she was less interested to hear about the complex interwoven imitative polyphonic setting, and more interested in the history of how he got the name "Clemens ... not the Pope".

I suppose after doing about a dozen interviews for this particular publication now, I should prepare the material a bit in advance for the meeting.  I often feel that I'm caught off guard on how to answer questions like "What is the focus of the concert"?  When in my mind the concert program grew from a number of non-connected, and really, non inspirational factors.

"Well, I sat down one day, with a deadline to come up with a season, and put together some pieces I really liked, tried to make ties between them, and eventually came up with The Spirit Sings! for the title for the concert, mainly because the title gives me the freedom to pick just about whatever I want as repertoire, as it covers anything "sung" and most things "sacred" or even secular music that can be thought of as internally spiritual ... then I threw in a few gospel spiritual arrangements and, presto! a concert is born" is not an answer that is going to sell tickets.

I do however think it's going to be a great concert!  That should sell a few!

Oh - and do check out our new webpage for Da Camera Singers.  It's tres chic! 

Solomon Poster

Here's the poster for the Solomon Concert.

I'm getting pretty excited about it - especially with the cast of soloists we've lined up for it!

Click on the poster for a larger image

Sarah Palin's Rhythm

I've seen this on a number of blogs now, but I think it's worth another post.

Pianist Henry Hey improvises an accompaniment to a Sarah Palin interview.

it's genius!

My Top "10" hymns

A friend of mine sent me a link to this blog a while back, and one of his recent posts describes a list of his favourite hymns.  

I've been involved in the Music of the Anglican church now for nearly 30 years, and over the course of that time I've managed to compile a list of hymns that have made it into favourites.  It's a running joke with my choir now that every time we sing a hymn that I like, I say that it is in my top 10, when in fact, if they have been keeping track, the top 10 might include as many as 100 hymns.

So here, in no particular order, is a list of my top 10 favourite hymns, and for the sake of clarity, I'll try to keep it to 10!

1. All My Hope on God is Founded (Michael)

2. For All The Saints (Sine Nomine)

3. Praise My Soul The King of Heaven (Praise my Soul) - it was our Wedding processional, after all!

4. Jesus Lover of my Soul (Aberysthwyth)

5. O Jesus I have promised (Thornbury - PLEASE not Wolvercote!!)

6. Love Divine (Hyfrydol - again NOT Blaenwern or, God forbid, Love Divine)

7. The Day Thou Gavest (St. Clement) - which reminds me - we are way overdue for a good choral evensong at our parish!

8.  Once to Every Man and Nation (Ebenezer) I mean really - who wouldn't love a hymn tune named after the Scrooge himself?

9. Come Down O Love Divine (Down Ampney and no other tune please!)  Actually, you can add any RVW tune to this list safely I think.

10. I Feel the Winds of God Today (Kingsfold) to which the words have been completely demolished in the new Hymn Book.

So that's the list ... for today ... tomorrow it would probably contain different ones.  Maybe I should do a top 10 by season.  Although, when we get into Lent, the list would be changing everyday! (this list may become a regular feature!)  Noticeable absences include Melita and Ewing.

So, if these are some of my favourites, what are my least favourites?  Let's see if I can think of 10.  None of these are horrible hymns - but they all trigger some kind of memory to me, that helped nominate them to this list.

1. Lord of the Dance (Lord of the Dance) - "They Whipped and they Stripped" was once misprinted in our leaflet as "Whiped and Striped" - it was a good moment, but otherwise, I'll leave this tune with the Quakers and Michael Flatley (with a certain amount of respect and appreciation for Aaron Copland as well) 

2. How Great Thou Art (How Great Thou Art) - Yes he's great - but the hymn - not so great.  One too many Catholic funerals, with one particularly horrid cantor, who took the pause at the end of the refrain (see #7) way too long.  Funny thing is, I can't hear this hymn now without smelling incense.

3. Now There is No Male or Female (Omni Die) I have nothing against the tune - but really - 

what was the poet thinking?

4. Pretty much anything with the tune Beach Spring attached to it.  I think it was because of a bad youth group experience WAY back when our Pastoral Vicar sat us down to listen to sermons of Herbert O'Driscoll.  I have nothing against the guy, but I cannot remember at that age (15?) being so mightily bored.  The next time I saw his name, it was attached to the hymn "Come and Journey" to Beach Spring, so that's my rationale.

5. Jesus Loves Me (Jesus Loves me) - memories of Catholic Sunday School.

6. Take up your Cross, the Saviour Said (Breslau) - actually, this isn't really one of my least favourites, it's just that, thanks to a friend, I can't sing this hymn without thinking of Foghorn-Leghorn singing "Camptown Races" ... and so it goes "Take up your Cross the Savour Said .. doo dah.... doo dah ..."  Forever ruined it is.

7. All Things Bright and Beautiful (All Things Bright or Royal Oak).  Too many "Blessing of the Animals" services.  In general, (sine nomine aside), any hymn with a "refrain" makes this list.  We did however have 26 dogs this year at the service - and they all barked on cue for the Alleluia's in "All Creatures of our God and King" - Reminds me of this part of "Mr Bean Goes to Church".

8. Just As I Am (Woodworth) - memories of a Catholic church in Ottawa that I played for, with a very bad funeral choir - who sang this at EVERY funeral I played.

9. Pick up your "Gather" book or some equivalent - find a hymn - nine times out of ten, I won't like it.  If it has guitar chords - the chance of me not liking it goes up tenfold.

10. Holy, Holy, Holy (Nicaea) - Ok, here's a touchy one.  Nothing against the hymn, but I was once organist at a United church where it was the "call to worship" EVERY Sunday.  The saving grace for me is that in our hymnal, they printed Godfrey Hewitt's descant - one of Canada's finest!  It's also the hymn that is best suited for Trinity Sunday, which is our Patronal Feast Day, so there's no getting around it really.

Have you any to add to either list?

It's only fun until ...

Well, I didn't exactly lose an eye, but this past weekend's Da Camera retreat had at least one exciting moment.

The location of our retreat is in a very large log cabin about an hour outside Edmonton, and a good half-hour from any major centre with a hospital (this becomes important later in the story).

From Friday night to Sunday morning, we have scheduled in about eleven hours of rehearsals, our promotional choir photos, which include new head shots for myself, our accompanist and my assistant, plus a variety of social activities which will include board games, ping-pong, foosball, cards, good friends and good wine.

For the most part everything went very smoothly, we made incredible progress on our repertoire, including big steps in the memorization process of our spiritual set (something that our choir is not used to doing - memorizing that is).  One valuable tip I can give for a choir retreat is that if you have the space, rehearsing in a circle, in mixed formation, does wonders!  I found we had fewer moments of fatigue - especially when everyone is so exposed and feels they have to work and concentrate that much harder.  We also had a head start on some of our tricky March repertoire, which we are planning on recording, and in our spare time, we sang through every Messiah chorus, including the one that Novello has put in the appendix - just for fun - and also because we are going to be a part of the ESO Messiah this year.

Saturday night, after our last rehearsal, we brought out the wine and games and played until late in the evening.  Having still one more rehearsal to do in the morning, I thought that an early sleep would be welcome, and I head to bed around 10:30... 

The room that my wife and I were staying in  was on the second floor, carved into the side of the house where the roof is most sloped.  Thereby creating a room with a very high roof on one side, quickly going to a crawl space on the other side.  The only place you can stand fully upright is either by the door, or near the window, which is cut into the slope of the roof.  The problem is - the roof is white, and the walls are also white, making it difficult to tell where one starts and the other stops, especially around the aforementioned window - where I found myself standing.  Looking forward to sleep, I made a very quick motion to my side of the bed (on the slopey side of the room) whereby, at full speed, my head made full contact with the corner of the roof and the wall under the window cutout.  Rather surprised at this, I fell to the floor in great pain and grabbed my head.  When I moved my hands to show my wife the damage, the great flow of blood started.

We do have one retired nurse in the choir, who suggested we seek medical help with this one, just to be sure I didn't leave my mark all over the room, like a CSI crime scene. 

Long story short .... 

2 and half hours later, I was back at the lodge, with three stitches in my head, and one tetanus shot in my arm.

I'm glad to be home in my own bed - where the angles of my walls and ceilings are all 90 degrees.

"Classical" Punishment

Fresh off the CNN news feed:

URBANA, Ohio (AP) -- A defendant had a hard time facing the music.

Ludwig van Beethoven's music fails to appeal to a man fined for playing rap music too loudly in his car.

Andrew Vactor was facing a $150 fine for playing rap music too loudly on his car stereo in July. But a judge offered to reduce that to $35 if Vactor spent 20 hours listening to classical music by the likes of Bach, Beethoven and Chopin.

Vactor, 24, lasted only about 15 minutes, a probation officer said.

It wasn't the music, Vactor said, he just needed to be at practice with the rest of the Urbana University basketball team.

"I didn't have the time to deal with that," he said. "I just decided to pay the fine."

Champaign County Municipal Court Judge Susan Fornof-Lippencott says the idea was to force Vactor to listen to something he might not prefer, just as other people had no choice but to listen to his loud rap music.

"I think a lot of people don't like to be forced to listen to music," she said.

She's also taped TV shows for defendants in other cases to watch on topics such as financial responsibility. As she sees it, they get the chance to have their fine reduced "and at the same time broaden their horizons."

After the first reading of this article, I laughed.  However, on second reading there were a few things which upset me a bit (our furnace broke down this morning, and it was -4 celsius  when we woke up - I'm a bit grumpy I think).  

As someone who spends six hours a week teaching an introductory music appreciation course, I take a great amount of pride in teaching the fundamentals of the History of Western European Music, and 20th/21st century music to students who for the most part do not have any previous knowledge of the subject matter.  What really excites me though is when I have student who admits to me at the end of the semester that they took the course as an "easy A", but ended up enjoying the course so much that they now regularly attend concerts and seek out good recordings.

However, here is a judge who ruled that a person should listen to "classical" music as a punishment? And justifying it by saying "I think most people don't like being forced to listen to music".  As if to say - - since his neighbours didn't like the Rap music, a suitable punishment is to force him into listening to Beethoven?  (Give me 15 minutes with this kid - and two recordings of MY choice.  I think I could turn him around).

I once had a landlord knock on my door and tell me to turn my music down ... I was listening too the Sanctus from the Pizzetti Requiem.  My guess this had less to do with the genre of music, and more to do with the volume.

Looking ahead

On October 17th, Podium Speak will be celebrating it's first Birthday, and I've taken a moment or two in the past day to reflect on what the purpose of my blog is, and what I hope to achieve with it.

Still now in its infancy, and trying to find a voice amidst the other great blogs that I read everyday, I find that I struggle from time to time to think of a creative, individual, and thoughtful post.  Once in a while, an article will pop up that will make for an easy post, but to find a topic outside of a borrowed subject can be difficult.  My topics have ranged from the mundane to the serious, from the pedagogical to the theoretical, and occasionally (and most recently) the political.

The coming months are pretty full up with concerts and rehearsals, and will likely not leave me with a lot of energy to think up creative posts, so what I hope to do is write a bit about the various projects I am involved with, which include my first ever staged opera, and conducting a Handel oratorio (which is NOT Messiah).  You can read more about these projects here.

You'll have to excuse me if the posts become rambling sessions, but the hope is that there will a topic or two, whether it be about performance practice, rehearsing and conducting pedagogy, or just plain straight forward observations.  I'll probably also work on program notes and translations through this venue.

I tend to go about my daily schedule without much thought about what's coming up next, so having a few things down in writing might assist me with the planning - and certainly be an interesting look back for me in a few months.

I'll still post interesting articles and silly stories (and likely my strong opinions on the current and future political landscape) from time time.

I hope you enjoy the journey!

In other news - a recent cold front has brought the season of Fall upon the northern Alberta capital, so the golf clubs are being removed from the trunk, and being replaced by the curling broom.  The first draw is tonight (the only night a week where I normally do not have a rehearsal) - I anticipate soreness in the upper body tomorrow morning.

I am so smrt!

I'm not sure how much of an exact science there can be in a study which only involved 40 people, but I sure like the conclusions!

Taken from http://www.physorg.com/news142185056.html

Musicians use both sides of their brains more frequently than average people

Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.

The research by Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park is currently in press at the journal Brain and Cognition.

"We were interested in how individuals who are naturally creative look at problems that are best solved by thinking 'out of the box'," Folley said. "We studied musicians because creative thinking is part of their daily experience, and we found that there were qualitative differences in the types of answers they gave to problems and in their associated brain activity."

One possible explanation the researchers offer for the musicians' elevated use of both brain hemispheres is that many musicians must be able to use both hands independently to play their instruments.

"Musicians may be particularly good at efficiently accessing and integrating competing information from both hemispheres," Folley said. "Instrumental musicians often integrate different melodic lines with both hands into a single musical piece, and they have to be very good at simultaneously reading the musical symbols, which are like left-hemisphere-based language, and integrating the written music with their own interpretation, which has been linked to the right hemisphere."

Previous studies of creativity have focused on divergent thinking, which is the ability to come up with new solutions to open-ended, multifaceted problems. Highly creative individuals often display more divergent thinking than their less creative counterparts.

To conduct the study, the researchers recruited 20 classical music students from the Vanderbilt Blair School of Music and 20 non-musicians from a Vanderbilt introductory psychology course. The musicians each had at least eight years of training. The instruments they played included the piano, woodwind, string and percussion instruments. The groups were matched based on age, gender, education, sex, high school grades and SAT scores.

The researchers conducted two experiments to compare the creative thinking processes of the musicians and the control subjects. In the first experiment, the researchers showed the research subjects a variety of household objects and asked them to make up new functions for them, and also gave them a written word association test. The musicians gave more correct responses than non-musicians on the word association test, which the researchers believe may be attributed to enhanced verbal ability among musicians. The musicians also suggested more novel uses for the household objects than their non-musical counterparts.

In the second experiment, the two groups again were asked to identify new uses for everyday objects as well as to perform a basic control task while the activity in their prefrontal lobes was monitored using a brain scanning technique called near-infrared spectroscopy, or NIRS. NIRS measures changes in blood oxygenation in the cortex while an individual is performing a cognitive task.

"When we measured subjects' prefrontal cortical activity while completing the alternate uses task, we found that trained musicians had greater activity in both sides of their frontal lobes. Because we equated musicians and non-musicians in terms of their performance, this finding was not simply due to the musicians inventing more uses; there seems to be a qualitative difference in how they think about this information," Folley said.

The researchers also found that, overall, the musicians had higher IQ scores than the non-musicians, supporting recent studies that intensive musical training is associated with an elevated IQ score.

Source: Vanderbilt University

Tongue Twister of the day

There I am in front of the choir this week, trying to teach this line to the choir, from Handel's Solomon:  "Now the hard fought battle won" Which is set in a very excited double-choir-quickly-sung-polyphony type of thing.  

Of course in good English diction, the "r" in "hard" should not be pronounced.

So I demonstrate .. "Hard Fought .. H-aw-d Fought ... h-aw-d fought ...  Hot Fart" 

Well, so much for productivity on that movement.

Let's see you say "Hard Fought" 10x fast!