Author: Tim Jarrett

Programs of concerts past

Some new features on the Virginia Glee Club wiki. Pages have been added for selected Glee Club seasons which list the concerts, tours, and other events known for that season, and include information about the conductor and officers of the group, where available.

The most fun part of this section of the wiki has been the old concert programs. The administrator of the Virginia Glee Club has scanned quite a few concert programs, including the one from the premiere of the Testament of Freedom, and I was inspired to do the same, starting with programs and posters from the 1993-1994 season (that’s the group photo from the spring of 1994 above, as used on the poster for the Tour of the Northeast).

As always, contributions of information from other alumni are welcome as we build this record of the Glee Club’s history together.

Moving iTunes libraries from one hard drive to another

For the love of me, I don’t know how I ended up here again. The last time I moved my iTunes library to a bigger disk, I was able to use the Consolidate Library command and let iTunes do all the file moves. This time… not so much.

I was trying to do two things at once with this move: put all my music onto a larger external drive (a 1TB MiniStack from OtherWorld Computing. Can’t recommend the enclosure enough for form factor, ports, and reliability; my older 500 MB drive is in the same enclosure), and move to the new iTunes library layout, where there are separate top level folders for music, movies, podcasts, etc. This didn’t work, because partway through the process writing to the disk errored out. I quickly realized that the problem was that I was doing it over the network (the new 1TB drive and my older drive were both connected to my AirPort Extreme). So I directly connected the new drive via FireWire, left the old one on the AirPort, and tried to consolidate again. Only this time, it told me I didn’t have enough disk space. On the new 1TB drive.

What?

Then I realized what was going on. The restructuring of the library wasn’t moving files, it was creating another copy of the files on the same drive. I had started consolidating before I did the library restructuring, so now it was trying to write a second copy of all my music on the drive. Since I probably have about 515 GB of music to work with (some resident on my MacBook Pro’s internal drive), two copies weren’t going to fit on the new drive.

So now I had: a full copy of my library spread across the old drive and my hard drive; one partial copy at the root of my new drive; and another partial copy in the proper location in a Music subdirectory. I didn’t want to delete either of the partial copies because songs in my library were mapped to both locations; I couldn’t reconsolidate on the old drive for lack of space. But I still had over 160 GB free on the new drive, so I could probably copy over the missing files by hand.

So I’m going the manual route to clean up. First, I went to the Terminal and ran the comm command, which compares two text files line by line; I fed it the directory listings of the old external drive and the new final destination, and it spit out about 165 differences, directories that didn’t get copied from the old drive to the new one.

Second, I’m going line by line through the results of the comm listing. For each line, I:

  1. Copy the missing files from the old drive to the new one.
  2. Delete the old files from the old drive.
  3. Go to the matching tracks in iTunes and do a Get Info. Amazingly, since I’m copying the new files into the correct directory structure, a lot of the time I don’t have to do any more work and the library automatically finds the files in the new drive. Sometimes I have to browse one file at a time to link up to the new files, which is a drag.

I expect I’ll be done with the process sometime next week. Painful, but at least no data is lost. Then I can repeat with any files from my laptop’s disk, a much shorter list.

The final cleanup may take some XSLT fu. I will need to triple check the final library to make sure no tracks point to locations on the old drives. I’m going to try using XSLT on the iTunes Library.xml file to see if I can cull out the problem tracks that way; if not, it’ll be a matter of trial and error, because there’s no convenient way to find the file system locations of iTunes tracks from within iTunes itself, other than one at a time.

I’d love to have this be  a more error-free process. I’m beginning to think that iTunes libraries on external drives simply isn’t a well tested scenario by Apple.

Blast from the Past: Young TJ

I have quite a few updates to post about the progress of the history of the Virginia Glee Club on the wiki, but today’s item deserved a jump to the head of the line: the resurfacing of a lost recording of the 1993 Virginia Glee Club singing our commissioned work to commemorate Thomas Jefferson’s 250th birthday, Young T.J.

Some background: Thomas Jefferson is a Big Thing at the University of Virginia, the school he founded and one of only three accomplishments on his tombstone. When the 250th anniversary of his birth rolled around, there were a lot of stops pulled out to celebrate: Mikhail Gorbachev came to speak at the University, the Today Show did a remote from Monticello, Bill Clinton spoke at the Jefferson Memorial…

And Judith Shatin wrote a setting of the Declaration of Independence that proved what the Testament of Freedom had hinted: setting Jefferson’s writing to music was full of pitfalls.

The Glee Club had begun commissioning new works for men’s voices in the 1991-1992 season, and for Jefferson’s birthday we wanted something special. So our fearless director John Liepold reached out to his old professor and mentor Neely Bruce for a Jefferson-inspired composition. They decided that, since the Glee Club had already gone down the Jefferson words path with Testament, the smart thing was to choose texts that inspired Jefferson instead. Bruce selected ten texts from Jefferson’s Commonplace Book and set them to music that Jefferson might have heard in his youth, songs heavily inspired by the Sacred Harp and other shape note music. The result was Young T.J., a group of short settings that try to imagine what influenced the young Jefferson.

The Glee Club performed the whole work a few times that year, notably at our spring concert, and used a short set of the works on a number of occasions, mostly notably during our trifecta of performances on April 13, 1993. We began the morning at Monticello, shivering in the pre-dawn light on risers, and using Young T.J. to provide music for the commercial cutaways during the broadcast. I also remember standing at a urinal under Monticello next to Willard Scott, and of course Katie posing for pictures with Tyler Magill, Paul Stancil, Scott Norris, Denis McNamara, and Mitch Harris (above). We also performed portions of the work at the Jefferson Memorial for Bill Clinton and a capacity crowd (after a frantic drive from Monticello to DC at top speed followed by a sprint across the grass to get to the stage on time). A final performance at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond that night was the capper.

So, the lost recording. This page, linked from Neely Bruce’s publisher’s site, has a full set of recordings of all ten movements. When exactly they were recorded is subject to dispute–the page claims they were recorded at Monticello on April 13, 1993, but there’s no background noise and we didn’t have time to run and record everything that day, I don’t think. But they are unmistakably a document of the 1992-1993 Glee Club under John Liepold’s direction. And since none of Liepold’s recordings have ever been transferred to digital release (only three tapes, the 1991 Christmas Concert, a concert at River Road Baptist Church, and the Dove in the Hall recording surfaced from his time with the group through the summer of 1994), this is a nice present to have, even if it’s not available for download.

On winning a Grammy

Last night, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Tanglewood Festival Chorus, James Levine conducting, won a Best Orchestral Performance Grammy for our 2009 recording of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe. I blogged our nomination a while ago but am still delighted that we won. All the hard work seems worthwhile today.

Not that my work, as a member of the chorus, is onerous. In fact, I feel like one of the luckiest guys in the world today. We all come from our day jobs to Symphony Hall or Tanglewood, rehearse, and perform, and get to be part of something great together with musicians who train for decades to take that job.

So today, I’m grateful to the musicians of the BSO for letting us come along for the ride, and to our maestro James Levine for leading us down paths of excellence. (Even if, during the concert run for this recording, he did get mistaken for Keith Lockhart.)

Apple iPad: first reactions

Four reactions that I agree with (parts of) in response to Apple’s iPad announcement yesterday:

  • Doc Searls places the iPad in the context of vertical integration (apps all the way down to CPUs) and horizontal playing fields and says, “What you have to appreciate, even admire, is how well Apple plays the vertical game. It’s really amazing. What you also have to appreciate is how much we also need the horizontal one. The iPad needs an open alternative, soon.”
  • Dave Weinberger says that the iPad is the “future of the past of books” and says it’s missing interactivity and collaboration as key features.
  • John Gruber says that the iPad user experience feels like it’s all about speed, and says that Apple’s vertical integration play (the aforementioned Apple A4 chip) is responsible, and that “this is Apple’s way of asserting that they’re taking over the penthouse suite as the strongest and best company in the whole ones-and-zeroes racket” ahead of Sony, Nokia, and Samsung.
  • Michael at Cruftbox sums up the reactions of the rest of the world and says, “You’ll bang on about features, data plans, DRM, open source, and a multitude of issues. You’ll storm the message boards, wring your hands, and promise you won’t buy one till ‘Gen 2.’ The din will grow and grow as time passes. And then one day, in a few months, you will actually hold one and use it. And you will say, ‘I want one. Iwant one right now.'”

I think what disappointed me about the launch was not the device but the position it occupies. Jobs sees the iPad as occupying empty space in the consumer world between a PC (laptop) and phone. And there is probably room in that position. But the iPad seems also to be firmly positioned, at least for now, as a companion device. You sync it to another computer over iTunes. There’s no USB port or optical drive. It’s not going to be replacing anyone’s laptop any time soon.

And, frankly, that’s what I was hoping it would do. Because while it looks like it blows away its target use cases (web browsing, mail, calendar, gaming, music, book reading, even office apps), there are some very real use cases it doesn’t handle. And not just being a development platform. Like:

  • Preparing taxes (though Intuit could probably do a tax application for it)
  • Scanning documents (no USB port…)
  • Printing (ditto–though I wonder if it supports network based printing?)
  • Videoconferencing (no camera and no ports)
  • Organizing photos
  • Making a calendar or Christmas card

Additionally, I have question marks about some of the use cases that it seems to handle well otherwise. Like: can I point its version of iTunes at my 500 GB network drive and play music from there? How do the new iWork apps manage their files? (Remember, there is no user visible file system on the iPhone OS, on which the iPad is based.)

But, my quibbles aside, I have to confess that I’ve already talked with my wife about getting one. We’re pretty excited for the brave new iPad future. Because for most of what it does, it does beautifully.

1911 UVa Football Songbook

A quick post from the depths of Virginia musical history tonight. As part of a lot of miscellaneous University of Virginia memorabilia I got from eBay recently, I got an unusual item: a University of Virginia songbook that was handed out at football games. (Scans of the whole thing are available on Flickr.)  This particular instance dates from 1911, and probably from the November 4 game against Wake Forest. (The attentive among us will note that in 1911, six games into the season, Virginia was 6–0, while the uncharitable will note that the games were played against Hampden-Sydney, William and Mary, Randolph-Macon, Swarthmore, St John’s, and VMI.)

Football songs? Sure. All those fight songs and team specific songs that appear on Songs of Virginia really were current at one time, and sung at games. Even “Oh, Carolina.” (“They can manufacture rosin, but they’ll never, never score.”) Almost as much fun are reading the ads, for a bunch of businesses that are no longer around (the Jefferson Shaving Parlor, anyone?) As the house ad in the back exhorts, “remember the advertisers,” indeed.

The book was published “for the benefit of the University of Virginia Band,” and I suspect that—aside from contributing the text of “The Good Old Song” and maybe others—the Glee Club had nothing to do with the book, as all evidence is that the group was on hiatus in 1911. But it’s still fun to look at, and to imagine the modern attendees of Scott Stadium swaying as they sing 115-year-old words to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” never quite realizing the depth of the tradition that they are, however inadvertently, keeping alive.

More MacMillan

There’s a fair bit of chatter about the MacMillan St. John Passion, so I thought I’d do a quick roundup. I’ll lead off with three other TFC bloggers, two of whom I’ve already linked, then include a few other notes.

  • Tenore (Len): Free tickets available. Len writes, “While some of it is tonally challenging and a bitch to sing, most of it is quite melodic and beautiful.” Which of course drew a comment from the composer (seriously).
  • Angelina Calderón: From the depths of Symphony Hall. Angelina writes a little about the rehearsal process.
  • Jeff, aka Just Another Bass, has a set of great articles about the process and the piece.

Then there’s all the other writings, some of which stem from the piece’s first round of performances, others are more contemporary:

  • The Guardian, James MacMillan charts the progress of his latest composition The Passion. Interesting diary in progress of the work. My favorite bit from the article: “The scene where Jesus is brought before Pilate is the work’s biggest movement. It’s pure drama. This is the first point where I’ve wondered if I need more soloists. Instead, I’ve decided to give the role of Pilate to the basses. His music has a particular colour – a desiccated, dry clicking sound, col legno strings, temple blocks with low bassoons and parping trombones. It’s a challenge to write this music for chorus rather than soloists; I’m trying to write what I feel the part needs while making sure it’s still manageable for an amateur chorus. I’ve just written a tricky F sharp up to F natural interval for the basses – the music has to prepare and help them in some way, so I’ve outlined the interval in the timpani which sets up a kind of context so they can feel more relaxed about it. They’ll still scream when they first see it, I’m sure.” (For what it’s worth, the TFC basses are doing just fine with the part.)
  • The Jewish Daily, Forward: MacMillan and strife: a new ‘St. John Passion.’ The article calls out the orchestration and the inclusion of the Reproaches text in leveling a charge of antisemitism against the work.
  • Boston Globe, An act of ‘Passion’. Good introduction to the piece for American audiences, including the perspective of Sir Colin Davis, our conductor for the run.

Preparing the MacMillan St. John Passion

It’s that time of year again. My colleagues and I in the Tanglewood Festival Chorus have put away our Holiday Pops scores in preparation for tackling more sublime repertoire. This upcoming concert, the US premier of James Macmillan‘s St. John Passion, a joint commission by the BSO and the London Symphony in honor of Sir Colin Davis’s 80th birthday and under his baton, should fit that adjective nicely.

The Boosey and Hawkes catalog entry for the Passion dryly notes the choral “level of difficulty” as “5 (the greatest).” Other singers have noted some of the challenges without going into details. At the risk of going in over my head, I’ll take a shot at describing both the difficulties and their payoffs.

Voices: The Passion is not shy in its use of choral forces, leveraging a small “narrator chorus” to perform the role sometimes filled by an Evangelist solo in the Bach settings of the Passions, in addition to a large chorus performing the traditional functions (Pharisees, crowd reactions, and chorales) and some more dramatic semi-soloistic roles (Pilate and Peter), with only one role for a true soloist, Christ himself. That’s a lot of moving parts and a lot of work for the chorus, which is not unusual for any Passion. What is a little more unusual is the…

Vocal writing: The text of the Passion is Latin and English, with traditional liturgical poems added to the Biblical text. The narrator chorus is written with plainchant in mind, but is generally written in four-part harmonies that are miles away from traditional Gregorian forms and rhythms. The chorus’s parts are even more gnarly, with vocal effects ranging from Sprechstimme and eight-to-twelve-voice chromatic passages to simultaneous juxtapositions of the Stabat Mater text with an English-language lullaby inspired by the Coventry Carol. The vocal ornamentation and rhythms are unusual as well, with Christ’s muezzin-like melismas reminding us that the original Biblical setting would have been more at home with the vocal traditions of the Middle East than that of Bach. For a chorus like the TFC, used to memorizing everything from the old warhorses like the Beethoven 9 to modern works like the Bolcom 8th Symphony, the combination of all of the above suggested that having scores in the performance might be a really good idea. That said, there are substantial portions of the work that are now firmly lodged somewhere in my cerebellum and won’t go away. And that’s due to…

The overall effect: MacMillan has a lot of forces and tools at his command, and he uses them to move the narrative of the story through to its inexorable conclusion with a lot of jaw-dropping effects along the way. Peter’s triple denial of Christ, sung by four-part men’s chorus, trips over itself singing, “I am not… I am… not,” dropping an octave down from vehemence into a piano unison in a strong psychological portrayal of the shame of the lie. The chorale on Judas’s betrayal of Christ (“Judas mercator pessimus”) begins gangbusters with a condemnatory declamation before improbably melting away to a jewel-like setting of his request of a kiss from Christ for the second sopranos and second tenors, then  sets the “Melius illi erat” (“It would have been better if he had never been born”) as a Renaissance motet accompanied by fast recitation of text (an effect not unlike the library scene in Wings of Desire). The Crucifixio employs the classic cross vocal motif as a starting point (a four note melody moving down and up around a central tone), suspending Bach chorale harmonies on long whole-note phrases that decrescendo into a stunned silence.

But it’s the Stabat Mater in part 7 that really brings home the genius of all the moving parts of the work, with narrator chorus describing the fate of Mary, the inner voices sing the Latin poem in a breathtaking melismatic canon of fourths and fifths… and the outer voices (soprano and bass) sing a gentle lullaby to the deceased Christ, all at the same time–before closing on a quote from Bach made utterly personal: “Your sacred head is wounded.” It’s one of those moments outside of time that don’t come along too often in symphonic repertoire. I’m looking forward to continuing to journey into the work. Hopefully some of you can be there for the performance with me.

Glee Club history Friday: New directors on the Wiki

I’m going through the backlog of blog posts I have about Club history and translating them into articles on the new Virginia Glee Club Wiki. It’s going to take a while, but slowly but surely things are getting filled in. This week I created new articles on J. A. Morrow and the Virginia Music Festival (referencing past posts here).

I’ve also had some time for new research. Today we spotlight four previously unknown directors of the Virginia Glee Club. None of them, as far as we can tell, served for a long period of time, but all had unique contributions.

Cyril Dadswell (ca. 1906). Dr. Dadswell was one of the individuals who turned up when back issues of the Cavalier Daily (and its predecessor College Topics) showed up on the Google News archives. Dadswell was the director of the Dramatic Club, also known as the “Arcadians,” and his vision for Club seems to have been shaped by dramatic considerations, with a stated intention to focus on light opera. That Club was a second focus after the successful Arcadians might have been one of the reasons that Club diminished in visibility (or disappeared entirely) between this time and M. S. Remsburg‘s renewal of the group in 1910.

Erwin Schneider (ca. 1917-1918). A naturalized German citizen, Dr. Schneider was an associate faculty member who appears in the University of Virginia Bulletin as a piano and violin instructor in the summer school program. There was a good deal of enthusiasm about his directorship in the fall of 1917, but the timing could not have been worse for him as the whole University was about to buckle down to support the war effort the following year. There’s no further information about his connection with the group, and indeed no news about Club at all, until Fickenscher took it over in 1920 with the beginning of the Music Department.

Henry Morgan (1947-1948). Morgan was a UVA music professor who was acting head of the music department and Glee Club director in 1947-1948; my best guess is that he took over while Stephen Tuttle was on sabbatical with his Guggenheim fellowship. Not much is known about Morgan’s directorship, save that he conducted the ninth annual Christmas concert in 1948.

James Dearing (1974-1975). Dearing was like Morgan, a UVA professor who took over directorship of the Glee Club during another’s sabbatical, in this case for Donald Loach while Loach was on sabbatical in Italy. We know a bit more about Dearing, though: he had a good deal of involvement with Virginia choral music, including directing the University Singers and founding the Virginia Women’s Chorus.

I was especially pleased to find the information on Dearing, as it shed light on a period of Club history that we know very little about, and it came from an alumnus who commented on the wiki. It should go without saying, but I’m always grateful for the contributions of other alums to this project. Keep ’em coming!

Watch out, Rudolph

We haven’t taken down our Christmas tree yet. Sometimes I fantasize about just sticking the whole thing away, decorations and all, and hauling it out next year ready to go. But these guys did one better: they launched it. On 32 model rocket boosters (Estes D boosters, to be exact). Watch:

(Okay, it’s not really a tree, but who cares? It’s still one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a long time.)

The Virginia Glee Club Wiki: live history

I’ve been busy recently, in my capacity as historian of the Virginia Glee Club Alumni and Friends Association, launching the next stage of the Virginia Glee Club history project: the Virginia Glee Club Wiki. Currently at 29 articles and growing, the wiki is intended as an authoritative repository of all sorts of Glee Club history.

Why a new wiki? There’s a lot of material that is relevant to the Glee Club’s history (biographies of lesser known Club members like J. A. Morrow, tour information, newspaper clippings) that does not meet Wikipedia’s standards of notability. I also felt it was important to have a more topic centered approach to presenting information about the group’s history than I can do with this blog. Finally, I wanted a platform that other Club folks could contribute to.

The wiki is still in its early days, but already there are some interesting directions emerging. I’ll highlight some of the new articles over the next few days.

Merry Christmas from Google: Cavalier Daily in Google News

A nice Christmas present from the Googlemind: if not a complete run, then a pretty good sampling of the full archives of the Cavalier Daily and its predecessor College Topics, the long standing student newspaper of the University of Virginia.

The boon to a researcher of the University (or the Virginia Glee Club) cannot be overestimated. Just in a few minutes I found:

If Google News’s presentation of archival newspapers leaves something to be desired (I find it much more difficult to manage searching through a single issue than with the UVA library’s search interface), there is still a real treasure trove here, and not just on the Glee Club but on just about ever other topic.

Magret a la Mad Elf

Christmas dinner has come and gone, and brought some unusual triumphs.

First, the side dishes: alongside the usual boiled parslied potatoes and green beans, I slipped in a dish of glazed turnips. The turnips were so young and soft that I was afraid to really brown them for fear of turning them to mush, so they were just kind of boiled. But delicious. Like a potato and a radish made sweet, forbidden love. I never had turnips growing up, but they are certainly growing on me now. I suppose that increases my New Englander score a bit.

Next, the main dish. As already noted, I seared duck breasts — four Muscovy breasts and a Magret — then popped them in the oven to rest while I worked on the sauce. I poured out all but a thin film of duck fat on the bottom of the pan, dumped in a diced shallot, and scooted it around a bit while it sizzled. Then a few tablespoons of flour to thicken the roux while I pondered the deglazing. I steeled my nerves, opened a Troëgs Mad Elf—and poured the whole thing into the pan.

An aside on the Mad Elf. I try to find a holiday beer every year–sometimes it’s been a standby like the Harpoon Winter Warmer, sometimes Belgians like the Kerst Pater Winter Ale. Some of the selections have not lasted, and I’m still sad that Orchard Street Brewing Company’s Jingle Ale went away when the brewery did. This year’s holiday beer was the Mad Elf from the Troëgs Brewing Company in Harrisburg, PA. An astonishingly subtle 11% ABV, the cherries and honey mask the heat until it’s too late, as a rule. Well worth snapping up a few sixes if you come across it.

At any rate, I thought, if I was going to do a cherry sauce for the duck but had no cherries, why not use a beer brewed with cherries instead? The answer became clear after I had deglazed the pan and cooked it for a bit: the bitterness from the hops threatened to swamp the other flavors and make the sauce inedible. I desperately cast about for something to fight the bitterness and found a bottle of pure cranberry juice in the fridge, and added about 3/4 cup, tasting after each splash. The cranberry juice did wonders: without totally removing the bitterness, it added a deep sweetness and redness to the sauce that made it piquant and splendid. I added dried thyme and sage, cooked it through, and we were ready to go.

And it was excellent. The flavor of the magret breasts was gamier than I thought, but the sauce carried it through. Definitely a keeper.

Christmas 2009

Things have been a little quiet on the blog, even on the linkblog, this month. That’s because things have been anything but quiet in the rest of my life.

We have all but finished the addition project; I’ll be posting pictures of the finished work later. I’ve been insanely busy at the office, running from a web platform release (our seventh this year) to a couple of large projects to budget meetings. Then there’s been Holiday Pops. I still have a couple more concerts to sing for that…

Christmas itself has been a little challenging this year. My father-in-law fell on the second night of his visit. Originally we thought he was OK, but his pain was getting worse, so we took him to the hospital. Turns out he had a compression fracture of one of his lumbar vertebrae. So he’s spending Christmas in the hospital (that’s a seasonably snowy picture from the hospital window above), and we’re not very festive at the house. He seems to be getting better; hopefully we will have some time with him here at home soon before everyone has to go back to work.

Not that being home isn’t work–what with putting together Christmas presents and moving into our new bedroom, I’ve been a busy beaver indeed. But I’ve still taken time out to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas (on one of our Christmas presents–a new bigger flatscreen, so that we can put the old one in the basement guest bedroom). After all, I need to thank Mr. Schulz’s creation for driving a ton of traffic to my blog–the number one search term since Thanksgiving around here has been “charlie brown christmas tree,” leading to an old article about Urban Outfitters’ replica of the tiny real Christmas tree from the show (and amazingly, they still make it).

Ah well. The rest of the family can nap. I’m off to figure out how to cook the duck breasts we got for Christmas dinner. Maybe we’ll give the recipe with the cherries and port sauce another go. Or shall we just do a sweet cherry sauce? A pomegranate-wine sauce? Balsamic and apricot? The blood orange sauce I made for Valentines Day in 2005? Or maybe I’ll just punt and do a pan sauce. We’ll see. I like having these kinds of dilemmas.

Friday Random 15: Out of Rotation

I keep a playlist in iTunes, and on my iPod, that consists of highly rated songs (4 stars or better) that I haven’t heard in at least a year. It’s called Out of Rotation, and it always surprises me in a positive way. Today, when I needed a pickup after car trouble, it came through. Here’s the playlist:

  1. Johnny Cash, “Belshazzar” (Complete Sun Singles, Vol. 2)
  2. Liz Phair, “Chopsticks” (Whip-Smart)
  3. Pernice Brothers, “Waiting for the Universe” (Yours, Mine and Ours)
  4. Sonic Youth, “Radical Adults Lick Godhead Style” (Murray Street)
  5. Ted Leo/Pharmacists, “The High Party” (Hearts of Oak)
  6. Yo La Tengo, “Nothing but You and Me” (Summer Sun)
  7. UNKLE, “Nursery Rhyme Breather” (Psyence Fiction)
  8. The Raconteurs, “Blue Veins” (Broken Boy Soldiers)
  9. The Raconteurs, “Intimate Secretary” (Broken Boy Soldiers)
  10. Pixies, “River Euphrates” (Surfer Rosa)
  11. Gillian Welch, “Revelator” (Time (The Revelator))
  12. Gillian Welch, “My First Lover” (Time (The Revelator))
  13. Chemical Brothers, “Elektrobank” (Dig Your Own Hole)
  14. Prince, “Wherever U Go, Whatever U Do” (Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic)
  15. Elvis Presley, “New Orleans” (The King of Rock ‘n” Roll: The Complete ’50s Singles)