Holiday music roundup

Two years ago, I put out a series of reviews of Christmas CDs, one a day for about a week, focusing on CDs that weren’t the usual Jingle Bells/White Christmas fare. While I’m not in a position time- or inclination-wise to repeat that feat this year, I thought I’d throw out a couple of pointers to some interesting holiday tunes I’ve found this year.

blind boys

First, thanks go to Hooblogger and friend Zalm, who has been doing some really intense Christmas music posts this year: a series of posts on songs of hope, peace, and joy, with love yet to come, and a pair of iTunes mixes for the season. Thanks to his posts, I was encouraged to go back and revisit the Christmas album that the Blind Boys of Alabama put out a few years ago, which has some extremely cool moments.

alligator records

Second, as I noted earlier, there is some humor in having a holiday that is protean enough to embrace the concepts of peace, redemption, hope… and “Santa Claus Wants Some Lovin’.” Holiday collections that reflect the latter side of Christmas include the Alligator Records Christmas Collection, with some really great blues, Cajun, and R&B tracks; the killer Stax/Volt compilation It’s Christmas Time Again, with contributions from the Staple Singers, the Emotions, and the inimitable Isaac Hayes; and even Yule Be Miserable, a Verve compilation that features Ella Fitzgerald’s sassy “Santa Claus Got Stuck (In My Chimney).”

phil spector

For slightly classier Santa-flavored music, there’s the album that Phil Spector masterminded, A Christmas Gift to You From Phil Spector. Featuring the debut of the classic “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” (later memorably covered by U2 on the first Very Special Christmas compilation), this is a spectacular slice of the 1960s sound in the service of the season, featuring the signature Phil Spector girl groups and Wall of Sound. Too bad about that trial, which compels me to note that the spoken word outro from Phil at the end over “Silent Night” now sounds far creepier than originally intended.

new york ensemble

And if, like me, your Christmas isn’t complete without a big slice of early music, you could do far worse than to seek out A Medieval Christmas, a slightly obscure but highly worthwhile album by the New York Ensemble for Early Music under the direction of Frederick Renz. A heady brew of chant, early polyphony, and instrumental tunes, the album brings some medieval boisterousness as well as meditative grace to the season.

The Pops, Jesus, and Santa

Singing with the Boston Pops has been a mixed blessing this season. I’ve had to confront my lack of holiday spirit head on, but I’ve also been given plenty of exposure to the lighter side of the season–the side that is about excited children and Santa and cheery singalongs.

It’s sometimes difficult to reconcile all of the facets of Christmas. Yes, Christmas is traditionally among the most depressing times of the year; yes, it’s a solemn religious holiday that observes the birth of Jesus, the arrival of a baby who would die on the cross as a replacement sacrifice for our sins and be raised from the dead in the promise of our ultimate redemption. But it is also, and perhaps equally fundamentally, a season of hope and love. The knowledge of Christ’s ultimate destiny deepens that sense of hope and makes it more poignant, rather than diminishing it.

As for Santa Claus: Tony Pierce has had some very pointed things to say on the subject of the Big Guy with the Beard over the years. Certainly the focus on Santa to the exclusion of Christ is a mistake. But I think it’s also a mistake to exclude Santa, who provides a focus for the secular parts of the holiday in a context of love and acceptance. Yes, there is some greed that creeps in around the edges. But if you could stand on the stage at Symphony Hall in Boston and see the look on the kids’ faces when Santa Claus enters the hall, you’d see no greed. You’d see excitement, and joy. And happiness. And I’d rather see that by having a Santa–a proxy for hope and love–come into the hall than some actor dressed as Christ, or worse as Mary carrying a babydoll. If we must risk cheapening something with pageantry, let us cheapen the Victorian image of Santa rather than the cosmic mystery of the Redeemer.

Tis the season… for outages

I always remember Christmas as one of the most peaceful times in the blogosphere, and my stats back me up. So why does it seem that major blogging services are dropping like snowflakes right now? On the heels of the Six Apart outage comes a daylong outage at Kinja, the aggregator that powers the consolidated Hooblogs view (and, apparently, the Add to Kinja graphic in my sidebar. Ooops).

I think these folks could use some IT service management software. But that’s just my professional opinion.

(Disclaimer: I’m employed by iET Solutions as a product manager.)

WCRB on the block

Courtesy The Universal Hub, the news arrives that one of the radio stations in Boston that plays classical is entering negotiations to be sold to a local broadcasting corporation that likely only wants it for its spectrum and transmitters. Now, yes, those of you who aren’t in the Boston media market are right now sputtering, “One of the radio stations??? How dare you complain if your market has more than one station that you’re losing one of them?”

For one thing, WCRB is that rarity, a non-public-radio station that plays classical music 24 hours a day, rather than breaking it into chunks of NPR news and other musical ghettos underserved formats. For another, it plays concerts from Tanglewood (might as well get that bit of self-interest out of the way).

But the comments thread on the Universal Hub piece raises another problem: what if your classical station only plays Classical’s Greatest Hits? Eeka put it most succinctly: “They should replace it with actual classical music that classical music enthusiasts would like to listen to.” I rambled in response:

If you want to understand the devolution of classical radio in this country, look no further than the same programming malady that has swept the rest of the radio industry.

I can’t help but think that programming outside the 18th-19th century box—early music, Shostakovich, Ives, any living composer—during prime listening hours could only broaden the audience. Hell, look at the surprise classical bestsellers of the last decade or so: Chant, Górecki’s Third Symphony with Dawn Upshaw, Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum. All outside the mainstream (yes, of course, because they’re surprises they are outside the mainstream by definition. Work with me).

Great editorial on this topic, Drawing the Classical Line, that I can’t recommend highly enough.

I’m reminded of Peter Schickele’s fictitious WTWP (Wall-To-Wall Pachelbel), whose station slogan was “We play the music you don’t mind hearing”: “Nothing written after 1912,” “Nothing longer than eleven and a half minutes,” “All music must be in a major key until after 11 PM,” and “No vocal music during office hours.”

Tree trimming

We get a little closer to the holidays every day. Our Christmas cards are just about ready to drop in the mail—at least, once I finish addressing the envelopes and signing them, which will probably take another three days. (So if yours is late, apologies). We got the tree up last night with a minimum of loss of life and only two broken ornaments—considering the ornaments went from Kirkland to Arlington with minimal protection that’s not too bad. And our new front door supports our wreath hanger, so I’ll be picking up an evergreen wreath on the way home.

It took about three weeks, but I’m finally getting the holiday spirit. (Ironically, I think it was the cross country sales trip that did it. Being removed from all the hustle and bustle of the holiday makes it that much clearer which things are important.) Alas, I have another three days (at a minimum) in the office this week, so I probably won’t really get into the spirit until the day before.

Catch up: surviving snow in Boston

I didn’t post about this at the time because of time constraints, but December 9—the last time I was in the office prior to a week on the west coast—was one of the most incredibly miserable days I have ever spent in an automobile. I had a morning rehearsal at Symphony Hall to which I drove in light snow. By the time the rehearsal was over the snow had changed to mostly rain, and I figured I was off the hook for weather for the rest of the day.

Hah.

I drove to my office in Framingham, and even driving cautiously it took me only about 40 minutes. I did a conference call and a couple hours of work; during the call, I realized that the snow was getting heavier. I made a judgment call that I needed to get out at 3 if I wanted to make it back to Symphony Hall for my 7 pm concert call.

As it turns out, I was only seven minutes off.

In the two and a half hours I had been at the office, I got something like a foot of snow on my car. It took me 40 minutes, with two people including my VP of Sales pushing, to get out of our office parking lot, thanks to no snowplow and a steep exit onto the street. It took another 45 minutes to get onto the Mass Pike, less than two miles from my office. The Pike was okay, but thanks to a jackknifed truck on Rt 128 North it took me until 10 past 6 to get to our house in Arlington. To sum up: 45 minutes from Boston to Framingham, three hours from Framingham to Arlington.

Fortunately after that it only took me 55 minutes to get back to Symphony Hall, where I missed my call time by about 7 minutes—fortunately to no lasting ill effect. But the lesson was learned: on days that it will be snowing and I have to be somewhere at the end of the day, just work from home. It is entirely possible to overwhelm the snow infrastructure of Massachusetts: it just takes a little more snow than it takes to perform a comparable feat in, say, Virginia.

Christmas with housebloggers

As I washed paint off my hands this afternoon, I reflected: You can always tell the housebloggers among us. They are the ones who have to finish priming and painting a wall before they can put up their Christmas tree in front of it.

To backtrack a bit: I wrote back in October about our finishing the framing for the radiator niches, and in November about getting some of the finished plaster sanded and painted. But I left out a detail—because of time constraints, we had to leave some of the work undone. We opted not to work on the two patches of walls that were obscured—one by a sofa, the other by a freestanding Ikea cabinet unit.

Unfortunately, we subsequently figured out that the only place to put the Christmas tree was next to the sofa, and that the new wall section would be exposed. So of course, now that we are all home from our respective business trips, that meant the wall had to be sanded and painted before the tree could go up.

So here I am having finished sanding and priming, gathering strength before going on to the finish coat (hopefully that’s singular). It’s not that there is so much work to be done; more that I have so little energy left, after a week spent with a prospective customer and back to back Pops concerts yesterday, with which to do the job.

Ah well. Perhaps some photos of the finished product, with a tree in front of it, later.

Google Music Search

Seen on Scripting News: Google Music Search (see also announcement on the Google Blog). Pretty slick way to organize information about music from around the web. Included: links to album art, organized list of songs, buy links, lyrics (though perhaps not for long). Probably never included: links to MP3 files or torrents.

I wonder what their source of data is, btw. Artists on independent sites like CDBaby aren’t picked up (no Suspicious Cheese Lords, Justin Rosolino’s first album is present but not his latest), but obscure long dead bands like Annabouboula are.

Dark mornings before Christmas

I awake this morning at 5:30 — not as much of a hardship on the left coast, where I’ve been for the past few days with a prospective customer — and think, It can’t really be Christmas in ten days.

This year it seems that time is going faster to Christmas than ever before, and, even though I’ve been attending church regularly, I haven’t felt that Christmas spirit. Partly it’s work–I have been working on getting ready for this client visit for what seems like months. Partly it’s everything else. Singing with the BSO and the Pops is magnificent, and there is something really nice about a group that puts so much individual responsibility on its members and only rehearses a few times prior to each concert. But each concert is sung at least three times–many more, in the case of the Pops Christmas concerts–and they all back up on each other.

I feel as though I have lost any reflective time that I ever had. As I get older, I find that’s more precious than I had ever realized, and find that I feel much less myself with no time to settle my head.

To that end, I have discovered something about business travel. There is no better use for those hours stuck in an airplane than reading, or re-reading, books of poetry. I hadn’t touched Seamus Heaney’s work in several years, and his Seeing Things hit me with a ton of bricks as I was reading it on Monday, flying between Chicago and Sacramento:

The Skylight

You were the one for skylights. I opposed
Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove
Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed,
Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof
Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling,
The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling.
Under there, it was all hutch and hatch.
The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.

But when the slates came off, extravagant
Sky entered and held surprise wide open.
For days I felt like an inhabitant
Of that house where the man sick of the palsy
Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven,
Was healed, took up his bed and walked away.

I think I keep forgetting that time moving forward does not always mean an end, and that Christmas is here in its wide eyed astonishment whether I am the same person I was twenty years ago or not.

Don’t celebrate the end of DRM?

Interesting post on the faculty blog of the University of Chicago Law School, by professor Doug Lichtman, that argues that the end of DRM would be disastrous for the music industry and music lovers. He suggests that without DRM, the industry will have no incentive to invest in music or will develop some other draconian response to piracy, such as streaming music to proprietary players. He also argues that improvements in labeling law or changes to the law to prevent the use of DRM as draconian as Sony’s would backfire, as this would lead to legislating over what types of DRM are permissible.

It’s good to see someone even try to argue the value of DRM after the whole Sony rootkit fiasco, but in this case Professor Lichtman has it wrong.

First, as Doug Lay points out in the comments, imagining the major labels moving to supporting only a single proprietary player leads to some interesting speculative schadenfreude. Certainly it’s easy to imagine the major labels continuing their downward spirals by fragmenting the playback market and alienating their channel. But just because the solution to come might be further detrimental to the labels’ interests is no reason to keep an antipiracy solution that has been proven harmful.

Second, Professor Lichtman suggests that the law needs not only to require better labeling for DRM but also to identify what is and is not allowed:

DRM of the sort adopted by SonyBMG might similarly be so bad as to beimpermissible. But then we need to say more about what forms of DRMwould be permissible, just as we similarly today allow shopkeepers toput locks on their doors, call the police in the event of a burglary,and so on.

If I’m not mistaken, there are a few lawsuits out there that point out ways in which Sony BMG’s DRM is in violation of existing laws against spyware, computer fraud, false or misleading statements, trespass, false advertising, unauthorized computer tampering, and other generally consumer hostile acts. I think this point of Professor Lichtman’s is a red herring. As Doug Lay points out, we don’t need new laws, we need Sony to be punished for violating the laws they’ve already done. In fact, I’m not sure I’d say that legislation against DRM is needed at this point even after this case, and perhaps on this point I do agree with Professor Lichtman, though for different reasons. I think we still need to see what the market, competitive pressures, and general customer awareness will do to address the labeling problem, and in the meantime the fallout from lawsuits will hopefully force Sony BMG and other labels to reconsider their choices.

Finally, Professor Lichtman assumes that the major labels’ investment in music somehow creates value for the musician and the customer. I’m not going to comment except to point out that the list of XCP infected discs contained albums by Celine Dion and Our Lady Peace. And I’m not sure how anyone could construe putting XCP on discs of reissued material by Dexter Gordon, Louis Armstrong, Art Blakey, Shel Silverstein, Horace Silver, Gerry Mulligan, or Dion, all on the XCP list, as constituting protecting an ongoing investment in music.

(Originally posted on the Sony Boycott blog. I don’t normally crosspost material like this except for my music reviews, but thought there might be some readers here who aren’t following the Boycott blog who might find this discussion interesting.)

Grounded.

Sometimes I wonder: how much time and money does United waste moving passengers between flights that are delayed, then ultimately cancelled?

Context: I arrived at Logan this morning for an 11:55 flight. I attempted to check in at the self service queue, but the computer indicated they weren’t taking any check-ins at the current time. I  asked around and found out that the flight had an equipment problem and wasn’t taking off; my travel agency informed me that it would cost over three times the cost of the existing reservation to change my flight to a different airline.

So I waited in line, and they booked me onto another flight that was to have been leaving earlier but that was also delayed, and said I would make my original connection. Sounds good, right?

Not so good, as it turns out. Now the new flight has an equipment problem, and they’re cancelling it and moving everyone… to the flight I was originally supposed to be on in the first place.

In the Wishful Thinking department: they put me in a business class seat on the new flight. I’d say the odds of my keeping that seat on the new flight are slim to none, but maybe there’s a chance. Heh.

Font for the nations, now under open license

The new version of Gentium, a Unicode typeface family designed to provide well designed characters for all the Latin (and Greek, and soon Cyrillic) characters in Unicode, is available under the SIL Open Font License which allows modification and redistribution of the font. All you multilingual font designers out there, hop on.

I last wrote about Gentium in 2003, which is the source of the leading quote on the main project page for Gentium. Maybe I’ll play with it again to see if the bold weights have been improved—or the size on Windows machines.

Slow progress

As if you couldn’t tell from my unusually glacial posting this week, it’s going to continue to be light for a while. Final rehearsals for the Boston Pops Christmas concerts are tonight and tomorrow, the first concert is tomorrow night, and I’m up to my eyeballs in preparations for a three day demonstration at a potential customer site.

But I have found time to get a few things done. Our Christmas cards came back from the printer this morning and look great (now I just have to address them). And I was able to get one of our three computers printing to the new printer–apparently, searching for it by hostname worked where specifying the IP address didn’t. But I still haven’t gotten the installer working on a Mac.

Printing is broken.

I brought home an HP OfficeJet 7310 xi last night. Slick little device: 1200 DPI output, high res scanning, copy & fax capability, plus a built in Ethernet port that would have easily cost me an extra $100 to add to an all-in-one laser (aside: why is Ethernet built in on HP’s all-in-one inkjets but not on their all-in-one monochrome lasers?). Assembly time (putting on the output trays, installing the ink, connecting the printer to a wireless adapter, verifying it got an address via DHCP) was about an hour. Unfortunately, I then spent the rest of the evening and part of the morning trying to get two of our three laptops to see the printer.

Rant: why is installing a networked printer on a modern OS so complicated? On our four to six year old LaserJet 2100M, installation was as simple as creating a TCP/IP printer pointing at the printer’s address, and maybe picking a PPD. With this OfficeJet, which includes ZeroConf (aka Bonjour, fka Rendezvous), I didn’t have to specify the IP address on Mac OS X, but I couldn’t get a job to print. Nor could I make it work manually connecting as an IP printer. On my wife’s Windows XP laptop, the installation program wanted us to shut down all firewalls so it could let ZeroConf do its thing. Problem is, on her corporate laptop there are multiple programs that are detected as firewalls by the installer, each of which is configured in a different place, and even after we shut them all off the installer still couldn’t detect the printer. At that point, I had to give up and go to the office.

I don’t really want to return the printer, but honestly, if two IT professionals can’t get the damned thing installed, there is something seriously wrong. Maybe I’ll have better luck later.