Grab bag: the “My Stomach Hurts” election

Master of obscure audio formats

Not satisfied with my vinyl adventures, I expanded my repertoire of obscure audio formats yesterday with the acquisition of a … cassette deck. I haven’t had one since my nonfunctional bookshelf stereo from college went to the curb, some time before I started to transfer all my media to digital, and I was worried that my cassette tapes would crumble to dust before I found something to transfer them.

Who cares? Well, I had a lot of audio that isn’t available in any other format, including Virginia Glee Club concert recordings (the 50th annual Christmas concert and A Dove in the Hall among them), a few rare Shannon Worrell and Monsoon EPs, and others. The Shannon Worrell stuff is just for me (though I missed the ability to hear her song with the late Haines Fullerton, “Lighthouse”), but the Glee Club stuff was for posterity.

And then someone posted on the local Arlington email list that they had a cassette deck that they were giving away–literally leaving on the curb. It turned out to be a very nice Teac W-520R dual deck unit that had no issues in playback. Twenty minutes later it was hooked up in the basement, audio out going into my trusty Griffin iMic and then into the MacBook, recording the 1992 concert recording that the Glee Club did at Smith–complete with the Benjamin Broening “When David Heard”, the James Erb “Shenandoah” arrangement, and … “Time Piece.”

Now I have to figure out what the right way is to make the Glee Club recordings available to other alumni and friends. But this should be a fun challenge.

Successful friends: The Parking Lot Movie

This week, the documentary The Parking Lot Movie hit the iTunes store for download or rent. A movie about the Corner Parking Lot in Charlottesville and the philospher-kings who work there, it features an appearance by Our Very Own D.R. Tyler Magill (that’s him above), with music by another friend, Sam Retzer.

I have rarely laughed so hard when listening to a soundtrack as I did when the first cut came on, Rikka Rikka’s “Life in a Nutshell.” To paraphrase does it no justice; you simply have to hear it.

There’s also a set of outtakes on YouTube: check this one that Tyler leads off:

I am going to have to start a whole new Glee Club history chapter about this thing; both Sam and Tyler sang with me, back in the day.

Grab bag: Ask and tell

Grab Bag: 2010 election sideshow

Grab bag: Lost data centers, new Wangs and more

Grab bag: Technical and copyright debt

Grab bag: Obama and hacking online voting

Tanglewood Festival Chorus: 40th Anniversary

TFC 40th Anniversary

This year’s CD release of Tanglewood Festival Chorus: 40th Anniversary marks a number of interesting milestones. First, it is the first time the TFC has headlined a recording (rather than participating alongside the BSO or Pops, or on a soundtrack) since 1983’s Nonesuch recording Kurt Weill: Recordare/Dallapiccola: Canti di Prigionia (surely a collector’s item now). Second, of course, it celebrates the 40th anniversary of the chorus in a significant, tangible way.

Third, and best of all, it collects examples of the superb Prelude concerts that the TFC has put on at Tanglewood over the last ten years in the evocative space of Seiji Ozawa Hall. (Disclaimer for all superlatives: I don’t sing on any of the performances on this disc, so my conflict of interest as a reviewer is minimal.)

The repertoire is a mix of old friends (the Lotti “Crucifixus”, Bruckner motets, Bach’s “Singet dem Herrn Ein Neues Lied”) and slightly less familiar works (the Martin Mass is performed in its entirety here). Reception to the disc has been good; Jeremy Eichler of the Boston Globe singles out the Bruckner “Virga Jesse Floruit” for “robust and hearty singing,” and calls the Bach a “wonderfully vibrant performance” and “the highlight of the disc.”

For me, the highlight is the closing work, Copland’s “In the Beginning.” I’ve sung the work twice in performance with various groups and the TFC performance recorded here is simply superb, beginning with the performance of soprano Stephanie Blythe and carrying through all the chromatic chord changes, tricky rhythms, and shifts of mood as the Genesis story unfolds.

And that’s no small trick: the Copland is a work with many layers. The piece is in no specific key or meter, but visits about twelve different tonalities throughout, all with hummable melodies and each yielding to the next in a slow chromatic rise of pitch throughout the piece until the final lines are sung in an ecstatic seventh above where the music started. And the work embodies multiple shifts in musical voice, neatly signalling the (presumed) change in authorial voice from the P author (Genesis 1:1 – 2:3) to the Redactor (Genesis 2:4a, “These are the generations”, which Copland’s performance direction indicates should be sung “rather hurriedly,” as if to get it out of the way), and then the conclusion, the story of the creation of Man as told by the J author, the oldest part of the story, which seems to rise out of the mist like the clay that is fashioned into man and breathed full of the divine breath. (Wikipedia has a good summary of the theory of differing authorial voices in Genesis.)

The TFC performance neatly captures all the layers of the work–the differing sections are full of the excitement and exultation of creation and then, in the end, its mystery and a more solemn gladness. Until now, I don’t think I had a good reference recording for the work; this certainly qualifies. The overall effect of the recording is captured in the summation of the brief Globe review: “Oliver conducts eloquently in this well-deserved recognition of the chorus’s anniversary year.”

Originally written for the Tanglewood Festival Chorus newsletter.