On the record

The BSO announced two new albums this week. I’m looking forward to hearing the Carter, and am ordering multiple copies of TFC: Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. Not because it’s my chorus (I’m not on the disc–these were small group recordings that went through the year I started with the chorus), but because the repertoire is astonishing. A pair of Bruckner motets, including the Christus factus est, the Lotti Crucifixus, the Frank Martin Mass, and of course Copland’s In the Beginning.

Of course there’s a small irony–the cover photo shows the group holding music! But it’s a great image of a large Prelude concert group in Seiji Ozawa Hall. One of these days I’d love to be in that setting; our Prelude performances have been done by small groups since I joined the chorus, so I’ve never performed in Ozawa.

Grab bag: Monkeybagels!

Happy birthday, Mr. Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson was born 267 years ago, on April 13, 1743. Seventy-six years later he would lay the cornerstone at the University of Virginia.

I’ll have a few more thoughts later about Mr. Jefferson, UVA, and Founder’s Day, but for now two thoughts from the man himself:

Determine never to be idle…It is wonderful how much may be done if we are always doing.

Enlighten the people, generally, and tyranny and oppressions of body and mind will vanish like spirits at the dawn of day.

Adventure looking forward

Chris Baldwin’s brilliant comic (I won’t belittle it by calling it a “web comic”) Little Dee ended today. He’s been winding it down for months, so it’s no surprise that it’s over. What is a surprise to me is how resonant the ending is, even in its first two panels:

baldwin_deefinale.jpg

It’s tempting, as I start to see forty up on the horizon, to think that all my adventures and all the beauty are behind me. Weeks like last week, when my father in law was in and out of the hospital and I was forced by illness to withdraw from a Tanglewood Festival Chorus concert run that would have taken me to Carnegie Hall, seem to reinforce that thought.

But then I watch my family, and I catch my breath a little bit at all the beauty that is yet to come.

Grab bag: Foolishness, sputtering, and agendas

Ten years ago

Ten years ago, give or take two weeks, I posted my first permanent update on my Manila site, the web site that morphed into this blog.

Userland Software‘s Manila was a hobby for me for a few months starting back in 1999. When I first got DSL (back when we still called it ADSL), it was new enough that no one really was clear about whether it was kosher to run a server from your house, and certainly new enough that Bell Atlantic (yes, this is before it was called Verizon) was filtering traffic upstream. So I ran an HTTP server on my Mac, using first personal web sharing and then Aretha to run a little web site.

Sometime later Dave Winer and Userland opened up EditThisPage.com, and I set up my own blog there, and that’s when it all took off. The site, originally hosted at jarretthousenorth.editthispage.com, was something I played with for a few months in early 2000. Then I went to B-school and stopped having time to play with things. Then I moved to Seattle for a summer by myself and had way too much time on my hands. And I started writing.

These days, I hardly have enough time to write at all, save for the occasional Glee Club history writeup. But I still think back to the technology that started it all, and I’m grateful to Dave for starting something big that turned into something big for me.

Grab bag: Two turntables and a microphone

Stop, said God, holding his head

I am working this afternoon in my garage, having cleaned off the top of my workbench for the first time in recent memory. I find a cassette tape next to the workbench–the garage radio is the only one in the house that can play cassettes–and put it in. It’s the Virginia Glee Club and Smith College Glee Club at Smith, fall 1992. I listen to side B first—Smith sings the “Alice in Wonderland” songs by Irving Fine, a few other tunes, and then a reasonable joint performance of Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. (Though I’ve never forgiven the Smith director for insisting that we use an alto soloist in the second movement instead of a countertenor.)

Then I flip the tape to side A. The Glee Club set that fall opened with a four-part meditation on the death of Absalom: Josquin’s “Absalon, fili mi,” the Sacred Harp tune “David the King,” Tomkin’s “When David Heard,” and our premiere of Benjamin Broening’s setting of “When David Heard.” In other words, a fine uplifting set. Then I heard—a hum. Some multi-tonal stuff going on. I go over and look at the tape liner notes. It’s “Time Piece.”

“Time Piece“! Written for the King’s Singers in 1972, it goes from polytonal to high comedy to low comedy. After a while, there are cuckoo clocks, roosters, and other vocal effects, and then C. J. Higley, bless him, as the voice of God, yells “STOP!” The chorus intones, “‘Stop’, said God, holding his head…” and then continues for another five minutes more. Total run time: about 15 minutes. The Smith chorus (and audience) were moved to laughter at more than a few points.

And then we wrapped up with another three song set of spirituals.

I can’t imagine doing such a long guest set today. I also can’t believe that we only performed “Time Piece” twice (once during the Kickoff Concert that fall, once at Smith). But by springtime we were on to Young T.J. and a totally different repertoire.

Grab bag: Alex Chilton RIP