Author: sohothedog

Food, Glorious Food


Today’s carol (previously: 1, 2) comes to us courtesy of 17th-century England, where carving a roast was apparently regarded as a descendant of jousting—an oddly Proustian trigger for chivalric nostalgia. For Karen and Mike (you can share some with the boys if they’ve been good). Tritones and augmented triads make everything festive!

Guerrieri: My Master and Dame (PDF, 99 KB; Cooperstown-Giant-authentic-sounding MIDI here)

Can I start you off with some drinks?


Today’s carol (previously) tells the heartwarming tale of a group of pushy carousers who demand nothing but alcohol. We have no need of your “food”! It might be nutritionally unsound, but I’ll bet a roast goose they gained less weight in December than I will.

For Jeana and Glenn, and critic-at-large Moe’s rural Midwestern counterpart Dougal. Musically: as if 19th-century wassailers were carrying around pocket transistor AM radios.

Guerrieri: Bring Us In Good Ale (PDF, 148 KB; Casiotone-esque MIDI here)

Knock knock


New England has been whomped by two major winter storms in relatively short order. The one on Thursday resulted in the cancellation of choir practice; the one yesterday resulted in the cancellation of church services and our yearly nursing home Christmas service and our yearly community carol sing. Apparently the pagan gods of nature are gaining the upper hand in the mythical War on Christmas. Look for Bill O’Reilly to denounce the singing of “Let It Snow” as an insult to Christian America.

Anyway, I took it as an opportunity to tinker with some original carols. My personal preference is for wassails—if you’re not sure what a wassail involves, the almost always suspect Wikipedia actually nails this one:

Wassailing is the practice of going door-to-door singing Christmas carols until paid to go away and leave the occupants in peace.

Nothing epitomizes the holiday spirit quite like roving bands of musical extortionists, does it? Today’s offering, a stocking stuffer for my brother Tony, is pretty much all about how two-over-three rhythms sound somewhat inebriated to my ear.

Guerrieri: The Wassaile (PDF, 104 KB; curious-sounding MIDI here)

Stay tuned—a new wassail every day this week!

Update (12/21): the rest—2, 3, 4, 5.

It’s up to your knees out there


That was the awfully pretty view out my window this morning, but I think spending the night shoveling it all left too much of a brain fog for proper blogging. Nevertheless, here’s some topics I was thinking about delving into. Maybe I’ll get to the bottom of some of them at some point in the future. For today, I think I’ll eat a whole bag of potato chips. Realistic goals, you know.

  • The New York Philharmonic goes to North Korea. It sounds kind of like the highbrow version of a “Bad News Bears” sequel, doesn’t it? I always find these sorts of cultural exchanges fascinating, because you can make equally good arguments that they’re almost inevitably failures because, at the end of the day, they don’t really mean anything politically, or that they’re almost inevitably successful, because, at the end of the day, they don’t really mean anything politically. I’m curious to see just how much the view of this will hearken back to the Cold War: somebody’s always keeping those Soviet-era journalistic lenses well-polished.


  • The 2008 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees were announced this week. More and more, the lesson of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame seems to be that the surest path to artistic immortality is to a) get in on the ground floor of b) a medium pitched towards impressionable teenagers who grow up to be nostalgic critics. I mean, I like the Dave Clark Five, but were they really that good or that important? I’m starting to get the feeling that, fifty years from now, every single act who released a record between 1955 and 1970 will be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. (And again, “Weird Al” Yankovic is passed over. For shame.)


  • Punkte and Circumstance. For future publication, I spent a good deal of this week studying Karlheinz Stockhausen; for future publication, I’m embarking on a study of Edward Elgar. Maybe it’s just the accidental juxtaposition, but I think there’s a particular connection between them that has a lot to do with how easily music can paper over awkward aesthetic impulses: namely, the fact that both composers rose to positions of public prominence at the same time the strong religious aspects of their music were publicly soft-pedaled. Elgar’s Catholicism was politely discounted for pretty much his whole career; Stockhausen’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink didn’t receive much mention until the late 1960s, when it became too front-and-center to ignore.


    • I’ll close with a commercial: here in Framingham, I live within shouting distance of about a hundred shopping malls, and if the traffic I have to crawl through when I’m not even going to the mall is any indication, there’s a lot of holiday-gift aggravation out there for the having. Why not just stay home and give everyone t-shirts? Not to be an insufferable shill or anything, but proceeds do go to a good cause. (Don’t like mine? Darcy’s are pretty stylish. And Matt has cornered the market on wearable puns—my favorite is “Fine and D’Indy,” with its subversive anti-anti-Semitic vibe.)

    Deck the walls

    It’s dueling art collector day on Soho the Dog!


    Pablo Picasso’s Head of a Woman in Profile (Jacqueline), a 1970 canvas that’s part of the Lazarof collection, a major trove of modernist art that was given to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art this week.

    The “fractional and partial” gift, in which title passes to the museum over a number of years, includes 20 paintings and drawings by Picasso, seven bronze sculptures and a painting by Alberto Giacometti, 11 drawings by Klee, two versions of “Bird in Space” by sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and late 19th-century works by Edgar Degas and Camille Pissarro.

    Not a bad haul for a composer. Yes, a composer—that’s Lazarof as in Henri Lazarof, longtime UCLA professor—though it would seem that the main wherewithal came from Lazarof’s wife Janice, daughter of noted LA philanthropist Mark Taper. LACMA has been very, very good this Christmas—the collection is one masterpiece after another.

    Now, yesterday in Milan, Sotheby’s was auctioning off some other artwork, as part of a sale of letters, paintings, and various other tchotchkes formerly owned by Maria Callas. And what did La Divina grace her walls with? Sad clowns!


    That’s a Clown by A. Morgante, which sold for 750 Euros—which, it should be noted, was well above the 350-500 estimate: the Callas mystique still holds. To be fair, there was quite a bit of worthy stuff—this Baldassare Carrari (free registration required) is rather nice—and maybe the clowns were Meneghini’s, anyway. (I see Maria walking through the house, passing the clown painting in the hallway, and, every time, giving it that dagger-sharp big-eyed Callas look.) But honestly, what is that tie made of? Lemon meringue? The eye of the beholder, indeed.

    fl. 2007


    MT: You know you’re considered a strange case of prudence and foresight. And yet you don’t give up electronic production, which is a kind of gamble. Why?

    KS: Because the sense of risk is actually indispensable to me. At this point, my argument is about to become metaphysical. Most people have no intention of following me to this level; but I’m convinced that the tangible results of my work, the electro-acoustical material, could even end up destroyed, and that it wouldn’t matter, because the inner impulse which compels me to bring a work to completion would remain. The idea which takes form and materializes in a substantial design of metallic molecules; the spirit which coagulates when pressed on to tape—what else are they but the exact equivalent of an abstract order? When the ear—that is, the auditory imagination—is no longer conditioned by the body, and the membrane of the loudspeaker disappears into the dust, along with the entire universe, the only thing to survive, in so far as it is ‘idea’, will be the spiritual force which emanates from my music.

    —Mya Tannenbaum (trans. David Butchart),
    Conversations With Stockhausen (1987)

    Image from Klavierstücke VI. More from: Marc Geelhoed, Alex Ross, Tim Rutherford-Johnson, ANABlog, Associated Press.

    The envelopes

    This year’s Grammy nominations were announced yesterday, and my own irrelevance was staved off yet again—every year, I expect to reach the level of complete non-familiarity with the rock/pop nominees, but some passing radio encounters with Amy Winehouse and a couple of excursions to Starbucks saved me. (Though if Amy Winehouse got six nominations, that means that next year, Sharon Jones should get, I don’t know, a hundred.)

    The classical nominations reveal a fair number of smaller labels, I think reflecting the way the Internet has completely changed the rules of promotion and distribution. The big story, of course, is the multiple nods for Peter Lieberson’s Grawemeyer-award-winning Neruda Songs, which deserve as many statuettes as possible. I’ve decided, though, that the rooting interest here at Soho the Dog HQ will be for the Brian Setzer Orchestra, who scored a nomination in the Best Classical Crossover category for the thoroughly goofy/awesome warhorse/surf-guitar mashup Wolfgang’s Big Night Out. (You can hear a few tracks on their MySpace page.)