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"We must now have the courage to continue this exhilarating and frightening adventure without procrastination"

News of the day:

The Fairbanks Symphony is once again throwing down their yearly challenge: Run a 5K in less time than it takes to play Beethoven’s 5th Symphony.

A striking replica of Beethoven, Steve Bainbridge, runs to the beat of the music, so anyone who finishes the event ahead of the great composer will receive a voucher good for one of the Fairbanks Symphony’s season concerts for the 2009-10 season that starts in September.

Classical radio for animals. Critic-at-Large Moe approves. (The pun made him growl, though.)

Ravel becomes the latest composer to inspire speculation of secret musical codes. I blame Dan Brown!

R.I.P., Robert Delford Brown, artist, provocateur, founder of The First National Church of Exquisite Panic, Inc., and a performer in the legendary 1964 New York production of Stockhausen’s Originale. (Do him the honor of kissing a pig.)

I care not for Caruso


http://www.matthewguerrieri.com/sounds/player.swf

L.C. Davis and Charles Kunkel, “Baseball vs. Opera” (1912)

A little ditty for Opening Day (Zambrano vs. Oswalt, 7:05 PM), with lyrics by sportswriter L. C. Davis, from the days when sportswriters rhymed more than they do now. (Yeah, that’s me singing. Sorry.) “Shine,” by the way, is not a racial slur against Italians as well—it’s used in the turn-of-the-century sense of “show-off.” (Too bad—I thought I could mock two of my ancestries at once.)

I’m practicing Appalachian Spring right now, trying to get my hands to stop thinking about how they already know “Simple Gifts” and instead actually pay attention to what’s on the page. (I’m pretending to be an orchestra for a conducting class later today.) I’m also still bleary from the weekend: worked all day yesterday, stayed up too late on Saturday helping my UConn-fan wife obliterate the immediate past with mojitos and Classical Barbra, and was out too late on Friday witnessing The Bad Plus in the flesh and then finally meeting Ethan Iverson. I bought Ethan a drink, after which somebody else came up and wanted to buy Ethan a drink. That’s right—his fans were fighting over who got to pay for his alcohol. Ethan swore that this had never happened to him before. I’m not sure I believe him.

And you still wouldn’t want to see how it’s made

Thanks to technological acceleration, John Cage jokes are rapidly approaching their sell-by date (remember when 4’33” was this wild, crazy cult thing that nobody knew about?), but this riff is a worthy entry in the pantheon. Though I would still need to chase it with more canonic fare. (Hot Doug’s, by the way, is famous for their weekend-only duck-fat fries. Dieting is for the insecure!)

(Thanks to our librarian friend—really, all of you &c.—Rebecca Hunt for the link.)

"Knowledge of music… knowledge of literature… knowledge of… knowledge of… you’re an interesting man, there’s no doubt about it."

Our librarian friend (really, all of you should have a librarian friend) Rebecca Hunt alerted us to the news that Maurice Jarre has died at the age of 84. Jarre composed (and, uncredited, conducted) the score to David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia, a film regarded with sacred awe here at Soho the Dog HQ—in addition to Lean (the score to Doctor Zhivago was also his) Jarre penned scores for Luchino Visconti, Alfred Hitchcock, John Huston, George Miller, and even the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker trio (Top Secret!). Jarre won three Oscars and also accrued a fair amount of abuse—Irwin Bazelon’s film-music book Knowing the Score has some petulantly nasty things to say about Jarre. To me, that falls under the same banner as criticism of Ringo Starr—he’s the drummer in possibly the greatest rock-and-roll band of all time, he must be doing something right. (For the record, I like Ringo’s drumming a lot. Now I’m off topic.) Anyway, here’s Jarre conducting the Lawrence overture—one of the all-time great distillations of classical-music exoticism.

Ma di gaiezza il bel tempo fuggì!

It’ll be random, spotty posting until I get out from under a crush of deadlines. (For some reason, I’ve been walking around thinking March had about 42 days.) In the meantime, enjoy the late, great Giuseppe Sinopoli (who I would totally look like if I stopped cutting my hair) conducting the “Intermezzo” from Puccini’s Manon Lescaut.

Glass and steel


Via Geoff Edgers, John Mellencamp on how the corporatization of America has wrecked the music industry. I agree with a lot of this, although I think it’s complicated by the fact that the rise of the popular music industry was also fueled by an economic quirk: the post-WWII increase in adolescent disposable income. Corporate money started flooding into pop music in the 1950s, even if the corporations had no clue about the content—it just took a while for technology to render that ignorance moot. And, for the record, I can sing the chorus to “All I Want For Christmas Is You,” and frequently do, at seasonally inappropriate times.

The winners of the first Guthman Musical Instrument Competition were announced earlier this month. None of them, though, I’m betting, are as big as the Mid-Hudson Bridge, which Joseph Bertolozzi turned into percussion to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Henry Hudson’s journey up the eponymous river. (I’m still trying to imagine what that initial $2.2 million budget would have entailed.)

Singing astronomer! I’m a big enough nerd to get behind that. Have you ever drunkenly confused Messier and Messaien? I have. (Take a listen here.)

And “Beverly Hills Housewife,” David Hockney’s portrait of patron Betty Freeman, is expected to bring $7-10 million when it’s auctioned in May.