Choir performance this weekend!

With all the chaos in the world I’m gonna spend some time away from social media this week and blessedly focus on being the best dang tenor I can be in this weekend’s concerts. The Mozart Requiem isn’t gonna sing itself, folks.

I joined the Orchestra Iowa choir last fall when they had an open audition call and I had a little bit of free time. I’ve done all sorts of music stuff in my life but very little actual choir singing, so I was a little bit nervous. But I made it through the audition and it’s been a delightful experience singing with the choir. Maestro Tim Hankewich runs a tight and effective rehearsal, and I’ve never been the best singer in the group but I’m a dang good sight reader (thanks, decades of piano playing!) and I’m not pitchy (thanks, years of listening to my dad tune pianos!).

Tonight we head to the first rehearsal with the orchestra; tomorrow the same; Saturday night and Sunday afternoon we perform. There are still tickets available if you’re in Eastern Iowa and want to attend.

ne cadant in obscurum

I am singing in the Orchestra Iowa chorus for the spring performance of Mozart’s Requiem and we’re in rehearsals right now. And I know this is a hazard of learning and performing music, but I have had this single phrase stuck in my head every day for TWO FULL WEEKS at this point.

Not sure what it is about this particular line. Maybe the bit of time I spent working out in my head that big jump did it… a major seventh is a fun one to navigate, and in this spot the tenors are the only ones singing, so it’s naked and we really need to nail it.

Whatever the reason, I’ll be glad when some other musical phrase supplants this one as my persistent earworm. I mean, I love me some Mozart, but this has been long enough.

I'm all caught up...

Well, after 171 hours of listening starting back in 2023, I am finally caught up with the podcast A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs. This is one of those cases where the podcast medium perfectly lines up with the intent, since fair-use clips of music for illustration can be regularly inset in the show and give you insights into the music that a book could never provide.

Andrew Hickey has slowed his pace a good bit since he started the podcast. While I have doubts about whether he will ever actually make it to song #500, even through the first 177 songs he has provided me a wonderful background education about the development of rock music from the early 20th century up through the late 1960s.

Now that I’m caught up, I need to figure out what podcast becomes my next binge show. I’ve let my Filmspotting backlog get pretty big, I might do a quick scan through at least the review bits of those. Otherwise I’m open to suggestions!

Sharing my own music for the season: Carols for Christmas (piano instrumentals)

Hard to believe it’s been a dozen years since I recorded a set of Christmas carol piano instrumentals which I inventively titled Carols for Christmas. My audience has probably changed a bit since then, so it’s worth a re-post.

It’s just over 30 minutes worth of music, all piano versions of traditional Christmas carols. There’s not a lot in the way of production - I recorded them using my Casio midi controller keyboard in single takes in GarageBand and did a minimal amount of editing to remove the clunky notes. The perfectionist part of me wishes I had another 80 hours to really refine and polish the arrangements and recordings; the engineer in me declared “good enough”. The engineer won the debate.

If you maintain your own music library, you can download mp3s from Dropbox here. If YouTube is more your thing, here’s the YouTube playlist.

Bullet Points for a Friday

  • Between now and July there are only 2 weeks where I’m in the office for 5 full days. This week I was in DC Monday through Wednesday.
  • I’m gonna be back in the saddle, er, on the bench as a church musician the next couple weeks. Looking forward to it.
  • Pretty dang excited for the concert tickets I bought this week. More on that later.
  • Next week I’m out of office for 3 days for Anwyn’s high school graduation.
  • This means that by next week at this time we’ll have 2 of our 3 kids out of high school. When did we get old?
  • I’ve been helping pick out the hymns for our church services for the past several months, which has been a good way to learn the Episcopal hymnal and also to pick out songs I enjoy singing. Is that self-serving?
  • Obviously I mean that I got old but my beautiful wife is as young and lovely as ever.

Happy Friday, everybody.

Because I need more piano music...

Because I’m a sucker for trying out new piano music that I’ll probably never be good enough to play (or at least to play well), I just ordered this one:

A Russian composer writing jazz-styled preludes? Too much awesome.

Here’s a video of the composer playing one of them:

Jennifer Knapp: Kansas 25

I was an instant supporter of this album on Kickstarter and now I’m finally getting a chance to listen to it: Jennifer Knapp’s Kansas 25. Back when Kansas came out in 1998, college me was totally drawn in. Smart lyrics, catchy tunes, and a raw honesty that I didn’t hear in a lot of the other Christian music that was on the radio and for sale in the bookstore. I memorized the songs, sang them on my guitar, sang one of them in church, and spun that CD all the time in the car. I have often mentioned it as one of the three “perfect” Christian music albums ever. It’s that good.

Knapp, now 50, has been on a long road since releasing the original Kansas in her early twenties. She moved to Australia in 2002, publicly came out as a lesbian in 2010, recorded some other albums, and became an outspoken advocate for LGBT causes. There’s something incredibly meaningful about hearing her revisit these faith-filled songs in middle age. The miles have taken their toll - the voice is a little more raspy, the tempos a little slower - but the youthful expressions of faith still ring true all these years later.

If you supported the Kickstarter, you probably already have the download. (If not, find it in your inbox!) If you didn’t get in early, head over to Bandcamp where you can preorder it and listen as soon as it officially releases on May 17.

Pictures at an Exhibition for Guitar

I got to know Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition when I was in high school and my piano teacher assigned me The Gnome. I never got it mastered as much as I wanted, but it was such a fun suite to hack my way through. I listened to the orchestral version of it, and love the gong at the end, but overall I still prefer the piano version.

This video, though, has me reconsidering my opinion. Guitarist Kazuhito Yamashita has arranged the entire Pictures suite for guitar and it is amazing. He has captured both the feel and almost all the notes from the piano version. He varies playing techniques to create lovely textures of sound. And while I’m not up on all the modern classical guitarists, I think it’s safe to say that Yamashita has amazing skill.

Bringing joy to people IS bringing glory to God

Crisanne Werner has a lovely essay up on Substack today about her changing understanding of how the experience of music, and specifically playing music, relates to her spirituality as she goes through a sort of deconstruction.

I, too, have had music be a core part of my spiritual experience for most all of my life. As a worship leader in evangelical churches, I have far too many times heard (and probably used) the “audience of One” phrase that Crisanne wrestles with in her essay. But I love where she lands with it:

…music can, and should, bring glory to God. It shouldn’t be manipulated by false humility; it should have an altruistic motivation. But something that didn’t occur to me as a teen/young adult, was that bringing joy to people is bringing glory to God. Using music to evoke emotions that people otherwise wouldn’t have access to is a gift to them. A gift of love. It falls firmly under the umbrella of loving God and loving others. Other people’s music is that same sort of gift to me- my life, especially my spiritual life, is parched without music. And, despite the proliferation of electronic recordings, nothing moves the soul more than an in-person experience. … On that church stage this weekend, I was fully at peace with my motivation of helping the congregation enter beauty and joy. I was at peace with my audience being One plus three hundred.

I met Crisanne at a retreat last fall and quickly learned that beneath her quiet veneer was a depth of brave wisdom just waiting to come out. I’ve so enjoyed reading her Substack this year. What a treat.

Chopin Being Mean

I have hacked through the Chopin Ballades for years now. I started learning the first one in high school, and in adulthood I played through #3 and #4 often enough that I can, well, hack through them. I never spent the time working everything out and polishing; I just kept sight reading until I could blaze through it.

This past week I decided it was time to actually sit down with #4 and work it out more carefully. Today I got to this pictured section which, when sight reading, had always thrown me for a loop. Practicing the right hand by itself, I finally realized what makes it such a pain.

It’s 6/8 time. On the first line, the bass has gone to triplets in each eighth note. Then on the second line, the right hand picks up triplets per eighth, while the left switches to sixteenths. Ok, that’s 3 against 2, no big deal.

But while the right hand is in triplets, the pattern written (as indicated by the eighth notes on the up stems) is a four-note pattern, almost an Alberti pattern. So, you have what is by pattern a four-beat pattern, played as triplets against two in the bass. My brain wants to interpret that as four against two, which is very simple. But it’s not - rhythmically, it’s 3 against 2, but the 3s are logically and musically grouped in sets of four. This one is gonna take my brain a while to work out.