17 posts tagged “music”
First igasu posted this to LJ, and them my mom emailed the link to me a couple of days later.
I think that's a sign that I should repost it, don't you? :-)
This is definitely for all of my music geek friends out there.
...went well.
By the way, someone asked me what my audition piece was, so here it is:
KFME stills rocks my world.
That is all.
By way of a preface: I usually do not have the patience to read political blogs. Frankly, I find that it tends to be a bunch of people sitting around congratulating themselves over how smart they are to have the views they already share. Still, it's good to keep up with the news and opinions of the day, and to see what the people I disagree with -- on BOTH sides of the aisle -- are thinking. To that end, I try to read from both of what Uncle Jay calls "Corporate Right Wing Racist Bush Is God Bible Flag Homophobe NeoCon Cold Dead Hands Transfat Scumbag Blogs" and "Godless Left Wing Hate America Bush Is Hitler Cut & Run NannyState Tree Hugging Socialist Amnesty Traitor Scumbag Blogs."
It's been a slow, lazy Sunday morning here. I got to make breakfast for Teh Geek, and eventually got bored while she was in the shower and started reading political blogs. While perusing Crooks and Liars, however, I found something completely unexpected and absolutely wonderful. Someone has linked to a YouTube video, and it has one of the most jaw-droppingly beautiful pieces of music I have heard this year. It is a setting of Octavio Paz' "Water Night," composed by Eric Whitacre and sung by the BYU Singers. The video itself is stark and haunting, simple and beautiful... and it cuts off the last minute or so of the song. Even with the missing stanza, however, the video had my body quivering and my eyes watering by the end. You should listen to this. It is very, very good.
The full MP3 can be heard here. The lyrics are here, and you can open them in another tab so you can read them while listening. If you have a good set of headphones handy, listen through those and not your computer speakers -- it will make it much easier to appreciate the full polyphony of the piece. Enjoy!
I've really been pushing hard at learning all of the music for Revels over the last week or two. (I'm even bringing my music binder on the Metro with me every day to study during my commute.) I knew I was making significant headway last night at rehearsal when I could leave my notebook closed on the seat next to me for most of the evening. (Heh heh... Off-book already on 6 songs!)
So, what do I get in return for my hard work? I learned last night that I've been added to another song. I'm going to be singing with the teen boys for this song, and they don't really know it at all yet. Add to that, it's not an easy song; I have my work cut out for me learning this one.
Well, add one more log to the fire straw to the camel's back piece of music to the stack. Sheesh... Just when I though I had all of the music under control.
I'm spending some time this morning looking over the music that we'll be doing in this year's show. It's all online now, for those of you who happen to know the URL. There's a lot of good stuff in there, and I can't wait to get started learning it for real. Highlights for me include:
- TanTaRa Cries Mars by Thomas Weelkes
- When Griping Griefs by Richard Edwards (We did this back in June, and it's still hauntingly beautiful.)
- Weep, O Mine Eyes by John Bennet
By the time I got down to Byrd's Haec Dies, Something occurred to me. There's a LOT of new music here. Out of twenty-some-odd songs, Boar's Head, Deck the Hall, What Child Is This and Dona Nobis are the only ones that the audience (even long time fans of the Revels) are going to recognize. Clearly, I'm going to have my work cut out for me over the next couple of months learning all of this.
One of my delightful new finds from Pennsic was the discovery of the fantastic Whiskey Bards from Atenveldt. (That's Arizona, for my mundane friends out there.) This all-male quartet has a fantastic sound and magnificent stage presence. They write most of their music themselves, but have been known to dabble in a "trad" tune from time to time. I heard them perform a couple of their own pieces at Marian of Heatherdale's concert on Wednesday evening, and then heard them sing Da Vinci's Notebook's "Enormous [censored]" at a private camp on Thursday. I doubt they'll ever be coming through this neck of the woods any time soon, but if you happen to be going by a Ren Faire somewhere in the southwest, you should check them out.
Here's a couple of their songs. I'm thinking about learning both of them as solo numbers for myself, because they are REALLY COOL! (Cold October Wind especially needs to be worked up as a piece for Kingdom Crusades, but only a couple of you are actually going to get that joke.)
4: Songs to learn for this weekend when I go singing at DLC's church.
4 (again): Songs handed out on Tuesday to learn before Revels does the opening weekend of RenFaire.
7: Songs for the pick-up choir at Pennsic in a week.
So, Steve, how do you feel with all of this singing coming up?
GIDDY.
For starters, you might want to look back at a few of my recent posts to get the context for this. Anyway, flutestory claims that the tune of the Opera Reel I posted about earlier is the same as the tune on the second half of this track here:
To be honest, I don't hear it. Sure, the tunes have the same name, but that's about all of the similarity I'm willing to acknowledge. The tunes seem so different that I don't think they have the same source at all. Do any of you out there with a better ear for this kind of stuff want to weigh in? (Hey, Faireraven and Acroyear70! I'm looking squarely in your direction on this. Feel free to reply over on LJ.) I'm rather eager to see what other people think.
So I got a new CD on Sunday. It wasn't exactly what I was expecting, but that's okay. (In fact, there is a mildly funny series of misunderstandings I had relating to why I bought the CD, but it really would be diminished if I tried to write it down. Feel free to ask me about it sometime.) Anyway, I had a realization while listening to one of the tracks. Here, this might make more sense if you listen to it yourself first:
So, I start out really enjoying the novelty of listening to a standard instrumental melody getting "spelled out" by two or three voices. Then I started to notice what those voices were actually doing...
You see, they're actually including the ornamentations that they would normally include if they were playing their instruments -- but for the first time, I can actually hear the individual notes. (This is especially noticeable with the bass' ascending line about 25 seconds in.) Even better yet, I can actually parse out on the fly which voices happen to be on the melody and which ones are just trilling about. This has actually been a bit of a sticking point for me for a long time while listening to this kind of music. I can always more or less pick out the melody line, but the transitions between lines and tunes always sound like a jumbled mash of notes and I just can't figure out what's going on. (This also applies very frequently to the middle of the musical line as well if the players are particularly enthusiastic.) The net result of too many ornaments always gets parsed by my ear as "Splat!"
But now... It's actually starting to make sense. I finally understand how some of those little trills are supposed to go and how they relate to the main melodic line. Even when I listen to other tracks on the same CD, I can now hear the individual lines for the first time. It makes sense! It doesn't go "Splat" anymore!
All this from a CD that I might not have gotten if I had known what was on it...
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