The Elephant's Child

If A Ball Falls in a Forest, Does It Sound Like Bach?

Apparently, yes.  

 

Also, I want a wooden cell phone.

My Husband's Been Keeping A Secret.

I'm cleaning out the media cabinet.  There is an awful lot in there that hasn't been listened to for a long, long time.   I expected that.  But I did not expect this:

You've got some 'splaining to do, Mad Musician!

 

I Made it 90 Seconds.

There's a vocal performance thing on exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.  Voice Piece for Soprano and Wish Tree, it's called. You can read about the whole exhibit at the MoMA website, or you can view it on YouTube.

It's about three and a half minutes long.  If you click over to watch and listen, come back and let me know how far you got before you gave up.  Also note the facial expressions of those viewing the exhibit.

Sometimes it's hard to believe that there was a time when art was created because it brought beauty to the world, some kind of joy or satisfaction to the artist, or at least fed some inner creative drive of the artist.  I have a hard time believing any of those reasons were the motivation behind Voice Piece for Soprano and Wish Tree.

Now "art" isn't valid "art" unless it deconstructs everything.  And "art" can't just be what it is, anymore, either.  It has to address some sociopolitical issue.

Barf.

Why I Listen to Country And Not Rock In the Car.

1. The singing is better in tune.

2. Instrumentalists are better able to play their instruments. 

3. The lyrics are better able to make you smile or make you cry.

4. More puns, and more clever use of wordplay.

5. Makes us of a wider vocabulary.  (Seriously.)

6. Like NASCAR and baseball, it bleeds red, white and blue when you cut it open. 

7. Not every single male vocalist is a emo hipster tenor with a reedy, thin, immature voice.

8. The importance of God, family, and home are celebrated. Furthermore, it's ok to care about your country.

And finally,

9.  It annoys the heck out of Collegetown liberals when I pull up next to their tidy Priuses plastered with COEXIST and Obama bumper stickers in my Saab turbo with the windows down and the sunroof open blasting Courtesy of the Red White and Blue.

We Stumbled Upon A Singing.

Mad Musician and I had a blissful afternoon.

Alone.  

His mother is visiting for a few days, and one of her goals for her visit was to make sure that her son and his wife had some quality time together, without Sparkle Kitty.  (Have I mentioned what a dreamy mother-in-law I have?) After lunch today, we said goodbye to Oma and Sparkle and headed out for a small road trip.

Boy, it was quiet in the car with Sparkle Kitty in the back seat. 

We took the Saab, a car we fall more in love with each year.  It will hit 200,000 miles sometime this month; as of this afternoon it was at 199,588 miles.  As a car screamed past us in the left lane going about 100 miles an hour, I commented on how I never see the cars that are really built for safe handling at those kind of speeds going that fast.  Instead, you see minivans, Grand Ams, Pontiac Sunfires and the like being driven way beyond the speeds the cars' handling and steering were built for.

Mad Musician told me he's only taken a car up to 90 mph or so a couple of times. He says our Saab is the only car he has felt was solid at those speeds. (For the record, I don't recommend driving a car that fast, no matter what you're driving.)  We promised ourselves that we'll keep this Saab till it has 800,000 miles.  At least.

We did some driving around in town, and did some walking. The downtown areas looked promising from the car, but were disappointing on foot.  We stopped at a pipe shop and picked up a pipe nail for Mad Musician.  Now he can stop using the snap setter from my sewing tools to tamp down his pipe. 

The coolest thing that happened this afternoon, though, happened when we followed some "Singing Today" signs.  The signs ended at a Mennonite church parking lot.  Following open doors into the church basement, we stumbled upon a Sacred Harp singing that was just getting underway.   Not many people were there yet, but all were friendly and welcoming.  We chatted for a few minutes, picked up a schedule for future sings, and stayed to try our hand at three songs before we excused ourselves to head out on the rest of our afternoon.  What horrible timing; I've got a persistent tickle in my throat left over from last week's bout of strep throat that's making singing rather difficult right now. 

But now we've got a list of all the singings in this area of the Midwest (sadly, several are much too far for us to travel to on a Sunday afternoon), an email contact, and a place to go to sing in May. 

We're excited.

Across The Centuries, Across The World.

The music originally dates from 1664, and the original words from Alt­dorf­lisch­es Ge­sang-Buch­lein, 1663.   Here the song is sung in French, from the new French-language version of the Lutheran Service Book, by seminary students and others in Dapoang, Togo.  Read the English words here.

Have a blessed Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil and Easter morning, everyone. See you next week.

The Wind.

Click on image for cleaner, larger version of the music, if your screen is narrower than mine and you can't see it well enough to read it.  The text, written by J. R. R. Tolkien, can be found here, in Monday's post.  I'm awaiting word from Mad Musician on whether we'll be gifted with an audio recording of him singing it.  For those of my readers who can't read music, I'm sorry.  (You're never too old to learn something new, by the way... )

The Wind Was On the Withered Heath.

I'm sitting up here at the computer, with Mad Musician's beautiful reading voice drifting up the stairs from the couch in the living room.  He's reading The Hobbit to Sparkle Kitty.  This is our second time through the book; we read it out loud last winter, too.

It's such rich writing, with long, descriptive passages, complex sentence structure and anything-but-juvenile vocabulary.  And yet, it's eminently easy to read aloud. The best books always are.  In fact, I'd hazard a theory that a test of good writing is whether or not the text reads comfortably out loud.  Is it easy to read, despite being complex?  Or are you tripping over words even though the book is an emerging-reader chapter book published by Scholastic?

The Hobbit has multiple poems and songs included in the story.  Tonight Sparkle Kitty demanded that Mad Musician make up a tune for the song in the chapter they read tonight, and he did. 

It was stunning.  In a minor key, it made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Here's the text:

The wind was on the withered heath,
But in the forest stirred no leaf:
There shadows lay by night and day,
And dark things silent crept beneath.

The wind came down from mountains cold,
And like a tide it roared and rolled;
The branches groaned, the forest moaned,
And leaves were laid upon the mould.

The wind went on from West to East;
All movement in the forest ceased,
But shrill and harsh across the marsh,
Its whistling voices were released.

The grasses hissed, their tassels bent,
The reeds were rattling - on it went
O'er shaken pool under heavens cool
Where racing clouds were torn and rent.

It passed the lonely Mountain bare,
And swept above the dragon's lair:
There black and dark lay boulders stark
And flying smoke was in the air.

It left the world and took its flight,
Over the wide seas of the night.
The moon set sail upon the gale,
And stars were fanned to leaping light.

I crept down the stairs with my mp3 player set to the voice recorder to capture a bit of it.  I hope I can convince Mad Musician to write the tune down so I can share it with you.  (The recording was made from too far away to be of good enough quality to share online.)

For any hymn writers out there who might be curious about the tune, make note: the poem from The Hobbit is written in long meter, 8.8.8.8.   But I don't think this tune seems suited to a hymn text.

We'll see what you all think once Mad Musician gets it written down.

Sunday Moments.

Mad Musician improvising a baritone tune for the "Smash the Plates" song from The Hobbit:

Dump the crocks in a boiling bowl;
Pound them up with a thumping pole;
And when you've finished, if any are whole,
Send them down the hall to roll!
That's what Bilbo Baggins hates!
So, carefully! carefully! with the plates! 

Communion service at church today.  "Love caused Your incarnation; love brought You down to me. Your thirst for my salvation procured my liberty." (Lutheran Service Book, our hymnal, hymn 334.)

Spotted some people putting on jackets and leaving right after Communion.  I hope they had a family party to get to or something and weren't just leaving because the service ran 15 minutes past the one-hour mark.

During Altar Guild, I got a "We've never, ever done it that way, ever" response for demonstrating that the napkins *cough* purificators can be folded in thirds to represent the Trinity.  Oops.  I must work harder at keeping my head down. 

I took the last cup of real coffee after coming down from Altar Guild duty. Bwahahaha! Oh. Wait. I got the last one because the crew had carefully set aside a cup for the lady I work with.  I had to ask for what was left in the pot and about to be throw out.

Pastor sidetracked into a history lesson on the intertestamental period during Bible class because someone asked what Hanukkah was. I was surprised that someone didn't know about Hanukkah.  And I thought I lived under a rock.

Mad Musician chanted Psalm 85 today using an Anglican chant melody.  "What's that? I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome my husband is. "

Pizza for lunch; thick crust for Sparkle and Mad Musician, super-thin cracker crust with an enzyme chaser for wheat-intolerant me. 

We shuffled the desks again, and put Mad Musician back downstairs, this time in the dining room. I think we're done now.  Just have a bunch of tidying up to do in the upstairs office-den-school-computer-work-guest room.

I've lost my voice. Off to Le Wal Marte tomorrow for Tazo Wild Orange and Tazo Zen to brew together for the perfect cure. (HT to Melody for that one.) 

I'd run out for the teas tonight, but I'm too tired and I've just had a Sam Adams Blackberry Witbier.  The witbier is ok.  I'm not a huge pale-ale and weiss beer sort of girl, paritially because that style seems to be quite trendy right now.   These crispy, hoppy, fizzy, shandy-style beers are for people who would rather be drinking a white zinfandel. (Oh, Cheryl... are you listening? I know you don't like beer, but you might like the pale ales.  They're different. Sparkly and shimmery. Think Asti. )  I'll take the pale ales when I'm at the beach in the summer time. For anything else, give me a brew you can scrape off the floor if you spill it.

And last but not least, Pastor's side-tracked Bible class has got me obsessing about history again. Time to hit up the library. Yay!

It's Coming. Doom!

It's coming, sooner than you'd think, and about three weeks before you're ready for it.  Driving, wailing, syrupy stick-sweet waves of creeping earworm torture, poking into your brain while you're trying to fight the crowds for the one special thing that will make your husband's Grandma Edsella hate you slightly less.

It's Christmas music, playing incessantly on the radio and in the stores, day and night and day.   It will start no later than Black Friday, that crazy day of shopping the day after Thanksgiving, and continue until midnight on December 24th, immediately after which all the music will return to normal, in mid-song if necessary.  Come they told me, pa rum pum pum pum. A new born King to see, pa rum pum never gonna give you up, never gonna let you down...

Mad Musician hates the Little Drummer Boy, the poor man.  I don't mind it so much, although it's not one of my favorites, certainly.  I can't stand Feliz Navidad.  It should be banned by the Geneva Convention.  Rocking Around The Christmas Tree drives me batty. 

Please. Stop the rocking.  Get a hotel room already.

In fact, I can't think of one single commonly-played Christmas song that I really like.

Maybe White Christmas.  But even that is schmaltzy and annoying when heard in isolation, by itself, without a soft couch, a warm blanket, a husband, an ottoman (not an automan or auduban), and an adult beverage to go with it.

What Christmas song makes you want to break a certain locked glass cabinet in the back of the Walmart and shoot out the store's speakers?