jrtom

Until high school, almost all of the music that I owned and listened to on the radio, and most of the music that I listened to at other times, was instrumental (mostly classical and chamber music). (At that point, my sisters decided that I'd been deprived and started introducing me to classic rock, which stuck pretty well.)

Anyway, I don't know if this is cause or effect, but I tend not to really be aware of most of the lyrics of most popular music that I listen to. It's not that I was never curious, but if I'm not specifically trying to pick out the lyrics (and often even if I am), it's not what I hear. (I also learn music much faster than I learn lyrics when I'm studying it to perform.)

Slow accretion of lyrical knowledge, plus the more recent introduction of a smartphone that can both identify songs and look up lyrics, have changed this somewhat. As a result, I've become more aware that while there's a lot of music out there that I like, much of it has lyrics that are either banal or distasteful. (E.g., I like most of Elton John's music quite a lot but hardly any of Bernie Taupin's lyrics.)

How do you listen to music? What do you pay attention to? How do you decide whether you like a given piece of music?

Star Wars Uncut: what happens when someone gets the looney tunes idea to recreate the original movie, shot-for-shot...crowdsourced.
http://www.starwarsuncut.com/trailer

Japanese cafe service as performance art:
http://www.cabel.name/2009/09/kashiwa-mystery-cafe.html

Ornithology as performance art...in reverse:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9T1vfsHYiKY

And to finish up, a music video involving Carl Sagan and autotuning...which is much cooler than it sounds:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc

in a cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Sweet Home Alabama":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lNFRLrP014

There are other, longer versions of this on YouTube (including
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UuFJoexdlU, which involves someone rocking a
Wagner tuba) but in this one you can actually hear the choir and get
closeups of them.

This would be pretty surreal even without the band's hairdos (if that
is the word) and glasses.

*quietly boggles*

snagged from maradydd:

Put your music player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first song is the title.

Notes:

• I've got a lot of instrumental music, and it seemed a shame to leave it out entirely. So I've left it in where it occurred, but didn't count them as part of the 21 songs.
  
• I took some liberties with arrangement into stanzas.
  
• I left out the 2 tracks of French language lessons.
  

Personally, I think that Meredith's worked much better as poetry, but the title of mine kicks ass in this context. I'm just sayin'.

"Tell Me, Who's That Writing?"

Only a woman's heart
Send your love
Fear no more the heat o' the sun
Did you see the frightened ones?
Here am I

[instrumental: sub-Saharan]

I saw you dancing out the ocean
I don't want to spend the rest of my life
Oh, Mary, don't you weep
[percussion solo]
[piano solo]
Today...find my way

[Celtic instrumental]
[orchestral instrumental]

There's a calm surrender to the rush of day
[orchestral instrumental]
You come out at night
Domineo veniteo sacramentum

I am just an aging drummer boy
When John Henry was a little baby

[brass ensemble plays "Summertime" from Porgy and Bess]
Hey girl
Send your love
Climbing under
I see me with you and all the things you do

[brass ensemble instrumental]

This is the day
[percussion solo]
Seven weeks have passed now since she left me

I think this constitutes adequate background information for the reason that I typically create playlists. (Often playlists consisting of several hundred songs, but playlists nonetheless.)

I found this a couple of years ago and then lost it again; I just ran across it again. It makes me happy, so I'm posting it here so that I can find it again.

http://www.dooku.net

Click on the white rectangle a few times. Some of the musical accompaniment works better than others...but there aren't any particularly bad ones. Enjoy.

http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/the_prosody_of_itaking_the_hobbits_i/

Really, what else is there to say?

So I had my conducting debut this past weekend (see http://jrtom.livejournal.com/225901.html for details if you have no idea what I'm talking about). It went very well: all sorts of people (in and out of the choir) came up and told me that they thought I'd done an excellent job, I enjoyed it, and I'm told that one could hardly see the marionette strings coming from the cathedral ceiling. :)

There were a couple of things that I would have done differently if I'd had more rehearsal time; I would have liked to add a third repetition (to the Ukrainian and English lyric reps) with 'scat' syllables simulating bell tones, and it would have been nice if they'd actually put my name in the program (although they did announce me in the concert).

The biggest bummer, though, is that Megan wasn't able to make it: this past weekend she caught whatever sickness that the kids had had the previous week, and she was exhausted both from that and from riding herd on the kids by herself this weekend. I feel pretty bad that I was gone at a time that she really needed help. :(

However, my brother- and father-in-law both taped the second performance (in addition to the more professional taping from a different angle), so at least we'll have that...and I think there's a good chance that neither of them would have attended if they hadn't felt bad about the fact that Megan couldn't attend.


For the occasion, I wore my tuxedo (tails, white tie, vest, the works); this caused at least one person to remark that I definitely looked the part of a conductor. I replied that while I figured that they wouldn't necessarily bar me from the conductor's podium if I showed up in grimy jeans and sweatshirt clutching an AK-47 (well, maybe the assault rifle would present a problem) that I thought it was probably better to look like a conductor than a resistor, regardless. :)

Vegetable Orchestra (courtesy of gwyd): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpfYt7vRHuY

Sweeney Todd clips:
http://www.bordersmedia.com/features/audio/sweeneytodd_wait.asp
http://www.bordersmedia.com/features/audio/sweeneytodd_myfriends.asp
http://www.sweeneytoddmovie.com/

(My initial reaction to the ST remake: eh. Neither Helena Bonham Carter nor Johnny Depp are really making it work with the vocals. The acting might carry it, though.)

http://www.fistfulayen.com/blog/?p=127

The money quote:

I’m here to tell you today that I for one am no longer going to fall into this trap. If the licensing labels offer their content to Yahoo! put more barriers in front of the users, I’m not interested. Do what you feel you need to do for your business, I’ll be polite, say thank you, and decline to sign. I won’t let Yahoo! invest any more money in consumer inconvenience. I will tell Yahoo! to give the money they were going to give me to build awesome media applications to Yahoo! Mail or Answers or some other deserving endeavor. I personally don’t have any more time to give and can’t bear to see any more money spent on pathetic attempts for control instead of building consumer value. Life’s too short. I want to delight consumers, not bum them out.

Now let's see if Yahoo! backs him up...

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18511/

Not new in essential concept, although the idea of doing nearest-neighbor searches on the hums themselves is interesting. I'll have to check this out.