I’ve got a new article up on the Liberty Fund website: “Bach’s Ode to Caffeine.” Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata, “Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht,” more often known in English as the “Coffee Cantata,” was likely first performed at Zimmermann’s Coffeehouse, where he was a regular performer. It’s a miniature comic opera in which a father wages a one-man War on Coffee.
If you’d like to hear the cantata, I highly recommend this performance on YouTube:
This post is something new. I’m thinking of making blog posts on classical music a regular feature here, for no better reason than that I love it. Liberty Fund has published several articles I’ve written on classical composers. If computer security expert Bruce Schneier can devote a post every Friday to squid, I think I can diversify too. I’ve added a WordPress category, “Music,” for these posts.
Here I’d like to talk about some composers whom I like but aren’t currently as well-known as the regulars on concert programs. The idea for this came when I learned that Vivaldi was known only to a few in the nineteenth century. He came to prominence, oddly, because of a piece which Fritz Kreisler wrote himself but attributed to Vivaldi. On the other side of the ledger, Louis Spohr and Joseph Joachim Raff were among the top-ranked composers of the nineteenth century but aren’t heard very much today.
(more…)
My latest article for Online Library of Liberty, “Authority and Oppression in Verdi’s Operas”, is now up for your reading enjoyment. I’m especially proud of the research that went into this one.
(Off-topic for this blog, but I want people to know about this album.)
There are filk albums that excite me with their stories, impress me with their musicianship and technical skill, or make me laugh at their humor. Not many, though, grab me from the inside the way Gray Rinehart’s “Taking You Out to See the Stars.” The songs touch on hope for the future, love, painful loss, facing adversity, mortality, and more. It’s billed as a “pre-order,” but don’t be fooled; it’s got thirteen fully-realized songs.
(more…)
My first article on the Online Library of Liberty has been published!
Fidelio: Beethoven’s Hymn to Freedom
This post deals with a music publisher, GIA. That puts it a little beyond my blog’s usual scope, but it’s still publishing, and I write lots of songs (though only one has ever made me money) and have edited convention songbooks. The story is hard to believe, but the reports I’ve seen support it. My primary source is a Reason article by Robby Soave. I’ll grant that since I tend to agree with Reason‘s positions, I have to watch out for bias, but in my experience the site’s fact-checking is good, and they don’t often publish wild fictions.
On the other hand, if the report is accurate, the company it calls “the major publisher of religious content” (in choral music) is run by fanatics who don’t just support arson but think there’s “no justification” for opposing it. Or perhaps GIA is run by miserable cowards who will do anything that they think will help their revenues, no matter how unjust. Both possibilities are disturbing.
(more…)
“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” It’s not clear who first said this, but it reflects the difficulty of discussing music in words. It doesn’t mean either one is impossible — I can imagine a good ballet on the creation of a monumental building — but both are challenges.
The problem comes when addressing a general audience. If you’re writing for musicians or music students, there’s a whole technical language for the job. But how do you say meaningful things about a musical piece without talking about voice leading, diminished chords, tonality, and other esoteric concepts?
I like to make music and write about it, though I haven’t often been paid for either. I enjoy good writing about music and have a lot of books on the subject. Based on that, here are some of my thoughts on how to write about it, with examples that I didn’t write.
(more…)
Finally! Yesterday’s Songs Transformed is available on Smashwords!
Did you know that “Charlie on the M.T.A.” started out as a song about a ship that never returned? That the “Streets of Laredo” follow a path from St. James’ Hospital in London? That “Yankee Doodle” originally was a song mocking the colonists?
This book follows the ways songs have changed and evolved over the years. It starts from the Middle Ages and conducts a tour that leads to Mad magazine, the Smothers Brothers, and Weird Al. It looks at where protest songs came from and how they changed with the times.
YST makes no pretense of being a scholarly book. It’s simply a look, with lots of quotations, at changing song lyrics and what lies behind them. You may learn a few bits of history you hadn’t known, and hopefully you’ll enjoy the ride.
The list price on Smashwords is $4.99, but I’m thanking readers of this blog by offering it at just $3.49 with the coupon code QV69U till August 20.
(more…)
Yesterday’s Songs Transformed is getting close to completion. I’m working on the introduction, which traditionally is one of the last things you write. It deals with the relationship of the book to Tomorrow’s Songs Today. TST is about filk music. YST grows out of my interest in filk. It puts the rewriting of song lyrics into a bigger context. I expect a large part of my audience to be people interested in filk, people who love the idea of replacing old lyrics with new ones. I also hope that other music lovers will get enjoyment out of it.
(more…)
A current project of mine is compiling and editing the songbook portion of the ConCertino 2018 program book. I’m using OpenOffice for the pages and Finale for the music notation.
This is the first time I’ve worked with the full version of Finale on a project. Previously I’d used the budget versions, called Finale Allegro and later Finale PrintMusic. When the publisher dropped PrintMusic and offered a cheap upgrade to Finale, I took them up on it. I didn’t think that the extra features would be that useful for my purposes, but they’ve turned out to be quite helpful.
(more…)