blogcutter | Entries tagged with music

As we move into a second pandemical long Easter Weekend, most of us are once again modifying our traditional Eastertime activities. While attending live music concerts in person may be out of the question, we can still enjoy seasonal music like Bach's St. John Passion from our own homes. Here are the details of what I have helped to support and what I plan to tune into:

Good Friday at 3 PM
J. S. Bach's St. John Passion
Featuring Caelis Academy Ensemble, directed by Matthew Larkin
Recorded on 5th and 6th March of this year.
When: April 2 at 1500hrs EDT
Where: On YOUTUBE
Support this special initiative at Canadahelps.org

On Good Friday (April 2) at 3:00 PM, as a special collaboration of Southminster's with Caelis Academy Ensemble, Matthew Larkin leads a chorus of singers, soloists and a period-instrument baroque ensemble, through a reading of Bach's St. John Passion. A musical setting of the Gospel narrative depicting the events leading up to Jesus Christ's crucifixion, the "St. John" was Bach's first of four known settings (the others being the longer St. Matthew Passion, and the only partially surviving St. Mark and St. Luke settings), written during Bach's first year in Leipzig and first performed on Good Friday in 1724. The St. John Passion follows a tighter design and faster action sequence than the St. Matthew version, and only last two hours. Originally, it would have been presented liturgically, with the congregation joining to sing the chorales interspersed throughout the work and time for a sermon between its two halves, but Friday's performance will follow the modern practise of concert treatment, leaving listeners to explore their own reflections and reactions to the timeless story-of-all-stories. Fridays' performance will not be live: Due to the considerable constraints of the current times, the music was pre-recorded in early March, mixed and put together for broadcast by Southminster's audio/video team. There is no charge for viewing the concert broadcast, but donations will be greatly accepted to help offset production costs and support the ongoing music ministries of Southminster United Church and Caelis Academy Ensemble.

To join us for the performance, visit the Caelis Academy Ensemble YouTube page this Friday at 3 PM:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm56ejvY2X0

Current Mood: chipper
Current Location: home
Current Music: Bach

I guess a lot of people have been working on fixing up their living-quarters since pandemic lockdown began. For some, that's been pretty much a necessity as their home becomes their office, the one-room schoolhouse for their kids, the entertainment centre, the workshop... and so forth.

I haven't done anything nearly that ambitious around here, but I have been doing a little reorganizing in the bedroom that our daughter occupied when she still lived here. The mattress on the Ikea bed in there was pretty much a write-off and we discarded it some time ago. When stay-home orders were invoked and we were perpetually at home anyway and suddenly had readier access to delivery services, I ordered a new mattress for it. I've also been removing the tired old wallpaper that used to cover one of four walls in there. It's not really the dry-strippable type but it does seem to be reasonably wet-strippable and I find it kind of therapeutic to listen to old music in there while I peel off old wallpaper. As far as the music goes, I have a kind of multi-use appliance in there now: it consists of a 3-speed turntable, CD player, and record-record function (by which I mean you can record from an LP or 45 or even a 78 if you still have them, on to a CD). It also has AM and FM radio. It doesn't play or record tapes, but I also have a portable cassette player in there. All of this is good since soon after lockdown, the amplifier in the living room died, leaving the CD player, turntable, radio and cassette player in there out of action. Components were considered the way to go back in the day when we first installed them, but I'm now mentally revisiting the merits of a self-contained console structure like I've got in my she-shed. Especially since I readily admit that I'm definitely NOT a techie (though luckily there's one in residence here!)

So yeah. I've always had a fondness for a lot my old LPs so there's nostalgia value right there. And there are a lot of kids' books (plus a few toys and games) still in there, including old Nancy Drews, Secret Circle and Enid Blytons, which ups the nostalgia value a bit more. I've weeded out some, of course, and have been sorting out the LPs too. It's great to see the vinyl renaissance since it means that those I DON'T want any more can hopefully live to see another day in another home. And hey, I just recently got an e-mail from Value Village to say that their Donation Centres are re-opening, albeit with reduced hours!

It's interesting to note that that bedroom has been used as a quarantine centre of sorts before. Five years ago, when my mother-in-law died and we decided to adopt her cats, we set up a temporary detention centre for them in there. This served to keep them apart from our existing feline in residence while we ensured they were in good health and their vaccine records were in order. Then we gradually integrated them into their new home and family and were able to enjoy their company for another couple of years.

Virginia Woolf wrote eloquently about having a room of one's own. This isn't the kind of Bluebeard's chamber or locked room of murder mystery lore but it does serve as a kind of oasis of childhood or youth when I want a break from the mundane tedium of everyday life!

Current Mood: nostalgic
Current Location: Kids Room
Current Music: A Day in the Life, Day to Day Dust

So I recently got back from Belfast, where I was attending the second Noireland crime fiction festival:

http://www.noireland.com

It was my first trip to any part of Ireland, be it Ulster or the south. And I figured now would be a good time to go, while the U.K. pound is still pretty affordable and before Brexit wreaks whatever havoc it's going to wreak over the next month or so.

While the event was held in Belfast and focused particularly on Northern Ireland writers - people like Adrian McKinty and Brian McGilloway who write about the Troubles - there was also a strong contingent from the Republic of Ireland and from Scotland and England too. It was great to discover a lot of new (to me) Irish writers. Claire Allan. Claire McGowan. Jo Spain. Gerard Brennan. Steve Kavanagh. Andrea Carter. Haylen Beck (Stuart Neville). Scotland has Bloody Scotland, held annually in Sterling; England has Crimefest (amongst others), held annually in Bristol; but Noireland to my knowledge is the first crime fiction festival to focus on Ireland.

But Noireland also bills itself as an international crime fiction festival, so there were lots of big name authors too. Anthony Horowitz. Denise Mina. Ann Cleeves. Stuart MacBride. Belinda Bauer. Scandinavian authors Thomas Enger from Norway and Will Dean from Sweden. It was a full weekend of programming, running from early evening on the Friday through 5 PM on Sunday. I played hooky on the Saturday morning to visit St. George's Market and do a bit of a walking tour of downtown Belfast. It was good weather for it then. I was impressed at how pedestrian-friendly their downtown area is, with little maps all over the place so you can locate their major landmarks. Then I had lunch at the Crown Bar opposite my hotel before going back to the conference for the afternoon and evening sessions. Sunday I attended all the sessions and when the festivities ended at 5PM I ventured out on foot again (the weather was not so great by then - windy and rainy/sleety), determined to find a dinner venue where I could enjoy some good live music.

I headed for the Dirty Onion in the Cathedral Quarter but discovered that it was strictly a drinking venue; it had a restaurant upstairs (the Yardbird) but that was mainly chicken-oriented, so I went to the nearby Thirsty Goat which was still pub fare but rather more vegetarian-friendly. After enjoying a decent meal washed down with Irish coffee, I was ready to enjoy their live music which began at 7 PM. One guy with a guitar, a fairly traditional folk-singer who may or may not have been mostly performing his own compositions, although he did a couple of covers too that I recognized - The Boxer and Working-class Hero. After sitting through one set, I decided to return to the Dirty Onion for a nightcap. The live music there was strictly instrumental, on traditional Irish instruments (or what I think of as traditional instruments anyway) and I enjoyed that as well. When I got tired, I left and found a few taxis waiting patiently outside, so I took one of those back to my hotel.

Monday was my free day and while many museums are closed on Mondays, the Titanic exhibits along the waterfront were open and after seeing several dramatic versions of the Titanic story, I knew I wanted to see those. So after a leisurely breakfast, I got a taxi outside my hotel to take me there. I spent the next few hours wandering through the exhibits and the gift shop and ambling about outside, then gradually made my way on foot back to my hotel, stopping anywhere that looked interesting along the way. I was very impressed with their post offices - not only can you buy stamps there but you can perform a number of other transactions there including exchanging Canadian dollars for U.K. pounds. I wish we'd get proper postal banking here in Canada!

By the time I got back to the hotel, it was time for afternoon tea - the piano lounge there serves it seven days a week from 2 to 5 PM - and since I hadn't had lunch and didn't want to be out too late as I had an early flight next morning, that seemed like a suitable occasion for a lunch/dinner combination-meal.

Then it was back to my room for packing, napping and a bit of TV-watching before turning in for the night. Coronation Street, I discovered, is about 2 weeks ahead of us in Canada. The time shift to Daylight Savings, on the other hand, worked in my favour for once - they had "sprung ahead" in Canada over the weekend I was in Belfast, whereas the U.K. was still on winter time; so it was only a 4-hour time difference when I flew home.

I want to say something about Brexit before I conclude this piece, since it is so much on the minds of folk over there (and in fact, one of the conference panels was devoted to that very subject). Generally speaking, it seems to be the "little guys" who are apprehensive about the prospect of Brexit and would prefer to ally themselves with the Big Boys, the European Union. Back in 2014, the Scots held a referendum and voted to remain within the U.K. But then in 2016, when the U.K. opted for Brexit, Scotland made noises about staying within the EU, even if that entailed another referendum. Northern Ireland is similarly uneasy about Brexit, fearing that it could result in a "hard border" with Ireland-the-separate-country and perhaps compromise the delicate truce reached twenty years ago at the end of the "Troubles". It's the "big guy" (or gal) - England - who wants out of the larger trading bloc. And they, in a way, were never fully in, in the sense that they maintained their own currency and their habit of driving on the other side of the road!

Comparing it with the Canadian situation, I find myself a little baffled. Here we're so defensive about Canadian content, culture and identity. Thirty years ago with Brian Mulroney and the FTA, all my friends were lamenting that under a Mulroney government, Canada was doomed to become the 51st state (Canada 5-1?) Then we had the Mulroneys and the Reagans (he probably already descending into dementia, though it wasn't acknowledged back then) singing "When Irish eyes are smiling" on prime-time TV, followed by the great federal public service strike of 1991, and... well anyway. My point is that we over here have always cherished our unique identities and distinct societies and have prided ourselves on being a mosaic rather than a melting pot. Why are the Scots, the Northern Irish, and for that matter other unique groups like the Welsh, the Cornish, and so on - so anxious to be assimilated - or re-assimilated - into the European Union?

It's their decision, of course. And I can fully understand that people want the trains between Belfast and Dublin (like those between Ottawa and Montreal or even Ottawa and Gatineau if we ever get our bridges and light rail) to continue to run smoothly without annoyances and delays like Customs and Security checks. But is that really what the future holds? Will it even be an issue a year or two hence? We'll see.

Current Mood: pensive
Current Location: The Reading Room
Current Music: Rakish Paddy

... through so many sieves, filters and other intermediaries as to be but a pale imitation of its former self.

Not everyone accepts this state of affairs, of course. When people started moving from records to compact discs, there remained - and remains to this day - a loyal core of vinyl lovers. From the first time I heard music on compact disc, I thought it had a rather "boxed in" sound to it. The sound was "cleaned up", but in cleaning it up and removing little scratches and other imperfections, the CD-makers also removed much of the dynamic range and much of the emotional impact.

Of course, the CDs that appeared in the 80s are not necessarily completely comparable to the ones being made today. In those days, they all had mysterious letters like AAA or ADD or AAD or DDD on them. Unlike in the academic world, D's were considered to be better than A's because they referred to digital rather than analog - a newer, though not necessarily better technology. Nowadays, many if not most of the CDs out there are "burned" on home computers or other in-home devices. It's an open question as to whether this results in better or worse quality than with commercially available CDs. What is certain is that not all playback devices "respect" or are compatible with homegrown CDs.

With the early commercial CDs, I often had problems with them "skipping". This could sometimes be repaired at home. If you didn't want to attempt that, you could usually take the disc back and get a replacement copy - which might or might not suffer from the same defect. It's been a long while since I bought a CD that was problematic in that way.

People are basically lazy. Some of us diehards invested in reel-to-reel tapedecks in the 1970s because the sound was so much better. But eventually it became virtually impossible to get reel-to-reel tapes for home use. Everyone wanted cassettes, which were much more portable and convenient. With cassette decks, you needed Dolby and other processes to clean up the sound, which homogenized it at the same time. People listened to these cassettes on their Walkmans and the like, through miserable scratchy little earphones. And don't even get me started on eight-tracks!

With the advent and ready availability of equally portable CDs (as well as digital dictaphones, answerphones and the like), cassettes began to fade into oblivion too. As did the mass-market popularity of record albums, now widely referred to as "vinyl".

Nowadays, young people typically satisfy their musical interests in piecemeal fashion, downloading a snippet here, a song there. One thing that has suffered as a result is the sound quality. But that's not necessarily an inevitable byproduct of the way music is delivered. For example, Neil Young in his recent bestselling autobiography "Waging Heavy Peace" touts the virtues of a high-resolution studio quality recording technology called PureTone, which he calls "the new gold standard". I've never heard it myself, but it sounds promising.

There are some other reservations I have about the way people these days absorb their music, though I won't comment on them at great length today. For one thing, when LPs gave way to CDs, cover art and liner notes took a nosedive. There simply wasn't as much surface area to catch your eye and do something dramatic with. The other major reservation I have relates to the integrity of the whole. Something like The Who's Tommy is a rock opera - it's designed to be listened to in a sequential way in its entirety, not to be splintered off into hit singles. And that's true to a great extent of other albums too, in all genres of music. Increasingly, we seem to be catering to the shortening attention span of today's youth ... and perhaps today's adults too.

Call me an audio-snob if you will, but I suspect there are some like-minded people out there!

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Location: in the groove
Current Music: Plastic People

I found Chamberfest this year to be much more interesting and innovative than it was last year. And it seems that they do actually listen to feedback given by previous years' festival-goers. For example, there were many more concerts held at the air-conditioned Dominion Chalmers church, and fewer of them at the uncomfortable and difficult-to-get-to St. Brigid's. They introduced a P2 pass, general admission for two adults to all concerts except the Festival Plus ones (of which there were only a few), at a cost of $299 for the full two-week period. And they seemed, in many ways, to be trying to emulate Music and Beyond in highlighting the overlap between music and the other arts. In particular, there were several programmes held right in the galleries at the National Art Gallery - the highlight for me was the "Ave Maria" presentation by Rob Kapilow and the Ottawa Bach Choir, showcasing three specific paintings of the Virgin Mary at key points in her life. "Chamber Elements", with a choir in the garden court and trumpeters and trombonists who wandered through the galleries while the audience got to follow them, was a little more experimental and we didn't always quite know what to make of them, but I'm still definitely glad we went. Another interesting concert was held at Dominion Chalmers and featured (in the first half) Gordon Pinsent narrating Tennyson's Enoch Arden with the accompaniment of Richard Strauss' music and (in the second half) Pinsent reading Ogden Nash poetry with Saint-Saens' Carnival of the Animals as the accompanying music.

Most days we attended one or two concerts; some days none; there was one day, the first Wednesday, where (somewhat insanely) we decided to attend three concerts, at noon, 3PM and 7 PM (the last two each consisting of Colin Carr playing three of the six Bach cello suites). Midway through Chamberfest, we managed to acquire a second grandchild - but in between several visits to Gatineau, we still managed to attend an impressive number of concerts during the second week.

Music and Beyond and Chamberfest were not the only musical treats of the summer. In between the two festivals, I went to Montreal to attend the annual conference of the International Association of Music Librarians. In addition to librarian-stuff, there was plenty of good music to be enjoyed. A particular highlight for me was the "organ crawl" field trip led by organist and composer Gilles Leclerc in which we got to visit three church organs in the Montreal area: the Casavant organ at Eglise St-Jean Baptiste; the Beckerath organ at the St. Joseph Oratory; and the organs in the Chapelle du Grand Séminaire de Montréal, including the new Guilbault-Thérien one (based on French pipe organs from the classical period) commissioned in 1990 to celebrate their 150th anniversary. I also went to several concerts, my favourite being the one by the Studio de musique ancienne de Montréal, held at Notre-Dame de Bon Secours in Old Montreal.

Returning to Ottawa and the National Art Gallery, we've been enjoying the 40-part, 40-speaker Thomas Tallis motet (Spem in alium), arranged by Janet Cardiff and being played in the Rideau Chapel part of the Gallery; we went in to listen between Chamberfest concerts and went back today to hear it again, before it leaves for good on Aug. 25.

It's been a very music-filled summer so far!

Current Mood: mellow
Current Music: Musical Friends