Some gorgeous unaccompanied choral works

Alexander Gretchaninov (1864-1956) has always been one of my favorite choral composers, especially his works in the Russian Orthodox tradition.  I love the dense harmonies and especially the way this tradition uses those low bass voices.  When my local group, the New Mexico Symphonic Chorus, did Rachmaninoff's All-night vigil in the spring of 201, it reminded me how much I love this kind of music. We will be doing some more a capella modern liturgical music in our upcoming concert, including Gorecki's Totus tuus, that has many of these qualities.

Here are some YouTubes of Gretchaninov works that gratified my search for good performances.

• Svete Tihiy (O gladsome light). This April 11, 2011 performance by the Central Washington University Chamber Choir in Ellensburg gave me goosebumps. Their faces reflect the ecstasy I feel listening to them. See how their bodies sway so slightly, leaning into the notes.
• Nunc dimittis (Time to hit the road).  Holland Chorale, Hope College, Holland, MI. A larger, older choir with a beautifully balanced sound.
• Vespers. No information about this version, but it is apparently a study compilation that also shows you the sheet music (hope you can read Slavonic).  The first piece shows off that great Russian basso sound.
• The cherubic hymn by the Wicker Park Choral Singers of Chicago. Sweet sound, nice balance, solid bass line. Nice-looking room they're in, too.

Our recording of the Rachmaninoff Vespers should be available shortly.  Until then, our CD of our October 2011 Mozart Requiem is already available. I think it came out rather well, for one show—live without a net, as our director Roger Melone calls it.

Meanwhile, check out the State Russian Choir's version of Blagoslovi Dushe Moya Gospoda (Bless the Lord, O my soul).

The three hardest choral pieces I've sung

After singing baritone parts for 18 seasons with the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra Chorus (NMSOC) and its 2011 reincarnation as the New Mexico Symphonic Chorus (NMSC), I've seen our director Roger Melone pick pieces that are all over the classical map, from ancient times to several actual 21st Century works.

It's a tough balancing act. You can't ignore the warhorses like the Mozart Requiem and the Beethoven Ninth, but you can't just program the warhorses if you want to keep singers from getting bored. You have to give your singers some challenging works to keep them growing, and program some modern works to attract concertgoers who may also be tired of the warhorses.

Of all these pieces, some of them were tough and some of them relatively easy, but three stand out in my memory as the hardest I've had to work to prepare my part.

• Rhythmically, the most challenging was Sir William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast (1931).  This is the story of the Writing on the Wall, mene mene tekel upharsin: you have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. It reminded me of some jazz pieces by Thelonious Monk or Dave Brubeck.  Highly dramatic, punchy notes in odd places, surrounded by treacherous rests.  The most dangerous piece I've sung in terms of opportunities for an accidental solo.
• In terms of being able to find pitches, the hardest piece to hear was When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd by Paul Hindemith (1946). This deeply moving piece was a setting of the Walt Whitman poem commemorating the death of Abraham Lincoln. It was commissioned by Robert Shaw to commemorate the passing of Franklin Roosevelt: the mood was similar, the passing of a great national leader who had just gotten us through a long and bloody war.  Learning the piece was a bloody war, too.  In many sections I had to mark every single interval in my line. I use lowercase Roman numerals for minor intervals and uppercase Roman numerals for major intervals.  Long sections have marks like “ii III iii IV ii II ii ii” so I could hear each interval. Very 20th century.  By the time the concert rolled around, all this chopped salad somehow jelled into quite emotionally intense music.
• The most physically challenging piece was clearly the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven (1824).  In the engineering field we have a saying: “Faster, better, cheaper: Pick any two”. For this piece, the rule is easier: Faster, higher, louder, longer, pick any four. An hour of singing, much of it at high volume,  much of it in a very high tessitura, with lyrics that go by like a bullet train.

Honorable mentions:

• The piece the NMSC just sang in January 2012, the oratorio King David (1925) by Arthur Honegger, was notable for both rhythmic and chromatic difficulty. Lots of pitches you have to pull out of thin air, lots of rapid-fire words that sound terrible unless every single singer is extremely careful about diction.
• In 2004, the New Mexico Tech Chamber Chorus performed Giancarlo Menotti's The unicorn, the gorgon, and the manticore. Another piece both rhythmically and chromatically non-Euclidean.  It took us three semesters to get this piece working, along with the accompanists (one flute and one bassoon). We took it on the road and performed it in St. Francis Cathedral in Santa Fe. After I got my first look at the score, and swallowed hard, I asked Roger Melone if he knew the piece. “Oh, yes,” he replied, “It's very difficult.” But the NMT Chamber Chorus did a credible job, thanks to the tireless and inspiring work of our conductor Dr. Doug Dunston.

Poppa Needs Shorts

Poppa Needs Shorts, by Leigh Richmond and Walt Richmond, is one of my all-time favorite short stories. Originally published in Analog, it is available here in a free version. It's a quick read and rather charming.

Hewlett-Packard tightens the screws (1973)

Around the time of the 1973 Oil Crisis, energy conservation suddenly became an issue in California. Hewlett-Packard was concerned about their electric bill. So they started a program to save energy.

Most -hp- buildings back then had high ceilings illuminated by fixtures that held eight fluorescent bulbs, each eight feet long. Every division's maintenance staff had various ladders and work platforms for getting up to the ceiling. They came around to take one bulb out of every fixture.

When that was done, they came around and took another bulb out of every fixture.

About the time the fixtures were down to three bulbs each, a lot of people started to complain that they couldn't see what they were doing. So they sent the staff around to make sure there were at least four bulbs in every fixture. The complaining died down because the company had responded.

This is a pattern I have observed many, many times in other contexts. I suspect they actually teach it in management schools: lay off staff until the remaining staff explode from the stress, then hire a thin slice of them back until the screaming dies down.

Is this actually a good idea? Not always, I'd say. Consider the American health care system. Because so much of the health care and pharmaceutical industries revolves around profit, they tend to cut to the bone, and then maybe a little more.

Maybe in normal times this will fly for a while. But what happens when disaster strikes? Have you spent much time in an emergency room lately? Because so many people are uninsured, they can't afford preventive care, then they get really sick and go to the ER. Waiting times in most ERs nowadays, I hear, are pretty long unless you have a severed artery or aren't breathing. And this is pretty much all the time. What if we get a really ugly flu epidemic or a natural disaster? Where is the reserve capacity?

My solution is, of course, typical Progressive cant. Make health care a nonprofit activity. Go to single-payer like all the rest of the civilized nations, which spend half what we do and get better outcomes, like the Canadian healthcare system.

The day I wore a burqa (ca. 1980)

Somewhere around 1980 I was invited to a Halloween party by an old New Mexico Tech friend who was living in Palo Alto at the time.

Another friend of mine was an inveterate shopper of second-hand stores and had a number of treasures, including an authentic burqa. She agreed to loan it to me for the party.

It was a black robe with a head covering that left only two parts visible: a tiny rectangle enclosing my eyes (with some small coins hanging just underneath), and my legs up to about mid-calf. I put flip-flops on my feet and drove to the party.

This was during the Iranian hostage crisis, when Islamist militants took over the American embassy and held 52 Americans for over a year. The news often showed footage of Iranian militants screaming “Death to Carter!”

So when my dear friend Candy answered the door, I said in a high sing-song voice, “Death to Carter! Death to Carter! Happy Halloween! May I come to the party now?”

Candy and I have been friends since we were freshmen together in 1966, so I was quite surprised that she didn't seem to know who I was. But I wasn't armed or otherwise menacing so she let me in. I didn't shave my legs, so I doubt anyone thought I was female, but no one had any early correct guesses about who I was.

I stayed in character for twenty minutes before Candy figured it out! The lesson that has stayed with me, since that day, is how much a burqa makes one anonymous. This is not a value judgement, just an observation.

At this point I weighed probably around 300 pounds, so finding a costume that concealed my identity was a good trick. But a burqa worked surprisingly well.

The first computer program I ever ran (1966)

This story is part of my permanent Web, but you are welcome to leave comments here.

At Texas Tech, I found a sympathetic staff member who said I could run my program. I was in ecstasy.

They had two computers then. One was an IBM 1620 with add-on core memory (persistent storage—a luxury of the day!) and a Flexowriter terminal. However, such was not for mere mortals, but I would be welcome to run it on their IBM 7044, the older and not so shiny system.

The first obstacle was learning how to use an IBM 026 keypunch. What a miserable excuse for a human-computer interface! Communicating with computers by punching holes in a piece of cardstock! If you made a mistake, you had to throw away the entire card and start over: once you punch a hole, you can't unpunch it.

(the full story)

A foot of snow in Socorro

The weatherman predicted 2-4", but we got over a foot the morning of 12/05. First shot shows the bird feeders and birdseed bin in my backyard with foot-tall snow caps.

I cleared off the back half of my car so I could get some snow gear out of the trunk. This picture shows the depth of the snow on the car roof. The “Pica pole” is a little over a foot long; there is another 3/4" or so of metal past the 0" mark, so definitely over a foot.

Looking east along Campus Drive on the south side of Fitch and Driscoll, you can see more cars with serious snow caps. Note the depth of the snow on the roof of the pickup truck on the left.