Young and Full of Fluff

I have been doing some long overdue organizing of the 300+ files in my downloaded folder. I have a habit of downloading stuff there and not moving it on to a final location or not deleting it. Today was the day I tackled it.

In there, I found two mp3s I have zero recollection of: Can I Sit Next to You by Spoon and how do you sleep? by LCD Soundsystem. A look at my order history shows I bought these in March 2021.

...why?

Normally I would think I heard them in a cab or in a show or something, but March 2021 I wasn't going f'ing anywhere. Google does not link these songs (as in, in a movie soundtrack) other than that they were both released in 2017.

Anybody have any idea why I would have heard these songs? I mean, I like them. But I usually immediately put purchased music into a playlist. It is weird to have two random mp3s I don't remember buying hanging out in the downloaded folder. Like the time I was downloading music from Napster and ended up with the song Darkness Darkness by Screaming Trees because someone had mislabeled a file.

This weekend there was a Record Riot in Jersey City. Working from home and the general *waves* means I have not been to my favorite local purveyor of used CDs--Iris Records--in a while.

I have a method when I go through used CDs. I focus on World, and I pick up anything from the Record Labels Real World and Luaka Bop, and any Rough Guides, as I've found those to be consistently high quality. (Yes, I realize this method of acquiring new music limits me to pre-2005ish but LET ME HAVE MY OLD WAYS.)

So I picked up a record from Luaka Bop, and I start it, and it's a little unusual, but I'm digging it. Then I look in the booklet for the translation and HOLY SHIT it is HATEFUL. It is in a language I do not speak, and the lyrical content of the entire album is violent misogyny and homophobia (like, literally, women are evil). I look up the artist, and he describes himself as a masculinist. So. We're done here.

If I stopped listening to Eve by Alan Parsons Project, a formative album for me, because I couldn't deal with the sexism anymore, I'm definitely not making an exception for this random album.

Last night, my choir (the Dessoff Choirs) performed with Roomful of Teeth (a Grammy-Award winning chamber vocal ensemble) at the Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center. I don't know if you've ever been there, but it is on the fifth floor of the Time Warner Center, and behind the stage is a wall of glass that looks out over Columbus Circle. We were singing with them in one song in their concert, so before we went out, we were lined up in the wings. I was the first one to go out, so that meant I spent fifteen minutes standing in the wings, looking out at the lights of the traffic in Columbus Circle and the reflections of the performers in the glass, listening to this. I don't know if you've ever heard something and thought I must own a recording of this. And trust me that, even with the quality of the recording, it is not the same as hearing it live.

Sometimes it's not just getting to collaborate with professional musicians in performances that's special, it's the moments in rehearsal or backstage that feel like a peak into a private world--who gets the chance to stand behind a Grammy- and Pulitzer-Prize winner and watch her draw abstract art on her sheet music? Years ago, the first time I did a gig with the New York Philharmonic, I saw a group of people enter the top balcony tier during our rehearsal and realized I'm part of their behind the scenes tour. We did a performance of Beethoven's 9th once seated directly in front of the violins with our backs to the audience until we stood at our first entrance, which meant I spent three movements watching the concert master play from a foot away.

And the performance went excellently last night as well--one of those rare occasions where you can feel that's you're nailing it in the moment. Most of the time, the focus is too much on getting every detail correct. It's rare to be able to enjoy the experience while performing.

In any case, I signed up for their mailing list as soon as I left the theater, and downloaded all of their albums when I got home.

I have another music recommendation: Tanya Tagaq. Tagaq is an Inuk throat singer. If you've heard Tuvan throat singing, this is--not the same thing. Her music is very visceral. I would recommend listening to Aorta from her latest album. If you like that, you'll probably like other of her stuff. If you hate that, well. At least you'll have been exposed to something novel.

On Tuesday, I saw Hamilton.

It felt like I spent the evening on a different planet. I bought the ticket a year ago, because I realized if I wanted to see it, I should buy the ticket before the Tony nominations, and I refused to pay more than $100. This meant clicking through every single performance till I found the first one with a single ticket for $100. Since I bought the ticket so long ago, I've had several dreams about seeing it, and I was incredibly anxious I'd forget the date or the time or lose the ticket or they wouldn't let me in or something. Even when I was waiting in line, I didn't believe it until they actually scanned my ticket and let me into the theater.

There was also the anxiety of, I was pretty sure this was my only chance to see the show. Since I'm an accountant, to put it an accountant way, the book value of my ticket, that is the historical cost, was $100. But the replacement value was $400 or $600. So I kept thinking, what if I get a headache? What if I have to pee? What if the people sitting next to me are jerks?

What I'm saying is, I see a lot of live theater, and the little imperfections are just part of it and usually don't bother me much, but because this was HAMILTON, and because I had to wait so long, OMG WHAT IF IT ISN'T PERFECT.

Then I got into theater, and holy crap, I've never seen merch move like this. I mean, it makes sense. If you spend $80 on a theater ticket, no, you're not going to spend another $40 on a sweatshirt. But if you spent $2,000 to take your family to see it? Then hell yes, you're going to buy a $35 T-shirt. At least then you'll have something tangible for what you just spent.

All this meant that people clogged up the lobby; you could barely move. The restrooms were also in the basement. I was sitting in the rear mezzanine, which was three flights up. I ran up and down those stairs three times--twice before the show, because I am an anxious dooby, and once at intermission. The bathroom line for intermission wrapped all the way into the orchestra section and down the aisle. I booked it from my seat as soon as the lights came up and still only made it back just before the second act started.

Then the seats themselves, which were just the minimum size I could wedge myself into. My thigh bone was too long for the distance between the rows, which meant it was one of those where you have to twist your feet to the sides and angle your legs and that's the one position you can sit in. For the next three hours.

The atmosphere was also something else. It was like a rock concert or opening night of a Marvel movie. The lights went down and everyone was like WOOOOOO! Every time a new person came on stage WOOOOO! And I was in the nosebleeds, which is where the true fans are, the ones who are just grateful to be in the theater. It was electric. In all my performances, there have only been one or two times when I could tell the audience was on board like that, and there was energy between them and the stage. And Hamilton gets that electricity every night?

The show then has so many words, you have to watch it with laser-like focus, attention unwavering or you'll miss something. All of this to say, I entered into an alternate physical reality that ran by its own rules.

Then the show itself.

I managed to avoid listening to the score at all (except for snatches of three songs) before watching the show, and that was the right choice for me to experience. Odd to talk about spoilers when it's based on historical fact, but a) I knew the broad strokes of the history, that doesn't mean I knew the granular details, and b) even if I had known all of that, the choices made in presenting the story are their own kind of spoiler.

( So the rest of this is going under a spoiler cut )

I realize I am late to the party on this one. It's so weird to suddenly be a newbie in a fandom that I've strenuously avoided so far. So I know it's been discussed to death by everybody already. I'm just going to enjoy getting to know the soundtrack recording, and finally getting to dive into this really awesome thing.

The concert season is over for my choir, and so I've been feeling a little wistful and listening to recordings of old Dessoff concerts. I keep the recordings of everything we do--in fact, I have recordings all the way back to high school, though those are still on tape. As I've been in Dessoff for more than a decade, we are talking several days worth of music. And that's not even including the recordings of my a cappella group.

This spring, we sang Rossini's "Petite Messe Solonelle," which I sang in high school and haven't sung since. It's been more than fifteen years since I sang it, and well over a decade since I listened to it. But when we sat down to our first rehearsal, I could sing the fugue at full speed and full volume with almost no errors--I remembered it completely. There's something about the things you learn in high school--both the incredible number of repetitions as compared to what I do now (which is sometimes run it once then go) and the plasticity of the teenage brain. Those pieces are lodged in there. I can remember a snatch of music I heard at a concert when I was sixteen and have never been able to find since. I can sing the entirety of a song about fog I sang in middle school and haven't heard since.

But these concerts over the last decade? Some of the pieces I remember all the way through. Some I remember the conductor talking to us about the piece, but I don't remember the music. Some I only remember one eight bar section--the tricky part we rehearsed over and over--and the rest is a blank.

And then there's an entire concert I don't remember at all. If you played it for me, I'd tell you I'd never heard those pieces before, let alone performed them. Yet I'm sure if I looked for it, I'd find both the program to that concert and the music with my markings in it. Maybe it's just cause that concert is Monteverdi and Gabrieli, and if there's a period of music that speaks to me less than Italian Renaissance, I haven't found it. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

I have acquired a new album of Bulgarian choral music (that is not as random as it seems--Bulgarian singing is AMAZING), and was listening through it, and came to this. Have a listen. Sound familiar?

That's because James Horner completely stole it for the main theme of the Willow soundtrack.

Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares was kind of a craze in the eighties. (You know the Xena main theme? Bulgarian.) I will bet you anything you want that I know what cassette was in Horner's tape deck sometime around 1988.

I have another case do, so you're getting a post on not that!

Watched 20 Feet from Stardom last night. It is fantastic. It gives a history of pop music over the last 60 years, highlighting the exploitation of black female voices. I mean, that's not the only thread going on, but one of the singers said, of British rock and rollers, "They wanted to sound black. So they had us." It also points out the disconnect between talent and success, talking about the failed solo careers of many of the singers. But they also talk about a woman, my new idol, Lisa Fischer, who put out a solo album--and won a Grammy for it--but didn't really want to do that. She really enjoys singing backup, so that's what she does. She doesn't want to be out front. Several people talked about the power of voices in harmony, and how some singers just prefer that to singing solo. That's certainly something that resonates with me (and my small talent). I get a lot more out of being part of the group than I do out of being out front.

What I found most interesting was to realize that the backup singers on like 90% of everything you've ever listened to are the same dozen or so people. It is a small world, session backup singers, and as each artist strives to capture the sound of other artists, they use the same backup groups. Makes me wish they were more frequently credited so that I could more easily track their careers. I mean, I'd like just to have a playlist of all the things I already own with these singers on them.

It was also heartening to see that, when I plugged 20 Feet from Stardom into amazon, looking for the soundtrack, it brought up all of the failed solo albums of the featured singers as things I might like. I bet this doc has actually done a fair bit of sales for them. I hope they get some of the residuals.

In conclusion, a great documentary that looked at a lot of different issues, not just failed ambition, and features amazing music. It's streaming on netflix--check it out.

I am listening to a radio documentary on John Cage's "Four minutes thirty-three seconds." Does it ever get performed any more? I've never seen it programed. I mean, it is fundamentally changed if the audience knows what it is, and it's so famous now that most classical audiences would know it. So can it even be performed anymore?

I think it's one of the most important modern classical music compositions, but I've never heard it in concert, and a recording would be pointless. And maybe a performance would be pointless now, too. Maybe it's just important that it happened.

I am doing some packing, which means I'm finally ripping some CDs my mom picked up in a bargain bin and thought I might like and--what the hell is coming out of my speakers? The CD jacket showed an Indian dancer, so my mom assumed it was Indian dance music, and it is a twee little folk song about Italian coffee shop workers.

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