mike's web log

Oh say, can you sing it?

Thu, 24 Feb 2011 18:40:57 GMT

Here's a little self-administered test for Americans. (Of course, non-Americans are welcome to play, too, if they want.) Sit yourself down with a blank piece of paper or a blank document in your text editor and write out the words — first stanza only — of the US national anthem. When you're done, check your answers by looking up the lyrics. (Here's one site you can use.)

How'd you do? Something like 2/3 of Americans can't get the lyrics right.

I got to thinking about this because twice in the last few weeks I've seen a sporting event at which the pre-game singer mangled the words to the anthem (most prominently, Christina Aguilera at the Superbowl).

The US national anthem presents some difficulties, I think, in a couple of ways:

The words only make sense if you know that it commemorates a siege and bombardment. What "perilous fight" are we talking about here? What's up with the "rockets' red glare"? In the second line, "what so proudly we hail'd," what does what refer to? Not that this is necessarily important, but what war is this?

The musical range, an octave plus a fifth, is at about the limit of the range for amateur singers. There's more than one reason that people applaud when singers hit that "home of the FREE". :-)

[more]

An early example of repurposing

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:24:42 GMT

That Mozart could be a sly fellow. Music poured out of the guy seemingly effortlessly -- legend has it that the Kegelstatt Trio was written out while Mozart was waiting his turn at skittles[1] -- but maybe it wasn't as always as easy as that. And the man did have to make a living, after all.

Take, for example, the flute concerto in D. According to S. W. Bennett, on the liner notes to the LP The Virtuoso Oboe:

[T]he financially hard-pressed Mozart had an opportunity to earn some money by writing for the flute, an instrument he disliked. A Dutch patron of music and flautist, M. de Jean, commissioned in 1778 a group of flute works, which Mozart had to supply in a hurry. He brought forth three flute quartets and two flute concertos.

You're in hurry, you have some distant patron, and you don't even like the flute. So what do you do?

Of the latter [that is, the concertos] the one in D is undoubtedly the C major oboe concerto transcribed. As "almost conclusive evidence" Alfred Einstein points to the fact that in its D major flute form, the violin parts of the concerto never go below A on the G-string, indicating that the whole work was simply transcribed a whole tone upwards.

Heh. Hey, maybe he won't notice that his commissioned flute concerto is actually an oboe concerto redone to make it more flute-y. But alas, it seems that De Jean did actually notice -- per the infallible Wikipedia [more]

DIY (almost) guitar setup

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:07:27 GMT

This post is strictly about guitar setup; for those who care naught for guitar mechanics, nothing here to see. Catch you next time.

I had an interesting guitar setup experience recently. If you have even moderate experience with guitar setup, this will probably all be old hat. (And if you have none, you probably don't care. So who's reading? Hmmm.)

I got my electric a year and some ago. It's a knockoff of a Gibson ES-330:

I like it fine. As I got it, it had some relatively high-gauge strings (11s, probably). Being new to electric, I had nothing to go by, so I used that guitar as-is. I had a setup done at one point, but didn't have it restrung. During one of my lessons, tho, we were talking about bending, and my teacher had a go on my guitar. "Lighter strings, dang!" was his recommendation, so I had one of the shop guys put on some lighter ones (10). It was sort of a rush job, which more-or-less explains the rest.

The lighter strings were a definite plus. However, it seemed to me that the guitar had developed a slight buzz. (This is where the experienced folks say "duh.") I kept thinking I should take it in for another setup, but didn't get around to it.

One night, tho, I was at guitar school (not to be confused with lessons), and the owner dude (Jay) introduced Ryan, a new guy they had. Ryan was a guitar builder, Jay said, and was open for business. Specifically, you could bring him your guitar for repair or whatever. It was the same price as taking the guitar to a shop, but -- the cool part -- you could watch and, if you wanted, Ryan would teach you to do what he was doing.

[more]

Roundup

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:20:19 GMT

You know what I wouldn't mind? A bit of sunshine. Wrong time (winter) in the wrong place (Seattle), I guess.

Fake reviews prompt Belkin apology. I guess I've just always assumed that some number of product reviews (and restaurant reviews) are by shills. (I'm usually most suspicious of the ones with the really, really bad grammar, haha.)

The #1 Song on this Date in History. What was the #1 song on the Billboard chart on the day that you were born? (Me, it was Elvis Presley, "Too Much.") [via Sarah] [18 Feb 2012: h/t to Rupert Charles for the updated link!]

What the Web knows about you. Check out the list in the sidebar of all the things the author was able to find about himself. [via ... just about everyone]

Facebook and list mania, aka "25 Things About Editors". John McIntyre's editor-specific take on the "25 things about me" meme that's been going around.

Roundup

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 10:01:50 GMT

A short list today. Spending too much time away from the computer. Ha!

How to get someone to answer your questions. Clever strategy, heh. [via Raymond Chen]

How Math Unraveled the 'Hard Day's Night' Mystery. You know that opening chord for The Beatles' "Hard Day's Night"? Guy figured out how they made it. [via Daughter Sabrina]

Spelling Bee. The Visual Thesaurus people have put up a spelling-bee style spelling test that's strangely addictive. [via Fritinancy]

Key to the Highway

Fri, 08 Aug 2008 10:17:23 GMT

Alternative lyrics.

I got the key to the highway
Billed out and bound to roam
It's a new GPS box
It tells me how to get home

I'm going back to the border
This time I won't get lost
Like when we went there that last time
And got ourselves all crossed

When the moon peeks over the mountains
My beacon I'll be able to set
I'm gonna roam this old highway
And my old maps I'm gonna forget

Gimme one more kiss, darling
And one for my GPS
Coz when I leave here this time
Directions I won't have to guess

Our bummer song lists

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:20:30 GMT

I've been taking guitar class for several sessions running, as noted before. Although members come and go, over the course of these sessions the median age of the participants just hasn't gone down much, so our jocular appellation for the class ("Old Guy Rock") these days is less humor and more just, you know, fact.

And as it turns out, left to our own devices, we always end up selecting songs that are not the, you know, sunniest pop songs. Let's see ... we've had suicide ("Fire and Rain"), regret ("Best of My Love"), regret ("Brown Eyed Girl"), regret ("Can't You See"), regret ("Layla"), regret ("Wish You Were Here"), depression ("You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"), resignation ("Flake"), despair ("Cold, Cold, Heart"), existential ennui ("Norwegian Wood"), prison ("Folsom Prison Blues"), death ("Gravedigger"), suicidal depression and regret ("Hurt"), and, um, who knows ("Ripple"). As a sample.

Well, it turns out there's a reason. I dug up an old, old quote tonight, and golly, maybe this is relevant.

Rock and roll has outlived its usefulness to most of us who grew up with it. The current hits aren't about us anymore, but that's all right--we're no longer crowding the clubs and record stores. Pop has always existed primarily for the young, the only ones who have time for it. The source of disenchantment is in realizing that the favorite songs of our high school and college years are no longer about us either--they reflect where we were in our lives then, not where we are now. This may be why so many of my friends have developed a sudden interest in country, a style of pop whose subject matter is less often adolescent sensuality than adult wreckage.

-- Francis Davis
"'Vox Populi"
The Atlantic Monthly, October 1993

Johnny Cash, anyone?

Disharmony at SSO

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 12:06:21 GMT

If you have any contacts at the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, or if you follow the gossip side of the cultural scene in Seattle, you certainly know that things have not been smooth in the relationship between the orchestra members and Gerard Schwarz, the music director. Just how not smooth, however, might be a surprise. The New York Times had an article on Sunday that recounts just how bad things have become:

The Seattle Symphony Orchestra has carried disharmony to new heights, lurching from crisis to crisis. There have been allegations of vandalism aimed at players, including a dented French horn and a razor blade planted in a mailbox; a players’ survey that condemned the conductor only to be deep-sixed by management; and lawsuits filed by players accusing the conductor of mental if not physical abuse.

It is a cautionary tale of how the relationship between performers and a long-term leader can go awry and how, in an artistic hothouse, a tangle of emotion and politics can veer out of control and take on a life of its own.

It's a tricky situtation. The problems are affecting morale and relationships all through the orchestra. At the same time, tho, Schwarz has basically put the orchestra on the map, and the board is presumably loath to mess with a formula that, from the perspective of fame, audience loyalty, and $$$, has been extremely successful.

Stride rite

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 00:20:44 GMT

One of my favorite Christmas CDs is "Yulestride" by Butch Thompson -- holiday favorites on stride piano. (sample, 775KB).

Butch Thompson spent a long time on A Prairie Home Companion, and he is versed in that same laconic storytelling style. This is from the liner notes he provides for the CD:

In December 1954, I was the leader of a three-piece band that closed our school Christmas program with an instrumental reading of Silent Night. We had two clarinets and a cornet, and we just played the whole thing, three times through, in unison. We were in the sixth grade, and had received three months of weekly lessons on our instruments. Rehearsing at home one day, I happened to throw in a little "Good evening, friends" blues lick that I thought sounded pretty good, but my mother persuaded me that people might not want to hear that kind of thing on a favorite hymn. They might be offended, she said, or (worse, I thought), they might laugh.

So when the big might came, we played it straight. We had no conductor, so our initial attack was unpromising, as each of us waited for somebody else to do something definite. A beachhead was eventually established, a gradual crescendo ensued, and as I recall we came to a forthright conclusion. Luckily, the first few weeks of clarinet instruction are customarily confined to the low register, so we didn't have to contend with the high notes and their hazardous intonation. In fact, our little trio had a comfortable, unthreatening reedy sound, not much different from an old pedal organ. As we say in the Midwest, it could have been worse.

[more]

Rip-roarin'

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:22:36 GMT

I've settled into the groove (haha) of ripping the CD collection. I started by using MusicMatch, a product I have an irrational loyalty to. I never loved starting it up, what with it doing its "component check" that took forever. Since Yahoo bought it, it's gotten even more inconvenient. It keeps popping up some screen about some subscription or other has expired, and sign up at Yahoo, and blah-blah.

Then there's the issue that MusicMatch doesn't recognize a lot of my more obscure CDs, i.e., it can't find them it whatever database it's using. (Perhaps this is the Yahoo message I keep getting -- no database?) This means I have to manually enter track and tag info, and holy cow, that's tedious.

But the problem that finally led me away from using it as a primary ripping tool was that I couldn't get support for WMA Lossless. Friend John had recommended WMA Lossless as compressed but, you know, lossless. And a day or so later I was reading someone's advice (sorry, don't remember where) that you should rip lossless, and then convert copies to whatever format you need for (e.g.) your iPod. MusicMatch doesn't support WMA Lossless native, but it's supposed to be available via an add-in. But the add-in page 404s, and about then I thought I'd had enough with MM, or more specifically, with how Yahoo is handling MM.

So I'm ripping using Windows Media Player 10. It supports WMA Lossless, and a little bit to my surprise, I've been able to configure it to create tracks with file name format I want. Plus it has recognized every CD I've put in, so no manual tag editing, yay. So far -- it's still early -- I haven't run into any problems that make me hate WMP.

I guess that over the course of the next few weeks I'll be whittling down the CD collection as I rip. For the time being I'm concentrating on CDs that it wouldn't devastate me to lose. Even so, I'll also burn some DVDs with backups of all this and keep them someplace offsite.

Roundup

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 13:28:38 GMT

On my list for Christmas is a magical ability to play blues lead.

Toyota Shows Violin-Playing Robot. Insert joke here about how we have plenty of mechanical musicians already.

'Cat Lady' Conundrum, The. Has Fluffy been eyeing you hungrily? One possible reason: more than 60 million people might be infected with Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite of cats. "... Toxo must find its way back to a cat’s stomach to survive. So the parasite has evolved a complicated system for taking over its hosts’ brains to increase the likelihood that they’ll be eaten by cats."

Buy Houses in Detroit For $250, Monthly Pmt = $1. "You can go to Realtor.com and search for homes for sale in any city in the U.S., and you can specify a certain price range. If you search for Detroit homes for sale between $0 and $1,000, you'll find that there are 74 homes for sale in that price range." Not quite so good in Seattle; the cheapest listing I found was for a manufactured home in Seatac that is listed as having a view of Angle Lake. Point being, there are cheaper houses out there than people probably think, as long as you think cheap. [via grow-a-brain]

Offical Home Page. Fast, "Ad-Free Internet Starting Page." Includes a (Google-based) search and links to email and popular sites. I just can't help but wonder what the angle is. (No ads?!)

Roundup

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 06:55:18 GMT

Snow, rain, gale-force winds, flooding, power outages, all in the last 72 hours. I tell ya, it's been some kinda weather up here in our corner. La Niña year, they say.

Ten Mistakes In Education.[1] "I believe that the school system is making a great many mistakes. Here are my ten favorites, favorite not because I like them but because eradicating them would go so far towards helping kids learn." Interesting ideas, not sure how practical. Here's a sample:

Mistake #6: SCHOOLS BELIEVE STUDYING IS AN IMPORTANT PART OF LEARNING.
Practice is an important part of learning, not studying. Studying is a complete waste of time. No one ever remembers the stuff they cram into their heads the night before the exam, so why do it? Practice, on the other hand, makes perfect. But, you have to be practicing a skill that you actually want to know how to perform.

One Possible Reason for On-The-Net SQL Servers. Reader follow-up to the recent posting about the 500,000 exposed SQL Server and Oracle databases. See also: Continuing the Exposed Server Debate. (Might be more to come, but I'll leave it at this.)

Gibson Shows New Self-Tuning Guitar [more]

Guitar heroes

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 11:17:10 GMT

As occasionally mentioned here, in my copious spare time I've been plunking away at (haha) learning to play guitar. Slow going, that, but I've sorted out that you press with the left hand and strum with the right, stuff like that.

So as to have some structure for the whole bidness, I am, uh, matriculated at a guitar school, where of late I've been in a class. The place offers ensemble classes in many manners of playing -- blues ensemble, classic rock ensemble, jazz, like that. I've been doing an "acoustic rock" ensemble, which might as well be called "old guys strum songs of their youth." No kidding -- we were joking that they should have a sign that says "You must be this old to take this class."

Aside from needing to get past the image of old guys rockin' out, which was my problem, not theirs, I've had a blast. The guys who run the school are all great guitarists and fun guys. (In fact, we had a couple of them play at the wedding.) The acoustic-rock class has been fun as well. At the beginning of the class the instructor presented a list of about 50 songs that were suitable for our level(s), and while I was off larking about in Hawaii, the class settled on an Eagles tune, a James Taylor song, and -- what else -- a Beatles song. As backup we had Clapton's unplugged version of "Layla," which was held out as a kind of "if we nail the first three" sort of option. (We didn't.) So you get the idea, basically.

Last week all the classes had their quarterly performance, which Sarah kept calling my "recital." Having attended many a student performance in my day, I know this drill, and "recital" is not entirely inappropriate.

[more]

Roundup

Mon, 09 Apr 2007 17:55:11 GMT

Hey, it's Monday.

Why do only the "Experts" use online help? Jeff Smith is the resident expert on many applications at his work. Like this:

Me: Ok, so, according to the help, it tells us <what to do>. So, let's just do this...

[later...]

User: It works! Wow! You are a GENIUS! I do not know how you memorize and know all this stuff!

[via Michael B]

Missing Greatness. If one of the world's best violinists were busking in a train station, would you notice? [via BrettZ]

Asirra. Another CAPTCHA control/service. Like HotCaptcha, Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting Access) is based on images, but it's substantially more work-safe, I'd say. I also like their explanation about HotCaptcha that "Asking users to rate people's attractiveness is potentially offensive, and the challenge does not have any ground truth." (Emphasis mine.) Linguistic note: the term CAPTCHA is tm'd by Carnegie-Mellon; the generic term, apparently, is HIP (Human Interactive Proof).

Pick a License, Any License. Jeff Atwood bravely catalogs the types of licenses under which you can release your software: "I hate software licenses. When I read a software license, what I see is a bunch of officious, mind-numbing lawyerly doublespeak. Blah, blah, blah.. kill me now." As usual with Jeff's posts, the comments go on and on and on, but as usual, with good info.

[more]

Craftsmanship (and violins)

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 23:39:16 GMT

Sarah recently got me a copy of The Violin Maker, a book about (what else) making violins, and one of a series of books I seem to have read on the craft of instrument making.[1] John Marchese, who is himself a trumpeter, watches the Brooklyn violin maker Sam Zygmuntowicz make a violin, a Guarneri copy, for Gene Drucker of the Emerson String Quartet.

As always, there are many keen meta-observations about music and craft. Here are two that I liked. In the first, he quotes Zygmuntowicz:

"If I may be so obnoxious as to say so--violin-making is a kind of un-American activity. It goes against one of our fundamental beliefs, which is that things always get better and the new replaces the old--Progress.

"[...] Violin making has been immune to mechanization and standardization ... it's a very foreign idea that violin making is not all that mysterious, but it is one of those things where the basic way it works best was stumbled onto a long time ago. The requirements haven't changed, and therefore the results haven't changed and therefore it's a very complex custom that is only learned through long application and a great deal of knowledge. It's not arcane knowledge; it's something any guy can learn--if you spend thirty years doing it."

Later on, Marchese observes that Zygmuntowicz has measured and recorded, perhaps obsessively, details about the size and thickness of every part of a violin. "Does every violin maker do this?" he asks Zygmuntowicz. The response:

[more]

Roundup

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 19:01:36 GMT

What better way to wait for traffic to die down than to inventory recent findings?

universcale. A beautifully designed, animated, interactive examination of the scale of the universe.

Elizabeth Warren on the Credit Card Industry. Have you ever wondered whether credit card companies are ... weasels? Why, yes! Way more than you think! Terry Gross interviews a Harvard professor who is an expert in the ways of credit.

Dead & Buried. Euphemisms for death and dying. [via John McIntyre]

Joe, this is for you. Geoff Pullum on offering grammar advice to writers: "The bottom line is that you should let your expert writers write, and choose from the full array of presentations that English grammar allows, rather than chasing around trying to eradicate putative errors that actually are not errors at all, and never have been."

Complaints Choirs of the World. Something new to me, anyway[1] -- choirs that sing complaints set to music. The idea originated in Finland and has spread across Europe. There are videos on the site; I found the German song the cleverest, and the children's complaint choir the funniest.

The Science of Lasting Happiness [more]

Roundup

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 14:04:00 GMT

Today's selection.

Gumby on the Moon. Nothing says "Childhood in the 60s" like Gumby. A 50th-anniversary celebration of the surreal claymation series. (Dig the theremin sounds -- nothing says "Sci-Fi in the 60s" like the theremin ...) [via Daily Grind].)

How naming works at Microsoft. Leon Bambrick explains how various proposed product names are considered and a final name is decided on.

Daffy “Times” Article on Amazon and Classical Music. Charles Petzold recounts the horrors of Amazon's search engine for classical music. For example, searching for "Schubert Piano Concert" gets a whopping 815 hits, which is odd, since Schubert didn't write a piano concerto ... [via Michael B]

McRidicUlous. Nicole Stockdale comments on an effort by McDonald's Corporation to have the dictionary definition of McJob changed "... to reflect a job that is stimulating, rewarding and offers genuine opportunities for career progression and skills that last a lifetime." Roger Shuy on the Language Log comments in more depth.

Roundup

Wed, 17 Jan 2007 19:22:09 GMT

I'm not even going to bother to post the spectacular video of the Demolition Derby that was Portland (OR) during a recent freezing spell.

You Say Tomato. Matthew Baldwin recounts a little intergenerational misunderstanding about working with routers.

The Complete Guide to the Guitar for the Beginner to Intermediate to Advanced Player. An early post from the inimitable Leon Bambrick. "The first Riff I am going to teach you is from the Cream classic 'Sunshine Of Your Love'. This riff requires a great deal of patience and you shouldn't expect to master it for at least a few years yet. In the tradition of over six million guitarists world wide this should be the first riff you learn, closely followed by smoke on the water. If however your guitar teacher/guru is born after 1980, then he or she will force you to start with a Kurt Cobaine tune or some Jeff Buckley nonsense." Note that this is followed by "Part 5 - How to Tune Your Guitar."

pork, porcelain, porcupine, porpoise, aardvark. Bradshaw (of the future) occasionally writes posts that explain the etymological relationships of a handful of (now) seemingly unrelated words. A few more: foot and pajamas, grime and Christ, crimson and worm.

Patching OFFLINE Systems with Windows Update [more]

Roundup

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 20:46:05 GMT

Been working on the house instead of reading blogs.

Watch a saxophone be built. Links to (long! like, 50MB+) videos showing how they make saxophones at Selmer, Keilwerth, and Yamaha. [via Gandalfe]

Oxford word of the Year. OUP whips up some of their annual lexicographic excitement!

Space: The Curse of the Ancient Computers. "The web, and sites like eBay, have been a salvation for the [Space] Shuttle. That's because these auction sites make available a lot of ancient (1980s) computer technology, to provide spares for Shuttle gear that is no longer manufactured."

How long did it take? Edmund Blair Bolles digests two positions on the current thinking about how old language is. [via The Tensor]

Oh, the emails you'll get ... [more]

Roundup

Mon, 06 Nov 2006 21:07:25 GMT

Recently. Much posting this month around the blogs on writing, coz it's NaNoWriMo. But you knew that.

How to write a novel. Leon sums up the wisdom of his experience(s) e.g. "Always start writing the book before you have determined the plot. A plot will come to you when it's good and ready. It's smarter to work one in later than to waste time on one right at the start."

Tonya and Nancy: the Opera. Everyone's favorite skating melodrama on the musical stage. [via raymond chen]

Things I've Learned in the Last Ten Days. "1. Crossing the road in Hanoi isn’t for the faint-hearted ...".

The Most Obscene Letter. Scott Adams (of Dilbert) explains the use of those f*ck*ng asterisks: "... it should be noted that the asterisk protects you from seeing naked cuss words that would otherwise blind you and put you on the slippery slope to porn addiction."

Value-Added, Outside-the-Box Sea Change--in Just Five Short Weeks! Nancy Friedman nominates her particular set of "Top Ten Wrongheaded Cliches."

Fretless modality

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 00:03:39 GMT

I am reading and much enjoying the book Guitar: An American Life by Tim Brookes.[1] The text alternates chapters about the custom guitar that Brookes is having made with chapters that describe the history of the guitar, with a heavy emphasis on its role in the U.S. For example, I was only vaguely aware of how popular Hawaiian guitar was in the 20s and 30s all through the US, and I did not know at all that the slide guitar, that mainstay of the blues, was invented by the Hawaiian guitarist Joseph Kekuku.

At one point, Brookes talks to Rich Kirby, a guitarist, DJ, record producer, and folklorist of traditional music, who had this surprising (to me) observation to make:

People complained that the guitar ruined old-time music because it forced a chordal structure on it that it didn't have. In Letcher County in the 1920s, virtually every household had a banjo. And to a lesser extent the fiddle. Not many pianos except in the Blue Ridge. A lot of the traditional music was in either the unaccompanied voice or [it used] musical instruments that had no definite pitches built in -- in other words, no fretted instruments, and no keyboard instruments. Many of the banjos and, of course, all of the fiddles were fretless. There was no standard tuning for the banjo, and the standard tuning for the fiddle was only one of many tunings that were, and to some extent still are, used.

So people had a wide-ranging, anarchistic sense of pitch, and many of the intonations used were clearly not of the standard twelve tones that you can find on a piano. I can remember listening to my grandmother's music, and she would sometimes hit what sounded like a wrong note, but when she would hit it in exactly the same place twelve verses in a row you would realize that it was not an accident, it was just a different scale.

[more]

Roundup

Wed, 11 Oct 2006 10:07:24 GMT

Recently:

Add variables to standard CSS stylesheets in ASP.NET. Mads Kristensen has an ASP.NET handler that lets you add some expression syntax (in C#) to .css files. (Via Mike Gunderloy.)

No Expense Spared at Google. NPR visits Google. What's better than the gourmet lunches? How about the bathrooms?

GNU Solfege. Free software for musical ear training.

10 things they didn't tell you about blogging.
1. It's easy to start but hard to maintain.
2. ... [1]

Kirkus shrugged. "Anyone who has written even a page of fiction knows about the nagging voices from within, the ones that say, 'It's no good, you have no talent, you should have gone to law school like your friends.' I heard that voice often while working on this book. But it's a different matter entirely to have an actual person, not a voice in your head, answer the anxious question, 'Is my book any good?' with the words, 'No, it's not.'" (Via Natalie MacLean at PowellsBooks.BLOG.)

Seduced by Snacks? No, Not You. "No one thinks he or she is the schmo who digs deep into the snack bowl without thinking, or orders dessert just because a restaurant plays a certain kind of music." Guess again. (NYT, requires registration.)

[more]

Roundup

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 22:11:41 GMT

Recent stuff, some technical, some musical.

How to be a programmer. The inimitable Leon provides a handy flowchart of how to program. Now with animation!

ASP.NET MessageBox. A MessageBox class you can call in ASP.NET code that shows a javascript alert box.[1]

How to Write a Fugue. Danielpi's video turns Britney Spears into Bach. (Sort of.) Dig the bowtie(s).

On a similar musical note (haha), Pachelbel's Canon, power-rock style. Version by arranger here. If this is your kind of thing, try searching YouTube, omg.

And another: Rollerblade bottle tune guy. Mozart on wheels.

[1] Sorry, I forgot whose blog I found this on originally.

20 years for GHS orchestra director

Sat, 17 Jun 2006 09:39:35 GMT

Marcus Tsutakawa, the director of the Garfield High School orchestra, has been at GHS for 20 years. Tomorrow (Sunday) there's a tribute program for him that includes a dinner and (of course) an orchestra performance involving from both current and alumni members.

The newspapers have picked up this nice human-interest story -- today's Seattle P-I has an article about "Tsut" and his program. As with Clarence Acox and the jazz prorgam, Marcus began with practically nothing and built the orchestra -- or now, orchestras -- into one of the top high-school ensembles in the country. The article duly notes that the school system's contribution toward this effort is palty -- less than $1000 per year for the entire program.

The thing I find astonishing -- other than the amazing success of the program -- is just how hard Tust (and Acox) work. As any of the students will tell you, both of these guys are there way before school starts and long after it closes. I know from personal experience that they both email late into the night. They both hold extra rehearals (orchestra rehearses every other Monday night, all year long) and as teachers and as potential benefactors of the largesse of corporate donors, they attend many after-school and evening functions. And both have other gigs as well -- Acox is a working musician and Tsut is director of one of the five Seattle Youth Symphony groups (and probably has other things going as well).

The article quotes several students talking about how great Marcus is with the kids and how he inspires them. No question about that -- Sabrina's gravitation toward her hoped-for career in music owes a great deal to Marcus -- the opportunities he has provided and the confidence that this has inspired in her.

[more]

Schenkman/Haydn

Thu, 11 May 2006 01:14:20 GMT

I was listening to the classical station the other day and heard an ad for a recital by Byron Schenkman at Town Hall. I know Schenkman as a harpsichordist, a co-founder of Seattle Baroque. But I hadn't heard him a long time, so it was news to me that he had decided to follow the history of the keyboard, sort of, and move to piano. Anyway, it sounded interesting and we (unusually) had a free evening on short notice. So we braved the crowds who had sold out the main hall to hear Madeleine Albright talk about religion in politics[1] and ensconced ourselves in the downstairs space to hear what ol' Byron had for us.

The recital was, as Schenkman pointed out, a dual debut -- he was debuting his new CD of piano sonatas, and he was debuting a 1921 Steinway piano that had belonged to Hans Wolf and was donated recently to Town Hall.

I'd been optimistic about the recital based on my previous experience listening to Schenkman. I recall one recital (on harpsichord) where Schenkman had played a sonata by C.P.E. Bach, a guy who is pretty much not on my radar. Not only was the playing good -- virtuosic -- but it was witty. I came out of that recital impressed with Schenkman and with a changed attitude about C.P.E.

Before he began playing, Schenkman said a few words about the occasion and the piano and about his new CD, which presents a collection Haydn sonatas for piano.[2] Schenkman said that if he had to pick one composer ("not that you have to, but") he'd pick Haydn, and I was all like Haydn? [more]