Some days I'm up early because of sleeping poorly. Today I'm up early because B. awoke me. The tire pressure light had gone on on her car, and since refilling it isn't in her skill set and she wouldn't have time on the way to work anyway, she needed me to clean out anything I needed from my car before she took that to work. Really, I'm going to have to start taking the cars in to the air station regularly, since tires need reflating long before they get to the warning-light stage.
So, visit to the gas station with free air is on my list of errands for the day, once the big light in the sky turns on. That's not enough of a trip to merit inclusion in my annual list of cities I've stayed in away from home:
Los Angeles, CA
Great Falls, MT
Dillon, MT
Salmon, ID
Missoula, MT
Butte, MT
Hillingdon, England
Oxford, England
Ashland, OR
Atlanta, GA
San Jose, CA
San Diego, CA
Seattle, WA
That comes to two conventions (Mythcon and Worldcon, both with B.), one convention planning session, two trips for concerts or plays (both also with B.), one trip for a museum exhibit (in England!), and two vacations for the heck of it. All my stays were in hotels except for Oxford, where I stayed in a rental house with a fiberglass shark embedded in the roof.
In writings, I co-edited another volume of the journal Tolkien Studies, and contributed a bibliography and part of "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies" therein. Elsewhere, I wrote a memorial appreciation of the work of Ursula K. Le Guin for Mythlore at the request of the editor, and published an essay on Tolkien's Smith of Wootton Major in a festschrift for Verlyn Flieger.
I had 38 concert reviews professionally published this year, probably a record, not counting two musical articles in the same venues and one CD review.
Kalimac's corner: a journal by DB
Monday, December 31, 2018
Sunday, December 30, 2018
the millennium has arrived
It's just that, for the first time in its history, the comic Pearls Before Swine has produced today a strip that's actually funny, that actually made me laugh. First time a newspaper comic has done that since Dilbert's heyday, and that was a while ago.
Saturday, December 29, 2018
whatever happened to ...?
The link on the blog page read Steve Jobs hired a career juggler to teach programming to developers.
I clicked out of curiosity, not suspecting that I'd be more familiar with the juggler than with Steve Jobs.
But it's true: It was Randy Nelson, "Alyosha" from the Flying Karamazov Brothers.
I first saw the FKB in 1977, when they were playing regularly at the Magic Cellar, a small magic club in San Francisco where my friends would hang out. They were all fans of the Karamazovs, too, and we would make group expeditions whenever they played locally for over a decade. (The full show of which the embedded flaming torch clip is part 8 is a good record of their standard stage show at that date, 1983.)
After Randy dropped out of regular appearances, I understood he'd gotten a job in the computer industry somewhere, but I never heard details or that it came about because Steve Jobs was an FKB fan. It's puzzling to me, because, being in Silicon Valley, I know a lot of people in the industry. I never met Jobs myself, but I know people who knew both him and the Karamazovs, and I don't recall any of them mentioning any of this.
So it's great to hear that distinctive voice again, even though instead of telling knockabout jokes it's discoursing seriously in an embedded clip on intelligent if rather alarming personnel practices. And to wonder how that applies to Pixar of today, for B. and I just watched their latest product, Incredibles 2, and I have to wonder. I love the characters of the Incredibles: all five are distinctive and fascinating people. But why are they embedded in such a dull and predictable plot?
I clicked out of curiosity, not suspecting that I'd be more familiar with the juggler than with Steve Jobs.
But it's true: It was Randy Nelson, "Alyosha" from the Flying Karamazov Brothers.
I first saw the FKB in 1977, when they were playing regularly at the Magic Cellar, a small magic club in San Francisco where my friends would hang out. They were all fans of the Karamazovs, too, and we would make group expeditions whenever they played locally for over a decade. (The full show of which the embedded flaming torch clip is part 8 is a good record of their standard stage show at that date, 1983.)
After Randy dropped out of regular appearances, I understood he'd gotten a job in the computer industry somewhere, but I never heard details or that it came about because Steve Jobs was an FKB fan. It's puzzling to me, because, being in Silicon Valley, I know a lot of people in the industry. I never met Jobs myself, but I know people who knew both him and the Karamazovs, and I don't recall any of them mentioning any of this.
So it's great to hear that distinctive voice again, even though instead of telling knockabout jokes it's discoursing seriously in an embedded clip on intelligent if rather alarming personnel practices. And to wonder how that applies to Pixar of today, for B. and I just watched their latest product, Incredibles 2, and I have to wonder. I love the characters of the Incredibles: all five are distinctive and fascinating people. But why are they embedded in such a dull and predictable plot?
Wednesday, December 26, 2018
post-xmas
So what did we get for Christmas? I'm hard to shop for, so I got a DVD on Churchill and a canister of candied popcorn from B., and tendonitis from an anonymous giver. The cats (by courtesy) got us a few things, including the annual wall calendar. Usually our choice features photos of cats, big cats, or penguins, but 2018's was one of medieval illuminations we found in the DeYoung Museum gift store at the end of the previous year. This year, animal calendars were short on the ground where I looked, and I found one of reading-themed illustrations by Mary Engelbreit. The cover shows a girl perched, I hope not too precariously, in some high tree branches, reading a book whose distinctive jacket design reveals it to be The Hobbit. So, can't miss.
This will probably be the last year that B's family gathers in the old family homestead, as her brother and his wife, who are currently rattling around in it after the departure of all their children, are planning on selling it and moving up to Seattle where their grandchildren are. At least we had a festive gathering, enlivened in particular by the burgeoning family of the niece from Fresno. I asked her eldest, the ten-year-old, about the school play her parents' holiday letter had said she'd be in come spring. What's the play? Treasure Island, she said. I thought rapidly for anything I knew about Treasure Island, a book I've never read, having bounced off it in childhood. (I also bounced off of Hornblower, much to my navy-veteran father's dismay. This was before the fame of Patrick O'Brian, whom I did not bounce off of until a considerably later date.) "The one with the pirates?" I said, and earned compliments for my familiarity with Treasure Island.
As my contribution to dinner I brought the veggies in the form of a rice casserole, but little of it got eaten, so dinner at home for us for the next few days is set.
Back to making hooting noises as I wrap the dashed cold ice-pack around the hand I'm trying not to type with. See you later.
This will probably be the last year that B's family gathers in the old family homestead, as her brother and his wife, who are currently rattling around in it after the departure of all their children, are planning on selling it and moving up to Seattle where their grandchildren are. At least we had a festive gathering, enlivened in particular by the burgeoning family of the niece from Fresno. I asked her eldest, the ten-year-old, about the school play her parents' holiday letter had said she'd be in come spring. What's the play? Treasure Island, she said. I thought rapidly for anything I knew about Treasure Island, a book I've never read, having bounced off it in childhood. (I also bounced off of Hornblower, much to my navy-veteran father's dismay. This was before the fame of Patrick O'Brian, whom I did not bounce off of until a considerably later date.) "The one with the pirates?" I said, and earned compliments for my familiarity with Treasure Island.
As my contribution to dinner I brought the veggies in the form of a rice casserole, but little of it got eaten, so dinner at home for us for the next few days is set.
Back to making hooting noises as I wrap the dashed cold ice-pack around the hand I'm trying not to type with. See you later.
Monday, December 24, 2018
rabbits of the uncanny valley
I've just spent three hours that I'm not going to get back watching the newly-released miniseries adaptation of Watership Down on Netflix. Here we have, once again, a book I cherish adapted into a movie I can't imagine wanting to see again.
Visually, it's disastrous. The computer animation has attempted realism instead of cartoons, but has only achieved that creepy almost-realism known as the Uncanny Valley. Some of the rabbits look like Bunnicula, others resemble stuffed toys. Few of them are distinctive enough to enable me to distinguish groups of Watership Down rabbits from groups of Efrafans, which makes the lengthy confrontation and battle scenes rather confusing. The camera angles seem inordinately fond of rabbit butts. The other animals aren't much better: the farmyard dog looks more like a pig.
As the plot got under way, I began to wonder if it had been adapted by Peter Jackson, as the flaws of his Tolkien adaptations were so lovingly replicated. The rabbits' crossing of the Enbourne is encouraged by the entire Sandleford Owsla at their heels, as so many moments from Tolkien were beefed up in those movies by turning them into superfluous chase scenes. What this tendency becomes when they get to Efrafa is almost indescribable. The plot is entirely rewritten, not to its benefit. The rescue of the does in particular is concocted by throwing out almost everything that was in the book - including the complete disappearance of the boat, which was the best part - taking care to make its replacement as boring, tedious, confusing, and repetitious as possible. It's not quite as awful as Jackson's Hobbit, but it deserves at least a (dis)honorable mention in that category. Some specific scenes - the destruction of the Sandleford warren, Bigwig's final confrontation with Woundwort - work pretty well, but not enough to be cherishable.
Efrafa itself is no longer an ordinary warren at a bridlepath crossing, but rendered into a sinister hellmouth by being placed in the basement of some abandoned human industrial buildings. The rabbits' relationship to human things is peculiar. In the scene of rescuing the hutch rabbits from the farm, the raiding rabbits actually enter the farmhouse, for no apparent reason. Later on, Fiver actually ventures into heavy automotive traffic that's waiting for a bridge opening, for even less reason unless it's as a clumsy foreshadowing of how he (not Hazel) is rescued from the farm cat by the farm girl and driven home in a car. Describing this, he calls her a "little girl". Little? She's twenty times his size! This brings us to the lousy and imperceptive dialogue: droopy emotionalism, noble sentiments from the book rephrased into mush, words that I can't imagine Adams' rabbits using (sometimes turned into a joke by having other rabbits saying they don't understand them), and exact quotes from the book used in ways that show the screenwriters didn't understand it. Most glaring of these is the final moment of the show, as Bluebell (not Dandelion or Vilthuril) starts to tell the young-uns the story of Hazel-rah and his rag-tag band, and quotes exactly, word for word, the opening sentences of the book. Which are all scene-description, not plot, and the use of which utterly ignores Adams' quite brilliant evocation of the mythologizing process, in which real events are reworked, dropped into the cauldron of story, and re-emerge as tales of El-ahrairah. Not that we ever get to hear any tale, except the opening myth, in full, same way that Jackson is reluctant to let us hear full Tolkien poems.
There is asperity and conflict among the heroes in the book, but mostly it's a tale of cooperation among skilled specialists. Which again the movie undercuts, by turning the characters grouchy and uncooperative for most of the movie, and their plans into haphazard whiffle. The resemblance of this to the truly awful parts of J-Frodo and J-Sam's journey to Mordor is quite remarkable.
The one change I thought almost worked was the attempt to beef up the role of females in the plot. Strawberry is changed to a doe, though a chatty and goofy one (I guess a role abandoned by Bluebell when they turned him into Dandelion). Various subplots of romantic pair-bonding fit in reasonably well, though the scenes themselves are often wincingly embarrassing. But it's odd when the hutch rabbit Clover, who in the book is timid and hesitant due to her captive upbringing, not only takes the place of Blackberry in knowing how to open the hutch, but is the one to reach Hazel after he's shot. How dashingly noble of her. It all turns out to be for foreshadowing so that she and Hazel can pair-bond later.
And immediately after being with Hazel, she's captured by scouts from Efrafa. WTF? They're on the far side of Watership Down from Efrafa, but the bad guys are everywhere. In fact, the movie inserts a scene of Woundwort (Ben Kingsley at his most implacable: most of the other voice actors are over-earnest and rather breathless, except for Peter Capaldi as Kehaar who is at his most stage-Scottish) ordering the capture of the heroes as soon as they arrive at Watership Down. He already knows they're there! This is like J-Saruman tracking the Fellowship over Caradhras with his palantir. It reduces the epic scope of the story to the scale of a tabletop role-playing game.
Well, look, I know the adapters can do what they want. But by the same token I can say what I think, which is: ugh.
Visually, it's disastrous. The computer animation has attempted realism instead of cartoons, but has only achieved that creepy almost-realism known as the Uncanny Valley. Some of the rabbits look like Bunnicula, others resemble stuffed toys. Few of them are distinctive enough to enable me to distinguish groups of Watership Down rabbits from groups of Efrafans, which makes the lengthy confrontation and battle scenes rather confusing. The camera angles seem inordinately fond of rabbit butts. The other animals aren't much better: the farmyard dog looks more like a pig.
As the plot got under way, I began to wonder if it had been adapted by Peter Jackson, as the flaws of his Tolkien adaptations were so lovingly replicated. The rabbits' crossing of the Enbourne is encouraged by the entire Sandleford Owsla at their heels, as so many moments from Tolkien were beefed up in those movies by turning them into superfluous chase scenes. What this tendency becomes when they get to Efrafa is almost indescribable. The plot is entirely rewritten, not to its benefit. The rescue of the does in particular is concocted by throwing out almost everything that was in the book - including the complete disappearance of the boat, which was the best part - taking care to make its replacement as boring, tedious, confusing, and repetitious as possible. It's not quite as awful as Jackson's Hobbit, but it deserves at least a (dis)honorable mention in that category. Some specific scenes - the destruction of the Sandleford warren, Bigwig's final confrontation with Woundwort - work pretty well, but not enough to be cherishable.
Efrafa itself is no longer an ordinary warren at a bridlepath crossing, but rendered into a sinister hellmouth by being placed in the basement of some abandoned human industrial buildings. The rabbits' relationship to human things is peculiar. In the scene of rescuing the hutch rabbits from the farm, the raiding rabbits actually enter the farmhouse, for no apparent reason. Later on, Fiver actually ventures into heavy automotive traffic that's waiting for a bridge opening, for even less reason unless it's as a clumsy foreshadowing of how he (not Hazel) is rescued from the farm cat by the farm girl and driven home in a car. Describing this, he calls her a "little girl". Little? She's twenty times his size! This brings us to the lousy and imperceptive dialogue: droopy emotionalism, noble sentiments from the book rephrased into mush, words that I can't imagine Adams' rabbits using (sometimes turned into a joke by having other rabbits saying they don't understand them), and exact quotes from the book used in ways that show the screenwriters didn't understand it. Most glaring of these is the final moment of the show, as Bluebell (not Dandelion or Vilthuril) starts to tell the young-uns the story of Hazel-rah and his rag-tag band, and quotes exactly, word for word, the opening sentences of the book. Which are all scene-description, not plot, and the use of which utterly ignores Adams' quite brilliant evocation of the mythologizing process, in which real events are reworked, dropped into the cauldron of story, and re-emerge as tales of El-ahrairah. Not that we ever get to hear any tale, except the opening myth, in full, same way that Jackson is reluctant to let us hear full Tolkien poems.
There is asperity and conflict among the heroes in the book, but mostly it's a tale of cooperation among skilled specialists. Which again the movie undercuts, by turning the characters grouchy and uncooperative for most of the movie, and their plans into haphazard whiffle. The resemblance of this to the truly awful parts of J-Frodo and J-Sam's journey to Mordor is quite remarkable.
The one change I thought almost worked was the attempt to beef up the role of females in the plot. Strawberry is changed to a doe, though a chatty and goofy one (I guess a role abandoned by Bluebell when they turned him into Dandelion). Various subplots of romantic pair-bonding fit in reasonably well, though the scenes themselves are often wincingly embarrassing. But it's odd when the hutch rabbit Clover, who in the book is timid and hesitant due to her captive upbringing, not only takes the place of Blackberry in knowing how to open the hutch, but is the one to reach Hazel after he's shot. How dashingly noble of her. It all turns out to be for foreshadowing so that she and Hazel can pair-bond later.
And immediately after being with Hazel, she's captured by scouts from Efrafa. WTF? They're on the far side of Watership Down from Efrafa, but the bad guys are everywhere. In fact, the movie inserts a scene of Woundwort (Ben Kingsley at his most implacable: most of the other voice actors are over-earnest and rather breathless, except for Peter Capaldi as Kehaar who is at his most stage-Scottish) ordering the capture of the heroes as soon as they arrive at Watership Down. He already knows they're there! This is like J-Saruman tracking the Fellowship over Caradhras with his palantir. It reduces the epic scope of the story to the scale of a tabletop role-playing game.
Well, look, I know the adapters can do what they want. But by the same token I can say what I think, which is: ugh.
yuletide
So why are we getting articles and follow-up about Stan Freberg's commercial satire "Green Christmas", but nobody's mentioning Tom Lehrer's "Christmas Carol" or Allan Sherman's "Twelve Gifts of Christmas"?
Friday, December 21, 2018
poorhouse in the village
When Google announced that it was acquiring land in the scattered industrial/commercial/residential zone west of downtown San Jose for a future Google village, I looked at the little maps in the paper nervously, because my favorite local restaurant, the Poor House Bistro, is located in a converted house right in the middle of that territory.
Next time I was there, I asked the counter clerk what their status was. "We're safe: we own the building," she said. Apparently they don't own the land, though, or not any more, for here's a report that the land has been sold to Google.
The owner sounds confident about remaining, though: they have a long-term lease. At least, an expiration of 2021 sounds impressively far off, but it's actually only 2 or 3 years.
Will Google keep it around after the redevelopment? If not, I'll have something else to be annoyed with Google about.
Next time I was there, I asked the counter clerk what their status was. "We're safe: we own the building," she said. Apparently they don't own the land, though, or not any more, for here's a report that the land has been sold to Google.
The owner sounds confident about remaining, though: they have a long-term lease. At least, an expiration of 2021 sounds impressively far off, but it's actually only 2 or 3 years.
Will Google keep it around after the redevelopment? If not, I'll have something else to be annoyed with Google about.
idem
1. The last adult has left the building. (You know which building. It has an oval-shaped room in it.) Oh dear.
2. Alex Ross is trying to convince us that György Kurtág is a good composer. No he isn't.
3. Pippin's internal clock, the one he uses to determine when it's time to be fed, runs fast, and one thing he knows: when I'm home, he's to be fed before B. comes home from work. Recently she came home early, and he hadn't been fed, so he expressed his displeasure by thinking outside the box. As B. put it, he'd converted from Catholic to Episscopalian.
4. A few days earlier, I exercised my membership in the Frequent Fallers Club. My innards got disheveled, and are slowly shifting their way back into place.
5. The grocery had only the extra-large size of one of my favorite rice mixes. Never mind, I can use it to fix my contribution to the Christmas celebration with B's family, since I was going to make a rice mix anyway.
6. With a little help from me, the cats bought us several presents this year. They're stacked underneath the tree, waiting for the day. It's coming ...
2. Alex Ross is trying to convince us that György Kurtág is a good composer. No he isn't.
3. Pippin's internal clock, the one he uses to determine when it's time to be fed, runs fast, and one thing he knows: when I'm home, he's to be fed before B. comes home from work. Recently she came home early, and he hadn't been fed, so he expressed his displeasure by thinking outside the box. As B. put it, he'd converted from Catholic to Episscopalian.
4. A few days earlier, I exercised my membership in the Frequent Fallers Club. My innards got disheveled, and are slowly shifting their way back into place.
5. The grocery had only the extra-large size of one of my favorite rice mixes. Never mind, I can use it to fix my contribution to the Christmas celebration with B's family, since I was going to make a rice mix anyway.
6. With a little help from me, the cats bought us several presents this year. They're stacked underneath the tree, waiting for the day. It's coming ...
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
passeport
Having made my plans for my next trip out of the country, even though it's not until next August, I figured it was finally time to replace my lost passport, especially as now is the slow season for passport applications.
Replacing a lost passport is considerably more complex than renewing an expired one. For renewal, you just get a new photo, attach it and a check to the application form, and mail it and the old passport in. (You get the old one back.)
For the lost one, I filled in and submitted a special form online which asks for things like the date and circumstances of the loss. The only place I got stuck was with the question, "Did you file a police report?" I didn't know how to answer this one. I filed a lost item report, yes, but not with the police, but with airport lost-and-found. (The police had in fact directed me to do so, after an airline employee had incorrectly directed me to the police, which only increased the amount of running around I had to do in the airport on the day.) So either a yes or a no would have been misleading.
The questions the online procedure asks you turn out also to fill out an application form for a new passport, which you print out with everything already filled out. But you can't just mail it in, no, you have to take it to a passport application center. You can look these up by zip code. Most of them are post offices, but I was relieved to find one at a local public library. Visiting the library in question, before I could get to the desk to ask, I noticed a sign on an office near the new books display, reading "passport applications." But on that office door was a notice saying you have to make an appointment in advance. Fair enough, and I could have gotten the same info from the library's web site if I'd thought to check that first.
Cross-correlating the info from the Dept of State website, the library's website, and an automated phone call I got from the library the day before my appointment was challenging enough. I learned from the others that I'd need to photocopy my driver's license, but only the phone call revealed that I'd need to photocopy both sides of it, on the same sheet of paper.
I also needed proof of ID, for which it said an expired passport would do, so since I still had the old one I brought that (and a photocopy of the info page) along, but just in case, I also prepared for the other option and hauled out my original birth certificate - the one I'd used to replace my driver's license - again, and photocopied that.
Arriving for my appointment, I found two librarians in the office, who went through all the questions in the application, examined all the supporting documentation, and then had me hold up my hand and swear to the truth of all the contents thereof. Have I ever had to do that before? I remember nothing of the process of my first passport application, but that was in more primitive times.
Then the library sends in the application, not me - something else unclear from the instructions - and now I wait.
Replacing a lost passport is considerably more complex than renewing an expired one. For renewal, you just get a new photo, attach it and a check to the application form, and mail it and the old passport in. (You get the old one back.)
For the lost one, I filled in and submitted a special form online which asks for things like the date and circumstances of the loss. The only place I got stuck was with the question, "Did you file a police report?" I didn't know how to answer this one. I filed a lost item report, yes, but not with the police, but with airport lost-and-found. (The police had in fact directed me to do so, after an airline employee had incorrectly directed me to the police, which only increased the amount of running around I had to do in the airport on the day.) So either a yes or a no would have been misleading.
The questions the online procedure asks you turn out also to fill out an application form for a new passport, which you print out with everything already filled out. But you can't just mail it in, no, you have to take it to a passport application center. You can look these up by zip code. Most of them are post offices, but I was relieved to find one at a local public library. Visiting the library in question, before I could get to the desk to ask, I noticed a sign on an office near the new books display, reading "passport applications." But on that office door was a notice saying you have to make an appointment in advance. Fair enough, and I could have gotten the same info from the library's web site if I'd thought to check that first.
Cross-correlating the info from the Dept of State website, the library's website, and an automated phone call I got from the library the day before my appointment was challenging enough. I learned from the others that I'd need to photocopy my driver's license, but only the phone call revealed that I'd need to photocopy both sides of it, on the same sheet of paper.
I also needed proof of ID, for which it said an expired passport would do, so since I still had the old one I brought that (and a photocopy of the info page) along, but just in case, I also prepared for the other option and hauled out my original birth certificate - the one I'd used to replace my driver's license - again, and photocopied that.
Arriving for my appointment, I found two librarians in the office, who went through all the questions in the application, examined all the supporting documentation, and then had me hold up my hand and swear to the truth of all the contents thereof. Have I ever had to do that before? I remember nothing of the process of my first passport application, but that was in more primitive times.
Then the library sends in the application, not me - something else unclear from the instructions - and now I wait.
Saturday, December 15, 2018
a messiah
Years ago, B. and I used to go to sing-along performances of Handel's Messiah that would crop up at this time of year, particularly the ones at Stanford's Memorial Church, as astoundingly resonant building. She'd sing soprano and, as probably the best non-professional soprano there, would attract all the other nearby sopranos as someone to follow, while I'd do what I could as a bass.
But we hadn't been for some years - probably since before I started blogging, since I can't find any earlier references to this - until this year, when due to the shift in her performing activities B. decided to join the Stanford play-along orchestra as a second violinist. (Most violinists want to be firsts, which leaves more room for the few who don't.) We parked at the student union, which while behind the church is actually a shorter walk than the obvious lots in front of it, and though we arrived before opening time, B. still only managed to grab a seat in the last stand of violins. I wandered separately down front, in hopes of being close enough to the orchestra to find B. when it was over, and found a tall mustached man standing in an empty row by the aisle holding up a sign reading "BASS", obviously looking to form a phalanx.
Just what I need, I thought, as I approached him and said, "I see you're wanting basses. I'm one, too."
He stuck out his hand. "My name's David."
"I'm one, too."
It was hard to tell how many we actually wound up with in the crowds and chaos of a full house, but there must have been at least a dozen occupying one end of three consecutive rows. I was next to a man with a very strong voice, which put me in a position of following him, useful in parts I didn't really know but a bit of a hindrance when I was more comfortable with the music. However, he left before Steve Sano, the conductor, announced we'd encore the Hallelujah Chorus, so I was able to do what I'd hoped, which was hook my voice up with a more general welter of bass sound and belt up.
I hadn't rehearsed any for this, but I'd worked on it hard enough back in the day that a lot of things came flooding back. I'm not a sight-reading singer, but have to learn by ear, but once I have learned a line by ear the score is my prompt-book and life-line and I wouldn't be without it.
We did the entirety of part one, minus a few arhythmic recitatives, plus a few highlights from later on: "The Trumpet Shall Sound," a bass aria I don't recall having done before; the final "Worthy Is the Lamb" and grand "Amen"; and of course the Hallelujah Chorus. Pretty festive show, and we all walked out warm into the night.
But we hadn't been for some years - probably since before I started blogging, since I can't find any earlier references to this - until this year, when due to the shift in her performing activities B. decided to join the Stanford play-along orchestra as a second violinist. (Most violinists want to be firsts, which leaves more room for the few who don't.) We parked at the student union, which while behind the church is actually a shorter walk than the obvious lots in front of it, and though we arrived before opening time, B. still only managed to grab a seat in the last stand of violins. I wandered separately down front, in hopes of being close enough to the orchestra to find B. when it was over, and found a tall mustached man standing in an empty row by the aisle holding up a sign reading "BASS", obviously looking to form a phalanx.
Just what I need, I thought, as I approached him and said, "I see you're wanting basses. I'm one, too."
He stuck out his hand. "My name's David."
"I'm one, too."
It was hard to tell how many we actually wound up with in the crowds and chaos of a full house, but there must have been at least a dozen occupying one end of three consecutive rows. I was next to a man with a very strong voice, which put me in a position of following him, useful in parts I didn't really know but a bit of a hindrance when I was more comfortable with the music. However, he left before Steve Sano, the conductor, announced we'd encore the Hallelujah Chorus, so I was able to do what I'd hoped, which was hook my voice up with a more general welter of bass sound and belt up.
I hadn't rehearsed any for this, but I'd worked on it hard enough back in the day that a lot of things came flooding back. I'm not a sight-reading singer, but have to learn by ear, but once I have learned a line by ear the score is my prompt-book and life-line and I wouldn't be without it.
We did the entirety of part one, minus a few arhythmic recitatives, plus a few highlights from later on: "The Trumpet Shall Sound," a bass aria I don't recall having done before; the final "Worthy Is the Lamb" and grand "Amen"; and of course the Hallelujah Chorus. Pretty festive show, and we all walked out warm into the night.
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