music for Halloween

I have a truly ideal Halloween song for you. I came across this a few months ago and have been saving it up.

It's from Big Daddy, a group whose schtick is to take songs of a more recent vintage and play them in the style of a late 50s/early 60s rock-&-roll band. Often they merge the victim, er tune, incongruously with a specific song of the earlier era. The best of these was taking "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" and combining it with "Duke of Earl."

This time, they have "The Music of the Night" from Phantom of the Opera, and have subsumed it under a bizarre match with the unforgettable novelty song "Monster Mash." What's more, there's a spooky video, in which the Phantom, with some assistance from Dracula, serenades an oblivious Bride of Frankenstein. Enjoy!

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Another week, another EPS-conducted concert. This one filled the hall rather more than the previous two did. Perhaps that's because Yefim Bronfman was on hand for the Beethoven Third Piano Concerto, which he played with charm and zest.

Also on the program, one hunk of string orchestra music and one of wind ensemble music. The first was Kongsgaard Variations by Anders Hillborg, supposedly based on a lyrical Beethoven theme, but it was buried so far as to be undetectable except in expressing a gentle mien throughout the piece. The latter was the "Happy Workshop" Sonatina by Richard Strauss, which didn't remind me particularly of anything even less than the Hillborg did of Beethoven.

Having had a nap that afternoon, I eschewed caffeine before the concert, but found myself, though not sleepy, tired and fidgety. Not a good state to appreciate music in. Also, I had practical problems both coming and going.

For a previous concert, I'd pre-ordered online and then picked up a fried chicken dinner from a boutique vendor that operates out of an industrial park garage slot just off the road inbound. The food had been of mixed quality, so I decided to try it again before judging. But though my order today went through fine, when I got there they were closed. Not out of business, just closed. Nobody there, no explanatory sign. I'm giving them till Monday (they don't claim to be open on weekends) to explain themselves, or else the blistering negative reviews are going up.

On the way home, huge construction-caused backup on the freeway. Got off, drove around the construction zone, got back on, only to find another such huge backup a few miles later. Switched to an entirely different route. Look, I take the freeway because it's fast and efficient. If it's neither, why bother?

me and popular music

I came across a series of YouTube videos labeled "Most Popular Song Each Month in the ..." for each decade from the 1950s to the 2010s. I don't know on what basis it was determined what was the most popular song for each month, but it seems a pretty good sampling of 12 songs per year, and a chance for me to test my knowledge of popular music. I listened through the whole set and counted up the songs that I recognized, that I know I'd heard before, and also the number of those that I positively like, that I've deliberately gone and listened to because I enjoy them. (A few that I recognize I positively hate, but only a few.)

What I couldn't count from clips of a few seconds is ones that I didn't know but would come to like if I listened to them a few times in full. All I can say of that is that there were more clips that sounded likely in the 2000s than in the 1990s.

I divided up the years by meaningful chunks.

1950-63, i.e. before the Beatles: A lot of nightclub crooner types in here, as well as (from 1956) Elvis Presley, whom I don't care for at all and, it turns out, know little of. I recognized a few instrumentals from the lush Muzak radio stations that my father liked to listen to in my youth. And some songs I know from Allan Sherman or Stan Freberg parodies. Rate: know about 3.25/year, like about .75/year.

1964-70: full of Beatles songs, every one of which I like. And a lot of others as well. (Top favorite non-Beatles song, probably "Downtown.") Though most of my knowledge of this period is retroactive - I wasn't listening to current pop music at the time - I'm apparently a child of my generation in finding this the heart of my pop-music tastes. Rate: know about 9/year, like about 6/year. Remember that's out of 12 total per year.

1971-80: this is the period I was in high school and college, so I was hearing a lot of incidental pop music even though I wasn't seeking it out, and styles were turning against my taste in the later 70s: though I know a lot of songs from that period, except for the weird outlier of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" (1978) (what's that doing in here?), there's nothing I really like in between McCartney's "Band on the Run" (1974) and Lennon's Double Fantasy songs (1980). Rate: know about 5/year, like about 1/year.

1981-85: This is the sole period in my life when I was actually listening to current pop music of my own volition. A couple songs I really liked hit the charts - one of them is here - and I kept on until the good stuff dribbled off a few years later. Rate: know about 6/year, like about 2/year.

1987-present: A true desert. I know almost none of this stuff, though when listening to these clips there's a fair number of post-2000 songs that I expect I might come to like if I ever heard them in full, but the point is, I never have, and I'm not moved to seek them out. One that I did, it turned out I wished I hadn't. For the 90s in particular, almost everything I know is either because it's a remake of an older song I know or else because Weird Al parodied it. But of the 6 songs I list as liking, most I really like. Top favorite: "Orinoco Flow" by Enya (1988) (what's that doing in here?). Rate: know about 1/year, like about .25/year.

War of the Weirlds

I'm not sure what to make of the theatrical presentation I just saw at Stanford's Bing Concert Hall. Based on Orson Welles' famous 1938 War of the Worlds radio dramatization, it has that for a title and was concocted by something called the Rhum and Clay Theatre Company and premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe two years ago, and that's all I know, because the program is only accessible by QR code and isn't even on the presenter's website.

Four actors, all playing many parts - including all four of them coming out with pipes in mouth to play Welles in turns - combining chunks of the dramatization (the original script, I presume but don't know) with a story (fictional, I presume but don't know) about a reporter visiting present-day Grover's Mills, where the story was set, to research a podcast about whether the stories of wide-spread panic on the day were true or not, and gets involved in the family drama of a woman whose grandparents supposedly fled ... well, it's complicated, and the lies and truths and dramatizations and fictionalizations just pile up and start to involve DT and Qanon, but after a slow start the play does manage to maintain interest.

But two hours of that were enough, so I skipped out on the offer of a post-show panel discussion on media and disinformation, the more so as I've already gotten a surfeit of that from the book I've been reading at meals, The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's 1984 by Dorian Lynskey (Doubleday, 2019). A combination of a biography of Orwell focused on the concerns he expressed in the book, a history of relevant earlier utopian and dystopian literature, an account of the novel's reception from submission up to the present-day, and a consideration of later works inspired by it or on the same theme (highlighting 3 media presentations: Brazil, V for Vendetta, and The Handmaid's Tale), it told me a couple things I hadn't known about Orwell.
1. From the beginning of his work on the novel, he referred to it in letters as his novel about the future, which should put an end to the frequent claim that he originally intended to call it 1948, which I've always doubted anyway.
2. When Orwell was sent as a correspondent to liberated Paris in 1944, one of the things he did there was dine with P.G. Wodehouse. George Orwell meets P.G. Wodehouse. "I inspected my imagination. Jeeves was right. It boggled."

new phone

AT&T has been after me for months to get a new cell phone, because the old network is being shut down. In February, so what's the hurry? Putting this off has been encouraged by the prospect of the difficulty always attendant on getting a new device with new protocols and new arrangements, and having to learn them all. Antipathy to technological advances would considerably lessen if interfaces were standardized across versions, instead of being upended and redesigned every time some engineer has a brainstorm.

However, the last time they badgered me, they also revealed - which previous badgers had not - that I was entitled to a free upgraded phone, and that it would be a flip phone like the one I already had. So it arrived yesterday and I set it up and actually got my account transferred through the online interface, even though it crashed halfway through.

Of course I'm not as happy with the phone's interface as I was with the old one. The navigation buttons, the ones that surround the OK key, are not programmable as they had been. I'd had them set up to go directly to useful apps like the tip calculator. This one doesn't even have a tip calculator. On the other hand, other useful items, like the contacts list, are easier to get to in other ways than they had been on the old phone. I was able to change the settings list from a page of cryptic icons - I hate icons, I'm an iconoclast - to an actual list with the names of the items on them, and what's more one can re-order the list so that the preferred ones are on top.

Biggest problem is that the phone is full of links to online things like Google Assistant, Bluetooth, WiFi, even YouTube, dangerous things that would use up all the money in my prepaid account in a flash. I made sure they're all off and I hope they stay that way. The net effect is to make my flip phone feel more like a smartphone. I don't want a smartphone; if I wanted a smartphone I'd have gotten an actual smartphone. I want a dumbphone. I'm an iconoclast and I want a dumbphone.

two concerts

1) Music@Menlo held the first of its winter "residency" concerts of the year on Saturday afternoon. It was titled "Voyage Through the Americas," and one's first thought might be of a rather cramped idea of a sampling of composers of the Americas. Only 3 are South Americans, from just 2 countries; the other 5 are all U.S.ians, 3 of them from the "greatest generation" that flourished in the 1930s-40s. All 8 are men, of course; all but one white, all but one dead. Well, you review the concert you heard, not the one you might wish to have heard.

But it emerged that the plan in the minds of the curators and principal performers, pianist Michael Brown and cellist Nicholas Canellakis, was more specific than that. They wanted to show musical cross-pollination in the mid-20C between the U.S. and Latin America. Thus, the two Argentine composers both studied in the U.S. And most of the U.S. music on offer was directly influenced by Latin American style. This was obvious in the case of Copland's El Salon Mexico and Gershwin's Cuban Overture, both of which resulted from the composers' visits to the named countries in 1932, at which they were impressed by the local music and returned with chunks of it in their tourist bags.

But some of the connections were a little more strained, thus Barber's Souvenirs, a four-hand piano suite, played by Brown and Gilles Vonsattel, evoking, tongue slightly in cheek, the glossy ballroom dance music of the composer's 1910s youth. It earned its place on this program because one of the six dances is a tango. Of sorts.

Both the Copland and Gershwin were orchestral works, played here in piano arrangements dating from the time (2 hands for Copland, 4 hands for Gershwin), but with the orchestral percussion added back in for what the curators considered a necessary flavor. This was played with zest by virtuoso percussionist Ian David Rosenbaum and added as much to the texture as you might imagine.

All the playing was very good, reaching its height in Canellakis's rendition of the cello solos in Bernstein's Meditations from Mass written for Rostropovich. (Also a reduction with piano of an orchestral work, also with percussion reinserted.) I also liked his work in Golijov's Mariel, a lament for a deceased friend, in which the rumbling accompaniment comes not from a piano but - more agreeably, actually - from a marimba, clonked by Rosenbaum.

There was a little more - a cello/piano rhapsody by Ginastera and some brief piano pieces, modernist by Villa-Lobos from Brown and ragtime by Joplin from Vonsattel. An enjoyable outing altogether, regardless of what it consisted or didn't consist of.

2) Back to SFS on Thursday for another lightly populated EPS-conducted concert, this one featuring the U.S. premiere of a new violin concerto by Bryce Dessner. This is a most peculiar work, fast-paced, nervous, and chittery. The soloist, Pekka Kuusisto, for whom the work was written - did he ask for this? - saws quickly back and forth almost ceaselessly for the whole 24 minutes, but except in the cadenza he could rarely be heard, as the orchestral strings either match him or do something else that drowns him out. Meanwhile the rest of the orchestra is trying out fragmentary melodic material with a vaguely minimalist cast. Certainly the clanging chords for percussion and brass at the very end of the work bore more than a faint echo of Glass's Akhnaten.

This was surrounded by two standard repertoire but not blockbuster pieces, Beethoven's Leonore Overture No. 2 (a more garrulous first draft for No. 3) and Schubert's Fifth Symphony, the most popular of his early essays in that genre. These received fast-paced but not over-hasty performances, smooth and genial but with hints of potential turmoil underneath.

Last week all the string and percussion players were wearing masks; this week only two or three players were. Neither did any of the performers at Menlo have masks. In both cases, though, by decree of the venue the audience was entirely masked up, with vaccinations checked at the door. This is a minor nuisance one can live with, especially considering the likelihood of dying without it. And I'm gradually learning to remember to have my vaccination record with me when I leave the house, instead of having to rush back in to fetch it.

the most boring day of my life since I stopped attending summer camp

It wasn't just that it was jury duty. Jury duty - by which I mean waiting in the courtroom as part of the jury pool; I've been called up for voir dire once or twice but have never actually served on a jury - is only moderately boring. What turned this into the transcendental was covid restrictions requiring half the seats in the courtroom to be empty.

This meant that the lower half of the jury pool, including me, had to be seated in an empty adjacent courtroom with a video and audio feed of the proceedings. The video was tiny and nearly useless, and the audio was frequently inaudible. Nevertheless we had to sit there and pretend to be paying attention to it for hours on end.

The only interest came from the automated instant transcription system, which struggled terribly. It had no more success hearing what was being said than we did, and was out of its depth when it could. The word "juror," which predictably appeared rather frequently in the proceedings, was not in its vocabulary, so we got frequent "German" and "Karen" and the occasional "jerk."

But the best moment came when the clerk called a new juror candidate by name. As best as I could hear, his name was Stephen Kirwan or something like that, but it came out in the transcript as "Stephen King Kong."

Everybody in the courtroom laughed, the only moment all day when we could be said to be enjoying ourselves, but I suddenly remembered my sf-con costuming friends who've made a gimmick out of comic mashup costumes like Will Scarlett O'Hara or Red Sonja Henie or Salvador Dali Lama. This would be a good one for their list, so I've passed it on.

more on Malcolm Arnold

When I posted for Malcolm Arnold's centenary yesterday morning, I was in a hurry, for a Reason to be Named Later, so I didn't have time to put up more than the basic dance sets. But today I have the time to bring up a little more Malcolm Arnold.

First is a video of the only live concert performance I've ever come across of one of Arnold's symphonies. And it's his Fifth, the best work of the bunch. Even though it's a community orchestra and a little rough, it's actually a very good performance. If I'd known about this before it happened four years ago, I'd seriously have considered going to Phoenix to hear it. At least I can get the videorecording.



And when I wrote my long post on Arnold several years back, I said that someday I wanted to annotate the jokes in Arnold's staggeringly ridiculous parody of Beethoven's Leonore Overture No. 3. Well, today is that day. This parody was one of several pieces that Arnold wrote for the comedy concerts that the cartoonist and musical humorist Gerard Hoffnung put on in the 1950s.

The original concerts exist only in audiorecordings, but fortunately a Hoffnung revival concert was put on in Prague, of all places, in 1992, and that was videorecorded, so you can see the visual jokes as well as hear the audible ones. You can watch the entire concert here and here - the overture is near the start of the second part - but here's a clip of just the overture, with my comments below.


(Note that throughout the work, the orchestration is coarsened, with added thumps, whoops, and blats)
0.07-0.20 Opening chord held for several bars
0.28-0.58 Conductor responds to diminuendo by crouching behind podium
1.08 Portamento swoop by violins
1.40 Extra punch in a sforzando chord
2.37-2.44 Must be a pop tune that's inserted into the flute part here, but I don't know its source
3.06-3.18 First insertion in the wrong place of the offstage trumpet call scheduled for later in the work
3.29 Tutti chord fails to arrive on schedule as the separating wind chords just keep going
3.31-3.45 Tutti chords continue not to match when the conductor expects them
4.29-5.30 Main theme of the piece (in altered form) transferred to oompah band which marches onstage here
6.16-6.19 Particularly over-coarsened chords here
6.36-6.46 Here's that offstage trumpet call in the wrong place again
7.06-7.15 A little added percussion
7.52-8.06 And the offstage trumpet call misplaced yet again
8.07-8.14 Duple-time music turned into triple-time oompah
8.22-8.30 This time the conductor dances along with the triple-time oompah
8.50-8.58 And when the offstage trumpet is supposed to play? Nothing
8.58-9.14 Conductor backs up four bars and tries again. This time he gets the main-theme oompah band
9.30-10.15 And for the second scheduled appearance of the offstage trumpet? We get all the trumpets in the world and they won't stop until the conductor holds up a red flag
(At this point we just skip over the entire recapitulation and go straight to the coda)
10.35-10.50 Violins get stuck and won't go into the closing Presto until somebody blows a whistle
(11.39 Here most of the coda is also cut)

And here's one more amusing Arnold work, a suite of his music for the 1954 comedy film The Belles of St. Trinian's.

Malcolm Arnold centenary

Today is the centenary of the birth - in Northampton, England - of Sir Malcolm Arnold, one of the noted British composers of the last century and, fifty years ago, the first then-contemporary composer I discovered whose music, in the form of his English Dances, I really enjoyed.

I've written of him here before, notably in this post, but here I'll just put links to his most deservedly popular music, his earlier dance sets. Here, have 16 slices of charm:

English Dances:


Scottish Dances


Cornish Dances

another missing item

I'd put the recorded tv show on pause when I went to the kitchen to put the snack away. Then I came back to the living room, sat down in the armchair, and started the show up again. And I did this with the remote, right? Because the set itself just has an on-off button, no other controls.

But when an ad came on and I wanted to fast-forward, I could not find the remote. It wasn't anywhere around, not tucked in the seat, not on the table, not under the chair or its footstool. I even checked in the kitchen in case I'd somehow absently taken it with me (which I do sometimes) and left it there and unpaused by magic.

Nowhere. I had to watch the rest of the show straight through and use the set's button to turn it off.

Only then did I notice the tiny edge of a shadow way under the couch. It was the remote. What was it doing there? I hadn't sat on the couch. It couldn't have fallen there from where I was sitting. It's too big for a cat to carry, and no cats were around anyway.

It's a mystery.