Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Calimac's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
8:45 pm	with friends like these Norman Lebrecht is a curmudgeonly music critic who often winds up casting more egg on his own face than that of his targets. I'm not sure if he does that much better when his intent is to praise. Take his recent column on Vaughan Williams. OK, got it, VW was a modest man (inviting the Churchillian retort "with much to be modest about"), that's why his socks didn't match and he put cats on his lap. But is it true that "his few posthumous champions came from the political right"? I don't recall VW being politically co-opted the way Bruckner was (along with Wagner and even Beethoven) by the political right in Germany, and most of the really snarky remarks about VW - "the cowpat school of English music" - came while he yet lived, and were generated by cultural politics, not electoral. Lebrecht says that of VW's symphonies, "the fourth is among the bleakest ever written, akin to Sibelius’s sixth." But VW's fourth is violent and aggressive, and Sibelius's sixth merely gnomic. Surely he means Sibelius's fourth and Vaughan Williams's sixth. I'm not sure whether to trust the accuracy of Lebrecht's claim that the current VW symphony festival by the Philharmonia (good as their Beethoven was, I wish they'd brought some of that to San Francisco this week) is "only the second time the VW nine have ever been done complete." If so that's startling, because it means I caught the first time. That was in 1995, I think, when I saw posters all over London that the Bournemouth Symphony was doing a series. I was lucky enough to get to the concert with the Sea Symphony and the Sinfonia Antartica, two works I never expect to hear live at home. (I have attended the fourth, fifth, and sixth here, so he's not entirely neglected.) It was a memorable encounter with the work of the man I consider one of the 20th century's four or five greatest symphonists. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
11:48 pm	concert review: Philharmonia Orchestra I can't get to London this year, so London came to me on Monday, in the form of the renowned Philharmonia Orchestra, which came to Davies with its principal conductor, Christoph von Dohnanyi, whose peculiar hairstyle looked from the second balcony as if he were wearing a white baseball cap. Dohnanyi didn't conduct any of his grandfather's music; that would have been far too advanced for this program, which was pure Viennese classics. Schubert's Unfinished Symphony (again; I've heard it three times this year) was well enough, but the evening belonged to Beethoven, in the form of the Egmont Overture and the Fifth Symphony. In his music, the Philharmonia was an orchestra with a big strong bottom. No, silly boy, that just means that the sound was dominated by the lower instruments: the cellos, string basses, and the timpani. The winds and brass growled and squeaked a little, but they couldn't compete. The Egmont was taken in a slow and deliberate manner that well suited this sound; the Fifth was a bit more of a skim-the-surface performance, but with this kind of sonic heft, the total effect was not at all superficial. I was pretty satisfied with this one. I've gotten to a couple more student concerts. Another Stanford undergraduate flutist proved superior to the ones I heard last week: her tone was full and mellow, and her only problems were a plonkiness of phrasing and a tendency to take noisy gasping breaths. But considering that she was playing the Franck Sonata, which was written for a violin and takes no account of flutists' breathing needs, the latter was excusable. The former will improve with maturity, but since she's not even a music major but (the program said) is going into marine resource management - well, there's more money in that - she may not get much chance to acquire it. Even more fun was a concert that formed the culmination of this term's undergraduate chamber music class at San Jose State. Two string quartets, two piano trios, and a flute-cello-piano trio each came on stage and played a movement each. Then, everybody came back out and formed the orchestra for a movement from a Bach double concerto for oboe and violin, with two more students as the soloists. True to the purpose of the class, all these groups showed fine ensemble in terms of reacting to each others' tempo and phrasing. Now, if only they'd also picked up on each others' tuning as well and tried to stay in the same key - well, maybe that's the subject for next term's class. (Comment on this)
Monday, May 5th, 2008
11:15 pm	Beatles musicology Before I return to more classical topics, as well as a lot of other overdue material (hi, scribblerworks! You're not forgotten, just postponed, and the big honking project that had to come first is finally done), I must pay note to a book I couldn't resist checking out from the library: The Beatles' Abbey Road Medley: Extended Forms in Popular Music by Thomas MacFarlane (Scarecrow Press, 2008). Counting "Because" as a "prelude" (so what's "Here Comes the Sun", then? chopped liver?) and "Her Majesty" as a "postlude" (*pfut*), we have here a full-length close-up technical study of just 20 minutes of the Beatles: form and structural analysis, harmonic analysis, literary analysis of the lyrics, all at a variety of levels of detail. Pretty impressive technically, though I don't see the large-scale structure as he does, and the parts discussing historical and musicological context are rather light-weight. The best line in the book is on p. 40 and doesn't concern Abbey Road at all: Sgt. Pepper isn't quite the album that it claims to be. Despite the reappearance of the title track near the end of side two, there is little evidence of thematic or harmonic relationship between any of the tracks. Here, rather than attempting to create a bona fide concept album, the Beatles seem to be saying, "Look everyone! Concept albums are possible! This album isn't it, but it proves that it's possible!" (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 3rd, 2008
9:38 am	it's a mystery peake says, apropos of Dorothy L. Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, that when he was a young crime-fiction reader, he "found it a tremendous disappointment. Now I understand why, it is barely a crime novel at all. That is just the excuse for a novel about the social consequences of the First World War, which is fascinating but not what I expected back then." My comment was that I find this interesting, because the only thing that can make a murder mystery palatable to me is for the mystery to be the least important part of the plot. Which is why I like Sayers. It was many re-readings before I could even remember whodunnit in a Sayers novel. I think the reason is that the necessity, in a classic by-the-rules mystery, to try to hide the culprit's identity from the reader means that that identity is not contingent. By merely jiggling the clues a little, it could just as easily turn out to be someone else (or mere happenstance) without altering the book much at all. The murderer could have been innocent, or an innocent person the murderer, without changing their observed behavior or personality. Consequently it doesn't matter emotionally who the murderer is, and I can't bring myself to care. I realize this makes me sound like Edmund Wilson, a fate normally to be avoided, but honestly ... (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 2nd, 2008
10:09 pm	book read standing up This is a category of books that I happen to pick up in bookstores to browse through, and the next thing I know it's a couple hours later and I've read the whole thing. In this case it's a literary novel. I rarely find SF novels these days that are even remotely compelling. I picked up The Rain Before It Falls by Jonathan Coe because I'd liked his The Rotters Club, though nothing else I'd seen by him caught my interest. The Rotters Club had been very funny as well as tragic. This one is purely dark, one of the most somber novels I've read, like a symphony of adagios. The bulk of it is a first-person narrative by a woman in her 70s, reviewing her life largely in her capacity as the (mostly) frustrated and ineffectual observer to three successive generations of girls being abused and neglected by their mothers, the same dismal pattern repeating over and over again. Coe unfolds the history like an emerging puzzle, to the horrified fascination of the other women listening to the tale, a tape recording made by the now-deceased narrator. Unlike most of Coe's work it's not at all political in the narrow sense; it does address a number of social issues in women's lives besides the abuse theme; but like The Rotters Club the story pivots on distant connections suddenly brought forward, and on some uncanny coincidences. But at the end I'd felt I'd read not a depressing book but a powerful one. (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 1st, 2008
9:35 pm	concert review: San Francisco Symphony To the City this afternoon for some Russian music, under asst. conductor James Gaffigan. First, Stravinsky's arrangement of a pas de deux from Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty for a tiny pit orchestra. The arranger and the composer were of highly different musical types, to say the least, but this works. I've noticed before the distinct tinny sound of a theatrical pit orchestra, and this performance proves that dubious playing quality has little to do with it: it's the balance of winds and brass outnumbering strings in what is still basically string-based music. Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1, with Vadim Gluzman as soloist, is mostly a subdued piece with long slow movements, that whipped up enough fire in the fast conclusion to rouse the matinee audience from torpor. Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances had a somewhat dull opening movement, normally my favorite part, but made up for this with sinuous flexibility in the slow movement and a colorfully creepy finale. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 30th, 2008
5:20 pm	oh, four tuna Carmina mondegreens (music and flash animation) (the real lyrics) (via Joshua Kosman, thus proving that even big-time classical critics, let alone small-time ones such as myself, can waste their time with such silliness) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 29th, 2008
9:17 pm	a composer I can't recommend ... because I doubt that the best music of Henry Brant (who died at 94 a few days ago) would make much of an impact on record. Brant was a devotee of what he called "spatial music". When commissioned, he would write the work for the specific hall where it was to be played. I was lucky enough to hear a couple of his works at Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, including the premiere of Ice Field, which went on to get the Pulitzer Prize in Music. Brant would place small groups of instruments around the hall in various specified locations, and for the listener, the effect of different types of sound coming from all directions was truly striking. For me it was the principal appeal of Brant's music, which reduced to one direction (or two stereo speakers) I doubt I'd have found very memorable. There's been multi-directional music before, of course. Gabrieli's antiphonal brass works, which since they involve only two or three choirs, without specified placement, can come across fairly well in stereo. Peter Maxwell Davies' An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise, which I've also heard live, ends with the back door being flung open and a highland piper in full fig and full throttle striding down the aisle to join the orchestra. The San Francisco Symphony once did a wonderful version of Janacek's Sinfonietta with part of the brass choir up in the balcony. These are all good, but Brant's work was of a much greater spatial complexity. He was present at both the concerts of his music I've attended. He was a peppy little old man who even in evening wear didn't remove the old-fashioned sub-editor's eyeshade that seemed to be his permanent trademark. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 28th, 2008
11:11 pm	inexpensive concerts My attendance of folk music concerts, once a regular part of my life, has slowly dribbled away since my usual companion moved away several years ago. Our customary destination was Freight and Salvage in Berkeley, a building that looks like it began life (and, for all I know, did) as a six-car garage, and whose warm ambience is due entirely to the echo of the hundreds of great folk musicians who've played there. So what should finally get me back to the Freight today but a classical concert? Musicians from the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra are playing monthly chamber music concerts there, and this one was tempting: Brahms's two string sextets. It was less expensive than a typical Freight concert, and a lot less expensive than a typical chamber music concert. So having carefully put together an agenda of errands in the area (and then getting started late because I was trying to finish a report for the Potlatch committee on the hotels we're considering), I headed up. It's probably impossible to give a performance of the B-flat sextet that I'd dislike, but despite some intonation problems it'd have been enjoyable even without this boost. But the most wit and vigor of the evening came in the scherzo trio of the G major sextet. The players solemnly concentrated on the sheet music before them, as classical chamber players do, except for SFCO music director Ben Simon, on first viola. He acted more like a folk musician, grinning delightedly at his colleagues whenever they took over the lead from him. (It switched frequently, the Brahms sextets being far from the first-violin-and-a-backup-band lineup of some string chamber music.) The audience was more folkie than classical too, applauding determinedly after every movement, but having either the concentration or simply the politeness to refrain from talking during the music. Sunday afternoon I'd also gotten out for a little concert, this one free: a senior recital by a Stanford student flutist (accompanied by piano). Actually there were two student flutists. One had a good tone, and the other had a secure sense of pitch, and if their strengths could have been combined somehow, there'd have been one good flutist. The one with the secure pitch wheezed and overblew her way through a sonata by Martinu, who sure wasn't in a neoclassical mood the day he wrote this one. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
12:11 pm	we are, we are, we are, we are the feline engineers Video: The Engineer's Guide to Cats. Well worth watching for anyone with an interest in either subject. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 26th, 2008
8:26 pm	what I tell you three times is ... slightly esoteric irontongue has pinged me thrice, by wind, water, and air, for the "page 123" meme, where you take the nearest book to hand, turn to page 123, count to the fifth sentence, and quote the next three sentences. All right, the fifth sentence on page 123 of the first book on my desk is: "Hans Kuhn, in the glossary to his corrected version of Gustav Neckel's edition of the Edda (1968: 147), translates myrcvidr as dunkelwald [...] auch name, u. von diesem schwer abzugrenzen, 'dark forest [...] also a name, and hard to distinguish from the latter.'" The next three sentences are even longer, and take us through an indented quote in Eddic Norse over on to the next page. Hmm, and I was about to write a review describing this book as captivating to read. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
4:40 pm	concert review: San Francisco Symphony Haydn's birthday was a month ago, but this week was the all-Haydn concert, conducted by Bernard Labadie. Three very late works, all more solemn than cheeky: the Military Symphony, a short Te Deum, and the Mass in Time of War, which advertises its title with a lot of ominous timpani, and a pretty heartfelt emphasis on the works "dona nobis pacem" at the end. Nice playing and singing, a little hard for me to judge as I was tired from having lugged myself all the way up from Santa Cruz in the late afternoon. But the Mass was the first time in many years that I've heard a Haydn work with orchestra that I didn't already know, so the freshness gave a chance to muse on the difference between Haydn and Mozart. Mozart is sweeter. His music has more sugar in the recipe. Haydn is drier and more astringent, and maybe that's why I can listen to more of him without getting tired of it. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
11:21 am	seder report The matzo shortage did not extend to the seder I attended on Saturday evening. Nor was there a shortage of gefilte fish, chicken soup, lamb, or peas so fresh that even I liked them. Nor of good conversation or fellowship neither. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, April 20th, 2008
11:15 am	does anyone out there understand e-mail attachments? I have been sent, twice now (because I asked the sender to try it again) an Important e-mail with an Important attachment. The e-mail itself comes through fine, but I can't read the attachment. It comes as a file named "winmail.dat". If I try to open it, I get a warning message that this is a system file that I should not be touching. If I open it using Word anyway, I get gibberish. I vaguely recall that I've gotten attachments with this filename before, and they turned out to be the new version of Word which is not backward compatible, or something like that. Does anyone have any idea what kind of file this is, and how to open it, or how to instruct the sender to send it as, like, something that an ordinary computer user can, like, read? (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, April 19th, 2008
10:26 am	concert review: Beaux Arts Trio For my sins I went to le petit Trianon to hear the Beaux Arts Trio on what they're calling their farewell tour, which I guess means that pianist Menahem Pressler is retiring. He's an ancient gnome who's been with the group since its founding fifty-mumble years ago, so this is reasonable, but listening to him play you can't imagine why he'd want to stop. The other players are younger. Last time I heard the trio they didn't seem to mesh together very well. This time they did, to put it mildly, so I'm even more sorry that they're breaking up. The program featured Schubert's two renowned piano trios from 1827, generally known as Op. 99 and Op. 100. (Few of Schubert's other works are known by opus numbers, not that many of them have any. I don't pretend to understand why these are the exception.) Even Op. 99, which I find a hard nut to crack, was a blissful, enchanting experience, but Op. 100, which I like much more, was just beyond wonderful. Fortunately this score gives plenty of opportunity for the players to do what they do best: cellist Antonio Meneses plays lyrical melodies with fine legato tone; and violinist Daniel Hope, with carefully controlled lightness of bowing (and likewise with pizzicato), chirps out tiny gossamer notes of accompaniment or rhythm that probably wouldn't be heard in any other hall; while Pressler pours cascades of sparkling notes over them from his position behind. Somewhere in the second movement I realized that this was one of the great performances, and the finale matched it. Between the Schuberts they played a tiny work newly-commissioned from Hungarian composer György Kurtág. Kurtág, a friend of Pressler's, is 82 years old and writes pontillistic serialism as if Anton Webern were still alive. Granted that the piece's hushed sonorities were well-chosen for these players' strengths, and granted that it didn't detain us for more than 4 minutes even played through twice, its presence in this context still made me wonder what point there is in listening to such stuff in a world which still contains Schubert. Two encores, a perfectly characteristic scherzo by Haydn (I think from Hob XV/18, but I'll have to check up on this) and the andante from Dvořák's Dumky Trio. The audience should have drifted out on air, but that didn't happen. A woman tripped on the outside steps and fell flat on her face with a sickening thud. When last seen by me, she was being tended to by a few other people while two or three men stood around talking to 911 on their cell phones, each having to repeat over and over again the exact location of this well-addressed downtown spot. Stop fiddling around and just send the ambulance, why don'tcha? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, April 18th, 2008
3:29 pm	just in time for Pesach A friend sends a link to a very Jewish blog. Being very Jewish, it's mostly about food. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, April 14th, 2008
8:54 am	not so bad as all that When the current Pope was elected, many of my Catholic friends rolled their eyes or moaned in quiet despair. I haven't much kept up on events in the Church since then, but now I find an article, largely about the impact of Catholic policies on U.S. domestic politics, that could have been titled, Pope Benny: Not So Bad As All That. I love this. An article on high-level Vatican theology that mentions Willie Brown. The conclusion is especially striking. Benedict hasn't changed; what's changed is his job. Previously he was a bureaucrat, but the Pope is primarily a pastor, and he knows that and what it means. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 13th, 2008
5:24 pm	doing my Democratic duty That's Democratic with a capital D, note. The prospect of a national political convention at which something actually might happen for a change has prompted more than the usual number of gnurrs to apply for the honor of spending a lot of their own money to attend as delegates. And in my state these delegates are chosen, not by anointment from the party elders as I'd vaguely thought, but by vote at caucuses organized by the individual campaigns and scheduled to be held today, which any registered Democrat may attend. Three Obama delegates and an alternate were assigned to my congressional district, and 44 people signed up as candidates. (It could've been worse: one hundred were on the list for the five Obama slots in Barbara Lee's district.) And a tiny campaign erupted. One of the candidates, a long-standing Democratic activist, is a friend of mine, and I got an e-mail asking for my support. Sure, I'll show up and vote for her. Many of the other candidates did the same, and as I walked through the parking lot towards the site, a school gymnasium, where the caucus was being held (passing a car with a Hillary bumper sticker on the way: caucus voters must be registered Democrats, but there's no pledge that you support the candidate), I could see the line of voters waiting outside for the caucus to open, sizzling in the sun, being buzzed by candidates and their agents bearing "why you should vote for me" flyers. I conversed with a couple, but one man just shook my hand and then stood there mutely, so I was a little surprised when he turned out during the proceedings to be a favorite even of the other candidates. Many of what turned out to be 600 voters just cast their ballots and left when they got inside, which you're permitted to do, but I decided that since I'd gone to this trouble, I might as well stick around for the formal proceedings and decide who to cast my other three votes for. About a third of the voters did so. I suppose most of them were campaign workers; certainly our congresscritter's opening speech was aimed at enthusing such an audience. Each candidate, if they were there to do it (23 were, and two more who are off working on the Pennsylvania campaign sent representatives), got 30 seconds to make a speech. My friend went first by the dictates of alphabetical order, which is never the best place. She spoke well enough, but others were more rousing or had more friends in the audience. Some had credentials, some just had enthusiasm, and some were just there. I picked three who seemed to show signs of particular intelligence, circled the four names on the paper, and left. I thought that staying for the counting, which was liable to take a while, was beyond the call of duty for a mere observer. (Comment on this)
Saturday, April 12th, 2008
11:26 pm	street names In place of all the other things ... The area where I live has a grid of main roads every mile. These were originally farm roads, but the farms are long gone and the square-mile blocks in between are filled with little residential streets that meander every which way to discourage through traffic. What interests me is how they're named. My particular neighborhood has mostly two kinds of street names. First, birds: some 65 of these. Some of them are types of birds you wouldn't have thought they'd name streets after. Grackle Way. Magpie Lane. Parrot Avenue. Albatross Drive. Flamingo Way (OK, but this isn't Florida or anywhere like it). Second, British place names, about 80 of them. These might be English (Carlisle Way), Scottish (Selkirk Place), Irish (Carlow Court), or rarely Welsh (Cardigan Drive). Not all of them are scenic (Liverpool Way, Croyden [sic] Court). Some of them are pseudo-British (Dartshire Way) or, like Croyden Court, are strangely misspelled (Cotswald Court, Hamshire Court). Elsewhere in this part of the city there are equally large clusters of fruits (Nectarine, Orange, Peach, Grape, Fig, and Elderberry), American historical heritage names (Revere, Shenandoah, Nantucket, Merrimac, and Knickerbocker, which last is actually a locally major street), northwestern US places (Centralia, Chehalis, Fort Laramie, Bend, Boise) and Canadian ones (including eight provinces), trees and flowers (Mahogany, Foxglove, Ponderosa, Tulip, Lupine), and my favorite, a select thirty artists and composers (you can turn off Manet Drive onto Offenbach Place, go past Klee Court, turn onto Gainsborough Drive and then to Romberg Drive) interspersed with a bit of meteorology (Cirrus Way and Cumulus Avenue separate Cezanne and Brahms on the one side from Debussy, Ives, and MacDowell on the other). Needless to say, none of these streets are in any way reminiscent of what they're named after - a few of the more common birds on the list might make an appearance, I suppose - though not far away in the next town there's a street called Arboretum Drive, and it really is one. In my Birds and Brits neighborhood, the names are clustered mostly by initial letter. Dove, Derby, and Dorset. Firebird, Flamingo, Finch, and Fife. Berwick, Belfast, and Bobolink. The Scottish and pseudo-Scottish names beginning with K are the most fearsome. Right within a couple blocks are Killean Court, Kirbyhill Way, Kenilworth Court, and Kinross Court. And right next to them is Locksunart. Can you remember all of these? I'm learning to. (Comment on this)
Friday, April 11th, 2008
12:10 pm	A post to record ... that early this morning I finished reading Mr. Baggins, Part One of John D. Rateliff's The History of The Hobbit, and it was at that moment that I had my flash of insight, a sudden understanding of a problem that seems to have baffled even John Rateliff, as well as a lot of other people. I already have a Mythcon paper to give on another subject, and in any case this is just an idea, not a paper, and I'll have to poke around and see if it's not original, though as far as I know it is. I shall not spill it now, but carefully preserve it in a bowl and lay it gently before my fellow Tolkien scholars when the opportunity arises. (3 Comments |Comment on this)