Hi folks,
Another quick update--I'm going to be changing my web host for TLB, and I'm initiating the domain transfer today. There may be several days of downtime while the transfer takes place, so you'll see a parking page if you visit TLB during that time--but have no fear, we'll be back up and running in a few days, hopefully with a new look!
Catch all y'all on the flip side!
I'm sorry I haven't posted in a while--I've been busy working on the site's redesign and host switch. It's turning out to be a lot more complicated than I thought it was going to be, and so consequently the redesign might be delayed until after May 26th. But have no fear--redesign or not, the Big Announcement will still be made that day. So stay tuned!
At my church, every Sunday morning we follow a set liturgy or order of service--the prayers, songs and Scripture readings change, but the structure of the service is always the same. Early in the service, there's a time of confession where the congregation reads a prayer aloud, and then prays in silence for 45 seconds. Following this we sing the "Agnus Dei," a traditional liturgical text originally used in the Catholic Mass: "Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us / Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, have mercy on us / Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, grant us peace." The Agnus Dei that we sing every week was composed by a member of the church, David Hlebo, who is a composer and musician who plays sax and flute on the church's worship team. The Agnus Dei that he wrote is amazing. It's very simple, and probably most lay people would think it adequate but unremarkable; but from a compositional standpoint, it comes close to technical perfection, and it works really well at the point in the service when it's used.
After becoming a member of the church myself, I thought it would be fun to try to compose another Agnus Dei that could alternate with Hlebo's version. (I suggested this to the pastor, and he was all for the idea, since he said "We've sung the same song every week for the past seven years"). It took me a long time to come up with a good idea, because Hlebo's version was so ingrained in my head and so good--most of my early thoughts were far too similar to his. But eventually I came up with a melody and chord progression I was happy with.
My Agnus Dei is in 6/8 time, in C minor. Since the piece is for congregational singing, I wanted it to be a simple, almost folk-like melody that would be easy to catch onto quickly; and since it's intended for use in the confessional part of the service, I wanted it to be solemn and reverent without being too slow or boring. I wrote along with the melody a suggested piano accompaniment; it's not too exciting, but it has some cool moments and it helps to give the piece some movement and energy. At the moment I don't have the ability to record the piano part, but in the future I will, and I'll let you know when that happens. In the meantime, you can head over to the Agnus Dei page on my website to listen to a scratch recording with guitar. Leave a comment here and let me know what you think!
This past week and a half or so, I've been listening again to an album by Sandra McCracken, Derek Webb's wife. Her latest, entitled Red Balloon, is my favorite of her seven albums, and the best in my opinion (which I recently relayed to her, although sadly I didn't get a response).
In order to make some of the comments I'd like to make about this CD, I have to go back a bit and mention a few things about her last few albums. (If you'd like to follow along you can see her discography here.) She's always had a folk/acoustic/singer-songwriter sound, with some country flavoring, and apart from her third release (Best Laid Plans) her music has always fallen on the underproduced side, opting for real-life simplicity and grit instead of slick production. However, following Derek Webb who used the technique beginning with his album Mockingbird in 2005, on her next few albums (The Builder and the Architect and Gravity | Love, as well as Ampersand EP with Webb) she adopted what I tend to think of as a "tired" sound. Most of the instruments and vocals on those albums were recorded in her home as opposed to a studio, and so have a very unproduced, almost grainy sound to them. (This sound, though, is intentional, it's not due to a lack of quality recording or production.) The songs were generally slow or mid tempo, without too much energy or quick movement. The main aspect of the "tired" sound, though, was a technique of recording the main vocal track twice, that is, singing and recording it once, and then singing and recording it a second time without changing the first one. The slight differences in intonation, different timings for final consonants (e.g. the "t" sound at the end of a word being heard twice, one a little after the other), and lack of polishing on the vocal production leads to a sound that is very original (in my experience). It's almost like an in-tune, good-song version of the "Juno sound", in a way. But it's still not a sound that I particularly enjoy, or at least it's not one that I could listen to all the time.
Which is why I love Red Balloon, which was released last September and produced by McCracken, Webb, and often-collaborator Cason Cooley (whom I recently wrote about on TLB). It keeps the best aspects of the "tired" sound--the house-recorded feel, the cool drum sounds, some effective use of the vocal doubling--without the tiresome aspects, like the lack of variation in tempo, the lack of energy and too much use of the doubling. Guitar and piano (both of which Sandra plays) freely trade primary importance, and the drums and percussion sound really good and have some really cool grooves (listen, for example, to the sweet percussion on the sixth track, "On The Outside," and the drums on "Halfway," track seven).
I also enjoy the lyrics quite a bit. Red Balloon was her first solo studio album released after the birth of her first child, and most of the record is about the emotions and experiences that that brought with it. (I especially love the opening lyrics to the second song, "Storehouse": "The first uninterrupted sleep since July / The first waves of wisdom swing like a wrecking ball / A child takes the throne / Displacing us all / In good time, just in time..."). McCracken is not as brilliant a lyricist as Webb, but she's got skills and the lyrics on this album are particularly emotional and evocative.
I only have two problems with this album. The first is that her promotional email touted it as including "ten previously unreleased songs." Technically that's true, but the last song, "The High Countries," was previously released by Caedmon's Call on their album Back Home, and so I didn't get the ten brand-new songs that I was hoping for. Even though it's a different recording, calling it a "previously unreleased song" is a bit of a stretch. And that's really the only song I'm not a big fan of on Red Balloon--I think the Caedmon's version is better. The other problem I had was that it came "in a special two-disk package." The entire album consists of ten songs, of normal song length (between three and five minutes); but it arrived as two CDs, labeled "Side A" and "Side B," each containing five songs. Kind of a cool idea in theory, and listening to the songs there's definitely a coherent feel to each of the halves by themselves; but practically, that's just annoying. The first thing I did when I got the album was to burn all the songs onto a single CD.
But those are my only beefs. This is a great album and I've listened to it a lot without growing tired of it. The songwriting is great (especially when you know the back story about her son being born), the sound is original, and it's inspiring to those of us who are aspiring independent songwriters ourselves.
You can find Red Balloon on iTunes and Amazon, as well as at the Sandra McCracken Official Online Shop. If you'd like a test drive first, you can hear four tracks from the album ("Guardian," "Lock and Key," "On the Outside" and "Big Blue Sky") on Sandra McCracken's Myspace page. You can see video of Sandra and Derek performing "Halfway" and "Lose You" at a recent house show by clicking on the links; and on that same page you can read Sandra's account of the recording of the album.
I had a dream as I was lying in bed this morning that it was the Christmas season; and in my dream it was the first day that they started playing Christmas music 24/7 in stores, restaurants, etc. I like Christmas music a lot. There are a great deal of good Christmas songs, both sacred and secular, and while there are innumerable bad versions of them, there are also many creative and excellent ones. And I love the feel of Christmas that holiday music injects into the atmosphere. One of the sure signs Christmas was coming when I was growing up was when my mother would start to cycle through her Christmas CDs on the living room stereo (including an amazing CD by Robert Shaw, which I don't seem to remember well enough to be able to find on the internet); we didn't often have music playing in the house, but Christmas music was a sine qua non of the holiday season for me.
All of that as a brief aside to say: I've decided to enter the Welcome Christmas Carol Contest this year. It's an annual composition contest, sponsored by the American Composers Forum of which I am a member, that asks composers to write new carols using a different given instrumentation each year; this year it's for mixed chorus and viola. The text can be "sacred or secular, medieval to present, appropriate for concert setting," and I decided to ask my brother to write a new Christmas text because I think he'd be good at that sort of thing, and he accepted.
Should be a lot of fun! I'll keep you posted as we make progress on our new Christmas carol.
P.S. TLB is nearing its first birthday! I can hardly believe it's been that long already. And as we near May 26th, there are some changes in the works. I'm contemplating a redesign of the site to make it look a little more professional, and also a move from Blogger to WordPress (thanks to Mike's persistent suggestions). I'm also planning to make a big announcement here on May 26th--so stay tuned!
Google rolled out a new feature last week, Google Profiles, that enable you to further control your "personal branding" on Google. You can set up a Google Profile for yourself, and if you fill in most or all of the information, your profile will show up at the bottom of the first page of Google's search results for your name. I just learned about this today, and I promptly set up a profile for myself. Most of the information I have on there can be found other places (like my website), but if you like, you can check it out at the following link:
http://www.google.com/profiles/ajharbison
Thanks to Seán Dunnahoe for the tipoff to this.... Nothing too profound here, but it's a lot of fun. Cookie Monster on xylophone and a pink gorilla on standup bass, plus a chicken on banjo in the second video, playing "novelty ragtime music from the 1920s" (http://www.myspace.com/xylopholks).
A few weeks ago my lovely wife and I watched the 2005 film Joyeux Noël ("Merry Christmas" in French)--her for the second time, me for the first. (Incidentally, we've been loving our subscription to Netflix and I'd heartily recommend it to anybody who enjoys watching a lot of movies.) Joyeux Noël is the story of the "Christmas Truces" during World War I, where soldiers on both sides left their trenches and met together in no man's land on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in 1914. It was a superlative film--the acting and cinematography were top-notch, and it was emotionally powerful while never falling into sentimentality.
I don't have much to say about the score, but I loved how music was portrayed in the movie as a force that brings people together. The truces were initiated when the German soldiers started singing carols on Christmas Eve, and were responded to by the other side singing carols back; in the movie (which takes a bit of historical license while still representing the spirit of the story) the Scottish soldiers start playing on their bagpipes, and are answered by the Germans singing "Silent Night." Cautiously, the Scottish soldiers begin playing "O Come, All Ye Faithful," and a German tenor rises from his trench and crosses no man's land, singing along. It's a powerful moment. Later, the Scottish chaplain holds a Mass, and the German tenor's wife (who has come along to raise the troops' morale) sings an "Ave Maria" to a transfixed crowd of all the soldiers: a great illustration of the power of beauty in a horrifically ugly situation.
The movie is a powerful testimony to how music can transcend race and culture and differences to unite people, and it garners my highest admiration and recommendation.
While researching something completely unrelated last week, I ran across this video on YouTube. It's a live performance of a piece called Spill, composed by one Erik Griswold, and it's very intriguing. It consists of a swinging pendulum that also acts as a funnel, slowly pouring thousands and thousands of rice grains onto the ground as it moves back and forth. The performer then places things like bowls and sheets of paper beneath the funnel, creating different timbres and sometimes pitches as the rice pours over them. It's strangely mesmerizing. What do you think? Is this music? It's certainly organized and orderly, and more aesthetically pleasing than, say, this piece of John Cage's. You can check out the website of the performer and composer at http://www.clockedout.org.
As you may have seen on my Twitter page (or the sidebar on the right), I went to see the movie Watchmen on Thursday night. It's the only film adaptation of what is generally accepted to be the greatest graphic novel/comic book of all time, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' work of the same name. It was considered "unfilmable" for over twenty years, but director Zack Snyder (of 300 fame) did a terrific job and made a movie worthy of the book. I've heard that he used the graphic novel basically as a storyboard for the movie, and many scenes are recreated almost shot-for-shot; overall it's probably the most faithful book-to-movie adaptation I've ever seen. The performances were all great, especially Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach and Patrick Wilson as Dan Dreiberg/Nite Owl II. One of my few reservations was that the movie didn't give the Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias character enough credit--he was too much of a pretty boy and not enough emphasis was given to his intelligence--but overall I vastly enjoyed it. (IMDB's trivia page on the movie is rather extensive, and is an interesting source of information on the long process of making the movie as well as a compendium of many of the subtle references made to the book in the movie. Well worth checking out, if you're interested.)
I really enjoyed the music, as well. Most of the soundtrack consisted of songs from the time in which the movie takes place--"The Times They Are A-Changin'" by Bob Dylan, "All Along The Watchtower" performed by Jimi Hendrix, "Hallelujah" by Leonard Cohen, "The Sound Of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, etc. Some of the songs play with the action happening on screen; for example, "The Times They are A-Changin'" plays over a historical montage setting the context of the movie and "The Sound Of Silence" plays over the graveyard scene of The Comedian's funeral. Other songs play against the action, for example when "Unforgettable" performed by Nat King Cole plays over the intense violence of The Comedian's murder at the beginning. Both uses are very effective in their own way, and I was impressed at how well all of the songs (which already exist in a set form, and were chosen because of their fame in the era) were put to use in the film. It's also worth noting that many of the songs were referenced in the original graphic novel, several being the basis of issue titles; another example of Snyder paying homage to the source material in as many ways as possible.
The movie also uses several "classical" cues like Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" for one of the Vietnam War scenes (the piece is referenced in the book, though not in that context). During the scene of Dr. Manhattan's origin story, which takes place on Mars, the music played is Philip Glass' "Prophecies," from the movie Koyaanisqatsi; the eerie, otherworldly quality of Glass' minimalism is a perfect complement to the isolation and (literally) otherworldliness of the scene.
I enjoyed the actual score by Tyler Bates too (many if not all of the choices of pop songs would have been made by the music supervisor). It was unintrusive, and mostly consisted of background atmosphere-type cues. The one moment that stood out, however, was the scene where Laurie and Daniel (aka Silk Spectre II and Nite Owl II) decide to put their costumes on and go out adventuring, like they did in the old days. The music grew to a stirring, inspirational feel as the characters gained confidence and sensed old excitements coming back. The first thing that stood out was the music's subtle homage paid to the Batman Begins and The Dark Knight scores, by James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer, in its rhythmic string pattern (I wrote about the Dark Knight score back in August). But scarcely before I began smiling at recognizing the reference, the score paid a much less subtle homage to Don Davis' score for The Matrix, particularly part of the last cue "Anything Is Possible" which occurs when Neo comes back from the dead and realizes all of his powers inside the Matrix. It was practically Bates' paraphrase of the Matrix cue. Both of the score references were to "superheroes," of a sort, and indicated strong decisions to take up superhero-like powers--which, of course, was exactly what was happening in that scene in Watchmen. It was rather brilliant.
Watchmen was a great movie with a great soundtrack. The caveat is that there's a lot of blood'n'guts and a few sex scenes, but I would recommend the movie highly to anyone who enjoyed the graphic novel. I rarely purchase film score albums, and even more rarely do I purchase soundtrack albums; but I'm considering both from this film. Well done, Zack Snyder and Tyler Bates.
