Conducting the Rite

This 5-year old makes it look easy...

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A few palindromes

Hannah,

devoted

madam.

Yo, banana boy!

No lemon, no melon.

No cab, no tuna nut on bacon.

Dammit, I'm mad.

Dennis and Edna sinned.

As I pee, sir, I see Pisa.

Anne, I vote more cars race Rome to Vienna.

A Toyota. Race fast, safe car. A Toyota.

Wow,

Devil lived

devoted

solos.

Boston did not sob.

Not so, Boston!

If I had hi-fi.

Paris, I rap.

Nina Ricci ran in.

Can I attain a "C"?

"La" - not atonal.

Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas!

Air an aria.

In Italian...

odo (to hear)

ossesso (obsessed)

ottetto (octet)

animina (little soul)

onorarono (to honor)

ingegni (ingeniousness)

otto (eight)

ala (wing)

In Dutch...

Legovogel (Lego bird)

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National Penguin Awareness Day

January 20th

Happy National Penguin Awareness Day!

Good luck to all of the Penguins out there.

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Composer as Superhero

Mighty Mouse beware! There is a new cartoon Superhero on the scene.

Introducing Wunderkid Little Amadeus...

The cartoon is set in a time when the aspiring composer is not yet eight, but already a rising Rockstar in 18th century Salzburg. The precocious boy is a tad arrogant, and has an incurable craving for anything sweet. He also gets into all sorts of trouble and loves to play clever pranks. His father tries to keep him him in check.

Enter the villians...

To keep things exciting, the young Mozart has a formative adversary named Lorenzo Devilius. Devilius is a self-serving jealous Italian bureaucrat working for the Archbishop. Devilius got his position by faking a reference letter. A clueless rat named Monti assists Devilius in his attempts to sabotoage Mozart's budding career.

Amadeus somehow "manages to free himself from any situation no matter how difficult, so that in the end Devilius, his greatest adversary, always draws the short straw."

The adventure of the young composer Superhero in Salzburg is Germany's answer to Superman and Mighty Mouse. Produced in Hamburg by GATEWAY4M, Wunderkid Little Amadeus is syndicated to television networks around the world.

I caught Amadeus, Devilius, and Monti the rat on RI PBS and viewed Episode 112 where Mozart single-handedly breaks down social barriers by performing for the masses beside lowly street musicians.

Composer as Superhero. Now, that's a refreshing concept.

Link: http://www.little-amadeus.de/index.php

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The Great Handini

The Great Handini (a.k.a. Maher A. Haddad) is one of America's leading Manualists. He has elevated his instrument of choice to a new level of professionalism. He has increased public awareness about this under-appreciated, but highly refined, technique of musical expression. A rising star and a virtuoso in his own right, Handini performs the great musical masterpieces of the world, including works by Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, and Liszt.

Here few examples of his formative craftsmanship...

Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manualism_(hand_music

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The Soupy Sales Show

TV personality Soupy Sales (1926 – 2009) died last week. He was a wacky comedian, actor, and host of a well-known New York area television show for children called “The Soupy Sales Show.’’ He died at Calvary Hospice in the New York at the age of 83.


He had a hit song around 1965 called "The Mouse" and I've included a copy of the sheet music cover below.








The song's words and music by Sandy Linzer and Denny Randell are not very impressive. The main lyric was the word "Yeah!" I don't recall if Soupy actually sang pitches or not, but here is a sample of the opening music.

While his TV program was ostensibly for children, the show attracted older views who enjoyed his madcap, vaudevillian comic style. At times his programs verged on theatre of the absurd. Soupy would push the envelope on live TV in ways that wouldn't be tolerated today. For example, on one program he told his young audience to sneak into their mothers’ purse, extract all the pieces of green paper bearing pictures of presidents, and mail them to him. It resulted in Mr. Sales getting lots of envelopes of cash, and being suspended from his job for a week.

The show ran for many years, and I grew up with the earlier programs. I loved the hand puppets and skits.

On YouTube you can find various clips from the programs, but here is a later program from the 1970s where he had rock star and composer Alice Cooper as a guest. Cooper is not someone you would normally associate with children's programming. His concerts featured guillotines, electric chairs, snakes, fake blood, and children's dolls. His heavy metal music is grandly theatrical, violent, and designed to shock.

Here is the YouTube of Soupy Sales together with avant garde composer/musician Alice Cooper...

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soupy_Sales

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Cooper

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Learning from UFOs

Get ready.

It's coming in February 2010.



If you can make it to the Southwest United States, there will be an interesting week-long conference about Unidentified Flying Objects (aka UFOs).

The International UFO Congress will be holding their 19th annual convention along with a UFO-related film festival. It's going to be 7 days and 8 nights of out-of-this-world adventure. The organizers expect to attract 30 enthusiastic speakers, 40 exhibitors, and perhaps a 1000 attendees from all over the world (and beyond).

Mark your calendar. It's all happening from February 21st to the 27th, 2010 in Laughlin, Nevada at the Aquarius Casino and Resort.

I think it's great. I'd love to spend my February with hip Alienologists in sunny-Nevada rather than hang with dry and boring academic Musicologists in cold and icy-Boston (The Farmer's Almanac predicts a particularly rotten Winter this year).



Perhaps I can bring my Theremin and compose/perform a new composition for the occasion: a UFO Suite, or an Area 51 Sonata. In fact, I've always been inspired by the modern musical soundtracks of 1950's era Sci-Fi movies, and this assortment of people at the UFO Congress could be a ripe, receptive, and open-minded (if not captive) audience for my odd-ball creative expression.

There probably is a large degree of similarity between experiencing alien life-forms, and listening to a brand new experimental music composition. Both experiences are forms of encounter that force carbon-based humanoids such as ourselves to think outside of the box and flex our bio-electrical brains. It forces our primitive minds to explore totally new dimensions of thought.

I don't think this analogy is a too much of a stretch. Any worthy piece of new music should result in an out-of-body experience, and any great musical work should rate as paranormal event.

Music transcends the physics of ordinary sound. It creates multi-dimensional layers of meaning that go beyond Einstein's standard space-time continuum. Music is a form of communication that humans speculate about, but don't fully understand. Music seems to work like telepathy, or time-travel, or according to the rules of fractals in chaos theory, or like the "transporter" on Star Trek.



Beam me up Scottie!

We don't know when, how, or where music started. Perhaps it was a gift from benevolent Aliens (photo above) who brought the mysterious science of music to Earth as a gift sometime near the dawn of civilization. It's time we explored music as a potential medium for inter-stellar, inter-galactic, and inter-universe communication. NASA needs to get on board pronto and learn this technology. Space shuttles are low tech, mucho expensive, and pollute the environment. Experimental music is sustainable, cutting-edge, and ethereal. I wouldn't care to venture into the event horizon of a Black Hole without my electric piano and plenty of J.S. Bach.

Biologists have long wondered why humans have the capacity for music. Could it be that we will need it someday to communicate (or jam) with our planetarily remote visitors? Is that what Arnold Schoenberg meant when he selected poetic text for his Second String Quartet (1908) that reads: "Ich fühle luft von anderem planeten" (I feel wind from other planets). This visionary text came from a poem titled "Entrückung" (Rapture) by Alien wannabe Stefan George.

I have never seen a UFO up close. Nor do I have any current or residual memories of an encounter with intelligent life from an origin other than the planet Earth (e.g. I've never met R. Buckminster Fuller in person).

But, I have met people who believe that they have had these types of encounters. These people seem to have a special gift, and I have always been a little envious of their unique experiences. The UFO Congress Convention has a forum for these people. They call it "Experiencer Sessions."


The Experiencer Sessions take place in a private room that is set aside four times during the week. It is hosted by a trained counselors who moderate and facilitate individuals who want to share their anomalous experiences. Participants are invited to come together and interact with one another, and also receive guidance and insight form the group moderator. These sessions are open to registered members of the conference, but not open to the press, and not allowed to be recorded.

That too sounds like a good model for contemporary music performance. If recordings and public ridicule were banned, more people would attend concerts. Experiencing live music would once again take on its long forgotten function as a ritual of communally-based transcendental elation. People would reclaim their in alienated rights to utilize music as a method of inter-dimensional communication within the cracks of the multi-verse. Not only would we be able to better converse with little green men, but with our human brethren as well.

If the likes of NASA and the International UFO Congress come to recognise the vital importance of music, it will create a surge of demand for the under-valued art form. Conservatories will start offering classes in "Alien Harmony." Already, some notes in standard music must be labeled as "unidentified non-harmonic tones." There will be graduate-level seminars in the music of Saturn-born space-age jazzer Sun Ra and about the music of composer Karlheinz Stockhausen who once said he came to Earth from a planet circling the star Sirius (not Modrath, Germany as previously reported).

Hey, wait a minute. Conservatories already ofter those classes. That must prove that Aliens are already among us!

And it's not just flaky musicians who are leading the charge. Miyuki Hatoyama, the wife of Japan's premier-in-waiting wrote this in her book: "While my body was asleep, I think my soul rode on a triangular-shaped UFO and went to Venus."

I rest my case.

See you at the UFO Convention.

Link:

http://ufocongress.com/

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Flying Saucers

September 5th, 2009.

That was the date when the second "O" from the word Google was abducted by Aliens. Oh-no!

According to Wikipedia (my primary source of hard information) "Google issued a tweet on Twitter with the following cryptic sequence of numbers:

1.12.12 25.15.21.18 15 1.18.5 2.5.12.15.14.7 20.15 21.19

It is said to be a cipher for “all your ’O’ are belong to us.” (It's not the best grammatically, but not bad English for a space alien).

The cipher was based on a straight alpha-numeric translation:

1=a
2=b
3=c
etc.

At the same time, the www.google.com homepage graphic was updated show an UFO that is in the process of abducting the second ’O’ in Google.

Beware of flying saucers. Watch your Os today. This may go viral.

Cheerio!

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In other news...

Congratulations to William Ocean for winning first place in the US Championship for Air Guitar.

Ocean will move on to compete in the World Air Guitar Championship to be held in Finland.

If you don't know what Air Guitar is, get a life.

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Speed Pi

It speaks for itself...

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The Hello Song

Monday March 2nd. Today we have 15 inches of snow on the ground, the Dow Jones industrial average is falling like a rock (below 7,000 for the first time in a dozen years), and I can't get "The Hello Song" out of my head.

Actor David Paymer plays a person who is psychologically challenged residing in a mental institution, and he is obsessed with the word "Hello." It is pretty much all he says for the duration of the movie: "Crazy People" (1990) which stars Dudley Moore and Daryl Hannah.

Emory (played by Dudley Moore) works in Madison Avenue as a top advertising executive, but is beginning to have a nervous breakdown from all the pressure. He sent to a psychiatric hospital to recover. By way of a comedy of errors his fellow patients begin collaborating with him on advertising slogans and ideas. From this creative synergy the "The Hello Song" is born.

This YouTube clip leads up to "The Hello Song" and includes some background scenes.

Ever since seeing this movie, I've been struck by the economy of text in this song. It's actually very well constructed and phrased.

It is easy to see how someone can be obsessed with the word "Hello."

It's much better than "Goodbye."

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Bonnie the Whistling Orangutan

PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Whistling Orangutan at National Zoo wins MacArthur Genius Award

Flash.

The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation has announced that a 32-year-old orangutan living at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C. has been selected for a fellowship, or "genius" award, for her unique musical abilities. The half million dollar fellowship is awarded annually to US Citizens or residents, of any age and working in any field, who show exceptional merit and promise for continued and enhanced creative work. The fellowship is not a reward for past accomplishment, but rather an investment in a person's originality, insight, and potential.

A spokesperson for the foundation said, "We had to bend the rules a little in this case, since Bonnie is technically not a person, but everything else is in order."

The musical orangutan has been attracting much attention as a composer of serious note, and her first works have already earned critical acclaim. The NY Times has described Bonnie's whistling as "...primitive, earthy, haunting, and a total rejection of post-modernist aesthetics." The New Yorker writes that Bonnie's tunes are "...a breath of fresh air, simply spellbinding."

Bonnie seems to be taking her new-found fame in stride. While grazing over a light lunch comprised of fruit and leaves from her home at the National Zoo, she gave us a sample of her next magnum opus...

Her works are minimalistic (involving just one or two pitches), and explore the sonic qualities of her breathy, low-resonant whistling tone.

"I go ape over this music" said a professor at Princeton University. "It opens up completely new and uncharted territory of musical exploration that we as humans have hitherto not been privileged to experience. It's the most significant event in modern music since the discovery of humpback whale song in the early 7o's."

The MacArthur Foundation could not be reached for comment, but the early indications are that future foundation grants in the arts will be presented to other species in the animal kingdom. For example, several elephants residing in American zoos are under consideration for genius awards in the visual arts. Their work in acrylics is considered to be state-of-the-art and at the "cutting edge" of contemporary visual design. A spokesperson at the auction house Sotheby's (who did not want to be identified by name) said, "Animal art, of all kinds, is really hot right now."

http://www.elephantartgallery.com/paintings/

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Schumann or Schubert?

On July 20th, 1956 the German Democratic Republic (the former East Germany) released a pair of stamps commemorating composer Robert Schumann a 100 years after his death (photo on right).

It was soon discovered that the scores behind Schumann's portrait belonged to another composer, that of Austrian composer Franz Schubert. A redesigned postage stamp with corrected scores was reissued on October 10th, 1956.

You might think that the Schumann stamps with the Schubert scores would be valuable to collectors, but it only trades for about 4 Euros (5.50 US $) as listed in the German Michel catalogue. The corrected/reissued set with Schumann's scores sells for more: 9.50 Euro (13.- US $).

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The Mad Conductor

The Canadian clown Denis Lacombe studied music, mime, and tap dancing before entering l'École National de Cirque de Montréal (The National Circus School of Montreal) in 1984. He is a winner of the bronze medal Cirque de Demain 1983, and is influenced by Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, and Goofy.

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