My Romanian Tunes

Okay, one more post from the trip. Since I had my mandolin with me and a fair bit of downtime at the orphanage, I ended up writing a couple tunes. The Rowan Tree and The Carpathian Foothills, both in F# minor, a key I've been wanting to do something with for a while. Here they are, if you're interested.




I also made a quick recording of them (MP3, 3.2 MB). After messing around for way too long trying to get my computer to record nicely from my microphone, I didn't feel like doing a ton of takes. But it does the job.

What's the Right Thing to Do With CDs?

I love having all my music in digital form. In the interests of encouraging it, I always start by checking eMusic.com and Amazon MP3 first whenever I want to buy something. Aside from the instant gratification and better prices, I really appreciate not having to deal with the actual CDs. Heck, just unwrapping those things is a pain, and then once I've ripped them onto my computer, I've got them just sitting around taking up space even though I never intend to use them again. But sometimes, a CD is all that's available, so I'm stuck with it.

I have a lot of my original CD collection stored in several CD binders, which sit fairly unobtrusively in a closet these days. So they at least take up less space if not none. But they're full, and I've acquired a lot of new CDs recently that are stacking up because I don't really know what to do with them. I'm disinclined to buy more binders and transfer the CDs to them, because I don't want to go to that extra work for stuff that I don't even want to keep around in the first place. I don't want to just throw away the CDs because it feels so painfully wasteful. I can't sell or even give them away, because I'm keeping a copy on my computer, and that puts you back in the illegal file sharing situation: two copies are being used where only one was paid for.

So here I am, trying to be good and support artists I like by not downloading illegal music. But I'm paying a penalty for it by adding clutter to my life. What's the right thing to do here? Anybody have any ideas? (Building a CD stack lamp is kind of cool, but probably not something I'd realistically do.)

Camp Harmony

This was our last year of having Camp Harmony at its long-time location in the Santa Cruz mountains. The new location will probably be very nice, I'm sure, but this year's camp was tinged with a bit of sadness at the thought that we won't be back again. Aside from the fact that I inherently like redwood forests, there are 13 years of memories there for me. But moving on from that thought, this was a very good year, so I'm pleased that Camp Campbell is going out on a good note. I think I got a good mix of everything I usually want out of camp, plus the weather was beautiful and nobody got significantly sick.

Music-wise, I played a lot for the Irish dance and classes again. This was mostly fun, though there were some interpersonal frustrations with the pickup band on the dance night, but we worked those out. Had a good session after that dance, too, and in general I felt that my fiddle playing was in surprisingly good shape for the modest amount of practice I've had recently. I learned another awesome Liz Carroll tune, and wrote down a gorgeous waltz that I haven't had a chance to actually learn yet. I also resurrected a number of Québécois tunes at a workshop, though most of them have left my head again already. Quena and I experimented with two-person, one-fiddle duets, which was amusing.

With the singing, I was lucky in that there were two shape note sessions, since I missed the first one. I experimented with singing tenor this time, which worked fairly well considering how we pitched most things fairly low. I need to try that again when I start going back to the Palo Alto sings (soon). I was unluckier in that Madge and Tom weren't at camp, so there was no Balkan or Barbershop, which I really wanted to do again. But Katherine did a Weird Al songs workshop, and that was fun.

For the dancing, there were some very nice contras (thanks partly to Quena's calling). I also had some nice waltzes, mostly in the post-midnight New Year's dancing. Cass had hurt both her ankles recently, so she hadn't been dancing. So on that last night Quena and I picked her up and carried her through a waltz, so she wouldn't be left out. No swing this year, but there was some Scandinavian dancing, which was a nice change, and even included a couple nyckelharpa players.

I did some more teaching again this year. I didn't do a whole series of music theory classes, but instead just went for a single class trying to explain the concept behind music theory itself, rather than just giving people the rules that result from it. That might be an interesting thing to do another blog post on. Lacey and I also did an intermediate waltz workshop, mostly focusing on rotary waltz technique and a couple of moves (underarm turns and canter pivots).

I even got some good artsy-craftsy time in. Quena led a mask-making workshop, and we made some fun masks for the New Year's Eve party. I was quite proud of mine. It's cut out of a large manila folder, with a collage of cut-up origami paper on it. The paper had a fade-out on the colors, which added a little extra dimension to it.

Bob Reid's concert was a high point as usual. He jokes that he doesn't actually get any kids at the kids concert anymore, but he does. There are just a lot of us 20-somethings mixed in there as well. Some of those songs will never stop being wonderful, or bringing the occasional tear to my eye or grin to my face. Lacey and I came up with a new verse for the Foolish Questions song as well, which we wrote entirely on the walk between the dining hall and the concert, and Bob let me sing it for everyone at the end of the song.

The New Year's Eve celebration was exactly the way it always should be, though we cut it closer than ever, running in from the dance hall at the 12 second mark in the countdown. Singing with and hugging so many of your best friends and family is the best way to start a year, I think. And then a good two or three hours of waltzing, of course. We drew Angel Cards that night, rather than waiting until morning. Mine is especially appropriate for the way this year looks like it will unfold: Adventure.

On New Year's Day, after leaving camp, Lacey and I came back to my apartment and invited along Quena, Cass, Jonathan, and Antonia. We called Mom and Rowyn and had them come over to join us, making 8, which about maxes out the chairs here (including piano bench, though there was still the couch, I guess). Then we improvised a tea party with various snacks Rowyn and I had left over from different parties, gingerbread Antonia had made, a gingerbread house Quena had made, a bit of stuff we brought from camp, and of course, tea (I at least had plenty of that). This was a very satisfying way to end camp, easing the transition much better than a cold, empty apartment. It was still a bit of a wrench to go to work the very next day, but at least I was in good shape for it.

Happy New Year!

The Short List

I have several modes of music listening, from putting my whole library or large genres on shuffle, to focusing on specific artists and actually listening to entire albums in order. Lately I've been more conscious of my "Short List" mode, where I get three or four songs together and just play them repeatedly as a set. There are breaks in between to preserve the sense of order from a continuous loop, and I might listen to other music or just have silence then, but I come back and play the set many times a day until it's time to move on to the next one.

Short Lists can be themed sometimes, such as all dance music, like this set from quite a while ago that I still remember because I was stuck on it for so long:

• Big & Rich: Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy (polka)
• Kelly Clarkson: Breakaway (waltz)
• Indigo Swing: Blue Suit Boogie (swing)

More often they're collections of recently-discovered music, so I'm frequently in this mode when I'm scouting out new stuff. Like this previously blogged list, courtesy of my Last.fm recommendations:

• Hank Williams, Sr: Honky Tonk Blues
• Reel Big Fish: She Has a Girlfriend Now
• The Smiths: Bigmouth Strikes Again

The ordering within a list is specific, but I'm not always sure how I choose it. The songs are often exceedingly different (as above) but I think that just makes it more interesting as they developed relationships in my mind from repeatedly juxtaposed listenings. Here's the current, somewhat motley, collection:

• Colby Caillat: Bubbly
• Geoff Byrd: Elusive Butterfly
• Mika: Grace Kelly
• The Vincent Black Shadow: Metro

There's also the question of number. Three is usually the right amount, but this list has four songs in it because I was unable to squeeze out either of the two middle ones. (The bookenders of a set are usually non-negotiable.) Unfortunately, I have the next Short List starting to form already, when I'm not entirely done with the current one. Here's what's coming up:

• Indigo Girls: Fill It Up Again
• Sugababes: Hole in the Head
• Joan Osborne: St. Teresa

Though I don't know if the middle one will stay or get booted for something else (again, the middle position tends to be weakest). There are some Bowling for Soup songs that might get swapped in. I tried tacking this list on to the current one, but seven songs is really just too much for a Short List. So I'm in a transitional stage right now, which feels weird.

Credit (and thanks!) where due: This current flood of new music recommendations is coming mostly from Rowyn. Props also go to Bandanna Bob for introducing me to "Metro" at Faster Polka a few weeks ago (it's a good swing).

Hallowe'en Music

At the library last week I picked up some CDs by a Finnish group called Värttinä. For a random library find, I was extremely pleased, and I definitely recommend the group. But a song called "Äijö" on their Ilmatar album really just seems like something to sing at midnight on Hallowe'en under a full moon. I only know 3 or 4 words of Finnish but this thing was completely creeping me out the first time I heard it. Awesome. I've been listening to it all day. :-)

Another musician I've recently discovered is Screamin' Jay Hawkins. He sounds somewhat more insane than scary sometimes, but he's got some cool stuff. Richard even played some at Friday Night Waltz (at my suggestion): "Little Demon" (swing) and "Voodoo" (one-step/polka, sped up slightly). "Alligator Wine" and "I Put a Spell on You" are good, too.

Oh, and I just realized: we got all the way through a Hallowe'en FNW without a single rendition of "The Cockroach That Ate Cincinnati." Impressive.

So now I'm thinking about what else I have that's Hallowe'eny. Rockapella's "You're a Mean One Mr. Grinch," certainly, for all that it's a Christmas song. Definitely a few things by Tom Waits. Anybody have anything else to suggest?

Amazon.com MP3 Downloads

This weekend I got around to trying out Amazon's new MP3 download store. So far I've found a few albums that eMusic didn't have, so it's definitely worthwhile in that respect, in spite of being somewhat more expensive (though still vastly cheaper than CDs, and even somewhat cheaper than iTunes). I also appreciate it tying in to the whole recommendation system there, since I've got a considerable profile built up for that.

Just a couple peeves with it so far:

1. If I'm using Camino, Amazon doesn't believe I've installed their downloader application, so I have to switch to Firefox.
2. You can only download files once. They don't get saved in your account library or anything like that.

And one weirdness that I think (hope) was just a one-off: On one of the albums I got, all the tracks are shifted a minute and a half to the right. That is, the first track has 1'30" of silence before the beginning of the song, which then goes 1'30" into track 2. Then the last track is cut off abruptly in the middle. Pretty weird. Still waiting for customer service to get back to me about this, since I can't even try to fix it by re-downloading (see #2 above).

Update, 10/20: Support responded promptly, saying they were looking into the problem. So I waited a week and then wrote in again asking for an update. They responded again, saying they had taken that album down and would make it available again, at which point I could try downloading it again and see if it was any better. After a week of checking every day and finding it still unavailable, I wrote in again. They couldn't tell me when it would be ready, but said to just keep checking. Sigh. Anyway, it finally made it, and I downloaded it again, and the tracks are still screwed up. Back to the drawing board.

One other annoyance, too: They use browser cookies to determine whether you've installed their downloader app. If you happen to clear out your cookies, they force you through downloading and installing it all over again. Ugh.

Update, 1/10/08: I happened to check back today, after forgetting for a while, and found that the album in question (Jason Webley's "Only Just Beginning") is back up. I downloaded it and it all worked perfectly. So we got there in the end.

eMusic and Last.fm Recommendations

I don't know if this is new in eMusic or if I only just noticed it, but it's kind of cool. It generates recommendations of artists you might like based on what you've already bought, which is nothing new. But the visual display of it is pretty slick. You can see which recommendations come from which other users via which artists, and you can watch the connections change just while you mouse over the different names in all three columns. Plus, of course, you can play samples right there. Nice.



The problem here is that I don't really have a reason to care much about things eMusic is recommending based on just a couple months of purchases. What I want is this UI on my Last.fm recommendations, which is based on 3 years of what I've actually listened to. The Last.fm radio is cool and everything, but it would be fun to have this alternate way to browse recommendations more deliberately. Though with so many more recommendations, this design would probably get unwieldy, so you'd have to work out some way to just examine specific parts of the network at a time. E.g. limit it to friends, or neighbors, or tags, or using the obscure/popular slider.

Your Brain On Music

I just finished This Is Your Brain On Music, by Daniel J. Levitin. If you're at all interested in music and/or brains it's a fascinating read. I found a lot of concepts that I was familiar with from my cog. psy. classes in college, but it was fun seeing them applied so directly to our perception and experience of music. The book actually made me want to just sit down and really listen to music more than anything else, rather than just having it playing in the background like I usually do. But it also made me want to get back on track again with things like playing, composing, and developing my ear.

Particularly interesting to me was the information about perfect pitch. A number of studies have shown evidence that many people, even non-musicians, are able to store absolute pitch information in memory. E.g. they could be trained to recognize or sing back an assigned note that they learned. In other cases, when asked to sing a favorite popular song, they would do so in the right key without any prompting (or even awareness that they were doing so). My guess is that if we taught babies to recognize notes the way we teach them to recognize colors, a great many more people would have perfect pitch. It seems to be built into the brain, but most people just don't know how to use it or develop it. Granted, the people who seem to have it "automatically" make it seem inaccessible to the rest of us, but I think that's just a natural misinterpretation of ordinary person-to-person variability.

Another interesting concept regards what it takes to become an "expert" level musician. It seems that amount of practice time really is the biggest factor in becoming really good at something, even more so than perceived talent. Ten thousand hours is the usual amount of time you have to put in to really reach that top tier of world-class experts. And that same number seems to apply not only to music but to everything else that has been studied in this context: playing chess, figure skating, fiction writing, and more. Unfortunately, 10,000 hours is about 3 hours a day for 10 years. Sigh. But I guess that's why we're not all the best musicians in the world.

I was also amused at how well Levitin "predicted" the existence of Last.fm... a few years after its creation. Personalized radio stations mixing stuff you like with new recommendations to try? Yep, got that. :-)

Recessional

Last night I went to a Swing Kids "Jasmix" (I think the "s" is for "summer") on campus, and I have to thank two people for making me glad I stayed awake all the way to midnight: Jason for the last waltz he played, and Rachel for dancing it with me. Three people, perhaps, since I'll extend the gratitude to Vienna Teng for writing and recording "Recessional" on her latest album. In spite of it not being a cross-step, it's my new favorite last waltz.

The magic of this song is in how you have to let yourself be completely and utterly absorbed in it. While we were still nominally leader and follower, the only way to really dance to this was to both be followers of the music. The fluidity of the tempo changes, the fermatas, the pulses, all prevent you from letting your attention stray for even an instant. But the closeness and intimacy of it draw you in to the point where you don't even want anything other than to be a part of it. The incredibly restrained vocals especially give the impression of hearing her heart speaking directly to you from inside her chest. You not only have to listen to it, but to really feel it and experience it, to "breathe with it" as Jason said, so that it's flowing through you. Ending the dance was like waking up and having to come to terms with the real world again from scratch, though we'd only left it four minutes ago.

Vienna Teng has described "Recessional" as a sort of reverse emotional strip tease. It begins at the most open, raw, touching point, and slowly covers itself back up. It took me a few listens today, though, before I realized that it's still chronological, and not going backwards in time. The music helps show that, and once I realized what was going on it made the song even more intense and poignant. The emotional effects of this song have stayed with me most of the day today.

Ikaalinen, Finland

The idea to go to Ikaalinen came from finding out about the Sata-Häme Soi Accordion Festival that happens there every year. Miriam actually plays accordion, and I would if I had one, plus we just thought it sounded like a fun way to go somewhere beyond Helsinki. From Helsinki it was a 2 hour train to Tampere, then a 1+ hour bus ride out to Ikaalinen, then a walk out to a small island on the lake, where we found our lodgings in a campground that rents little cabin rooms. The festival is a week long, but we just went for a day of it.

For a supposedly international accordion festival, most of the music we heard seemed to be Finnish, or stuff for ballroom dancing. Nothing wrong with that, but not quite what I was expecting. Probably if we had gotten there for the actual championship accordion competition a day or two before we would have had a different impression. The main festival park area had two stages with seating areas and dance floors, so we got to do a bit more dancing. It was similar to the dancing we had in Helsinki, except people were mostly just dancing in fixed couples (i.e. not asking random people), and it was trickier dancing around in damp, muddy shoes. It was getting to my ankle a bit, actually, so I didn't do too much.

On the one evening we were there, we went to the church to hear a concert by The Baltic International Quintet Excelsior. Four piano accordions and one 5-row button (which is what we saw the most of around the festival). With that many accordions, and with a wide range of reed sets on each one, they have a remarkable sound, almost like a giant organ. The fact that none of them seemed to use the left-hand chord buttons probably contributed to this effect. They played a variety of things like arrangements of classical pieces (e.g. by Mozart) as well as stuff I assume was written specifically for accordions (e.g. by Astor Piazzolla). Miriam was rather put off by their stage presence, but I didn't pay much attention to that and just really enjoyed the music. We had great, front-row seats, too, which is good because I love watching musicians' hands. The baritone player was my favorite in that respect.

The Accordion Museum in Ikaalinen is a single room lined with accordions in glass cases. There was one person in it who I don't think even usually works there, but he was so excited to get visitors that he immediately took us under his wing and gave us an enthusiastic, informative, knowledgeable tour of nearly all the instruments. My favorite was this accordion that was designed to let a Finnish 5-row player fool an American audience that expected to see a piano accordion. It has three rows of buttons below a somewhat stubby row of what appear to be piano keys. But those piano keys are actually the last two rows of the buttons. If you look closely, you can see that there are actually white "black" keys to make the black row complete while still blending in to the piano look. I think that's hilarious.

There was also a building where lots of accordion makers were selling their instruments. I was sorely tempted to get one of the smaller 5-row accordions, but resisted for lack of a few thousand euros and an extra arm. Not to mention the fact that it probably wouldn't be wise to buy a "real" instrument before knowing anything about playing it. Anybody know someone who can lend me one?

Ikaalinen was as far north as we got in this trip, though everything on this trip from Stockholm on up was farther north than I'd ever been in my life. This sunset picture was taken at 11:30 PM. The night probably got a bit darker after that, but it wasn't long before the sun was coming up again. In a way, it's fun to have almost continual daytime when you're traveling. But it didn't always make sleeping easy, and I was really happy to be able to find proper darkness when I finally got back home.

Ikaalinen was also where we heard the most Finnish spoken. It's an absolutely fantastic language and I wish I could speak it. It just burbles along and makes me laugh sometimes even though I don't get the jokes. An interesting thing about being in Finland was having so many signs, labels, etc. be bilingual Finnish-Swedish. After a few days in Sweden, not to mention a Pimsleur CD and a bunch of cognates, we were actually turning to Swedish to help us translate or at least get the gist of any Finnish we had to read. Didn't help with what we heard spoken, though.

Blessed Are the Peacemakers

1. Watch the I Know I'm Not Alone music video.
2. Watch the I Know I'm Not Alone documentary (borrow mine if you like).

Michael Franti is a pretty incredible human being and makes good music to boot. He made this documentary traveling through Iraq, Israel and Palestine. He went around with just a guitar, a video camera, and an interpreter, and talked with U.S. soldiers, native soldiers, and people in the streets, homes and hospitals. His message is the importance of communication, and it really hits home when you see him getting Israeli soldiers talking with Palestinians over that crazy big fence they're building.

[Thanks to Quena for first playing me "Red Beans and Rice" way back in Costa Rica, and for Antonia for introducing me to the rest of Michael Franti & Spearhead's stuff.]

Another Plug for eMusic

So here's another "pro" for the list on my initial post about eMusic. I got an email from them today (yes, I signed up for it) that mentioned they're giving away for free two CDs worth of the 2007 Independent Music Awards Winners. I think you probably still have to be a subscribed member to get these free, but still, that's nearly 3 hours of music there. It's a nice variety of stuff, so it ranges from more to less within my usual tastes and was a fun sampler to listen to. Props to eMusic for that.

Trying Out eMusic

Very belatedly taking a tip from Case, I went to check out eMusic.com yesterday. Initial impressions:

Pros:

• No DRM.
• Good prices (about 30-60¢ per track, depending on your plan).
• "Booster packs" to supplement your regular subscription.
• Pretty easy, smooth download process, once you've installed the Download Manager.
• 25 free songs for your trial period.

Cons:

• I had trouble at first figuring out how to browse their selection without signing up. (If you get the giant promo page, click through to the about page in the footer, and browse from there.)
• You have to subscribe to a monthly plan, which doesn't carry over after the month is up.
• The site wouldn't let me find any info on the booster packs until I'd already signed up for a paid account.
• You can't search their help site. Sheesh, people, come on.

So I got my free trial, and then went ahead and took their cheapest subscription as well (30 tracks/month for $9.99). That let me get all three disks worth of Tom Waits' Orphans set. I'm still browsing around to determine what sort of a selection they have to go with my tastes, but I'll probably give it a try for a while, at least until we see what sort of a digital music store Amazon comes out with.

The forced-subscription thing is my biggest peeve about this, especially when things don't carry over. I'd be more than happy to just live off their booster packs (units of 10-30 tracks at a time), as long as I could get them when I wanted and use them when I wanted. It's a pity you can't just get those without a subscription. On the other hand, if I have trouble finding new stuff that I want each month, I figure I can always use my monthly quota to legitimize those parts of my music collection that may have come from *ahem* other sources. And that would probably be a good thing.

The Else

They Might Be Giants released their new album The Else today, iTunes only, 2 months before the CD comes out. (Though the CD is actually going to be 2 CDs, apparently.) I'd just as soon have had them selling DRM-free mp3s on theymightbegiants.com, but I bought it off iTunes anyway. It's a good album, though like most of their recent albums, I have a hard time getting fully behind it because it divides so sharply down the Flansburgh | Linnell line. Their earlier stuff was more homogeneous, I think, and it was easy to like entire albums. Nowadays, I usually feel like more of a Linnell fan than a TMBG fan. (E.g. when the heck is he going to write more State Songs?)

That said, I will give Flansburgh credit for With the Dark. I really like how the several parts are so different and yet still flow well into each other. Some pieces of it do sound "typically Flansy," but the track as a whole is made more interesting than that by the combination and juxtapositions. The instrumental part is pretty neat, and for some reason the one bit about taxidermy cracks me up. So anyway, good job there, Flans.

Contrecoup was the only song on here that I'd heard before, and I was looking forward to it. Unfortunately, I don't think it fits well with the rest of the album, due mostly to the instrumentation, I think. The simple acoustic guitar works well in the context of making up a song as a challenge on a radio show, but less so in the midst of their other stuff. So it lost a bit by that, even though they actually extended the song somewhat. I'm also not fond of the changed rhyme scheme at the end. They took an AABC (where the B had an internal rhyme) and made it an ABBC which makes the first B sound wrong (especially since my mind is pre-filling in something that actually does rhyme). Urgh. The gradual speeding up at the end was kind of cute though, even if it didn't go anywhere but to a fadeout.

Others I liked include Bee of the Bird of the Moth which is based on a nifty critter called the Hummingbird Hawk-Moth. The word play here is fun, with the equal / freak-we'll rhyme, and the line with head lice, heads lie and headlights. I like the dramatic beginning to the melody in Climbing the Walls, though it ironically sounds more like coming down from the walls than climbing them. While I love the chorus of Withered Hope, I need to work on liking the rest of it more so it doesn't feel lopsided. The Mesopotamians is fun just to get to sing "Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh."

Anyway, I'll probably listen to the whole album as a unit a few more times, to let things settle in more before I send it all into the usual TMBG division of tracks I listen to and those I don't.

Coastline Session

I went down to Santa Cruz last night to have dinner with Jim and then go to the Irish session at the Coastline Brewery. There were a lot of Santa Cruz folks I haven't seen for a very long time and it really kind of threw me back to high-school era memories. George's surprise when he saw me was particularly fun. It made me really happy to play with people like him and Laurie and Lars and Jim again. It was also good for me just to get to a different session. I do enjoy Patrick's sessions up here (when I manage to go) but it's also easy to get stuck in a musical rut when you always play at the same place. Hearing different people and different tunes is a good change. I need to try to make over-the-hill efforts to get down to the Santa Cruz session more often.

Open Letter to Brave Combo

Dear Brave Combo,

I had the inimitable pleasure of dancing to your music when you were out here at Stanford a couple of years ago. I've also gotten considerable enjoyment (and dancing!) out of all of your recordings. In short: I'm a fan. With that as my meager excuse, I would like to be presumptuous for a moment and ask a favor of you.

There is a dance that is very popular out here in the Bay Area dance community, called The Congress of Vienna. A fine little choreography to a lovely piece of music. However, by "popular" I mean that at certain dance events playing it twice per evening is a mandate. This has been going on for at least seven years, since that was about when I first learned the choreography. At this point, the poor dance desperately needs revitalizing. Various people around here, myself included, have considered re-choreographing it, but I think what it really needs is new music to shake things up a bit.

This is where you (I hope) come in. I've fantasized for a long time about what a Brave Combo version of The Congress of Vienna would be like. Your Box of Ghosts album especially inspires this, since I love how you take Mozart and Chopin and others, turn them on their heads, and make fun dance music out of them. That's what we need here, and if you were to record this, I would be eternally grateful. I've transcribed the basic melody and chords for you, and from there I'll just say: go nuts with it. Find something new in it that I can't find on my own after seven years of dancing to it. And imagine yourselves giving a shot of new energy to an entire dance community.

What's in this for you? Well, I hoping you'll just plain old enjoy the tune and have fun playing with it, but I should really make a better offer than that. So I'll say that if you record this tune, I will personally buy ten of your CDs and distribute them to people who have never heard your music before. And you will, of course, get full credit wherever I can get the recording played for dances.

So what do you think?

Sincerely,
Graham

-------------------------

I've said it before and I'll say it again: It would be the height of awesomeness to have an alternate recording of The Congress of Vienna by Brave Combo. So I'm finally getting around to writing this up and sending it to them. Anyone want to second me on this? And/or help create an alternate choreography? Leave a comment!

Camp Harmony

Happy New Year! 2007 has gotten off to a much better start than 2006 did, so far. Instead of being sick at home, I was getting hugs from dozens of my closest friends with everyone singing the Camp Harmony New Years song (whatever the heck it's called). That's the way things are supposed to work. It was a bit of a culture shock going straight back to work today, after 5 days singing and dancing out in the woods, but I'm adjusting. I posted a few pictures here, mostly from New Year's Eve.

I did a lot more singing than usual this year, mostly thanks to Tom and Madge. Tom led some Barbershop workshops, which I was really interesting to try out just so I could try a baritone part (I usually have to muddle by as a bass in shape note). It was cool to sing in something that's actually in my correct range, though baritone really is kind of the alto of the male voice world, meaning it's much less fun as a part. Oh well. I really enjoyed it, regardless, and we even performed our one song (Home on the Range) at the concert on the second-to-last night. Madge had "Balkan and other exotic songs" each day right after the barbershop, and several people were in both workshops, which led to a lot of funny associations and singings of Home on the Range with a flatted second and things like that. Next year we might have to put together some sort of "Balkanshop" piece, just for fun.

On the instrumental side of musical things, I did most of my playing for the Irish and Scottish dances. The Scottish was particularly challenging because Jim was explaining to me how (American) Scottish dance musicians arrange their sets: Instead of playing two tunes four times each, you pick four tunes and play them 12342341, or three tunes 1231231. That makes it really tricky to keep track of where you are and what's coming up next, and you really have to get all the musicians on the same page ahead of time. I mostly had to lead those, since Jim and I had practiced the sets ahead of time. The other folks mostly got a warning and just jumped in when they heard tunes they knew. Luckily there were only a couple sets of those. The Irish ones were easier because all we had to do was find a few tunes most of us knew and play them as fast as reasonably possible.

Dancing-wise, we had a bit of an anomaly on the swing night. The English Country Dance counter-dance, which always happens the same night as swing, actually had more dancers than the swing dance (once Lacey, Quena and I switched over). Pity, since the swing dance is usually so fun. But it was a small camp in general this year, so numbers everywhere were off. The contra dancing was fun, too, and Quena did a lot of the calling for it. (Yay for Quena calling! Boo for less Quena dancing!)

Other fun stuff:
- Fiddle lessons with Lacey. (And she didn't even break anything on my fiddle, so I think it's her fiddle that's cursed, and not her.)
- Being on Cass's lunch crew in the kitchen again. (And donating an extra hour of kitchen duty to make strudels while singing TMBG songs.)
- Bob Reid's Kids Concert and Tween Sing-along Extravaganza (Quena's description, because of all the very grown up kids who still love to go sing with Bob.)
- Absolutely perfect camp weather. (Really, it only rained once, briefly, and while we were asleep. Amazing.)
- Quena and me turning 10. (We met at camp 10 years ago this year. Yay!)

Synergy is my new X-Tunes

When I got my new MacBook, I lamented the fact that I couldn't get X-Tunes to work on it. But thanks to Case I recently discovered Synergy, which seems to be just what I needed. It took a bit of configuring to get it the way I wanted, and I can't get the keyboard shortcuts to precisely match what I was used to, but I'm liking it nonetheless. This kind of thing is practically essential if I want to listen to music at work. I don't like leave my music playing while I'm not listening to it, but I also need to be able to turn it off at a moment's notice to pay attention to folks asking me questions and whatnot. With some quick keyboard shortcuts, it's a snap. I'm using Cmd+Opt as the modifier keys, with Return and the arrows, for pause/play, volume and track skipping. My main feature request is to show the amount of time elapsed or remaining on the current track when you're viewing the floater display. There are probably some other niggly little things I'd enjoy, but that's what I most miss.

Musical Stress Responses

At some point in college, I don't remember exactly when, I noticed something that happened every dead week and finals week. I would consistently get the song "Everything You Know Is Wrong" by Weird Al stuck in my head, overriding my usual daily earworms. Kind of ironic for final exams, but luckily I managed to pass everything anyway.

A few weeks ago -- just before, during and after launching Blogger in beta -- I found the same thing happening. I guess something about stress and time pressure just automatically triggered the song. It certainly wasn't deliberate, especially since it took me a minute to get the connection after I started whistling it to myself.

My last few weeks have been exceedingly busy and tiring, and last week in particular was the longest short week I can remember having. Then yesterday I had to get up early again to go help Mom move, which made for a long and physcially tiring day. Somewhere in the middle of it I got the back of my thumb sliced open by a large piece of broken glass falling out a picture frame. And while I'm staunching the flow of blood, guess what pops into my head? Part of the first verse of that song, "...as I'm laying bleeding there on the asphalt...." So that's stuck for the rest of the day again.

It's a good song, at least. It has a very good, continuous flow to it, and I love the way the rhythm changes and pushes everything along. I just hope I don't eventually get too many bad associations with it and stop liking it as a song.

Musical Snapshot

Every once in a while I fire up Last.fm and see what it has to offer in terms of new musical recommendations. It tends to be pretty hit and miss, with rather more misses than hits, but it does occasionally come up with some good ones. The three memorable ones this time around were:

• Hank Williams, Sr. - Honky Tonk Blues
• Reel Big Fish - She Has a Girlfriend Now
• The Smiths - Bigmouth Strikes Again

Their choruses have been vying with each other for the title of Alpha Earworm for the last few days, which is kind of a weird sensation, since they're all pretty different. The other-worldly female vocal line in Bigmouth may be pushing that one into first place, but the one yodel in Honky Tonk sounds pretty funny interrupting it periodically.

Anyway, that's what the inside of my head sounds like right now. Anyone else have some other recommendations they want to throw my way?