New Online Harmonium Course

I’ve just recently launched a project I’ve been working on for the last several months: a new online beginner’s harmonium course! Find out all about it at www.HarmoniumChanting.com.

The course includes 5.5 hours of video, 33 pages of PDF handouts, and seven complete chants to learn, with both melodies and chords. Full contents are listed here. And here’s the trailer:

Also on YouTube you can find the first introductory video and a demo video of Door of My Heart in four languages.

Happy chanting!

I Wonder as I Wander

Dambara always used to sing this song at our Christmas concerts, as a beautiful solo with piano accompaniment. Since he moved away, I guess we haven’t quite been ready to have anyone else try it. But it’s always been a favorite of mine, and I recently had the idea to arrange it for a group of singers, just so we could feel like we’re doing something different and not just trying to follow Dambara’s act. I’m imagining this not so much for full choir as for, say, an octet accompanying a male soloist (though the soprano and bass parts get turns joining on the melody as well).

I haven’t ever done a proper choral arrangement before (and it’s not quite the same as all the music theory exercises I did in college, now that I have more of a stake in how it actually works out). But I had a lot of fun over the past week putting this together. If anyone wants to take a look and share thoughts on it, I’m open to feedback. You can download a PDF of the score here.

I’d love to hear it sung by actual voices, but we haven’t gotten that far yet. (If anyone out there wants to get folks together and try it, please send me a recording!) In the meantime, there’s this computer-generated mp3, which isn’t great, but is something at least.

(And... Christmas songs in August, you ask? Yes. I’m totally starting on Christmas music now, and I’m not ashamed to admit it!)

The (Old) New New Guitar

So. I know I was all excited about my new guitar, and even gave her a name and everything. But sometimes you just have to suck it up, admit you’ve made a mistake, and do a complete about-face.

After spending a little while in the honeymoon phase, then a little while in buyer’s remorse, and off-and-on convincing myself that I should just get over it, I finally went and had a talk with Karen, friend and choir director extraordinaire. She confirmed that, yes, perhaps I had bought a guitar that matched me pretty well, but did not necessarily best match what I was trying to do.

Well, when you put it like that… okay, back to square one. Practice spiritual qualities like non-attachment and non-embarrassment. (Is that one? It should be.) Karen was kind enough to come with me this time, and was an immense help in being an extra pair of ears and getting me to spend more time on guitars I would have overlooked.

Seraphina was a Taylor, and I liked a lot of the Taylors — they have a bright, clear sound, feel lovely to play, and many of them are just beautiful to look at at well. Most of the other contenders were Martins, and I like their sound too, though in a completely different way — more resonant, and just plain yummy. But most of the smaller selection at Gryphon didn’t feel as nice under the fingers as the Taylors did, and were simply unattractive, so I tended to pass over them. But Karen kept dragging them back out.

Finally, after about an hour, she found a surprise: a used Martin D1, not particularly noticeable, not very expensive, but with a simple fascinating sound. The low strings are so mellow that at first I thought they had just been left on too long (though all the guitars there have bright new strings). But then when you start playing it you find that it has just a huge dynamic range. The higher strings sound brighter, and here my first feeling was that it just wouldn’t blend well, but in some miraculous way it does. I almost didn’t like it at first simply because I was so distracted mentally trying to figure out what was going on.

I also have to admit that I just dislike the look of the dreadnaught body shape, and it’s a bit much to get my arms around sometimes, though it really does the trick with the sound. Karen told me to play with my eyes closed for a bit, and that helped. It felt okay to play — better than the other Martins, if not as lovely as the Taylors. But it’s the sound that sold me. Karen remarked that being used is a plus: it sounds like it’s been played and loved.

So the new guitar came home, and needed a name. It popped up in meditation that night: Neville. I almost couldn’t bear to name it “Neville” after giving up a “Seraphina,” but there’s really nothing else for it. It’s a good name, and one that will be forever associated with the Harry Potter books in my mind. Neville is the one of the most humble characters, but in the end also one of the most heroic. He does what you need him to do with courage, compassion, and faith. You could do a lot worse.

Meet Seraphina, the New Guitar

For the last 18 years or so, I’ve been playing Mom’s guitar that she bought in high school with her babysitting money. I’ve really been quite fond of it, if more for sentimental reasons than for any musical qualities. But over the last couple months, a few people have been floating the idea at me of getting a new guitar. The fact that two of our primary guitarists at Ananda Palo Alto recently moved away probably has something to do with it — I’m on accompaniment duty much more these days. So, while I can muddle along on my own alright for quite a while, the fact that other people have to listen to me finally got me out shopping.

Gryphon Stringed Instruments is like Ollivander’s Wand Shop for guitarists. I spent about 3 hours there yesterday, looking for one that would shoot red and gold sparks when I picked it up (the wand chooses the wizard, after all). None of them quite did in the literal sense, but I came away quite happy in the end anyway.

I surprised myself a little with how important the visual appearance turned out to be for me, but really, if I’m going to spend actual money on a new instrument, I’d like it to be beautiful in every dimension possible. One of my favorites had simply gorgeous koa wood back and sides, but an overly bright sound that was a bit too much against my singing voice. Probably the best-sounding one of my short list was mellower and smoother, but had other points against it. First, it was just a standard brown-and-black ugly. And second, I felt an odd sort of resistance from it when I played it. It took me a little while to notice the pattern (I was playing so many guitars that day), but I felt that I kept making unusual mistakes, and that the guitar in some sense didn’t want to cooperate with me.

Which leads us to the final winner, a Taylor 412-ce limited edition with granadillo back and sides, a simple but beautiful front, and fretboard dots that somehow remind me more of the chakras than other ones do. The body is a little more petite than most, which I rather appreciate. You can check it out on Gryphon’s site, or on Taylor’s.

The tone is brighter than the previous one mentioned, which I like, without being as overpowering as the first, and it works well for fingerpicking (something this model was particularly designed for). The strings don’t all blend quite as well for some kinds of strumming, but I think some of that will smooth out as we get used to each other. And most importantly, this guitar felt like it wanted to play with me. One of what you might call the “red and gold sparks” was the moment I did a double-take: “Did I really just play a barre chord? That was too easy!” I got the distinct impression that the instrument was trying to help.

The other thing guitar shopping reminds me of, besides wand shopping, is an afternoon of speed-dating, followed by a wedding. There’ll be some amount of trepidation no matter who you go home with, but the one that wants to help make the relationship work is pretty likely to be the best choice.

Oddly enough, considering how much I tend to anthropomorphize things, I don’t usually name my instruments. But this one seemed like she needed a name, and this evening I decided on Seraphina, after the dragon-girl musician from the eponymous and excellent book by Rachel Hartman. I also like the association with seraphim — angelic but fiery. (See also, for instance, here.)

Today is the anniversary of Yogananda’s birth, and so Seraphina got to jump right into the middle of things, playing with me both for the birthday celebration last night and for Sunday service this morning. Very appropriate, as I consider her to be both Master’s birthday gift to me and my birthday gift to Master.

The Next Chapter: East West

Well. This is the closest I’ve come in 9 years to going an entire year without blogging, and it didn’t seem like I ought to let that happen, so here we are.

One of the main reasons for this silence is that I have vastly less (can you do that?) free time to write these days, due to the fact that I have a new job. And despite what I said back when I started my last tutoring job, this one is full-time. “What could induce you to do such a thing?” I hear you cry. Well, I’m glad you asked.

East West Bookshop in Mountain View is owned by Ananda, so over the last few years I’ve gotten to know a number of the folks who work there. Tushti and Surendra have been the managers for the past 9 years, and earlier this year asked me if I’d like to take over for them when they move to Oregon in January.  After a bit of time spent wrapping my head around the idea of doing a very different job than I ever expected to, I decided it would be a fun new adventure. I’m joined in this by my new co-manager Nooshin, and the transition is going quite well. And we even have our photos in the new edition of the East West Magazine, so it must be official!

I feel immensely fortunate to be given this opportunity. I’ve spent a lot of the last few years of my “temporary retirement” doing increasing amounts of volunteer service for Ananda, and loving it. But there’s been a little part of me worrying in the background about the possibility of having to go elsewhere eventually, and work for a cause I believe in less, just to make money. So this job feels as much like a gift to me as a service to God, gurus, and all spiritual seekers of the Bay Area.

In other, less dramatic news, I got a hold of Pa’s ukulele recently, and have been having a surprisingly good time with it. It’s strangely addictive, actually. This is one of those cases where I can get a sense of what Yogananda meant when he said that “thoughts are universally, not individually, rooted.” The current ukulele fad that’s going on these days feels very much like a thing that I hopped onto for a ride. I’m enjoying it, but it doesn’t entirely feel like it came from my own head.

P.S. Okay, technically I have been blogging more than once a year, since I post to the Ananda Family News blog fairly often. But the word “blogging” for me will always default to my own little corner of the internet here on WhistleDance.

Singing in the Choir

About 5 weeks ago I joined the Ananda choir, singing tenor. (Major thanks to Ramesha for helping me figure out how to sing in that range, which will be much better for me in the long run than faking bass.) Tonight I'll be singing in the annual performance of Swami Kriyananda's oratorio: "Christ Lives."

This is a bit of an adventure for me, since a lot of the choir members have sung this many times before, and so we've been pretty light on the rehearsals this year. Which is trickier if you're the new guy. In addition to keeping up with the songs we've been singing for Sunday services, I've been trying to learn the 12 oratorio choir pieces, with just a few rehearsals and a practice CD. Last night at the dress rehearsal was actually the first time I ever sang some of the songs with the choir. But I think I've got it okay. I've learned the music enough that I don't need to carry my binder with me, which was my main goal. It's easier to pay attention to the director and tune in to the rest of the choir if I'm not looking down at music all the time.

At the dress rehearsal we mostly did the full-choir pieces, with just spot checks on the solos and small group pieces. It'll be nice to hear all of those in their entirety tonight, because we've got some fantastic singers, and beautiful songs. So I'm really looking forward to tonight, getting to both sing and listen to a lot of wonderfulness.

If you want to attend the concert, it's free (donations accepted) and at 7:30 tonight. Here's the info. It'll be great!

SYTYCD Solos

One thing I was appreciating during this latest season of So You Think You Can Dance was the solos. It seemed to me that more people were actually putting some thought into choreographing their solos to the music, and we had less of the "just turn on some song and do your stuff" kind of thing. I find that hugely important, since to me dance is inextricable from music. If you really want to have the biggest impact, you've got to get the most out of each part of the equation.

Brandon, however, deserves special props for taking this to still another level during the penultimate week of the show. He went beyond simply choreographing with the music, and also optimized both his choice and editing of the music. I didn't know the piece he used, but it was orchestral, choral, and hugely dramatic. Not only that, but he used the ending of it, with a powerful, bravissimo!-sort of ending that practically commands you to stand up and applaud your hands off. Combine that all with the fact that Brandon is a fantastic dancer, and it's no surprise that he got a standing ovation from the judges.

In fact, I think it's incredible that I've seen 4 seasons of this show now and this is the first solo like this that I remember. You'd think it would be a no-brainer, but so many dancers just let their music get cut off wherever the 30-second break comes. So even if it was a beautiful solo, you're left with a sense of frustration at the interruption, rather than a sense of satisfaction from the completion of an excellent performance.

As for the actual results, I thought Brandon had it in the bag after that solo. But Jeanine was tied with him in my own preferences, so I was quite please with her winning in the end. (And she had a wonderful tango-esque solo the last week.) I was surprised at Evan making it into the top 4. As much as I love him, Ade was honestly the better dancer. But oh well, it was still good to see the "nice guy" get that far.

And as for the choreographies, I thought the final competition show was kind of weak for a finale, aside from the Paso Doble, which was probably the best one of those they've had on the show yet. Throughout the season, though, there were some really good routines, so the final results show with the judges' favorites was excellent. I thought the hip hop routine that started the whole season was excellent, and I was also very impressed with the "Addiction" contemporary piece, and Brandon and Jeanette's tango. Lots of good stuff.

And Hills for Climbing

Nightingale has a beautiful song on their third album called "Hills," which I only started really hearing properly a couple weeks ago.



It's actually from a poem by Arthur Guiterman, and apparently they turned around the last two lines, but that's the part I now like most about it:

God, give me strength to climb,
And hills for climbing.

We can pray for strength, but what is strength without a use for it? Both sides of the equation have to go together.

Those lines for me resonate back two years ago, when I saw the movie "Evan Almighty." I think it was a decently entertaining movie, but one part burned into my brain and crowded the rest of it out. Morgan Freeman, as God, is comforting Evan's wife, and says:

Sounds like an opportunity. Let me ask you something. If someone prays for patience, do you think God gives them patience? Or does he give them the opportunity to be patient? If they pray for courage, does God give them courage, or does he give them opportunities to be courageous? If someone prayed for their family to be closer, you think God zaps them with warm, fuzzy feelings? Or does he give them opportunities to love each other?
(video clip)

It's a good reminder. If we're going through difficult times, we're not just suffering -- we're learning to be patient, or brave, or loving, or whatever our own personal lessons need to be. It's an opportunity to consciously acknowledge and accept those lessons. Sometimes it may be hard even just to tell what's going on, but we can still keep climbing our hills, and trust in the strength that goes with it.

So let me hold my way,
By nothing halted,
Until, at close of day,
I stand exalted.

Camp New Harmony

We got back from Camp Harmony yesterday afternoon, and camp was, in a word, fantastic. At the peak day we had twice as many people attending as last year, so there were lots of new friends to make as well as old ones to see again. And since everything is volunteer-run there, having that many more people just meant that much more great stuff to do. Camp has been needing to have a knock-it-out-of-the-park year for a while, I think, and this was it.

The new location (Camp Newman, in Santa Rosa) is quite lovely. It's still nice and woodsy, which I like, and it's decorated all over. There are murals on all the buildings, tile mosaics lining the pathways, etc. It's quite hilly, though, which is rough on people with bad knees, and dangerous when frosted over and slippery, so you have to be careful. There were a lot of good workshop and jamming spaces. I was worried about having to rent a portable dance floor, but that ended up working out quite well. There were a wide range of accommodations. At the top end they have a few buildings of what are basically two-bedroom, furnished apartments, complete with a small kitchen, living room, couches, and everything. At the other end they have the "youth dorm" that we stayed in: rickety metal bunks, saggy crinkly mattresses, cold tile floors, and a miniature space heater working day and night to try to keep the place warm. The cabins in between were probably the best places to stay, in terms of being more comfortable but still with lots of your friends.

I taught three dance classes. The first two were beginning East Coast Swing and beginning Lindy Hop, getting people ready for the swing dance evening. I was super lucky to have Sylvia Herold and a bunch of other great musicians playing music for the classes. It's hard to get used to interrupting fantastic live music just so you can teach another basic swing move, but it was really a privilege to have them there. And the lessons went really well, I think. I also taught a Cross-Step Waltz class, again with live music. Lacey and Rowyn very graciously helped out by being my lovely assistants.

Sylvia was also teaching a swing guitar class all week, so I went to all of those. Swing guitar has always seemed frightfully complicated compared to the folky stuff I'm used to, but she did a really good job of breaking it down and making it accessible. I'm going to have to see if I can keep that up and get better at it.

It was a very swingy camp for me all around, actually. The swing night was my favorite evening dance. There were a number of new campers this year who were good swing dancers that I got to dance with. And a lot of the younger kids are also starting to pick things up. I danced with several of the girls who don't have much in the way of basic steps or technique but who could still more or less follow all sorts of stuff, which is wonderful. In fact, I'm just getting more and more pleased with that next-younger generation overall, because more of them are getting to the point where they're really participating in the music and dance activities at camp. I was thrilled one evening when I saw Adam and Mary dancing an excellent cross-step waltz that they had just learned in my class that afternoon. They told me later that they were on a mission to become "superdancers" like me and Lacey. Talk about melting a Graham's heart.... I caught them practicing a few other times throughout camp and piled more moves on for them to learn.

I played tunes for the Irish dancing again, as usual, and also got in a couple nice late-night sessions. The new location had drawn in some more of the Lark in the Morning contingent, so there were some Irishing folks I haven't gotten to play with before. I also played some Quebecois tunes, though I only know a handful and they're hard to pick up on the fly. I mostly did fiddle the whole time. Never even took my mandolin out of its case, since I didn't figure my wimpy calluses could handle that after the guitar classes every day.

New Year's Eve was good, though strangely it felt smaller than usual. Probably because the dining hall there was bigger and because people were off in other places around camp as well, and not all congregating at the same place. The real heart of camp for me, though, wasn't so much the New Year celebration as Bob Reid's annual kids concert. He had an even bigger crowd with an even wider age range than usual this year, and it's amazing what an intense emotional experience gets created between everyone. We laugh like crazy, and some of us bigger kids go down the crying end of things, too. When it was all over we had a giant hug pile on Bob, and then just stayed there for a while, milling around the room, hugging people and playing with some of the littler kids. That's the time you really remember that everyone there is really just one huge family, and it's beautiful.

Other fun stuff:

• Shapenote singing. (Missed one session but scheduled a second to make up for it.)
• Calling my first contra dance. (On minimal preparation, but it went well enough.)
• Mask-making for New Year's Eve outfits. (And "leading" the workshop for Quena who was on a quest to retrieve her missing dance shoes from Davis.)
• Katie's surprise birthday party. (With 12 silly people crammed into a small, dark, stifling room for 20 minutes because she was late.)

Anyway, all around it was a very successful camp. I was glad to sleep in my own comfy bed last night, though. Now it's sort of sad, post-Harmony time, but there are also a lot of music and dance things that I'm inspired and excited about, so that's good. Happy New Year!

That Ringing in My Ears

A little while ago I realized that my cellphone ring was taking over my brain. It may be that I'm just overly sensitive to music, but I've come to the conclusion that the whole melodies-as-ringtones thing wasn't the greatest idea in the world. At least not for me and my phone.

First, I found myself occasionally noticing musical notes that matched the beginning of one of the melodies my phone uses. I don't have perfect pitch, but I apparently have enough pitch memory to set off associations sometimes. This resulted in periodic, split-second jolts of "oh-my-phone-is-ringing-oh-no-it's-not!" at the beginning of random songs, other people's cell phone rings, etc.

After that, I started being more aware of the part of my brain that's always scanning for my specific ring tone. If I left the TV on and go into another room, something was still picking up faint individual notes from the commercials and promoting them to brief moments of attention, in case they turned out to be from my phone. (Interestingly, though, regular music I was deliberately playing didn't have the same effect, perhaps because I was already consciously following a known melody.) Sometimes I would carry my phone with me from room to room, even though I knew I could hear it fine if it actually rang in another room, just to shut up that part of my mind that's out scouting for it.

Anyway, this all finally got annoying enough that I went and changed everything on my phone to real, honest-to-goodness ringing sounds, like a proper phone. And I must say it's been kind of a relief. My phone doesn't ring often enough to re-train me very quickly, but it doesn't have to. I know it won't be playing a melody at me when it does ring, so the musical part of my brain can relax and go back to it's normal job. Ahhhhh....

FNW DJ

Rowyn and I are DJing Friday Night Waltz in Palo Alto tomorrow night. We'll have some current favorites, some old favorites, and some new or newish songs to keep things interesting. So if you like the kind of music we like, come and dance to some of it!

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.