Begemot, from "Master and Margarita."

Inspired by some of the flap over the Koney 2012 video, and by having written several so-called factual pieces recently.

“It must be true because it’s so artful.”

“Because it all makes sense.”

Because it made me cry/laugh/angry…”

“I didn’t think it was true because it seems far fetched, but then I found out it really happened…”

“It’s one interpretation of what happened.”

“There is no such thing as a single truth, just different perspectives.”

“Do you want conclusions or questions?”

History is written by the victors.

People who’ve been bitten by the internet a la “Imagine my horror when my boss found out about my porn star past/my Nazi ravings cost me political office” etc. had maybe an overwhelming need to be themselves at the cost of discretion. Or maybe they were uninformed, or didn’t think it through.

I’ve drawn lines in the sand. I got squicked out when I searched for a sweater dress on Google and then saw ads for sweater dresses every time I performed a web search. I was totally bothered when I went on a news aggregating site after logging out from Facebook and was confronted with the faces of my FB friends who “liked” or commented on an article. Hey, Facebook, I’m not on you. Stop following me! I’ll tell my friends if I liked an article. I’ll do my own sweater dress searching, thanks anyway Google! (I found a really nice pattern on ravelry and made one. You can see it on my ravelry account which, I don’t care, I used my real name.)

I know, I know, the web business model of Google/FB/everyone else. You want insta-searches and 500 FB friends? Those servers farms aren’t free.

But who I am is none of their business. Unlike the Spotified, Foursquared, app-enabled friends of mine, I don’t want to be tracked unless I want to be tracked. So I installed ghostery, which I’ve written about before. And I blocked all the tags, bugs, pixels and beacons that pop up on every site I visit. There are a lot of them.

In the run-up to Facebook’s IPO there was some discussion about how FB could possibly be worth the billions of dollars they’re getting. The consensus is, if the investors want to turn a profit, FB will have to find out more about us and create significant ways to make money off our personal information. Figure out how to wrench our brains and pockets open more easily.

Today I was idly reading a story on salon about…oh well it was just a dumb story; read it yourself.  I thought I’d drop a snarky comment in. But no, here is the new thing on salon. You can’t post a comment if you’ve blocked linking to Facebook.

“That’s annoying,” I thought.

Then I thought, “Cripes whatever happened to free speech?”

“Nah,” I thought, “That’s overstating it a bit. Salon and FB aren’t the government. They’re private entities. They can limit, link, repost, broadcast, censor your speech however they want. There’s no constitutional right to make an anonymous snarky internet comment unlinked to FB.”

“Except,” I thought, “What if FB decides to change terms of service? And if a government or a scary corporation gained access to all the information they have on me? Oh, that kind of thing wouldn’t happen, would it? “

Saint Phalle/Tinguely fountain under construction

I am battling a deadline to get Fidgety Fairy Tales #4 written. We’re doing a presentation of it at Rough Cuts on the 23rd/24th of January and I need to get the score completed by Friday the 13th. It’s Tuesday, so I have a fighting chance, assuming I don’t run out of ideas.

I spent a lot of time fooling around with vocal harmonies on one particular song tonight. The song is a little wordy, a quasi-list song. List songs are fun to write and fun to listen to when they’re done well but they have some inherent challenges. They’re fun to write because one can be released from the tyranny of making sense, and just have fun with rhymes and odd juxtapositions. But it’s easy for the writer to become carried away with her own cleverness and create something difficult to memorize and perform. I’m hoping this song will be successful because I’ve devoted many hours to it.

My second challenge is to write a harmony for four voices for this song. It’s a finale, and it needs all voices in it. But of course, with all the words it’s very tough to make a harmony work. Some of the trickiest things are the smallest: for example conjunctions, which usually fall on the pickups or weak beats. It’s pretty easy to find a place for four voices on the strong beats. It’s the getting-between-them that presents difficulty. Similarly, any transition presents problems: passing tones and harmonies; everything needs to be accounted for and executed gracefully with good voice-leading in each individual part. It’s like working a four dimensional puzzle.

Often my vocal harmonies start out complex and simplify as I work on the arrangement. This might not be the best strategy but it works for me. After I’ve spent hours banging my head against the wall I finally find a solution, and I wonder why I didn’t think of it in the first place. But really, I know why. I have objectives in mind: for example I may want to create a psychological or dramatic effect that requires a certain vocal texture. If I’m working in a well-defined genre like gospel or doo-wop  it’s no problem; I just use the traditional style and things work out nicely. But if I’m plowing new ground then I have to experiment with every possibility until I’m satisfied.

The mainstream contemporary “legit” approach to writing choral music is to use a lot of suspensions, which I don’t do much, as a matter of personal taste. In tonal music, I hear a suspension as leading, and I’d rather deal with gnarly harmonic matters straight on, landing solidly on sevenths and ninths and tri-tones and seconds. Nothing against choral music, but I suspect that’s why I’ll always be a theatre composer who plays with pop and jazz, rather than a choral composer.  It’s kind of a shame, since I love voices so much…

A final note, for anyone who’s read this far. Check out this wonderful article about child singers. I’ll have more to say about it later.

I fixed all the links to recorded music on this website, so you should be able to hear them when you click ‘em.

I taught an unusually strong group of second- and third-grade singers at Children’s Theatre Company this fall. It’s always a challenge to find material written by others that will be appropriate for this age group. Which challenges I could discuss at length, but let’s leave it at vocal range, wordiness and realism.

I’ve written one draft of Josh and Imp. Have I written about this before? Well anyway, about a year ago I bought the rights to this charming comic by Diana Nock and Jon Bernhardt, and the plan is to make it into a musical theatre piece.

I’m planning to make a chestnut flour cake for Thanksgiving.

Many more things, but that’s it for now.

I don’t like being tracked by Google or Facebook, for whatever reason. It gives me the creeps to see which of my friends read an article on Salon, or to be presented with ads for the thing I searched for six months ago. For that reason I installed ghostery, a nifty free browser plug in that tells you what’s tracking you, and allows you to block tracking on a site-by-site or universal basis.

Mark Rothko, No. 4

Now, as for passwords. Like many of us, I used to use the same password for every website I frequented. Then one site (I think it was gawker)  got hacked and, holy buckets, my security just went down the tubes. So I got a free password manager called LastPass.  This program generates and saves unique secure passwords making it very easy to log in to all your sites. It synchs up all the devices you use, and can be accessed remotely. It has a lot of flexibility in its preferences, so you can tailor security to your personal needs.

I then went around to all my password-protected sites and changed out passwords, which took a little while but once it was done, it was done.  My one complaint with LastPass is that it took a month or so to achieve good compatibility with the latest version of Safari.  I suspect that problem might’ve be on Apple’s side, and am anticipating the day when I abandon all Mac programs because they are too complicated, glitchy and incompatible with the real world. What’s next? Open source? Back to Windows?

Minnesota Opera has raised a lot of money and a lot of expectations with its new works initiative. I didn’t see Ricky Ian Gordon’s Grapes of Wrath so I can’t say much, except that judging from recordings it’s more musical-theatre than opera. (Which raises the question, what’s an opera? But we’ll leave that aside.) There was a plan to present another Gordon work only three years later, an adaptation of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which disappeared from the season without a trace. The other “new” works MNOp has programmed in this initiative have been the American premiere of Jonathan Dove’s Pinocchio and a revival of Dominick Argento’s Casanova’s Homecoming.

So. One very messy “real opera,” one sort-of opera, one developed by MNOp in 1985, and one not developed by the company at all.  I wonder what is going on with their process. Actually, I can guess. It’s big and unwieldy, it’s expensive, it wants to make its mark for the company. SOP in the large, nonprofit theatre scene.

It’s always difficult to do opera. And creating new work…well, most things are going to fall short. I try to walk into a theatre with a clear mind and no expectations. But there are moments–like when Silent Night’s creaky turntable intruded, to the accompaniment of orchestral fill, or when the Guthrie Theatre decorated a set with an unplayed grand piano–that I get a little pissed. If you have that much money, could you please get it right? Or spend less money?

To start: Max Havelaar is the world’s most famous Dutch novel, although certainly not the best.  For that, try reading Cees Noteboom or Hugo Claus. Multatuli (”He who suffers much” in rough Latin) was the pen name of Eduard Douwes Dekker, a minor civil servant in the Dutch colonial empire in Java. He wrote the book in an attempt to expose the iniquities of the colonial system. In Amsterdam the author is um venerated by Multatuli bars, hotels, statues, etc, the way Dickens is in London and Bob Dylan in Duluth.

The structure of the novel is a book-within-a-book, in fact a book being written as we read it. Its eponymous hero is a minor civil servant who gets into scrapes and eventually resigns his post because he must tell the truth about the corruption he sees around him.  Down on his luck, shambling about the streets of Amsterdam in a frayed overcoat, he meets a coffee trader and presses a smudged manuscript upon him. The coffee trader commissions a young man with whom he wants to curry favor to produce a book from the manuscript, and as the story goes on he reads the book-in-progress and intrudes into the narrative with comments that reveal the outlook of a complacent, self-serving burgher. When we finally come to the meat of it, Havelaar’s revelations are vague and confusing, involving fudged records, bureaucratic squabbles, kickbacks and matters of honor. It’s surprising to me that the book caused a scandal, for in comparison to the known brutalities of the empire the hero’s story is thin gruel. Nevertheless, it did.

The writing is uneven but when satire kicks in the novel is enjoyable, and I have checked off my list another classic. Given how few Dutch books make it into English, Max Havelaar is worth reading for the cultural/historical journey alone.

The Maias, by Jose Maria Eca de Queiros, is a recent translation by Margaret Juli Costa. This is the story of Carlos de Maia, an immensely rich young man, the cream of Lisbon society who is, almost against his will, a dilettante and playboy. He falls into an intense and doomed relationship with a woman who…well, I don’t want to spoil the surprise. But really, the surprise is telegraphed early on, and would be no surprise to any discerning reader. Anyway, that’s not the point. The melodramatic aspects of the story are secondary to its portrait of a self-devouring nation, its glory past. De Queiros’s expansive and steady story chronicles cuckolding, antique-buying, drinking sprees, adventurers, dinner parties, card games and failed schemes for literary glory. The prose is cool, so its effect is like reading Flaubert, with greater sympathy and humor. Maybe Lampedusa would be a more apt comparison. In any case, this book is very good, although it didn’t overwhelm me the way The Illustrious House of Ramires did.

Of the two books, I’m sorrier to have had to leave The Maias in that hotel room. But I had to carry out Corsican sausage and honey and salt with myrtle berries, and something had to go.

Cathedral in Ajaccio, photo by Pierre Bona

Here’s a summary of past and current activity:

I’m working on a musical theatre adaptation of the impossibly wonderful comic “Josh and Imp” by Jon Bernhardt and Diana Nock.

The Picnic Operetta has one more performance, October 1st, on Nicollet Island. It’s been a smash hit, and I’m happy to have been the MD.

Fidgety Fairy Tales is in rehearsal and performance. Most of the performances will be at non-public locations this fall, but there will be a big Fidgety Festival November 6th at the Children’s Museum, featuring all three plays and a sneak peek at the fourth (to be written…ay!)

I’m teaching a couple classes at Children’s Theatre this fall, and more in winter, spring and summer. So far, just doing other people’s music, but I am planning for several lovely original bits this summer. You can now look at the class schedule and see who the teacher will be.

I spent a month overseas, mostly hanging out. A dear friend in Amsterdam passed away while I was there, so it was not an entirely joyous occasion, but it was good to get away.

My house is a mess. There are piles of books and papers all over the place.

This Friday, I have a one-night revival of Margo McCurry’s Diggity Dog Days, a benefit for Dreamland Arts.

I understand the links to my music samples are broken on this site. I’ll be fixing that soon.

Oh, and I read a couple books on my To-Be-Read list, Max Havelaar and The Maias. They were good, and I’ll have more to say about them later. I’ve read a lot of other things of course, but I can’t say this year has been the greatest one for books. I haven’t read anything that has slayed me recently. I’m thinking about cracking open Don Quixote.

That’s all for now.

Poet Len Cervantes

Making art is a difficult practice, but one can make things of beauty with scanty resources and little knowledge. It is one of the few experiences we can have in which there are no right answers and there is always room for improvement.

Good artists learn humility, not to take criticism personally and that failure is simply fuel for further experimentation and practice.

Art teaches us about people unlike ourselves: other times, cultures, ideologies. We learn to see and hear and think differently and we gain valuable perspective on our own culture and beliefs.

Art is pleasurably engrossing.

Art mystifies and attracts us because it deals in ideas and thoughts of the highest and most abstract order. Thus, it is one of the most valuable and lasting of human endeavors; we still feast upon art made centuries ago.

The ability to make and appreciate art adds depth to social, political, family and spiritual life.

Serious artists ask difficult questions and don’t accept easy answers. They take nothing for granted and they accept that nobody has the final word. They seek to communicate, but understand that all communication is imperfect and can be misunderstood. They maintain critical standards without being dogmatic or doctrinaire. They are open to new ideas. They are not afraid to take risks, nor of being unpopular. They are truthful.

A good artist is a good citizen.

photo from the Torontist website