Good stuff

It's great when something you look forward to for a long time actually meets or exceeds expectations. So it was with Tim Burton's version of Sweeney Todd, which I--and countless other fans of the musical--have been anticipating for years.

The film stays essentially faithful to the stage show but it is a leaner, darker, more focused piece of art than Sondheim's masterpiece and it is surely heretical to say it, but I might even prefer this version. A lot of people are complaining about what is missing--some of the songs, the choruses, some of the "charm," but I think a lot of what was cut was that which was necessary to telling the story on stage--songs that covered scene changes, or songs that established character and mood...all of which are redundant when you have rich, naturalistic settings and the ability to read emotion through close-ups.

Almost none of the leads are trained vocalists but while we might lose much of the power of great singers, we gain nuance and the ability of fine actors to shade and shape the lines with an intimacy that is lost in a big theatre. None of the actors are bad singers and all handle Sondheim's music credibly. I'm pretty picky but I was never distracted (well, almost never) by poor intonation or awkward phrasing. The one disappointing song for me was "Epiphany," because I thought it seemed a little less volcanic than it should have been. You often hear critics talk about Sondheim's tricky melodies but that's not really true. Sondheim's vocal lines are very melodic and logical but his rhythms can be tough to master, and hearing the tune against the accompaniment (which is often subtly laced with dissonance) takes some time to understand. But listen to the bass line--it is always strong and logical.

Visually, the film is beautiful, rich, dark, and totally appropriate. Some of the settings are so sensory and tactile I could almost smell the musty air.

I am seeing a touring production of the Sweeney revival this April. I am anxious to compare it, not just to the other productions of the show I've seen, but to the new film version.

Sweeney Fever!

We're excited! The trailer for the Tim Burton film version of Sondheim's SWEENEY TODD has just been released and it looks awesome. But what's even more exciting is that, this being America, and the movie being directed by a big-time Hollywood name and starring packaging-friendly Johnny Depp, the tie-in parade is no-brainer. Of course, I can't wait to play the Sweeney Todd game for the XBox 360. Ooooh! Maybe it'll come to the Wii! Just imagine using the Wii-mote to swing Sweeney's razor! Of course, there will be in inevitable McDonald's Happy Meal product. Can you say "Spicy Cajun Meat Pie?" I can't wait to see which characters they include with the meal...I sure hope cute, rolly-polly Beadle Banford is one of them!

Ikea: Shopping at the Apocalypse

It is the law that every Oregonian must, at some point, pay a visit to the new Portland Ikea store, so today we did our duty. It was one of the most monumentally unpleasant shopping experiences I've ever had. It was, in fact the Singularity of Unpleasant Shopping Experiences, the pinnacle and/or the nadir, the most painful hours I've ever spend inside a retail establishment, bar none.

First, the crowds. Oh. My. God. The above photo was taken in the parking lot. The first indication that we had penetrated the veil between the Earthly realm and Hell was the presence of orange-vested parking attendants guiding the desultory bumper-to-bumper traffic through the acres of parking lot like it was Jack Sparrow personal appearance day at Disneyland. Any store that requires parking attendants at 10:15 on a Sunday morning: not worth it.

As part of the four-abreast crowd snaking its way through the vestibule and into the store like cholesterol-laden blood through an artery after a Denny's Grand Slam, you're confronted with an immediate choice: go to the child abandonment area, where parents blithely leave their offspring to be trained as future Swedish furniture assemblers, while being entertained by Ikea blood sports (photo, right); take the Escalator to Showroom Hell; or proceed immediately to the warehouse, where, like the threatening boulders on the Mine Train Ride, desk sets weighing hundreds of pounds balance precariously on stacks of boxes, threatening to tumble the next time little Timmy rams into them with his greased-lightening Ikea cart, which his parents told him to go amuse himself with while they tried to decide between the blanched almond and off white futon cover for the spare bedroom.

We chose: Escalator to Hell.

"Showroom" is really a misnomer. First of all, if there was anything to show, it couldn't be seen due to the tens of thousands of slow-moving, hollow-eyed gawkers who either stood in the middle of the too-narrow aisle and gaped with the slack-jawed amazement of someone who had never seen actual furniture, or swarmed over the room displays like particularly voracious piranha. We moved through the maze of rooms with a slowness that made the parking lot seem like a NASCAR qualifying event. There may have been some nice things there. I'll never know.

Tumbling out of the showroom floor into the relatively unpopulated warehouse was liberating until you realized that the cloud-piercing stacks of boxes were meaningless containers unless you knew the item number you wanted, which you could only get by passing through the showroom, which was of course so crowded that actually seeing any particular item was impossible. But by God, we weren't going to leave empty handed, so we went to the aisle that the map suggested might contain office furniture, picked a box low to the floor, hoisted it into the cart, and got the hell out of there.

I'm pretty happy with my new computer desk.

Sibelius 5 vs. Finale 08, part 2

A few posts ago, I began to compare the two most recent iterations of the popular music notation packages, Sibelius and Finale. I got sidetracked by nostalgia and memories of the good old days of handwritten music and the copyist's art. As much as I enjoyed the act of hand copying music, it was also slow, frequently frustrating and inhibiting, and I would not want to return to those pre-digital days.

I don't wish to bore anyone with the easily researched history of notation software. Suffice it to say that at one time, Finale was the only game in town, the choice of composers and publishers everywhere, no matter how arcane or counterintuitive some of the aspects of it were. With a manual the size of a phone book (and equally engaging) and a learning curve as tall as K-2, to master Finale was a technological badge of honor. Then came Sibelius from the UK, with the premise that notation software should be intuitive, elegant, and simple. The war was on.

The end user has been both the winner and victim in this ongoing skirmish. Of course, the head-to-head competition has forced both companies to add features, tweak the interface, and refine their products. As a result, both Sibelius 5 and Finale 08 contain virtually the identical feature set, use the same sounds (Garritan Personal Orchestra) for playback, and while the chassis might be different, under the hood the engines both deliver roughly the same amount of power. Both applications do an admirable job of creating professional-looking notation, and both apps have nearly the identical ability to record and playback notated music. Both Sibelius and Finale offer supplemental programs aimed at educators and students.

So, what's the downside for consumers?

In an attempt to keep up in the notation arms race, both companies feel it necessary to release annual (in the case of Finale) or bi-annual (Sibelius) versions of their product. At an educator discount price of $100 or so, these upgrades are far too expensive and offer far too few new features to justify such a price. For example, the addition of a scroll view in Sibelius (which Finale always had) or dynamic parts (which came to Sibelius first) are really just interface tweaks. In the world of computer games, for example, these features would be added in the form of a free patch, or, if there was really a lot of new content, through an add-on pack (which often doubles the size and features of a game). Why not sell the core application and then offer yearly updates at $20, or allow the user to select which add-ons he or she needs? How many users really need the suite of classroom applications?

This neck-and-neck battle hurts the consumer in a couple of other ways. There is little cross-software compatibility. Finale has always had a playground bully-like attitude towards Sibelius and won't read Sibelius files; Sibelius will read (inconsistently, especially when there are version incompatibilities) Finale files. Finally, this feature-for-feature-matching contest prevents either company from truly innovating. Garritan sounds, while certainly better than general MIDI synth patches, are light-years away from the samples used by professional composers and producers.

In the end, both Sibelius 5 and Finale 08 are good products--not perfect ones--and choice will come down to aesthetic preference, brand loyalty, and perhaps the one or two features that make the software unique.

welcome, friend

I guess you could say I'm an "animal guy," and always have been. When I was a kid I had reptiles as pets and one of the coolest places in Southern California was the Hermosa Beach Reptile Farm. In those days, trade in exotic animals was unfortunately not well regulated and so in addition to a huge variety of snakes and lizards, you could run into a sloth or a slow loris for sale. Impractical and probably not at all pet material but interesting anyway. A little later--in college--I acquired a blue-front Amazon parrot and now, 30 years later, and the house is filled with dogs, cats, lizards, rats, and parrots large and small.

A couple of days ago this little guy--a black-billed magpie--landed outside our bedroom window and looked inside with a great deal of interest and curiosity. So, naturally, I went outside and offered him a tasty treat--a few superworms that I keep as bearded dragon food. This magpie--whom my wife named Oreo--has become friendlier and friendlier over the past few days, now following me around the yard and alighting on my hand and shoulder to eat. I can't help but wonder if he was partly hand-raised by people, he's so naturally tame and fearless. He's amazingly smart, too, taking extra worms and burying them in the yard for later consumption. He even uses twigs to tamp down the pile of camouflage.

We love our pets, but in all cases, we chose them. This magpie chose us--we were easy marks for food, no doubt--and that makes him sort of special. So, welcome, Oreo and hope you stick around for a while.

I don't know why it took me so long to think of this. Sometime during the last few days of school, it occurred to me that we had some wasted space in the music room and there was a way to move the drums forward and create a space for a permanent Spectrum keyboard setup. Voila! Thanks to John Bryan for doing this work for me. The frame will be painted but left open to be used for storage of guitar cases and miscreant percussionists (joke). There will also be a safety rail on the left side to prevent overenthusiastic students or uncoordinated music teachers from taking an accidental fall off the edge.

Facebook surprise

So, this week I finally checked off something that's been hovering around my to-do list for quite some time: I set up a Facebook page. Now, the reaction to this has been great (I thought I'd probably end up with 2 friends, if that) and amusing..."I was so surprised to see you on Facebook!" Why? Am I too old to totter to the keyboard, peer through my aged eyes, and comprehend how the whole thing works? Hey, I think I earned my geek cred a long time ago. Anyway, the main reasons I set it up were to communicate with my students (past and present) because I fear no one bothers to read the web pages and blog I spend so much time maintaining, whereas everyone is glued to Facebook 24/7; and to connect with all those students from past years, whom I still recall with fondness. Think, Chamber Singers reuniuon concert 2010! Well, I'm spending way to much time right now with it, but I do enjoy connecting with everyone so if you're reading this, you're welcome to join my friends!

Steel Cage Deathmatch: Sibelius 5 vs. Finale 2008

As a student composer in the late 1960s and early 70s, one of the greatest pleasures was hand-copying music. No, really. In those pre-digital, pre-photocopier days (!) there were basically two ways of distributing music: either typeset by a publisher, or hand copied on vellum (onionskin, a semi-transparent parchment-like paper that once was made out of soaked calfskin; the modern version is a cotton fiber product) and then reproduced. Everything about the process had an old-world craftsman like feel about it, from selecting the paper to choosing the type of fountain pen and nib. There were two basic styles of music calligraphy: either one could use a calligraphy pen freehand, which produced thick/thin lines and looked a little like the modern equivalent of 16th century manuscripts; or you could use music templates and a hollow-tip pen and carefully trace in every symbol using the template, which gave a uniform, printed appearance.

Since one was using indelible india ink on vellum, mistakes couldn't be "erased." You had to either use a razor blade to scrape away the mistake (and risk tearing the paper) or cut out the mistake and patch in a new piece of paper. And if you messed up something fundamental like spacing or transposition, you had to start the page or project over.

It sounds incredibly time-consuming, and it was. But the mental and physical process of copying a long manuscript was very relaxing (as long as you weren't under pressure to get something ready for an immediate performance) and meditative. The main supplier of manuscript paper, vellum, pens, and templates was--and still is--Judy Green Music in West Hollywood. Looking at the Judy Green catalogue, a thick paperback illustrated with manuscript papers, or going to the actual store, was an exercise in imagination and anticipation. All that blank paper, so many possibilities. The act of buying a thick sheaf of orchestra manuscript paper suggested a symphony was in the offing.

In between the complex and full featured notation applications that we use today, and the era of hand-copied music, was the Music Writer, a typewriter for music notation invented by the composer Cecil Effinger in the 1950s. Incredibly expensive ($300 in 1955) and unwieldy to use for all but the simplest projects, the Music Writer did offer uniform appearance without using templates, and in later versions, the ability to correct mistakes. The Music Writer sold well into the early 1980s, when it was made obsolete by digital software.

Next time: the two latest notation packages, head to head.

Songs from "My Butterfly"

This summer I've been spending a lot of time working on three one-act musicals (and starting a fourth) that are going to be produced at CAST next summer. I've been working on these shows off and on for a few years, but with a production actually in the works, I need to get all the music transcribed. First up is "My Butterfly" which is a rather absurd little show about a number of strange people who find themselves lost in the rainforest. One of the characters is The Balladeer, an actor who thought he was going to be in Stephen Sondheim's ASSASSINS...anyway, he sort of adds musical commentary as the action unfolds. Unfortunately, he might not be up to the task. Here are two songs (in PDF form): Your Butterfly and the Balladeer's big number, Freeway Girl.

while the xbox is away...

Since my XBox 360 is on furlough in Texas (having bricked with the infamous red rings of death, along with tens of thousands of others), I've turned to the PSP, which I've had for a while but honestly haven't played much. I'm enjoying Rockstar's PSP title The Warriors (based on the movie), along with MLB07 The Show, Killzone: Liberation, and Daxter. Before my poor Xbox 360 bricked, I was enjoying The Darkness (great voice acting), Overlord, DiRT, and Forza 2.

On the PC, I've been playing Lord of the Rings Online, the Half-Life 2 mod Insurgency and a little bit of CIty of Villains. Of course I didn't go to E3, but I've seen some amazing trailers come out of it. Check out the gameplay videos for Call of Duty 4, Gran Tourismo 5, and Resident Evil 5. Awesome! Add to those games Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto 4, and HL2:Episode 2 and it's going to be a busy Fall! (now kids--many of these are M rated games, so don't take that as an endorsement).

Musically, I've been listening to a lot of progressive rock in preparation for Spectrum's fall concerts. I've really gotten into Dream Theatre. Amazing musicians. One of my projects has been to write a concerto for tuba and strings, and the first movement is sort of based on heavy metal guitar riffs. Sort of.

Check out the audio files page for some MP3s of the tuba concerto!