In high school I was pretty close to the last desk of the viola section (which takes some doing) of the Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra. It was a fine way to keep me out of the pool hall, I suppose, but what’s particularly fun and absurd about it in retrospect is that our conductor was […]

Let’s take our rays of hope where we can get ’em, people. Today, that means BYU. From this Washington Post article: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints considers same-sex marriage to be a “serious transgression” — and, until this spring, treated Mormons involved in these unions as apostates, subject to church disciplinary hearings […]

It must be sometime in the last year I gave in to facebook’s bid for just an extra little bit of narcissism and started reading the “On This Day” feature, the one that tells you what you thought your friends would find clever on this day stretching back only to that dark era before you […]

Saving the best for first, here’s splendid dead French tenor Georges Thill singing “O, Holy Night” except obviously in French. [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS8G_LyYlso[/youtube] This is also nice, though. It isn’t explicitly Christmassoise but it’s become a winter holiday opera. The evening prayer from Hansel und Gretel, starring Frederica von Stade, Kathleen Battle, and Kathleen Battle’s sleeves. [youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6Fr3I4fUAo&list=PL48542B67F0FC7782[/youtube] […]

Is there an album or other musical something that, many years ago, was so basic to your aesthetic sensibility that you assumed you would always love it, but then it turned out you wouldn’t/didn’t/don’t? Yesterday, for no reason I could easily trace (though there’s always a seed you can dig up if you do something […]

Opera post: yay? So after I went on about Gruberova having an ugly voice and at least one person found this not to be so, I thought I’d throw something on about ugly voices and beautiful voices. It is, of course, purely subjective, but I think there tends to be a loose consensus about it. […]

[a confessional posting at this stage in the life cycle of the blog felt weird so I keeled it. instead, something I started a thousand million years ago] Ok more opera. You asked for it. You will be sorry! Sometimes what is interesting about a grotesque trend is trying to figure out why it happened […]

Throughout grad school I sang in a choir that performed Siberian folk songs that were basically impossible to describe without using the word “shouty.” We worked hard on the songs, and there was a kind of precision that was important to them, but at the end of phrases, the idiomatic delivery was for everyone to […]

Running: I feel like starting out with some grumpy denials. Foremost, I am not running because I like it, nor do I have any plans to like it, which is childish and self-defeating, but there you are. I will not spend a small fortune on shoes. Also no matter what else happens, even if it […]