Bear Down, Chicago Bears!

There is a strong buzz in the city of Chicago before this years Superbowl Sunday. Buildings everywhere are donning blue and orange colors to ramp-up team spirit. The CSO is also displaying their spirit. During the 1986 football season, Sir Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Chorus recorded Jerry Downs' Bear Down, Chicago Bears, a song written in 1941 that has served as the team's "fight song" ever since. This recording was originally on the CSO's two-disc set titled Chicago Symphony Chorus: 40th Anniversary Celebration, and was recently released a free mp3 of this recording. You can download and enjoy the recording from the CSO's website, or obtain it from the local copy here. A bit of trivia: the song was composed by Jerry Downs, which is actually a pseudonym for Song Writer Hall of Fame artist Al Hoffman.

Goodbye, Friend

Sadly, Tower Records has now ceased to exist in everywhere but cyberspace. I have many fond memories of the Tower Records location on Clark Street on the north side of Chicago, and even the Wabash Street location. There was always a wonderful selection of classical music and knowledgeable staff. While superstores such as Border's Books and Music and Barnes and Noble keep a decent stock of classical music, their support staff is often unaware of even the more popular classical and operatic recordings. Recordings in these stores are often incorrectly sorted in the wrong bin, jewel cases are often damaged, and special demands are not easy to request. It appears that classical music sales are entirely going the way of the Internet. At the "we sell everything megastore" near my home, the classical music selection consists of two small racks of compact discs. Perhaps the message is that it's time to find a new genre to love, or enjoy my already-purchased recordings and simply swap digital music collections with other classical fans.

Classical Music on an iPod

I've been avoiding the iPod craze now, successfully, for a few years. The 40GB version was nice, and the 60GB version seems nicer, but I'm looking for a 200GB model. Lately it's been getting tougher to wait since I want my music in one place; all of it. However, I do use iTunes to listen to music. It's a nice front-end to music encoded in formats such as AAC, MP3, etc. I found this article which has some interesting thoughts on using iTunes or an iPod to listen to classical music. It's worth a read, and there's some interesting points you might find useful.

IPv6 Streaming Radio

I've been listening to streaming radio over IPv6 lately. If you have iTunes and your network supports IPv6, just add virgin.6pack.org as a stream location. It's as simple as that!

The Tell-Tale Heart

I'm still working on getting all my analog recordings of performances online. Here's another: The Tell-Tale Heart, based on Edgar Allen Poe's poem of the same name, by Ilya Levinson. Levinson called for a saw blade in this piece. I picked up a large circular saw blade at Ace Hardware. The saw blade worked well mounted on a cymbal stand and was exactly what the composer intended to hear. However, I give one bit of advice: be very, very careful when you reach over to mute the sound. Ouch!

"1900, Backward and Forward"

The University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra, of which I am the timpanist of, just finished their winter quarter. My newest project is to start taking my minidisc's of each performance and put them online for anyone to listen to. You can listen to the latest concert entitled "1900, Backward and Forward." On this concert was...

• Rimsky-Korsakov: "Cortege" from Mlada
  
• Prokofiev: Autumnal Sketch, Op. 8
  
• Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D-Flat Major, Op. 10
  
• Dvorak: Symphony No. 7 in D Minor, Op. 70

Even if you're not a percussionist you still might notice that the last 2 minutes of the Prokofiev Piano Concerto has an amazingly cool (and difficult) glockenspiel passage which encompasses the entire range (and a bit more) of the instrument using scalar passages. Jamie Mezinah, our in-house mallet expert, did a wonderful job of covering the part excerpt.

XM Radio

From the slightly-off-topic department today: XM Radio really bothers me. I live in Chicago, a fairly large city by most estimations, and technologically progressive one might add. Lately I've been seeing alot of XM radio antennae on most of those overly-large SUV's. So I started doing some thinking while sitting in traffic yesterday (see how bad traffic currently is here) and realized that over the course of a year, you would spend approximately $127 USD a year on the hardware (estimated between $50 USD and $200 USD currently) and subscription rates (approximately $8 USD per month). That cost is assuming the subscription rates stay static and hardware upgrades are required every three years. The wonder of this technology is that it is commercial free. No commercials. Nothing. Thankfully!

Now, does anyone remember how long it was before cable television started having commercials? I figure it was about 10 years before the money-makers realized they could make more money by selling advertising slots. If we figure that to be the case here (and it's a big assumption; no one knows if the XM satellites will even be in orbit in 10 years!) it comes down to approximately $1280 USD being spent per subscriber in a ten year period for commercial-free radio.

Now, compare this to buying a computer for $600 USD ("dude, you're getting a Dell!"), buying an Apple iPod for $200 USD, and paying $0.99 USD per downloaded song. That allows you to download more than 444 songs that you will own (i.e. you can put them on CD, keep them for as long as the CD lasts, etc). Maybe that's better for some folks.

Of course it doesn't mean that you can just go and find anything already offered by Apple, there may be songs that you don't end up finding. But then again, how many songs that you're hearing on XM radio are actually what you want to hear? I'm curious -- so if anyone has comments, please post them. And by the way I have a conspiracy-theory that XM radio is backed by groups such as the RIAA to limit the rights of artists and listeners to obtain good music, free. But that's for another topic...

Tone and Concerto for Pizzicato Piano

I have added some recordings of a couple performances last winter. Listen to Tone for solo vibraphone (performed by Yours Truly) by Ja Young Choi. Then check out Tan Dun's Concerto for Pizzicato Piano and Ten Instruments. Lisa Kaplan of Eighth Blackbird offered an excellent interpretation with members of the University of Chicago New Music Ensemble. I was lucky enough to be the percussionist in this performance. The Tan Dun is one of the more interesting new music pieces I've done to date, and it really required a good effort on the part of the ensemble and soloist to effectively perform.

The Anvils of Das Rheingold

Recently I had the opportunity to play Richard Wagner'sDas Rheingold. Das Rheingoldis intended to be a prologue to Wagner's epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, also known as the the "Ring" cycle. Most listeners, and percussionists, find the Descent into Nibelheim before Scene III of this opera to be very unique in it's instrumentation. Wagner calls for a total of eighteen (yes, 18!) tuned anvils to be played simultaneously by various members of the orchestra. This is a representation of the mining of gold in Alberich's dark cavernous domain, forging the Ring. Read more about the Ring Cycle -- it's a very interesting story. Our concert arrangement reduced the number of anvils down to a mere three. To make this come across well in concert, we used four brake drums (as I managed to drop out the timpani low-F roll early and join in to add volume during the crescendo). Another local percussionist, Tina Laughlin-Keitel, brought a pair of railroad spikes to use as beaters on her brake drum. I must say that this idea is superior to plastic mallets which easily will break (yes, even Malletech mallets!). Also, the top-heavy weight of the railroad spike works well for metal-on-metal playing. I'm now looking for my own pair of railroad spikes for future use for playing loud, abrasive metalophones.

My one bit of advice to anyone playing this is to use ear plugs! You may not think the volume will sustain long enough to cause any problems, but often concert performances are much louder than rehearsals due to the excitement, and I had quite a ring in my ears for numerous days after the performance. You can hear a sample of the anvils performed by the University of Chicago Symphony Orchestra (1.2MB download).