PUNCTUATION PEEVES

posted by James Reel

    Yesterday I started proofreading a 400-page self-published book of baseball statistics. I haven’t yet decided whether this counts as suicide or euthanasia. It’s one of those projects that has me screaming by page 2, because by then it’s already obvious that the author will commit some particular error many times on every single page. In this case, for 400 pages. The problem in this book is an absence of hyphens. Imagine the first sentence of this post stripped of the hyphens, multiply by at least six instances per page, then by 400 pages, and you’ll see why this project may turn out to be a human-rights violation.
    At least the book isn’t littered with other basic errors that are alarmingly common among contributors to other publications I deal with; some of those errors even make it into print. Here are a few things that everybody who puts a sentence together ought to—but does not—know:

• If, as in the previous sentence, you initiate an interruption in a sentence with an em-dash (the long kind of dash, equal to the width of the letter “m”), you have to close it with another em-dash. NOT A COMMA, for crying out loud. Either use two dashes or two commas, but not one of each.
• In American English, commas and periods are placed inside quotation marks, not outside. Always. No exceptions. Ever.
• Without going into an explanation of restrictive and non-restrictive clauses and phrases, I’ll call this complaint “My Wife Gives Me Pause.” The phrase “the great Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso” is wrong because the comma means that Caruso was the ONLY great Italian tenor. Take the comma out, and the phrase rightly suggests that there have been several great Italian tenors, and Caruso is the one we’re talking about now. My mnemonic device for this rule is “my wife gives me pause”—use the comma when writing about your spouse, because unless you live in certain towns along the Utah-Arizona border, you can have only one wife or husband. Thus, “my wife, Jane.” Writing “my daughter, Judy,” means that you have only one daughter, and her name is Judy. Writing “my daughter Judy” means that Judy isn’t the only daughter you have. Got it? My wife gives me pause.

PULLING A PULITZER

posted by James Reel

    This week’s award of the annual Pulitzer Prize for music to avant-garde jazz musician Ornette Coleman will surely spur a lot of blather about how, for better and worse, the Pulitzer has finally broken its classical chains. But really, nothing has changed. There’s a long, though occasionally interrupted, tradition of the Pulitzer honoring music that very few people truly enjoy listening to, and in that regard Ornette Coleman is a traditional choice.

TO GET TO THE OTHER SIDE

posted by James Reel

    Lots of CDs left for me to catalog for the KUAT library today, so instead of distracting myself with fresh blogging I’ll simply point you to an article I wrote for the latest issue of Strings, on the very obscure subject of crossing from one string to another. If you’re not a beginning or intermediate string player, you’re better off sampling the other fine blogs listed on the right.

REVIEW: TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS/GEORGE HANSON, CONDUCTOR

posted by James Reel

    George Hanson led the Tucson Symphony Orchestra and Chorus last night in a stimulating program any way you look at it. Do you want spiritual stimulation? Meditate on the mystical Medieval texts set by Stephen Paulus in his recent Voices of Light. Want erotic stimulation? Check out the salacious Latin lyrics toward the end of Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Or maybe you just want to be slammed back into your seat by the power of a full orchestra and chorus? Well, Hanson and company were fully capable of that in stretches of both works.
    Don’t get the idea that the program was a nonstop noisefest, though. At least half of Carmina Burana is delicate music celebrating springtime and love, and Voices of Light runs the gamut of emotion and effect in a mélange of audience-friendly styles.
    Now, that “mélange of styles” comment may lead you to suspect that Paulus’ score is derivative. Some passages, indeed, do spring a bit too pure from other sources, but for the most part Paulus manages to filter everything through his own sensibilities. He draws his texts from 13th-century writings by the women mystics Mechtilde of Magdeburg and Hadewijch II. The first of the five movements blends the general sound of early Vaughan Williams (specifically his Sea Symphony) with the more contemporary choral harmonies of John Adams, though without a trace of the latter’s minimalism. The second movement steps out with Bernstein-style syncopations, and late portions of the score evoke Samuel Barber’s sadly under-performed The Lovers. But there’s plenty of echt-Paulus here, too, particularly in the central movement, “The Oneness Within,” which is in part a nocturne with delicate touches of percussion, and in the choral scherzo that follows.
    The chorus was very well prepared by Bruce Chamberlain, and Hanson kept it and the colorful orchestra in good balance. The one real drawback, here and throughout the concert, was the chorus’ enunciation; either it was mushy to start with, or the hall garbled it by the time it got past the conductor’s ears.
    Orff’s ever-popular Carmina Burana came off almost as well. Hanson did take the opening and closing “O Fortuna” at a clip just a shade too fast to convey the music’s underlying grim inevitability, but the tempo worked on its own terms. At times, the orchestra pulled ahead of the chorus; this was fine in contrasting instrumental episodes, rather less good if chorus and orchestra were supposed to be together. This didn’t happen often enough to compromise the overall effect.
    Otherwise, the performance fell nicely into place, with good contributions from the vocal soloists. Baritone Charles Roe nearly came to grief near the end when Orff sent him into a cruelly high tessitura, but otherwise he was tremendously effective: suave and tender in “Omnia sol temperat,” in praise of spring, and spitting out the drunken “Estuans interius” with the syllables popping almost like little hiccups. Tenor Jason Ferrante sang the song of the roasting swan with plenty of character, and soprano Mary Wilson delivered lovely, floating solos in the final third of the work.
    The programming was smart—two post-Romantic choral works employing Medieval texts—and so, overall, was the performance.

TEODORA MITEVA

posted by James Reel

    A listener has e-mailed me a link to a video of Teodora Miteva playing Bruch’s Kol Nidre, and my correspondent has high praise for Miteva’s performance. I haven’t had a chance to hear enough of it to form my own opinion, but I like what little I’ve heard. I didn’t know anything about Miteva until this morning, and I don't know much more after a cursory Googling. She was born 31 years ago in Bulgaria and seems to be active mainly in Austria and Germany. Her discography is extremely limited so far. The video clip, made with a single camera and thus not intended for normal broadcast, captures Miteva in concert with a women’s orchestra in Vienna—maybe it’s all the good female musicians who’ve been kept out of the Vienna Philharmonic. Or not. Follow the link and see what you think of her performance, and don’t forget to move on to the second half of the video in a separate file.

CAN YOU DIG IT?

posted by James Reel

    Borderlands Theater’s latest premiere proves to be a mild disappointment:

    Evangeline Ordaz's Hippie Mexicana is partly an affectionate nostalgia trip, looking back at a time when a "trip" didn't necessarily involve going away or falling down. Well, not going away, at least. The play is also a snort of exasperation over the institutionalized racism that kept a qualified man of part-Native American heritage from conducting credible scientific research on his own property. It's also a bittersweet story of how a bunch of likable, laid-back, optimistic people wind up 20 years later in dead-end jobs, and how these people who value their cultural and family history ultimately decide it makes sense to sell the old family home.
    Hippie Mexicana is getting its premiere performances courtesy of Borderlands Theater, and while it's the sort of play and production that one really wants to enjoy, it doesn't quite work.