Archives for 2011

Life as a “student” on the Stanford Campus is amazing and energizing. I’ve been mixing up a bunch of different classes and other experiences from taking “design thinking” bootcamps to lectures on the historical significance of chocolate on Mexican culture.

Yesterday, however, was a day dedicated to the voice. Here’s a rundown of what I did:

1. 9am Voice audition for Stephen Sato, who heads up the choral programs at Stanford. Audition went well. I’m hoping to sing in the thesis choruses run by a couple of his graduate students. Should be interesting repertoire and good singers.

2. 1.15pm Voice workshop with Thomas Freeland. Prof Freeland is a professional actor and is teaching a class on healthy vocal technique. We are learning stretches, breathing exercises, projection, support and other much-needed skills. I have been suffering from some vocal fatigue what with presenting a radio show, singing a lot and talking to people all the time in my role as a reporter. In short, I could use some assistance in regulating my bad habits. Freeland is even going to teach us to yawn properly: “The untutored yawn is a scourge,” he said at one point.

3. 2.15pm Vocal Repertory Workshop with Marie-Louise Catsalis. This class is going to kick my butt. And I’m certain it’s going to blow me away. Over the course of the semester, we are going to create a critical edition of a handwritten Italian manuscript from the 17th century, receive private coaching each week on period performance techniques and then perform and record the work — in this case, Serenata a 2 voci Aglaura e Corebo by Severa de Luca (who was one of Scarlatti’s friends) — in Stanford’s state of the art recording. Nicholas McGegan, a hero of mine and the head of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, is coming in to teach a special workshop. Plus, I’m going to get to learn all kinds of new skills like using music software on the computer and translating Italian lyrics. I’m also going to have to dust off some long-dormant knowledge I once had about how to write a figured bass. THis is going to be a wild ride.

4. 7.30pm Early Music Singers Rehearsal. We sightread through two hours worth of sacred and secular music by William Byrd. It’s kind of a fuddy old choir, though this type of music always floats my boat. I don’t know if I’m going to continue with it. Probably not.

It’s always a humbling experience critiquing other people’s artistic efforts and attempting to put your own out there.

I spent Saturday morning in the company of some talented San Francisco Conservatory students, graduates and pro musicians auditioning for a spot as an oboist in the eclectic Magik*Magik Orchestra. I’ve been wanting to join this group for a while because the orchestra, which is based in San Francisco, isn’t like other orchestras around here. Instead of scraping away at Mozart and Beethoven like every other ensemble on earth, they play scores for video games, accompany famous pop musicians and perform at non-classical events like The Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.

I had a blast at the audition, though I was well out of my league both in terms of the quality of the other instrumentalists and the repertoire we played. We wore headphones and played along with pre-recorded tracks for video game music. We improvised. At one point, we put down out instruments and sang. I’ve never experienced an audition quite like it and I wish more could be this way.

I don’t think the repertoire I auditioned with is the most satisfying music to play as an oboist. Very few if any excerpts were actually written for oboe. The bassoonist sitting next to me and I (we were the sole wind players in a group consisting of three violins, a viola and a double bass) had to hack our way through string parts verty frequently. Some of the music was fairly monotonous, consisting of endlessly repeated notes and three or four-note ostinati. But it was still fun to attempt this kind of repertoire.

I may not make the cut, but it was exciting to get an insider glimpse of how the Magik*Magik orchestra makes music.

Meanwhile, here on campus at Stanford, I had a very different kind of audition for the university “Early Music Singers” ensemble. The group, which has been going since 1972 (back when Stanford had a dedicated early music program), specializes in Renaissance repertoire. The upcoming concert series is a program of nothing but William Byrd. Bill Mahrt, who runs the chorus, says this is risky. I can’t quite see why.

In any case, Prof Mahrt and I had a chat, and then I sang him a few scales. Finally he had me sightread through a bit of an English madrigal which I essayed passably well. Or at least, well enough for him to admit me to the ensemble. It was the first time that I’ve ever tried out for a group in a space with no piano. And it was the first time that I’ve ever heard a conductor talk about what it’s like to go from leading a group comprising of early music specialists (which was the case when it attracted members from Stanford’s now-defunct early music program) to dealing with singers who aren’t necessarily specialists in this kind of music. The main change seems to be linguistic, according to the professor. Back in the day, singers used to worry about things like rhyming the word “die” with “sympathy.” These days, the chorus members mostly just want to get on with singing the notes.

P.S. I went to what I thought would be a lecture series on “American Social Dance” earlier today. It turned out to be an actual dance class. Richard Powers is an amazing teacher. If I can put up with jiving, lindy hopping and swinging with a bunch of awkward undergraduates (who make up 99% of the class) then I think I will learn a lot. Prof Powers’ most gratifying tip for swing dance beginners: There’s no such thing as a mistake; stand on someone’s toe or elbow them in the ribs and it’s really just creative improvisation.

Stanford is very proud of its “D.School,” the nickname for the much grander-sounding Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford.

The Kool Aid-drinking that goes on when people talk about the D.School is somewhat deserved as I found out today, while undertaking the first day of a two-day “bootcamp” aimed at introducing the members of my Knight Fellowship program as well as around 80 other Stanford fellows in fields as diverse as government, business, environmental studies and healthcare to the principles that underpin “design thinking.”

As far as I understand it from a single very intense day of undertaking two projects — one around re-engineering the process of giving a gift to someone and the other (still ongoing) about finding ways to engage members of the public more deeply in the power and importance of saving money — design thinking is basically a methodology for getting entrepreneurs to think in more fluid ways about problem-solving. It’s a user-focused approach which defines a need according to the experiences and feelings of the target audience for a service or product, rather than the desires of the inventor.

I found the business of talking to people to identify their needs and then distilling the fact-finding interviews into a single compelling point of view relating to an issue that needs to be solved to be a powerful way to go about solving problems on the whole. The fast-pace of the work (we often had just a few minutes to complete a task) was terrific because it forced us to be intuitive and playful, which is exactly what you need when you’re developing ideas. I also appreciated the fact that in this process, no idea is too silly. In the space of about 30 minutes from initial user interview to prototype, I managed to build an eccentric “mind reading” helmet out of a deflated inflatable globe, six pipe cleaners, some tin foil, two bulldog clips and a piece of plastic twine, aimed at helping a gift giver know how the recipient of a gift really felt about the gift and the act of receiving it.

What I found less compelling about the D.School way, was the amount of extrapolation that goes on as the design team works to understand the “subtext” that underpins what people on the street tell them in interviews. We spent a sweltering two hours wandering around the Stanford campus in pairs asking people for their stories and feelings about finances in general and savings in particular. Then we tried to figure out the users’ most pressing need and why they might have those needs. A lot of guesswork was involved which went beyond the stated facts from our reporting. This made many of us journalists in the room uncomfortable.

I don’t think I’m going to drink the D. School Kool Aid to the last drop. (I was considering signing up for a semester-long design thinking course but I think I’ll give that a miss.) However, I feel like I learned a great deal in one day and I’m curious to see how things pan out tomorrow when we go on to devise, prototype and test solutions to the overhauling savings question. Hopefully I can apply what I learn on this two-day program to ideas I want to explore in some of my own problem-solving projects.

In other news: I had my first harp lesson yesterday. The teacher, a formidable 89-year-old lady with leathery hands like pterodactyl talons, had me practice opening and closing my fists and fingers like pistons. I got to pluck a few strings. I had fun. The teacher explained the rivalry between the “Salzedo” school of harp playing (which is what she practices) and what she called “The French School.” This is confusing because according to Wikipedia, Salzedo was also part of the French School. But the main distinction she drew was that Salzedo had his students play with their elbows up in the air (quite tiring, that methodology turns out to be, though perhaps helpful in terms of generating a really resonant, strong tone) while other methodologies favor players positioning their downwards. I’m excited to continue with my studies — I’ll be practicing on Stanford’s two harps when I can. Needles to say, I won’t be buying a harp anytime soon.

A few thoughts about the weekend past, and two recommendations for the one that’s just around the corner…

1) Mark Morris’ Dido and Aeneas at Cal Performances: The famed American choreographer made his Bay Area conducting debut over the weekend, leading the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, a cast of superlative soloists including Stephanie Blythe and dancers from his company, in performances of his 1989 dance version of Purcell’s opera. No complaints about the musical side of things. Morris has a great sense for tempos and the combination of lightness and gravity that Purcell’s music requires. It was also a tremendous treat to hear Blythe singing Dido and the Sorceress. I only wish that I could have SEEN her sing the roles. Like all the musicians, she was stuck in the pit and didn’t even emerge for a curtain call. (I hear that the views from the nosebleeds were much better — a friend sitting up there said she could see all the singers and instrumentalists quite well, albeit with the aid of binoculars.) I also had difficulty, as I often do, with Morris’ taste for high camp in the choreography. There’s only so much arm flapping and hip swaggering and shoulder shaking one can take in an hour. And the choreographer’s habit of using actions to “mime” particular words (eg snapping arms together to illustrate a reference to a crocodile, clutching one’s midriff and cupping one’s hand to one’s ear for “breast” and “listen / hear” etc) is also tedious after a while. I’m all for irreverence and playfulness, but Morris’ take on Purcell’s Opera seems to be entirely encased in speech marks.

2) Pig Pong at Stamen: A reception at Stamen, a trendy design firm in San Francisco’s Mission District on Friday night, held several delights. On the more serious side is the company’s fascination for creating unusual ways of mapping the world, such as through its collaborations with National Geographic. On the more fun side, I found out about and played “Pig Pong” for the first time. The game involves a ping-pong table with a net, a “ball” made of very light paper and two miniature rubber pigs in place of ping pong bats. The players squeeze the pigs, which emit little gusts of air, sending the paper ball into the air. Tremendous fun. I guess new media companies have come a long way since the days of fussball and plain old table tennis over the past decade.

3) Joshua Dylan Mellars’ Heaven’s Mirror: The Sonoma Film Festival screened the premiere of Bay Area filmmakeer Mellars’ documentary about fado this past weekend. There have been a lot of documentaries made on the theme of fado, but this one seems quite different. It’s very personal, as it covers the filmmaker’s own philosophical journey into attempting to define the undefinable Portuguese concept of “saudade”, the idea which is at the heart of fado. I appreciated the range of wonderful Portuguese singers and instrumentalists captured in the film. I also loved the scenes depicting Mellars’ voyages to Goa, an Indian state which was once occupied by the Portuguese and still carries fado in its soul. The cinematography is often gorgeous. But what chafed slightly for me is that it was a little too gorgeous. I felt like I was watching a promotional video for the Portuguese tourist office at times.

Looking ahead: If you’re in the Bay Area next Sunday, here are two free events worth knowing about:

1) San Francisco Opera Opera in the Ballpark: Bring your kids and a picnic and enjoy Turandot on the jumbotron with about 30,000 other opera lovers. For free. (Sunday September 25, 2pm)

2) Cal Performances Fall Free for All: The wonderful Berkeley-based performing arts presenter is showcasing the talents of a wide array of great artists for a day throughout the UC Berkeley campus. Highlights include the New Century Chamber Orchestra, AXIS Dance, Sarah Cahill and Melanie DeMore’s Community Sing. (Sunday September 25, 11am-6pm)

One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is the relationship between journalism and advocacy.

The word ‘advocacy’ has a slightly pejorative ring to it, or somehow seems antithetical in some respects to the traditional notions of journalism as centering on the task of reporting ‘objectively’ around a subject or event, or responding to it in an analytical / critical fashion. It’s easy to confuse advocacy with public relations.

The other issue with advocacy as it relates to journalism is that it’s easy to reduce the term to an expression of simply ‘liking’ something. For example, if a theatre critic gives a show a positive review, it makes him or her, in the narrowest sense, an advocate of the production.

But for me, advocacy is a much deeper and broader idea —  and one that I feel should have a core place in journalism.

My vocal music media project, VoiceBox (a public radio and podcast series and website dedicated to exploring the art of the human voice) is a sort of hybrid between journalism and advocacy.

On the one hand, it involves a lot of research, reporting and interviewing. Each radio show/podcast is put together using many of the same techniques and impulses that I might apply to an article for The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal.

On the other hand, one of the core missions of the project is to advocate for the vocal arts. What does this mean in practice? I’ll tell you what it doesn’t mean: It’s not that VoiceBox seeks to bash people over the head with the message ‘everyone should get out and sing and support vocal music as listeners too!’ Neither do I refrain from making critical comments about particular singers or styles of singing on air if it’s appropriate to do so.

Yet advocacy for the vocal arts is crucial to what I’m trying to achieve with VoiceBox. It’s the guiding principle that underpins the project. The advocacy element of VoiceBox is what keeps the project on track and stops it from veering into some terrain where I don’t think it should go, such as PR. It’s at the root of every decision I make.

My thinking on the link between journalism and advocacy is in its infancy as you can tell if you’ve managed to stick with this post up to this point. I would love any thoughts or suggestions with regards to how others view the relationship. Feel free to respond in the comments section!

Sometimes in life you go looking for one thing and end up finding another.

On Friday night, I set off for the De Young Museum in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park, fully intending to spend the evening taking in a variety of exciting-sounding performances as part of the museum’s “Friday Nights at the De Young” series.

The lineup included live music by the John Santos Sextet, Teobi’s Dreaming (an interdisciplinary performance project conceived by museum artist fellow, Todd T Brown) and Campo Santo’s new production-in-progress Block by Block featuring live music and movement by the hip-hop collective Felonious.

But the museum was such a crazy clusterfuck by the time I got there, that I couldn’t face muscling my way through to the performance spaces. It was all way too loud and busy.

Instead, I ended up making a beeline for the art galleries. It’s amazing really: Go to the museum on any day of the week — especially at the weekend — and you can barely get into the galleries because they’re heaving with people. But on Friday nights, when most museum goers are there to socialize, watch performances and view various other more ad hoc art installations, the galleries are just about the quietest and most pleasant spaces in the building. I revisited the Picasso exhibition which was much less crowded and was able to linger properly with some of the works. And I also greatly enjoyed taking a look at the Marco Breuer exhibition, Line of Sight, in a single room which I had all to myself.

I love Breuer’s way of seeing the world. In this show, the artist takes obscure parts of the De Young’s collection and makes you look at them anew. One painting, a portrait of a 19th century dowager by the name of Mrs Mary Jane White, is displayed in the midst of the conservation process, with bits of repair paper obscuring parts of the canvas form view. In another part of the room, the artist puts on display a couple of showy, gilded mirrors, all covered in bandages and bits of paper — the flotsam and jetsam of the museum storage process.

Both of these works looked maimed somehow. I was intrigued by the contrast between their state of disarray and the artist’s decision to put them on display anyway. I walked out into the hectic lobby thinking about the traditional separation of process and performance. And then someone who was grooving to the live music a little too enthusiastically bashed into me and nearly spilled their glass of wine on my pants!

There seems to be a sense of relief among my colleagues on the Knight Fellowship program at Stanford about not having to cover 9/11 commemoration stuff. Most of them are hard news people of one kind or another, and I can relate to their aversion to having to do things like going around asking relatives of the dead for the thousandth time for their reactions ten years on and trying to come up with new angles on a subject that’s been so obsessively written and talked about that it’s almost become meaningless.

I have to say that as an arts journalist, I don’t share their relief. I actually think that were I not on this fellowship right now and going about my regular working life, I would quite enjoy covering 9/11 memorial season. The reason is that arts journalists get to write about the cultural aftermath of the disaster and use the art that’s been created as a prism through which to show how people have responded and how those responses have changed in the ensuing decade. This is interesting stuff in my opinion. You get to make connections between disparate ideas and you don’t have to knock on doors and hassle people who don’t want to be pestered.

Here and here are a couple of great examples of what I’m talking about culled from yesterday’s New York Times.

Speaking of covering 9/11, I went last night to the world premiere performance of Heart of a Soldier at San Francisco Opera, a new work by Christopher Theofanidis and Donna Di Novelli, created in response to 9/11. The opera tells the story of Rick Rescorla, a British soldier-turned-World-Trade-Center-security-chief who saved hundreds of lives from the falling buildings before going back in to make a final sweep and never reemerging. The opera is based on a book by James B. Stewart and stars Thomas Hampson.

The work sadly didn’t make much of an impact on me.

Theofanidis’ music is monotonous to the extreme. A lot of thumping ostinati and uninteresting harmonic progressions. The composer has written Rescorla’s part way too low for Hampson, who can barely be heard in some of the more bass-pitched passages. Only occasional highlights in orchestral timbre — the sound of a Scottish bagpipe (which makes no sense from a thematic perspective as Rescorla was from Cornwall and mentioned his love of Cornish pipes, not the Scottish variety), and jungle-thick marimba outbursts — enliven the scoring.

Di Novelli’s libretto is mostly ridiculous. Heart of a Soldier may go down in history as the only opera ever to have been written with a line about building a waffle house. I’m all for opera covering quotidian life, but this one does it in a truly bland way. The singers use a lot of expletives which don’t heighten the emotional moment at all. It’s all a bit self-conscious, as in ‘aren’t we daring — we just used the word ‘fuck’ on the war memorial opera stage.’

One thing that the opera does manage to achieve is a sense of the closeness of the relationships between the three main characters. There is a powerful intimacy between Hampson’s Rescorla and his wife, Susan, played by Melody Moore. Their long-in-the-tooth love affair is steeped in sweetness and playfulness. And the enduring strength of the friendship between Rescorla and his best chum, Dan Hill (played by the tenor William Burden) comes across in the men’s continued respect for one another in spite of the very different directions that their lives take.

The performers act the parts convincingly, making us believe in the connections between their characters and what’s at stake when they suffer eventual loss. But there’s nothing stand-out about their vocal performances, mostly because the music doesn’t live up to their abilities as actors.

Many operas about cataclysmic events purposefully avoid action movie-style disaster tactics. John Adams’ Doctor Atomic, which also received its world premiere a few years ago at SF Opera, underplayed the mushroom cloud of the first nuclear bomb being tested in the desert and focused instead on the lead-up to the explosion and the aftermath. Heart of a Soldier adopts the same tactic, and as in Doctor Atomic, fails to create the necessary feeling of horror.

I’m not suggesting that director Francesca Zambello should have had the cast running around screaming as the two Twin Tower structures positioned at the back of the stage throughout the opera crumbled before our eyes. But the long and sprawling story, which goes from Rescorla’s time in the 1960s and 70s fighting in Africa and then Vietnam to the events of September 11, 2001, deserves a more momentous ending than watching a few people fall over and some pieces of paper flutter to the ground. As it is, the whole opera peters out to an unsatisfying nothing.

Perhaps that’s the point: 9/11 has been covered every possible way in the news and in the arts. Maybe we’re all exhausted with thinking about it. At this point, there’s very little left to say.

“Gabriel’s Oboe,” Ennio Morricone’s haunting theme from the 1986 film The Mission has a special place in my heart as an oboist. The melody is so beautifully written for the instrument. It soars, it beseeches and it engulfs the senses. When someone asks me to ‘give ’em a tune’ in passing, more often than not, “Gabriel’s Oboe” will be the piece they ask me to play.

So I was interested to discover yesterday that Morricone has enlisted the 24 year old soprano Hayley Westenra to write lyrics for “Gabriel’s Oboe” among some of his other film score hits.

The new version of the piece is subtitled “Whispers In A Dream” and it’s just about the most mawkish song I’ve ever heard. Not only are the lyrics insipid, but Westenra’s voice, which has been autotuned (or whatever) into a state of loose-vibratoed ordinariness, cannot remotely compete with the oboe’s plaintive, characterful call. In short, the interpretation is a disaster.

The video for the track, which mostly features the singer gazing into middle distance in a variety of modish European settings as in a perfume ad, is equally laughable. Watch and listen to “Gabriel’s Oboe (Whispers In A Dream)” here.

P.S. I attended the opening night of the San Francisco Symphony’s 100th anniversary season on Wednesday. It feels silly to complain about the state of gala audiences, who are there to see and be seen rather than do any listening. It is a gala after all. And the same goes for the programming, which is invariably all about giving people what they know and like rather than shaking them up with anything radical or new. But at a certain point, it’s got to be about the music, even at a gala. As it was, the first five minutes of Copland’s Billy the Kid Ballet Suite was lost to shuffling, whispering, ballgown-trussed forms. And even Lang Lang, though on his usual pyrotechnic-inducing form, couldn’t transform Liszt’s Piano Concerto No 1 into something different from the crowd-pleasing warhorse that it has become.

P.P.S. It feel very strange to be an arts journalist amongst a crowd of Knight Fellowship reporters who cover things like drug wars in Mexico, corruption in Serbia and immigration issues in Ecuador and get their kicks by walking across America. I am in good company.

My life seems to be all about endings and beginnings at the moment. I spent the eve of the start of my John S Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford last night wandering around downtown Palo Alto taking in the sights.

Two places I came across made me pause for thought:

1) Borders Books: The massive bookstore in Palo Alto is having its closing down sale. I drifted about the space with its mostly empty bookcases (all of them for sale for about $50) feeling sort of depressed. Besides a couple of cookbooks and a volume of Noel Coward letters, there seemed to be only trashy self-improvement guides, CMAT primers and cheap romances left in the store. (I suppose I should be grateful that people in Palo Alto have good taste and bought the interesting stuff first. Assuming there was interesting stuff to be had in the first place.) The space is huge. I wonder if it will remain empty for long? It’s hard to imagine what kind of business, besides another big chain store, would go in there. And I don’t suppose a Walmart-like company would want to open its doors on University Avenue, where I imagine the real estate prices are sky high.

2) Stanford Cinema: Happily, chancing upon Palo Alto’s lovely old movie house just in time for an Alfred Hitchcock double feature, cheered me up. Although The Stanford isn’t as lovely as San Francisco’s Castro Theatre and the place was only about a quarter full for the 7.30pm showing of “To Catch A Thief,” the atmosphere is heart-warming. The high ceilings and art deco fixtures take one back to a bygone era, which is of course compounded by watching Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in action. The Wurlitzer organ player does a great job of setting the mood before the movie starts. And you can’t beat the $7 price tag. Plus, a bonus, there are no ads. It was interesting to note the disconnect between today’s movie-going audience and the Hitchcockian movie-making aproach, which seems dated even in these rarified surroundings. The audience whooped with laughter in particular at Hitchcock’s over-the-top use of imagery (how many times do we have to watch a cat prowling across the screen to get the message about the stealthy burglar at the heart of the plot?)

My fellowship begins in less than two hours. A whole year of adventures await…

A friend of mine just forwarded me an email from an American pianist/composer friend of his who’s based in Amsterdam. The Dutch and Belgian papers are all over this story about a religious nut’s attempt to derail a concert at the Concertgebouw and the fears for Queen Beatrix’s safety (the monarch was attending the concert.) But it has yet to break in the English-language press it seems, as I see no trace of it online anywhere.

Here are the contents of the email I just received about the incident:

I was just at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam for the concert celebrating 100 years Dutch composers association with the Dutch Queen and ex-mayor of Amsterdam there as special guests. There was a man claiming to be sent by Allah who stormed the podium, took the microphone and began preaching, so that the whole orchestra vacated the podium. The police came and arrested him and then began searching for a bomb. Heavy!!! We thought it was part of the program. A bassist in the orchestra who I’ve played with, came to me–I was sitting in the 4th row and told us it was real–we didn’t believe him. Still got to get my head around it–It’s all over Dutch news right now, because it was a threat on the Queen.

For any Dutch-speakers out there, here are links to local media stories from Die Stentor and Het Laatste Nieuws.

SUNDAY MORNING UPDATE:

Interesting to read such varied responses to the event described above. The pianist/composer Eugene Carl whose initial response, forwarded via a mutual friend I posted yesterday, followed up with these words when I emailed him last night for more information:

I saw the guy before the concert shaking hands with the ex-mayor, who’s now the head of the Labor party.  His wife is in a wheel-chair, and the guy walked up to Job Cohen and introduced himself and tried to talk with him. A very handsome man in his 30″s dressed very nicely.  I thought, he must be a dignitary or this is part of some kind of “act” for the concert.  There were policemen outside and inside, so it wasn’t “unprotected”.  After all the Queen was also coming–she’s the biggest supporter of the arts in Holland, especially dance, and is herself a brilliant sculpture and also painter.  

Ton Cremers said:

There really was nothing the matter. Just a confused man addressing the audience from the stage. He was very quiet, and seemed at ease. No threats whatsoever.

However different these reactions are, it seems like it was an interesting night at the Concertgebouw at any rate!

Memorial Church on the Stanford campus is probably the loveliest religious buildings I’ve seen in this country to date. I walked around the space with my eyes like saucers and my mouth agape on Thursday taking in the visual splendors.

The mosaic frescoes seemed to have every color in nature in them. The stain glass windows glowed in the afternoon sun, making the depicted Biblical scenes look almost like they were animated. The great rotunda was perfectly balanced by the raked galleries to the left and right of the main altar. The place fairly vibrates with visual harmony.

Sadly, I hear that the aural harmony of Memorial Church leaves much to be desired. I’ve heard from two separate sources over the past two days that the space is lousy to sing in from an acoustic perspective. “Everything sounds like mush,” a chorister friend who has performed there on a number of occasions told me.

It also sounds like the listening experience isn’t optimal at the church, either. “The acoustics in Stanford’s Memorial Church vary pretty dramatically depending on where you’re sitting,” another friend told me in an email upon reading my last post about my new life on campus for the coming academic year as a Knight Fellow. “You almost always want to be under the rotunda.”

I’ll wait to hear a concert or two (and maybe, if I’m lucky, the experience of singing or playing there) before passing judgment.

One criticism I am able to make about the church at this point, however, is the state of the floor. I find it strange that a church this physically stunning could have such a drab parquet. I know that churches are often designed with the idea that people should be looking up towards the heavens rather than down at their feet. But if you do happen to glance southwards, the ugly cork floor tiles come as a bit of a shock after the splendors of everything above them. I asked the student tour-guide who was leading the campus walking tour that I was on, why the university skimped on this aspect of the design. She panned the ground briefly as if noticing it for the first time. “I have no idea,” she said.

Two unrelated thoughts for Tuesday:

First of all, I read an interesting bit of trivia about the actor Bela Lugosi yesterday. Apparently, when the Hungarian native started appearing in English language talkies, he spoke his lines without understanding any English. The actor simply learned the sounds phonetically and dashed them off on camera. He thought that all actors should follow his lead.

Secondly, my friend Ange sent me a link to a video clip featuring the performer Christian Zehnder practicing throat singing while being X-Rayed. The imaging was created by the Dept. of Radiology at the CHUV Lausanne and comes from INLAND, a 2002 abstract film by Pierre-Yves Borgeaud. I’ve seen quite a few x-ray videos of people singing, but this one stands out for me: Even though Zehnder is making wildly contrasting sounds in the video, which range from sweet overtone whistles and ferocious barks, what’s going on inside his voicebox looks pretty much the same regardless. You can watch the video here.