Sword Saints

Thursday freebies

I love free stuff. Especially good free stuff.

First there's NoiseTrade.com. Tell three friends, legally download CDs from indie artists for free. Or download without spamming your friends with a "name your price" model. Bonus: a new EP from Sixpence None The Richer.

And the free audiobook of the month of July at ChristianAudio.com is Brother Lawrence's "The Practice of the Presence of God." Good stuff, go and get it.

Gonna be a long wait

Two downloads for Tuesday

Mozilla Firefox has reached version 3.0. Combined with the new and improved del.icio.us plugin it's browsing bliss, and fast enough even on the ancient PowerBook. It's the best browser out there, in my opinion.

Coldplay's Viva La Vida is out. On my second listen. I like it, though not as much as X & Y (yet). Available at Amazon or iTunes (link opens in iTunes) for immediate download.

A very old teething remedy

Forget pain medicine. Here's what calmed Nicholas during tonight's hysterics over the Molar Tooth Invasion:

Holding out for hope

Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 Pathetique was the musical backdrop for our Saturday night excursion to see the symphony. It was a fairly fitting piece considering the other events of Saturday. The last movement left me with the image of a sea after a great shipwreck. Blue sky, gentle waves, bits of flotsam floating by. Wooden planks. Empty luggage. A little girl's doll. The final sustained note gave me a picture of a body sinking beneath the waves, dead eyes staring sightless into the sky.

Depressing, I know. But what else would I expect from a piece of music written by someone who had no hope? If anything, the symphony offers us a glimpse of Tchaikovsky's fruitless search for hope in a sea temporal things. It's an incredible piece, yes, but my preference tends more toward music that holds out hope in the midst of tragedy.

Technorati Tags:  Atlanta Symphony,  Hope,  Music,  Tchaikovsky

A Bach day

I heard on the radio that today is the birthday of Johann Sebastian Bach. I had gained a new appreciation for Bach's genius after reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid a couple years back. The Art of Fugue is one of the pieces that influenced many of the themes in the book, and I think the Emerson String Quartet does a fine job in bringing the piece to life. Finally, according to David Bentley Hart in The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004),

Bach is the greatest of Christian theologians, the most inspired witness to the ordo amoris in the fabric of being; not only is no other composer capable of more freely developing lines or of more elaborate structures of tonal mediation (wheresoever the line goes, Bach is there also), but no one as compellingly demonstrates that the infinite is beauty and that beauty is infinite.

There you have it. Happy birthday to a musical genius who truly used his gifts to the greater glory of God.

Technorati Tags: Art Of Fugue, Bach, Infinite, Theology

"Just gimme what I want, and no-one gets hurt"

iTunes is the best. No need to drive out to a store in the rain (a good 40-minute round trip to the closest place), no need to pay sales tax, no need to bargain hunt or price match. Just a flat $9.99 and a fifteen minute download and U2's How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb was playing away another few minutes and I had an audio CD for the stereo and a data CD so I could take the tracks to work. Piece of cake.

Taken individually, there are quite a few stand-out tracks on the album. The lead-off "Vertigo" should be well-known by most, thanks to iPod ads and heavy radio airplay (I went out and downloaded the single from iTunes when I first heard it, in fact). "Love and Peace or Else", "All Because of You" and "Crumbs From Your Table" are among my favorites. And "Yahweh" is probably the best final track I've heard in quite some time. The album as an album, though ... that's where I think it really shines. The individual tracks are woven into the whole tapestry, a journey from the world-spinning dizziness of "Vertigo" to the solid foundation of "Yahweh" -- almost as if it's a spiritual journey, eh?

Humming a tune

While Friday is generally not the best night to make the trek into Atlanta (and adding rain only makes matters worse), we made it down to see the ASO with Bobby McFerrin guest conducting. Traffic being what it was, we missed the first piece (much to Margo's disappointment). Still, it was an engaging show, and Bobby McFerrin connects with an audience in an amazing way. From Bach's Prelude No. 1 (with the audience singing/humming Charles Gounod's Ave Maria as a descant) to a ten-minute singing and sound effects rendition of The Wizard of Oz to ending the program with the closing theme from The Mickey Mouse Club, he entertained, engaged, and enthralled with his talents. Beethoven's Symphony No. 8 closed out the evening, almost (but not quite) making up for us missing Prokofiev's Classical Symphony at the beginning of the program.

Silly symphony?

Well, now I've seen everything. We caught the ASO performance of the Lord of the Rings this past weekend. Howard Shore, the composer of the music for the movies, conducted the piece. And it was quite good, if a bit choppy in parts (differing from the more movement-oriented Johan de Meij symphony by the same name). I supposed that's the price of compressing twelve hours of music down to two.

I think it was the crowd that really stole the show, though. Bikers, hippies, college kids, yuppies urban and sub-, they ran the gamut. There was a guy a few rows up wearing a concert muscle shirt for The Reverend Horton Heat ... but with the distance I couldn't tell whether his tattoos were Tolkien-inspired. And beverages were allowed in symphony hall, so there were many with plastic glasses of beer, wine, and sterner stuff.

I lost count of the number of standing ovations (complete with wolf whistles and whoops and catcalls). The strangest was when Howard Shore first stepped out onto the stage. I think there was one at the intermission, and then another two or three after the concert (I was glad for the opportunity to stretch my legs, to be sure). As the flashbulbs popped I looked for the soft flickering of cigarette lighters, and I waited expectantly for cries of "Free Bird!" Thankfully, I was disappointed on those last two counts.

Making music

Last night the local NPR station broadcast an Atlanta Symphony Orchestra concert from a few months back, a show featuring the Christopher Rouse's Concerto for Flute and Orchestra. In the old days we'd just "make a tape" for later listening. But we're thoroughly modern, or something like that. Much of our music listening is on PC or iPod, so it's gotta be digital all the way.

So upstairs went the Bose radio, out came the cables (radio line out to PC line in), and away we went. (Yes, they do stream their audio, but 20kbps is a bit low for classical music.) The Windows sound recorder is a piece of junk, so I tried out Audacity. That is one fine piece of open-source software! I'll be able to carve up the recording (at least by piece, hopefully by movement), edit out all the talking and applause, and clean up the sound a bit. Not too shabby for a 3MB download!

As I was going through all this rigamarole, I had to stop and wonder why the ASO didn't just sell recordings for all their concerts. I guess it depends on their recording contract, but I'd think they'd be able to sell digital copies of anything that didn't get picked up by the label. Ah, but I am young and naive. I always forget that the record labels are basically the Mafia without the morals. Still, they're allowed to broadcast the concerts on the radio (and stream them online) ... why not actually make some money off 'em?