music

St. Peters, and a Miracle Voice Teacher

It’s been a low-energy and off-my-peak couple of days here for reasons I won’t bore you (or gross you out) with. Had to take a run up to Denver, but mostly I’ve been sitting quietly and reading. I finished a book that I don’t really recommend unless you’re chained to the potty and need to kill time: Basilica by R. A. Scotti is a popular history of the construction of the second St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, the one that we all know and love, which supports the largest church dome in the world. The book is competently written, but it’s a little thin on details of the construction itself. Ms. Scotti is much more interested in politics and personalities, and in truth I did learn a lot about Bramante, Michaelangelo, Raphael, and Bernini (and more than a few popes) that I didn’t know before. But she has no good head for architecture, and does not define any terms. I kept flipping into a wonderful DK book called The Visual Dictionary of Buildings to clarify certain elements of church architecture. Now that book I recommend, especially if you’re a writer trying to set a scene in a complicated building and aren’t entirely sure what an oculus is. (Or—quick, now!—define a “spandrel”.) There are some factual errors in Basilica, one of the worst of which suggests that poured concrete was used in some places in St. Peter’s. Not so—poured concrete was an ancient technology that was lost after Imperial Rome came apart and was not recovered until the 19th Century, or pretty close to it. St. Peter’s was built almost entirely of mortared masonry and sculpted stone.

If you’re interested in the peculiarities of St. Peter’s Basilica, a better book is The Bones of St. Peter by John Evangelist Walsh, which speaks of the excavations under the main altar just before WWII. The Basilica was built over a Roman graveyard, and there was a lot of fascinating stuff under the floors. More about the Shroud of Turin than about the Basilica is Holy Faces, Secret Places by Ian Wilson, of which I reread a considerable chunk. However, Wilson speaks of the countless weird little crannies in the Vatican complex, in which a lot of interesting things, and not only relics, may be hiding. Secrets are not good in religion for many reasons, but mostly because secrets are a power thing, and power corrupts spiritual organizations mortally. (See Encountering Mary by Sandra Zimdars-Swartz for a good discussion of this problem.) Wilson is a marvelously engaging writer, and potty reading doesn’t get a whole lot better.

I also reread several sections in Peter Ochiogrosso’s fascinating 1987 book Once a Catholic, in which a number of famous Catholics and (mostly) former Catholics explain what sorts of marks their Catholic upbringing left on them. The book is not explicitly about the gulf between Tridentine (i.e., Latin) Catholicism and Vatican II Catholicism, but the demographics of the people the author chose to interview almost guarantees it. Like them, I grew up Tridentine, and like them, I know what we lost, and why. (Not all that was lost was good; in fact, a good deal of what we lost was desperately in need of losing.) The book is secular in approach and intent, and does not preach, in either direction. It’s a character study, of real characters. (One of them is George Carlin.) Highly recommended, and I think I’ve spoken of it here before.

All these books but Basilica are currently out of print, but cheap on the used market. Reading them was research for a current project of mine—Old Catholics. (Nothing makes you a better writer than simply reading, and reading a lot.)

Finally, I’ll throw out an idea I had yesterday, for an invention I wish someone would get to work on. I want something I might charactize as a Miracle Voice Teacher. I want a program that will put a musical score on the PC screen and listen to me try to sing it. The program should average the frequencies that come in from the mic and put a line above or below a note in the score, telling me whether I’m high or low. It should have a metronome, and the ability to play the score as MIDI. It should be able to record what I sing and play it back for me, showing me on the screen where I botched the melody.

And if that’s possible, then the program should be able to teach me how to harmonize, by isolating one of the melodic lines and allowing me to sing it, and then gradually adding in the other lines in the headphones while I try to stick with my own line and not get confused. Scarily, such a thing would allow me to sing four part harmony…with myself. The world may not be quite ready for that, but at this juncture I think I am. I went looking for the product and didn’t find it, but if you know of something along those lines, I’d like to hear about it.

The Friction Is In the Discovery

I don't buy a lot of music anymore, and in thinking back, I suspect that I stopped buying when I stopped listening to the radio. (I stopped listening to the radio because the stations play the same sixteen stupid songs every twenty minutes…forever. But that's a separate rant.) The tough part in selling anything is discovery—basically, getting the prospective customers to know that you exist—and it becomes a lot tougher when you slide from machine screws to wine, and incomparably tougher yet when you move from wine into the realm of art. Absent radio, I discover new music a lot less often. Here's a recent discovery tale that did lead to a purchase, and if I were the artist I'd be maybe a little annoyed:

Carol and I don't watch a lot of TV, but we turn on the Weather Channel before we go to bed to catch Local on the 8s, and then again in the morning over breakfast. The Weather Channel plays “smooth jazz” during its canned local forecasts. My affection for smooth jazz is sparse, albeit less sparse than my affection for what I call club jazz. No sax please; we're contrarians—I think I dislike sax music because almost everybody else worships it. A few mornings ago, I looked up over my Cheerios to watch Local on the 8s, and realized that there were no saxophones playing. Better still, it was not the usual mournful, shapeless noodling, but a purposeful, upbeat (nay, near-manic) piano piece. Two minutes later, the forecast over and the music cut short by yet another Mucinex mucus man commercial, I ran out of the kitchen to the machine here, muttering, “I gotta have that!”

Alas, the Weather Channel does not announce the artists on its forecast music, so I hammered out a quick email to them, after spending several minutes digging through their site looking for a contact link: Please, folks, what was the title/artist of the bouncy piano piece playing during today's 6:58 AM Local on the 8s?

I only half expected an answer, and was working on memorizing the piece so that I could whistle it to whomever I might know in smooth jazz fandom. But yay wow, by late afternoon, I got a nice note from a Weather Channel junior staffer who confessed that she didn't know precisely, but the February AM playlist was attached. And so it was: The email carried an Excel spreadsheet containing the titles and artists for 15 songs, one of which was by implication the bouncy piano piece. I just didn't know which one.

I had done this kind of detective work a time or two before. I first looked up the artists, separating the pianists from the sax maniacs. It came down to either Leo Tizer or Bradley Joseph. I went over to Amazon, looked up the artists, and started playing the samples for the album tracks named in the playlist spreadsheet. On the third try, I got it: Brandley Joseph's “Rose-Colored Glasses” (and Bradley himself) had been discovered. Ninety seconds later, I had purchased the track through One Click for 89c, and had a DRM-free MP3 in my music directory. Ninety seconds after that, I had his CD album (Hear the Masses) on its way. The friction was all in the discovery.

Amazon supposedly sells two million music tracks as unencumbered MP3s. I shop for music so rarely that I didn't even know this. I did know that Amazon has been selling PDF-formatted short stories (and other short textual works, including nonfiction) for a couple of years now, for 49c a pop. Alas, by the time I decided to apply to the program, they had closed it to new submissions, but the delivery mechanism is the same as for MP3s: If you have One Click enabled, you get the item in a few seconds.

I think Amazon Shorts may have been doomed because Big Name Writers would not sell unencumbered PDFs, and Small Name (or No Name) writers do not sell enough of anything to justify the effort it takes Amazon to vet them and post them. Or perhaps Amazon is simply migrating the program to Kindle. We'll find out eventually. The point to be taken away here is that we have digital delivery down cold. Discovery is fluky and always will be, especially for things like fiction, which (with vanishingly rare exceptions) you do not hear on the radio. Amazon can make the gumballs drop into your hands. We're still not sure how they'll make you want the gumballs, but tougher problems have been solved.

In the meantime, Bradley Joseph has another fan, and might have more if the Weather Channel would just put his name in the corner of the screen while they're playing his music over their forecasts. I hope he got some cash for the license, because not everybody is going to dig as hard as I did!