The Fredösphere

SFF Audio found out about a new audio dramatization of C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters. Watch the promo and see the actors having way, way too much fun recording these diabolical words:

Labels: Religion, Spooky, VideoClip

Mahler's 6th Symphony caught my attention a while back when Alex Ross mentioned the big box constructed especially for the Redwood Symphony, to be used in the symphony's final movement.  Something in Alex's description moved me, especially when he wrote "to produce the famous hammer blows in Mahler's Sixth, the orchestra deployed a large wooden box that matched Mahler's original specifications."

Oooh, that got the latent speculative fiction author in me thinking.  The resulting story is still gestating and will continue to do so for a while, as fiction writing is my third-ranked hobby (after composing and bread baking) but I may finish the thing eventually.  Meanwhile I am loathe to give away all the details, but I'll mention that the story will feature a black hole, a skeleton orchestra sawing away on their violins with femurs--or something--and will definitively explain why Mahler was never comfortable with that last thud at the end of the fourth movement.

The thud whereof I speak is one of three (later revised to two) thuds Mahler specified in his score.  He did not, however, specify the means, asking only that the sound be loud but dull, and non-metallic, "like the stroke of an ax."  They were meant to be three blows that fate delivers on the heroic protagonist of the symphony.  Alma Mahler famously described these blows as prophetically depicting Gustav's own coming disasters:  the death of his daughter; his forced resignation from the Vienna opera; and the diagnosis of his (eventually fatal) heart condition.  (Keep in mind that, for whatever reason, almost anything Alma has said about Gustav and his music is generally treated as dubious.  And one critic has pointed out her oversight in mentioning another hammer blow of fate: her own infidelity.) Various orchestras have devised ingenious devices--usually big wooden boxes or giant bass drums--of varying thuddiness in an attempt to carry out the composer's wishes.  Mahler himself was doomed to frustration with his thudders, never finding a satisfying instrument.

For more information on Mahler's 6th and its tripartite thuddiness, do listen to Benjamin Zander's superb analysis of the four movements, and his decision to restore the 3rd thud in the recording he made with the Boston Phil.  (The mp3s are available at the link; I'm told the files of the symphony itself are low-res, but those of the discussion disc are crystal clear, and feature the most awesome, phattest thuds imaginable.)  Meanwhile, Ionarts has a good comparison of the various recordings of No. 6.  I've enjoyed Iván Fischer's Budapest recording, even though he chooses Mahler's second (and final, apparently) thoughts on both the thud numbering (only two) and the ordering of the middle movements (Andante, then Scherzo).  I lean heavily toward Mahler's original concept, although I'm hardly ready to call myself an expert on the work.  (I can say I also bought Lenny Bernstein's reading as a bargain from Amazon, but the recording seems veiled; perhaps a failing of the original engineers, or a mistake in conversion to a compressed file format.)

Finally, let me leave you with a quote from David Hurwitz, writing in The Mahler Symphonies: An Owner's Manual: "There has been more nonsense written about this symphony [no. 6] than any other work by Mahler."  As I sketch the outline of my story, to be titled Mahler's Box, I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to this opportunity to contribute yet more nonsense to the pile.

Labels: Composer, Fiction, Spooky

Read about this Salvador Dali/Walt Disney collaboration called Destino that was left on the Disney cutting room floor. (Twice. Once when only 18 seconds of film was made, and another time when the project was completed for—then cut from—Fantasia 2000.) The word that keeps coming to my mind is surreal for reasons I can't quite understand. The link is Monsters and Rockets,a blog new to me.

I suggest you do what I did and watch the clip without sound. It is, by its nature, a silent film, and the soundtrack given it is just as brainlessly incidental as most others soundtracks assigned to silent movies. This observation is becoming a Big Idea in my life, and, yes: you are free to draw Deep Yet Vague Conclusions from my admission of that fact.

Labels: Anime, Spooky, VideoClip

It's amazing what turns up when you do a little research for a science fiction story you're writing.  I was shocked to discover that Prescott Bush, the sire of presidents, was a member of Yale's Whiffenpoofs, the Mother of All Collegiate A Cappella Groups.

Skull & Bones, eat your hearts out (if you have any).  I guess I need to add another node to this network.  And finally, I should remind you people that you're supposed to tell me about this stuff.

Labels: Choral, Conspiracy, Spooky

I wanted an excuse to link to the blog The Claw of the Conciliator since I'm working my way through Gene Wolfe's impressive, dazzling, and yet sometimes exasperating Book of the New Sun, the second volume of which I am currently reading, and which is called (amazing coincidence!) The Claw of the Concilator.

So, here comes a post about the curious "Third Man" experience sometimes reported by persons in extreme situations.  T. S. Eliot gets a mention.  I would add that Kim Stanley Robinson discusses the experience at length in his Mars trilogy.

Labels: sci-fi, Spooky

Why, yes of course, this is Atlantis.  It's just as I remember it:  about as big as Wales, and about 600 miles off the coast of Morocco.

Ah, Atlantis.  How fondly I remember your palm-shaded avenues, your charming little cafes serving spring waters shipped in daily from Bimini by nuclear-powered zeppelins.  I recall many happy hours riding your cable cars powered by crystal technology, or loitering at the Great Library, browsing its excellent DVD collection.  How sad that your rulers grew fat and careless and failed to monitor their glycemic index, or inspect and maintain the island's dikes, which must be 3.5 miles high to keep the sea out.  Alas!  In one hour, destruction came upon you, fair city, and all your inhabitants.  Luckily for me, I was serving on a trade delegation to Shangri La at the time and escaped death, something that can come to me only through violence since my body contains cells that manufacture a rejuvenating élan vitale within the webbed tissues of my fingers and toes.  And did I mention I resemble Patrick Duffy, only better-looking?

Labels: Airship, Futurism, Spooky

That's right, just keep telling yourself that these things are "clouds."  Yep.  Clouds.  That's what they are.

Alex Ross dreams of a Messiaenic inaugural, conveniently forgetting just how Nixonian presidential fixations on dowdy, devout French modernists can be.

I got this video from A Cappella News.  These guys make Anglican chant sound actually attractive (ooh, that was snarky):

Labels: Choral, Composer, fun, Spooky, VideoClip