Otter's Rock

I have loved The Merry Widow operetta since they broadcast the New York Opera production of it in 1996. (An operetta, if you didn't know, is an opera where the dialog between the songs is spoken instead of sung. Think musical theater, except the music comes out of the classical tradition instead of the music hall/popular/low-brow tradition. Also, an operetta usually will have a 20-50 piece orchestra and expect the singers to be able to be heard over the top of it, whereas musicals usually have a MUCH smaller orchestra, so the size of the voice needed for operettas vs. musicals is different.) The Merry Widow is one of the most popular operettas of all time. The music is glorious, the characters are great, there's a lot of humor, and the romance ends with a happy ending. (Though, content warnings for 19th Century views of marriage and fidelity and patriarchy.)

The plot: The fictional European nation of Marshovia is in trouble! The entire nation was bankrupt, and only kept afloat by loans from a rich banker, Glawari, who died and left all his money to his widow! The Widow Glawari is living in Paris now, and her year of mourning is over ... and if she marries a Frenchman, he'll take her money out of Marshovia and all the nobles will have to take :gasp: public transportation! So the Marshovian ambassador to Paris has invited her to a party, and ordered the dashing Count Danilovitch (the King of Marshovia's nephew) to marry her. But Danilo doesn't want to marry her, because they used to be in love but had a falling out--she was too low-born, so the King forbade the match. He went off to persuade the King without telling her what he was doing, she believed he had abandoned her and married the banker, Danilo saw that and figured she must have only been after his social position and didn't really love him. They're both hurt, they both still love the other, they are both adamant that they don't want to marry the other, and Shenanigans ensue: trying to divide the Widow from all the Parisian men who want to marry her, marital intrigue among the Marshovians, Danilo and the Widow pining after each other and fighting at the same time, it's a lot of fun with a lot of glorious music.

And the 1996 New York City Opera production of it was spectacular. They managed to cast people who had top-notch voices to do the music justice, who were also great actors, and who could dance well. They brought in Broadway people for choreography and the comic roles that didn't require operatic voices. The sets, the costumes, everything is incredible. It's the very best of opera and the very best of Broadway all put together in one show. I wish there was a better quality recording of it; this is obviously a VHS that someone taped off TV. The sound is pretty good, but the video quality is not. I periodically go back and re-watch it on Youtube anyway.

But I also periodically go through Youtube to see what other productions of the show are on there, or to watch my favorite songs. And today I found ... something interesting. I watched the Witchita Grand Opera version of "Women" (from Act 2). It's the same production as the 1996 New York City Opera version! The set is the same, the choreography is the same ... quite interesting.

I really like the album version of 5 out of 6 by Dessa.  It's an awesome number.

Youtube just recommended the version of it she did with the Minnesota Orchestra.  The other stuff she's done with the Minnesota Orchestra are nice (not amazing, not super-different from the album versions, but nice).  So I clicked on it to see what it was like, expecting to like it but not expecting it to be much different from the album version.  It is so hard driving.

Holy cow, you guys, this one really makes use of the orchestra, in the best way to support the song.  I never expected that orchestra and rapping would go together so well!

I'm listening to the 1200 years of women composers playlist on Spotify (it's 78 hours long with lots of really great music, give it a shot).  I think my favorite composers are Alice Mary Smith (1839-1884) and Amy Beach (1867-1944).  But anyway, as I'm listening to Smith's Symphony in C Minor, I notice several fragments of phrases that sound a lot like the Hobbit themes from The Lord of the Rings.  Not an entire melodic line, but a few bars of a phrase that then weave into something different, and then a few minutes later there's another one.  Howard Shore obviously knows Smith's work, even if I've never heard of her before.  (Why, I don't know, because her work is delightful.)

I love Hamilton, but there's one thing that annoyed me: the repeated statement that, after the Reynolds pamphlet, Hamilton was "never goin' be President now."

Because, as Hamilton points out A LOT, Hamilton was an immigrant. And immigrants can't be President! You have to be a natural-born citizen!* It says so right in the constitution!

But then I decided to double-check, and there was a curlicue I didn't know about (because it hasn't applied in 200 years). Clause Five of Article Two reads:

No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

And there it goes. Hamilton was an immigrant, but he was a citizen of the United States when the Constitution was adopted, so he would indeed have been eligible to be president if he hadn't been such an idiot.

*Which is why the "birther" idiots kept trying to "prove" that Obama's birth certificate was fake, and he was born in Kenya instead of Hawaii, and thus not a US Citizen--which is stupid because even if it were true, Obama would still be a natural-born citizen because his mother was a citizen.

I love this show, I really do, but there’s some hella problematic things in it. Here's one example.
Stephen Sondheim's musical Into the Woods deals more explicitly with the wolf in Red Riding Hood being a metaphor for predatory sexual exploitation than most modern versions, and Johnny Depp made it even more creeptastic in the recent Disney version.

( Red and the Wolf ) She's pleasant enough when he first says hello, then he spends a song literally yanking her around to get her to pay attention to him, and telling her what she should be doing (that she doesn't want to do and is actively trying to get away from.) In the end, she smiles and says Okay! and picks some flowers that he showed her, at which point he stops hassling her. (And, of course, this shows why appeasing the creep is a dangerous course to take, because he uses her delay to go find her granny, eat her, and set up to eat Red Riding Hood too.)

Here's the video so you can watch the whole creeptastic scene:


So far, it's not problematic at all.  The wolf is a creep, and everyone knows it.  Yay!

Here's the problem.  Later on, when Red describes the whole thing to the Baker in “I Know Things Now,” she describes the wolf like this: “But he seemed so nice.”

I ask you, did the wolf seem “nice”? NO. He was not nice. He was, in fact, the creepiest creep to ever creep. And she knew it! She didn’t like his attention, she didn’t want his attention, she spends the entire song trying to get away from his attention! But a man is giving attention to a girl, she should be pleased, right? He's trying to give her things--flowers even--so she should appreciate it, right? The only way the wolf is "nice" is if you assume that any male attention to a female automatically is "nice" regardless of what kind of attention or whether she wants it or not.

But it's actually worse than that. Here's some context to that line:
"Mother said straight ahead
not to delay or be misled
I should have heeded her advice
but he seemed so nice.”

She tried to do the right thing. She did everything she possibly could to do what her mother told her and keep the wolf from misleading her. And now she’s blaming herself for the fact that he literally yanked her off the path.  And the show just kind of accepts this version, in which Red bears some of the blame for the wolf's "seduction" of her.  When, really, no, that's not what happened at all.

The whole song:




There’s actually some good and empowering stuff in the song, too, and I love it, but at the same time, eeeep!

If it actually reflected what had happened--if the wolf had been ambiguous and kinda nice, if Red had responded to him and chosen to go off the path with him, it would be a great song.  As it is, it's pretty failtastic.

Now, I hadn't ever heard of Janelle Monae because the only time I am introduced to music made in the last thirty years or so is when somebody does a vid of it and I go, huh, that's interesting, I like that.  And then my tastes run more to Regina Spektor.  But still: given that she's weaving an epic SF story involving robots and time travel across multiple albums and videos, why isn't more of the SF/F world talking about her?  I depend on you guys to learn about cool stuff that's happening!  You are falling down on the job!

Is there, like, a basic fannish primer out there?  So I know what to look for and what to get?  Because while the style of music in general leaves me feeling meh, she's good at it, and the overarching story has me feeling intrigued.  (This may be a new Yuletide fandom for me.)

Schola Cantorum will light up the wintry darkness with a choral setting for vespers in the season of Advent on Sunday, Dec. 2, at 7:30pm in the Chapel of the Abiding Presence at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg. The festival choral setting for evening prayer includes a Magnificat by Schutz.

I sing in the Schola Cantorum, and will be having a small solo. Gettysburg is about 1.5 hours north of Baltimore/DC; if you're in the area, we'd love to have you.

Map of 61 Seminary Rdg Gettysburg, PA 17325-1742, US

This year, I am a member of the Willamette Master Chorus, the premier auditioned chorus of the Willamette Valley (in Oregon, USA). Our Spring concert is coming up, and it's going to be a lot of fun.  If you have never heard Arthur Honegger's oratorio "King David," and you like classical music, I highly  reccomend getting a cd of it to listen to.  It's a great piece, and I am having a blast singing it.  Here's the press release for the concert: 

The Willamette Master Chorus Presents
“King David, Soldier, Psalmist, Shepherd” 



The Stravinsky, well, it will be nice to say I've sung it.  Bragging rights, y'know, and it is a major work.  I can appreciate the artistic merit of the piece on an intellectual level, but I don't reallly enjoy it.  The Honegger rocks.  Oh, and the soloists listed in the press release?  Almost all of them are altos, even the ones singing soprano solos.  We've got a lot of displaced sopranos in the alto section, for some reason.  I happen to be one of them, though I didn't try out for a solo.  Solos are a bit more pressure than I care for.