Narrator Ezra Knight

Narrator Ezra Knight does an absolutely fabulous job, not surprising considering what an accomplished actor he is. In fact, as I started listening to the book, I had to get out my print copy because it sounded so good I actually thought they must have rewritten the introduction–but no, those were my words!

According to a letter the publisher sent along with the two copies of the audiobook I received, this is the first Enslow Publishers title to be recorded as a full audio book. I feel honoured!

Also, I’m really enjoying listening to my own book. I usually read my own stuff out loud. Nice to hear someone else for a change!

It’s the official US Army Song Book from the Second World War. It begins, as you’d expect, with the Star Spangled Banner (three verses!), but the complete contents is eclectic, to say the least:

1. The Star Spangled Banner
2. Alma Mater
3. Aloha Oe
4. America
5. America, the Beautiful
6. Anchors Aweigh
7. The Army Air Corps
8. Song of the Army Engineer
9. Auld Lang Syne
10. Battle Hymn of the Republic
11. Bombed
12. The Caissons Go Rolling Along
13. Parody Field Artillery Song
14. Carry Me Back to Old Virginny
15. Casey Jones
16. Cindy
17. Colombo
18. Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean
19. Crash On! Artillery
20. Dixie
21. Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes
22. Arms for the Love of America (The Army Ordnance Song) by Irving Berlin
23. For Her Lover Who Was Far Away
24. For Sev’n Long Years
25. God Bless America
26. God of Our Fathers
27. Good Night, Ladies!
28. Home, Boys, Home! & The Infantry (there are two number 28′s: a SNAFU, I guess)
29. A Home on the Range
30. Honey Dat I Love So Well
31. I’ll Tell You Where They WEre
32. The Infantry (different than the previous one by this name)
33. It’s a Long Way to Tipperary
34. I’ve Been Workin’ on de Railroad
35. Juanita
36. K-K-K-Katy, plus parodies of the chorus of K-K-K-Katy, such as “K-K-K-K. P., Dirty old K.P., That’s the only Army Job that I abhor…” or the even more evocative “C-c-c-cootie, Horrible cootie, You’re the only b-b-b-bug that I abhor…”)
37. The Last Round-Up
38. Let Me Call You Sweetheart
39. The Man on the Flying Trapeze
40. The Marines’ Hymn
41. The Mintrels Sing of an English King
42. The Monkeys Have No Tails in Zamboanga
43. The Mountain Battery
44. My Buddy
45. My Wild Irish Rose (plus a parody, “My wild eyed cadet,/He ain’t learned nothing yet,/He noses her down/When close to the ground…”)
46. The New River Train
47. Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen
48. Oh! Susanna
49. The Old Gray Mare, She Ain’t What She Used To Be
50. Old Joe Clark (not a song about the former Canadian Prime Minister)
51. Old King Cole (with a modified chorus glorifying the “Fighting Infantry”: each chorus adds another rank, so the final chorus runs, “The Army’s gone to hell,” said the generals;”What’s my next command?” said the colonels;/”Where’re my boots and spurs?” said the majors;/”We want ten days’ leave,” said the captains;/”We do all the work,” said the shavetails;/”Right by squads, squads right,” said the sergeants;/”Beer, beer, beer,” said the privates,/”Merry men are we./There’s none so fair as can compare/With the Fighting Infantry.”
52. The Old Plantation
53. On, Brave Old Army Team
54. Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit-Bag
55. Pop! Goes the Weasel
56. The Raw Recruit
57. Red River Valley
58. She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain
59. Slum and Gravy & Sons of Randolph (there are two number 59s)
60. Smiles
61. Song of the Signal Corps
62. A Stein Song
63. Tammany
64. There’s a Long, Long Trail
65. Where Do We Go From Here?
66. Yankee Doodle
67. You’re in the Army Now

It’s an interesting mixture of sentimental old favorites, patriotic  songs, and songs poking fun at Army life. I like, for one example, Bombed:

We were bombed last night, bombed the night before

And we’re going to be bombed tonight as we never were bombed before.

When we’re bombed, we’re as scared as we can be,

They can bomb the whole darn Army if they don’t bomb me.

CHORUS

They’re over us, over us,

One little cave for the four of us,

Glory be to God, there are no more of us

Or they’d surely bomb the whole darned crew.

But I think my favorite part of the book is the warning you can see on the image of the inside front cover:

“This book is the property of the United States Government and its contents may be used only with the military services.”

Which means, of course, that every time since 1941 that anyone has sung “Home on the Range” or “That Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” they’ve been breaking military regulations.

I’ve sung both many times myself. I feel so ashamed.

But that’s all recorded music. Live music remains far rarer. Live musicians may occasionally show up in a public space, but you generally have to seek them out.

Which raises an interesting question. Do we perceive music differently when we watch it being played than we do when we are only listening to a recording?

Michael Schutz is both a noted percussionist and a noted researcher. Currently an assistant professor at McMaster University, he runs a research lab dedicated to studying the cognitive science of music, and the visual component of music is something he’s very interested in.

As he notes in an article published by the Acoustical Society of America, “while purists may argue that music is an auditory experience and therefore visual information is irrelevant, the enormous investment in clothing, lighting, smoke machines and other visual effects in live concerts demonstrates audiences clearly respond to and appreciate visual information as part of the musical experience.”

“Clothing, lighting, smoke machines and other visual effects” is rather too broad a collection of items to serve as the focus of a practical experiment, so Schutz decided to look at a much narrower question, i.e., “Do the gestures used by percussionists have any musical value irrespective of their acoustic consequences?”

This has long been a matter of debate. Some percussionists are adamant that using a sharp wrist motion produces a more staccato sound than a fluid motion. Others are adamant that gestures don’t matter: a percussion instrument will make the same sound if struck with the same amount of force no matter what gesture is used to produce the blow.

It turns out that they’re both right–or both wrong, depending on how you look at it–because there’s a difference between sound (acoustics) and the way that sound is experienced (perception).

Schutz and colleagues conducted two experiments. In the first, they recorded a world-renowned percussionist performing notes using long and short gestures on a professional-quality marimba. Participants rated the duration of each note twice: once while viewing the gesture, once just by listening.

The result: notes produced by long and short gestures were indistinguishable when judged by audio alone, but were judged to be significantly different when the accompanying gesture was seen…even though the participants had been specifically instructed to ignore visual information when making their ratings. Or, as Schutz puts it, in what at first glance seems a self-contradiction, “while gesture fails to alter the sound of the note, it…alters the way the note sounds.”

Earlier studies had suggested that visual information does not influence ratings of note length, but Schutz suspected his experiment revealed such an influence because of the particularly strong visual connection between the gesture of the marimba player and the sound produced. He predicted the results would only apply to percussive sounds, where the motion producing the sound is clearly visible.

To test that prediction, the researchers paired the original videos with notes produced, not only by the marimba, but by piano, French horn, clarinet and voice. A second set of participants followed the same procedure as before…and found that non-percussive sounds were unaffected by the visuals…not too surprising, since we obviously know that a man hitting a marimba won’t produce the sound of someone singing. (Interestingly, some visual influence was found in the piano…which is technically a percussive instrument.)

All of which seems to indicate that, at least for percussion, there is a very strong link between the sight of a live musician playing an instrument and the listeners’ perception of the sound…and that watching a percussionist play live is a very different experience from listening to a recording.

Percussionists, Schutz suggests, use this “musical illusion” to “align audience perception with performer intent.”

Quite likely, other musicians make use of similar illusions. Pete Townshend’s wind-milling arm may not produce any different sound from an electric guitar than the less flamboyant display of another musician–but that’s not the way we perceive it.

Our brains are so strongly affected by visual stimuli that we literally cannot ignore them…which means that, while recorded music has its uses, it can never replace the impact of hearing, and seeing, music performed live.

Bonus: no silly, uncomfortable earbuds required.

It begins:

What could be better than a wonderful Christmas brunch onstage at the Conexus Arts Centre?

How about a wonderful Christmas brunch followed by a performance by the South Saskatchewan Youth Orchestra?

That’s exactly the hard-to-imagine-a-better-than event scheduled for this Sunday. A silent auction and food kick off the event at 11 a.m., with the concert to follow. Conductor Alan Denike will lead the 45-member orchestra, made up of players whose ages range from 12 to their early 20s, in Peter Warlock’s Capriol Suite, selections from Carmen by Georges Bizet, and Leroy Anderson’s Christmas Festival, before finishing up with sing-along carols.

There’s something surreal about watching a symphony orchestra decked out in iterations of green and white playing Prokofiev and Mendelssohn, but even if clothes make the man, they don’t make (or unmake) the concert, and the Regina Symphony Orchestra gave another terrific performance Saturday night at the Conexus Arts Centre.

The highlight was Prokofiev’s “Second Piano Concerto,” considered one of the most difficult pieces of piano music ever composed — and yet, so well played by soloist Hung-Kuan Chen that if conductor Victor Sawa hadn’t told the audience how difficult it was they might not have suspected it — unless they were among the half of the crowd who could see Chen’s fingers flying up and down the keyboard at a speed that might have made you suspect a camera trick in a filmed performance.

Including directing and being part of the cast of Tent Meeting, Regina Lyric Musical Theatre‘s fall show, which opens next Tuesday, November 3, and runs through November 8 at the Shumiatcher Theatre in the MacKenzie Art Gallery.

I’d tell you about it, but you can read all about it in today’s Regina LeaderPost. The story begins:

Regina Lyric Musical Theatre’s production of the gospel-flavoured musical Tent Meeting opens on Tuesday.

Edward Willett, who is directing and performing in the play, explained that it’s set in the 1930s in a small town in Alberta. The town is in danger of “drying up and blowing away” when a gospel quartet arrives in town to put on a tent meeting.

The leader of the quartet group, Rev. Elroy Phillips, played by Michael W. Hamann, has a history in the town. A local farmer, George Hoveland — played by Willett, who also plays quartet bass Bob Lefsrud — is “watching his fields blow away” and has become bitter. He used to sing gospel music, but lost his faith because of the drought. George’s wife, Dolly — played by Heather Ross, who is also the pianist — is worried about her husband. A bit of a love triangle is one factor involved. Back in the town, Phillips is trying to set everything right.

If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll come see it! Tickets are $25 for adults and $15 for students, and are available at Bach & Beyond or online here (or at the door, if we’re not sold out). Show times are 7:30 p.m. Tuesday through Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday.

It’s a good show. It’d be a sin to miss it!

It’s a cliche, after a concert on a chilly Saskatchewan night, to say something about the performer heating things up inside despite the world outside having turned prematurely white.

But if there were ever a performer to whom that cliche was perfectly suited, it would have to be Robert Michaels, the Juno Award-winning guitarist who joined forces with the Regina Symphony Orchestra for Saturday’s Flamenco Fire concert, the first in this year’s Shumiatcher Pops Series.

From the opening number, it was easy to imagine, as Maestro Victor Sawa suggested, that you were sitting in Spain’s Sierra Nevada mountains sipping sangria as the sun set. Though the repertoire ranged from original compositions by Michaels to a traditional Neopolitan love song, the Mason Williams hit “Classical Gas,” and the Doors’ “Riders on the Storm,” it all had that Flamenco feel, full of fire, frenetic finger work, dramatic chords and melancholy progressions.

For every form of music there are purists who say of certain practitioners, “That’s not really (whatever form of music they’re a purist in).”

Guitarist Robert Michaels admits Flamenco purists might say the same about Flamenco Fire, the concert he’ll perform with the Regina Symphony Orchestra on Saturday.

But the man the Ottawa Sun once dubbed “Flamenco’s version of Led Zeppelin axe-god Jimmy Page” is OK with that.

Saturday’s high-energy show, he says, is “a cross of different styles, everything from Flamenco to Cuban sounding music, as well as Brazilian, even a bit of Italian.” But it’s all infused with Michaels’s Flamenco style.

I’ve just restored my page of music files. These are recordings of myself with various choruses and groups, ranging from the Harding University A Cappella Chorus and Men’s Ensemble up through Midnight Sun (the a cappella group I sang with in the ’9s, the University of Regina Chamber Singers, Livingston Square and Lyric Musical Theatre. There is also a recording of my dad singing Just A Closer Walk and other odds and ends.

Check it out!