Stacy Horn

No one can. He’s the perfect judge.

He tells the truth without the meanness, unlike Simon, and without apology, unlike Jennifer Lopez. I love that he tried to explain to Jennifer what a pentatonic scale is. Next time let him finish. He should give more quick lessons like that. It may sound boring at first—a pentatonic scale??—but if things like this are explained in a non-tedious manner, and I can’t imagine Harry Connick, Jr ever being tedious, music theory and music history can help you become a better singer.

Once, when we were working on Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass, John Maclay (our director) told us how just before Haydn got to work on this particular piece his benefactor fired the entire wind section of the orchestra. “Now what,” Haydn must have thought. So, in certain sections he substituted our voices for those missing instruments. “You’re there doing what a clarinet or oboe would have been doing,” John explained. It was not only a fun fact to know, it helps you sing. If the audience knew this too, like us they’d enjoy the music even more. Knowledge takes music up to 11.

Honestly, I’m pretty blown away at how much I like Harry Connick, Jr. Last week they had a quick shot of him playing with Jennifer’s Lopez’s children and he was so amazing with them I thought, “Oh for the love of God, he’s probably a great dad, too. On top of everything else.”

I started talking about him on Echo and a friend wrote about how she used to see him in the 1980’s at the Knickerbocker in the Village, right before he became famous. Here is part of her wonderfully evocative description.

“He ritualistically set up a tiny cassette player before he started, to record what he did each time … Sweet, serious, played for at least an hour even though there might be ten people there, full volume, full intensity, he’d sing, then pack up his little recorder and go home.

“It was an interesting lesson in taking one’s endeavors seriously regardless of the context, lack of immediate adulation, etc. A committed musican doing his gig every week and trying to keep getting better.”

Then she pointed out this post that was written by someone who was a waitress there at the time. It explains my reaction to him (I also want to know more about the singer Bibi Farber, who wrote it). Now I feel free-er to gush about him, it’s not just me. It also made me appreciate even more the reaction he had to the kid on American Idol who said he was going to do a jazzier version of a Michael Jackson song and then proceded to sing a version that had nothing jazzy about it whatsoever. Those kids trying out for American Idol should pay very, very close attention and follow Harry Connick, Jr’s example of how to work hard and grow as an artist.

I’d given up on American Idol, and I was only watching out of sheer inertia, maybe hope. But Harry Connick, Jr is making it good again.

These are choral singers at a rehearsal at Carnegie Hall, being conducted by composer Eric Whitacre. Whitacre has their complete and undivided attention.

I watched The Daily Show’s interview with documentary filmmaker Roger Ross Williams last night. They talked about his recent film, God Loves Uganda, which is about American evangelicals and their influence and support of Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Bill, a bill that included killing gay people.

Once again I thought of the classic piece from the Onion which came out right after 9/11: God Angrily Clarifies ‘Don’t Kill’ Rule. From the piece:

Responding to recent events on Earth, God, the omniscient creator-deity worshipped by billions of followers of various faiths for more than 6,000 years, angrily clarified His longtime stance against humans killing each other Monday.

“Look, I don’t know, maybe I haven’t made myself completely clear, so for the record, here it is again,” said the Lord, His divine face betraying visible emotion during a press conference near the site of the fallen Twin Towers. “Somehow, people keep coming up with the idea that I want them to kill their neighbor. Well, I don’t. And to be honest, I’m really getting sick and tired of it. Get it straight. Not only do I not want anybody to kill anyone, but I specifically commanded you not to, in really simple terms that anybody ought to be able to understand.”

It’s a brilliant piece, worth reading in its entirety. I will never ever understand how Christians could possibly support a Bill that includes killing people. Although that part of the Bill has now been scaled back to life imprisonment, it called for the death penalty when it was being actively pushed by fundamentalist Christians from American. Even life imprisonment though, and all the rest of it. Do these Christians forget that American was founded and built by people who came here to escape religious persecution?

We had a water main break in the Village yesterday. I took these shots walking home last night. My camera seems to be getting better at night shots. Yes, I realize the answer is I must be getting a little better at taking night shots.

I’m kicking myself for not walking around and taking pictures from the other side of 5th, so I could get shots of this worker’s face. This picture would have been so much better.

We have some splendid pieces on our spring program. There’s the Mozart Requiem, Randall Thompson’s The Last Invocation (which I wrote about in my singing book!) and The Beatitudes by Arvo Part.

And then there’s the Psalm 90 by Charles Ives. We ran through it for the first time last night. I don’t know. It’s beautiful in the last few minutes of the piece, but everything leading up to it?

I trust John Maclay’s judgement though (he’s the director of the Choral Society of Grace Church). Also, I love this one line of instruction that Ives wrote to the singers, about the feeling he’d like to elicit (presumably): “As evolution, quiet, unseen and unheeded, but strong fundamentally.”

Coincidentally, every time I walk to and from choir I pass by where Ives lived when he was first married (70 West 11th). For those who haven’t read my book, I have a section where I describe my walk to choir practice. Except, I see my description of his home was cut! It’s very unlike me to have left the Ives part out because one, he was a composer and two, he lived next door to a cemetery (the Second Cemetery of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue).

I was so sure it was going to turn out that Ives had written Psalm 90 while living there, inspired by the cemetery. But he lived there from 1908 to 1911, and John’s notes say Psalm 90 was written in 1894 and 1902, and revised in 1923-1924.

I took some pictures. My camera isn’t so great with night shots, but that works well when shooting a cemetery, it turns out.

The cemetery is marked with the dates “1805 to 1829” and has twenty-five graves that I can count. I wonder if there’s anyone left alive who still visits the grave of an ancestor here? Here are some of the people who are buried there (most of the remains were removed when the cemetery was reduced to build 11th Street). Oh, here is more information about the cemetery and few more names of those buried there. Victims of yellow fever and malaria were buried there initially.

Ives was also an insurance executive, and his firm, Ives & Myrick, used to be at 38 Nassau Street. I just looked, and there’s a new-ish building there now, alas.

PS: As we went through Psalm 90, there were a few spots where I heard the music from the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol, the one with Alastair Sims. The composer for that score was Richard Addinsell. I wonder if he was influenced by Ives.

A lot of people repeat this quote from Ives’s wife Harmony, saying that the Psalm 90 was “the only one of his works that satisfied him.” But I have been unable to find the source of that quote.

Another cemetery shot. I have to see if it is ever opened for visitors.

Sorry, I haven’t posted because I’ve been distracted. If you missed the pilot, find Enlisted on On Demand and watch it. You’re welcome.

A leftover photograph from last Halloween. Clowns. Shudder. Even tiny, itty bitty clowns (in a coffin) are scary.

Every day I get email about my book, or new reviews on Amazon or Goodreads, or elsewhere, and the feedback has been amazing. Even people who had trouble with parts of my book, like my agnosticism, still have wonderful things to say about the rest of it.

For the record though, the thread about my agnosticism was meant to show that, in the end, the state of my beliefs doesn’t matter. Group singing, and great music, and sacred music, cuts through all of that and unites people of different faiths, or no faith at all. It addresses needs that we all share, and highlights the best in everyone. I am nothing but grateful to the faith that has inspired such important work. I wish that I had done a better job at communicating that.

Thank you everyone for all that you say. You will never know how much it means to me. We all have fears, regrets, disappointments, but thanks to all of you I can look at your words and think I contributed something of value.

The prism light hits the sleeping, taking-a-break-from-general-rampaging, Bleecker.