Stacy Horn

I just watched this brief video of a discussion between composer Nico Muhly and Ira Glass at the New York Public Library. Muhly is talking about his issue with traditional Christmas music and a piece he wrote to counter that. Watch it! It’s very short and you get an inside look at a very original piece of music.

We performed the piece he’s talking about last year for our holiday concert. The direction he gives the choir for the section he discusses is: “freely – do not coordinate with other singers – ecstatic.”

Each section has a note and every individual singer can do whatever they want with their note as long as it’s nothing like what the other singers around the singer are doing with their notes. Here’s what I wrote about the experience:

“It should sound like a mess, but it does this pulsating, expanding and contracting … thing.  It’s like a singing choir traveling through a bunch of different universes, and the sound warps and changes depending on the physics of the universe they are in at the time. It’s an incredible result for such a simple thing.  But why he does this is even better.  He wants us to represent a crowd of different ages, sizes, genders, backgrounds, all proclaiming Gloria in excelsis Deo (Glory to God in the highest) each in our own unique way … it it effectively moves from spookiness, mystery, tenderness, love, to exaltation.”

Bleecker sitting on a chair above Finney. You can just feel the inherent danger in this arrangement. That dangling paw … a swipe is imminent.

Happy holidays from me and the boys! Thank you for visiting with us throughout the year!

I looked for listings for all my favorite Christmas shows, and unfortunately, most of them are not airing. I could see a lot of them on Hulu or YouTube for $$$, but somehow that takes the fun out of it. I’m not sure why.

But I found enough to make me happy. I’ve already seen the Bones episode, The Santa in the Slush. The two Sports Night Christmas episodes are airing today!! (The Six Southern Gentlemen of Tennessee and The Reunion.) The Newsradio episode Xmas Story is on YouTube for free, and the Grey’s Anatomy episode, Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer, airs on January 6th (a post holiday treat).

I’ve got a holiday party to go to later tonight that I’m looking forward to. The hosts are two sisters who have lived in the Village forever—they grew up here, and one of them used to be my neighbor. In fact, another of my other former neighbors used to be one of their babysitters. They have a wonderful array of interesting, very likable friends and they asked me to bring music for singing! Oh yeah.

Tiny Christmas trees. These must be the tops of bigger trees, which makes me a little sad. Were entire trees sacrificed to make these desktop versions? Or maybe the trees were damaged and this was what they were able to salvage.

I took this while my choir was caroling in front of Grace Church last week. I think it’s kinda interesting because I’m shooting it from within the choir, and depending on where I point my camera, you might hear an alto or a tenor, etc. (we don’t sing in sections). In fact, there were no sopranos anywhere near me (I’m a soprano) and I didn’t do so well on the descants as a result. I didn’t remember them so much and I’m pretty sure I hit a few bad notes. (Sorry people who sang nearby me.)

This was the first picture I took on my Christmas Window Display walk. It’s a couple of NYPD guys standing in front of the Apple store on 14th Street holding machine guns.

As I said, not one window blew me away. But this year interactivity was the theme. A lot of the displays involved an interactive element. I wondered if students or alumni of the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU (ITP) were involved. They’ve had shows every year for decades featuring work like this.

This was a popular one. It would take your picture, and then people would take pictures of their picture. All I could think about was how poor the quality of the picture of the picture would be.

I had more fun watching people. There were a lot of children but I didn’t get the sense that most of the windows were geared towards children.

I was behind these guys for a while. Adorable.

I liked the windows that did what they normally do, showcase a product.

This was kinda cool, this glittering serpent thing wrapped around the building.

And I always love the Tiffany windows. They’re very small and so you have to come in close, which the window artist uses to create a sense of intimacy. Oh, you can see the serpent thing in the reflection!

I went out to photograph Christmas window displays, but this non-holiday window turned out to be my favorite. I’m sorry to say that not one window out there blew my mind. Not even Barney’s, although I loved the sound effects in one. I’ll post a few of them later in any case. The people viewing the windows are fun to see.