For the past several days, the Nocturne (or Notturno) from Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” has been in my head– specifically the opening theme played on the horns (youtube). There’s a mixture of sadness, resignation, hope, and resolve in those simple opening phrases. This is one of the few pieces for me where I can actually appreciate the horns for the subtle yet complex colors they’re capable of crafting out of their seemingly cold and metallic shells. Although I suppose context also plays an undeniable role in how I interpret the piece.

I don’t know if anyone has been paying attention, but there’s been some interesting background music being played at the Olympic games this year. In the beach volleyball games, in between points, they played Naruto theme music a couple times. And just now, as NBC introduced the men’s basketball gold medal match, they played theme music from The Prince of Egypt.

The New York Times has an interesting article on the increasing prevalence of Western classical music in China, including the reasons for its popularity and the challenges classical music students face growing up in China. It’s fascinating to me, having been both Chinese and a classical music student for as long as I can remember.

At first I thought this was nothing more than a joke created by a third grader considering the atrocious website design, but it turns out to be the real deal. The RIAA has just launched a website that allows people to settle their lawsuits online. Not only is this convenient for the students and little kids targeted by the RIAA, it also streamlines the RIAA’s extortion process and probably saves a few trees as well. Plus, they take Mastercard, VISA, and Discover. What’s not to love? They even have a nice FAQ page where they answer questions such as:

How are P2P copyright infringers identified for lawsuits?
They are initially identified by their Internet Protocol (IP) address – the Internet address that the computer uses to communicate.

which seems to fit in nicely with their privacy statement:

This Web Site collects… non-personally identifiable information (for example, this can include your domain name, browser version, service provider, and/or IP address).

Brilliant.

That’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think about the Sennheiser HD595 headphones I recently purchased and am now using at work to help drown out the noise and get through the daily deluge of ennui. A vast improvement over my old pair of Sony MDR-V500s, these Senns sound a lot sweeter and clearer– I’m able to hear harmonies and subtleties in texture that I’ve never heard before with other headphones– and they are oh-so-much-more comfortable. I can actually wear these headphones for hours without my ears aching. It’s cliché, I know, but I can honestly say I’m rediscovering my music collection with these babies. Work has been really stressful and downright aggravating lately, so I’m just glad I have something to help get me through the workday.

I really need to do this more, to get out and take advantage of what NYC has to offer. Once I leave this area, I don’t want to regret not having done enough of the things that people who live around NYC so often take for granted. Thankfully, the oportunity to meet up with my friend Suanne, whom I hadn’t seen since last winter in Taipei, was motivation enough to get me onto a train and into the city today.

We met up at the MOMA, this being my first visit to this museum, and meandered around a bit before heading over to the Munch exhibit. Like so many other notable artists, tragedy in Munch’s life seems to fuel most of the emotions pervading his works. Why do you suppose that is? Is it because sadness and angst beg to be voiced, demand to be heard, more so than joy and happiness? Or is it because we as spectators are overly zealous in recognizing misfortune to the extent that we revel in dejected company. Or maybe it’s simply because we acknowledge more that with which we can more easily identify. Or maybe I’m just a cynic with terrible grammar ;) Anyway, back at the MOMA I spotted a Judd sculpture I remember seeing back at the Tate Modern in London. He describes his work as “the simple expression of complex thought,” but it just looks like a bunch of colored blocks to me.

Afterwards we had dinner at Sushi Yasuda, which I highly recommend. The service is friendly, the fish is deliciously fresh, and the prices are reasonable. The traditional atmosphere of the restaurant is also a refreshing break from the hustle and bustle of the city.

After dinner we took a taxi over to the Lincoln Center to be entertained by the New York Philharmonic and pianist Gabriela Montero. The nyphil performed Schubert’s fifth symphony, Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, and Ravel’s La Valse. I’d never heard (or at least didn’t recognize) the Schubert, and I don’t really care for Schoenberg’s twelve-tone aberrations, but La Valse I’d played once before during my short stint with the Princeton University Orchestra. I like La Valse– it’s colorful, dynamic, expressive, and historically relavent, and I thoguht the nyphil did a pretty good job with it. Gabriela Montero performed Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and boy was I jealous afterwards– and that’s a good thing, because it motivates me to pick up the piano again. I’ve stumbled through the 18th variation in the past, but hearing performances like this makes me want to go back and learn it properly.

I’m in the process of backing up my entire CD collection as well as organizing all the media on my server at home. I use simple directory structures and a homebrew database driven catalog program to manage my collections. For example, I have a directory called “Broadway” where I keep all my (on and off) Broadway related media, with each album in its own folder, such as:

Broadway/(Les Miserables) London Cast/03. One Day More.ape

Pretty simple and straightforward. However, unnerving complications arise when I get to my classical albums, which more often than not feature works from multiple composers and sometimes performances from multiple artists. How does one go about arranging these in a simple directory structure? I am NOT going to create path names like:

Classical/(Saint-Saens, Tchaikovsky, Faure, Bruch) [Han-na Chang, Rostropovich, LSO] - Cello Concerto No.1, Variations on a Rocco Theme, Elegie op.24, Kol Nidrei op.47/10. Cello Concerto No.1 [I. Allegro non troppo].ape

Talk about ridiculous!

At one point in time I tried sorting solely based on composer, requiring me to dissect apart most of my CD albums. This provided a nice, consistent naming scheme, along the lines of

Classical/Sibelius/(Midori) - Violin Concerto Op.47 [I. Allegro].ape

and the like. However, as time went on, having tracks that used to be in the same CD location now in different folder locations became too confusing. Plus it was messy dealing with identical pieces performed by the same artist in different venues. So I eventually scrapped that idea.

There is the option of ditching the dependence on directory names altogether and relying solely on my database application to arrange, sort, and find albums and tracks, but that creates a layer of abstraction that basically leaves me totally dependent on the application, an idea with which I am not comfortable.

So, here I am trying to figure out a decent way to organize my classical music files, but with very little progress. Anyone out there who has faced this problem before care to share their solutions?

I haven’t done much gaming in a long time with work being busy and all. So this past Saturday when I picked up Disgaea again for the first time in months, I submerged myself in level-uping goodness until 5am. I transmigrated several characters a couple times and am now working on leveling up a legendary Arcadia and a legendary Chakra Belt.

So, after three hours of sleep, I got up and went into the city to meet up with my cousin. We visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had lunch at a Cosi, and saw The Lion King on Broadway. The show provided some new music in the African-Disney hybrid style, i.e. strong solo voices tackling chromatic intervals, organic sounding wind and synth, tonic bass and percussive ostinato. Recapitulation of the solo voice from a swelling chorus was also used to produce some rather nice effects. The costume and set design were wonderfully done, though the voices seemed a bit weak at times. And then there was the rather ridiculous scene where Mufasa is trying to explain the “circle of life” to Simba:

“You must respect all life, Simba; the birds, the zebras, the deer…”
“But don’t we eat the deer?”
“Well, you see son, when we lions die, our bodies become food for the earth, which helps the grass grow, and the deer eat the grass. It’s the circle of life.”

My ass.

“Mommy, why did the bad man kill daddy and pillage his corpse?”
“Well, you see son, daddy was a judge. When bad people kill people like daddy, they have to go to court, which helps people like daddy earn money and feed their families. It’s the circle of life.”