My next project is an odd one for me. I’m taking a course in Gregorian chant, and each time we sing a sanctus (holy, holy, holy…), I just get the feeling I should be singing in Hebrew instead of Latin. So I thought, maybe I’ll set the Kedusha in a Gregorian chant style one day. I shared the idea with a friend in February, and she said, ooh ooh, my old voice teacher would love that! So she put us in touch.

A brainstorming session later, and now I’m working on a piece to be premiered at Jane’s vocal workshop in Croatia, in late June. And because of the Balkan setting, I find myself now not only setting the kedusha as Gregorian chant, but also adding the Old Church, or just plain Church Slavonic version of the sanctus, and also whatever version of the prayer I can find in Arabic. The idea is basically to “surprise” the largely-Catholic audience with Catholic-sounding music in the sacred languages of the two other large religions in the region, plus my own tradition, which also has deep roots in the Balkans. This is the sort of thing that I think I’d normally find silly, but for whatever reason, I’m getting more and more into it.

I’m still looking for the right Slavonic and Arabic texts. I’ve established that the Orthodox church uses the holy, holy, holy bit, but I haven’t found it in side-by-side translation with the Cyrillic (which thanks to my trip though the Balkans last year, I can sort of decipher, slowly). And the Arabic is proving to be a mess. Not only does holy, holy, holy not seem appear in the Quran, but, it would apparently be worse if it did.

I’ve been communicating with an Iranian friend who has lived in the US for the past dozen years trying to figure out what sort of text to use for the piece. The first thing he told me was that he didn’t think he’d ever seen holy, holy, holy in the Quran. But he continued, introducing me to the idea of “Ghena.” The definition of Ghena (at least in the Shia world) is subjective and open to interpretation by individual members of the Muslim clergy, but the main idea is that the Quran shouldn’t be set to music in certain ways. (more…)

The tea shop outside our building hosts a band each Sunday morning. It’s a big shopping time in our neighborhood, since most stores close at around 1pm, and everything is closed on Mondays. Normally, when I walk out the door on the way to the green market, I’m serenaded by chanson française, or something a little like Mahler’s second exploit, or maybe if the band is being really edgy, they might be playing something like Puff the Magic Dragon. All family-friendly stuff designed to get the kids to stop and listen and dance and cry a little bit, thereby sucking mom and dad into the cute tea shop.

This morning, I left the house and immediately burst out laughing because the band was playing Sweet Child O’ Mine. It was embarrassing, especially since I was still laughing when I crossed in front of the band. I wasn’t laughing because I don’t like the song (as I confided to Sarah a few days ago, though I probably shouldn’t admit to it here, Sweet Child o’ Mine is probably a candidate for my five favorite pop songs ever - but in my defense there are probably one or two hundred contenders for the list and I don’t know how I’d possibly narrow it down). It wasn’t even because it was incredibly bad - they weren’t exactly a great band (and the drummer was playing some sort of African-looking lap-drum, which didn’t help), but they played passably - but because of how unexpected it was. Last week was Klezmer, so for some reason I was really expecting the same thing again, and when it turned out to be cheesy but excellent 80s hard rock, it made me laugh.

When I go running, I’ve found that the best breathing pattern for me is to breath in for 2 steps and out for 3. In other words, I jog in a 2+3 mixed meter. I don’t run with headphones, but I typically have a tune in my head, and it tends to be the same one each time, possibly because there isn’t that much 5/4 music to choose from. Back in New York, I typically ran to a distorted version of a Brahms symphonic movement. I started running again semi-regularly again here in Paris at about the same time that all my tonal writing assignments were reminding me of Tchaikovsky’s 6th. So now I’m running with the second movement, the waltz-out-of-whack, of that piece, and I’m finding that it’s the second theme, the sad one but also the more repetitive and obsessive one, where I get stuck. Because jogging is a repetitive and obsessive activity, and more than a little sad, no?

Does anyone else think about this sort of thing while exercising? I know it’s weird enough to be thinking about classical music while running (don’t most people put on heavy metal or (contemporary) dance music?) - but how about this mixed meter thing? Should I be trying to jog in 5 while listening to music in 4 in order to improve my feeling for polymeter? (as though running isn’t already enough of an “it’s good for me” activity)