Fortunately popular culture these days has no problem enthusiastically running up a huge artistic deficit. The truth is, the audiences who flock to the kind of “Messiah and more” concerts I’m singing in this year are as much to blame for fetishizing that one “Messiah” chorus as the singers themselves, maybe more so. Or rather, whomever it is who programs all these Christmas events. For these are the people who continuously, year after everloving year, insist on making the Hallelujah chorus the centerpiece of concerts at this time of year. One doesn’t necessarily blame them, but still …

When I was kid, it was an annual event for several rural churches to load up a caravan of church buses on some Sunday afternoon in early to mid-December and head for Flat River, where the Mineral Area Community College music department (actually no slouch of a program for the middle of nowhere Missouri) put on the Messiah. Mostly the bus tended to be full of mothers and grandmas and aunts and sisters … and the few boys (like me) who preferred sotto voce and mezzo forte to Sunday afternoon football.

For community choruses, to sing Handel is almost literally to sing for one’s supper, inasmuch as large portions of the audience might not otherwise sit through “all the other stuff” – the real substance of the performance – to say nothing of buying a ticket in the first place, if those Hallelujahs weren’t on the playbill. But this is not necessarily a bad bargain. Such implicit truces between community and chorus have allowed contemporary composers like John Rutter to get his work out there, perhaps most famously his “What Sweeter Music.”

I first heard this piece 10 years or so ago at Powell Symphony Hall in St. Louis at the annual candlelight Christmas event there, and I was floored by it. My dear friend MNP was singing in the St. Louis Bach Society at the time and to hear the Rutter with the newly developed musical ear that MNP had been training me to cultivate was a revelation. Finally, a Christmas piece (which is part of his Polyphony collection of carols) that manages to capture, without unsubtly pinning down or gracelessly overarticulating, an authentic range of modern feeling about Christmas in musical thought: echoing the English tradition we all associate with holiday music but inflecting it with something newer – something like a post-modern sense of the more complex texture of contemporary holiday ritual, so full as it now is, for better and worse, with a multitude of traditions, beliefs, and unbeliefs. Polyphony, indeed.

Tonight I’m part of a chorus performing Rutter’s “Gloria,” a for more sacerdotal and Latinate composition than “What Sweeter Music.” I find “Gloria” at times rather repetitive and its rhythmic variations often gratuitously obtuse, but then I’m not very discerning when it comes to sacred music. Which means I’m probably just not getting it. Still, I have come to care deeply for it. It’s hard not to love a difficult piece you’ve worked months to … well, not exactly master (there are some “amen” runs in the third movement that have proven almost impervious to my limited skills), but I have summitted the peaks of Rutter, no matter how ungraceful the climbing may be at times.

I am fortunate to sing with a group that takes itself seriously enough to hire professional players for a small orchestra with organ. These people come from among the local symphony and the more musically sophisticated churches in the area. Singing with pros of this caliber can be so delightful as to become distracting. Like playing a fine piano, singing with good players just makes you sound better. And being a very minor part of a complexly interlocking harmonic system is a transcendent experience (it makes me wonder if the gospel artists who have gone bandless over the course of their careers feel their aesthetic experience of the music diminished at all … surely they must, right?). So if you have to end up hallelujahing yourself silly at the end of the evening, this ain’t a bad way to go about it. And as Rutter might say at this point: ah-ah-ah-ah-men.

I wish, though, there was some other way than “cardboard” to describe these miracles of modern engineering, some way to name them that captured how aesthetically and tactilely superior these bi-fold cardboard cases are to their plastic ancestors.

In the first place, they’re environmentally friendlier than the jewel case. But more immediately, their texture is so much more vital and warmer in the hand, the colors and printing so much richer and more saturated and fuller. The layered and pocketed design creates a sense of possibility when you open it, as if there are depths to be explored in the case’s slotted chambers, all kinds of great songs waiting to be described and detailed in that cute little story book of liner notes. The cardboard case feels substantial and looks beautiful in the way the cold, hard, brittle plasticity of the regular cd cases don’t.

But all that’s really just a $15 way of saying that plastic jewel cases have always been pretty crummily designed as packaging technology goes. More often than not the cover cracks and splinters under the strain and stress required to extract the case from the devil-spawned shrink wrap it arrives in. And once freed, the cases break really easily, leaving you with two (or more) pieces of a cd case you have to try to keep together if you don’t want to misplace the liner notes or end up with a damaged disc. And even before the unreliable and often misaligned plastic hinges give out or snap off (which is only a matter of weeks if you open and close the case with any degree of regularity – even less time if you keep it in the car), there’s the tedious task of getting the liner notes back under those four little plastic tabs so the case will click shut properly – a process almost (almost) as existentially infuriating and as soul-murdering as attempting to get that infernal hermetic seal off the top edge of case to begin with.

So far as I can tell, the only artists to adopt cardboard cases are the hip, the indie singers, and a few environmentally friendly types. And if sg holds true to form, it will wait until five years after everyone else adopts this new format before tentatively edging toward it – which means the cd will probably be driven to extinction by iTunes before sg gets around to contemplating cardboard cd cases (in fairness though, the cardboard may be more expensive than plastic … does anyone know?). So I guess I’ll have to prize my Lucinda Williams cd and those two Christine Kane albums all the more in the meantime.

Update: A few commenters have noted that the Collingsworth Family uses “digipacks” (see below and here). And sure enough, there in my stack of “listen to soon” music is a shrink-wrapped digipack from the Cworths. And that’s not all. Reader LR emails to say:

LordSong used the cardboard packaging — not very successfully — on the “Refuse to Be Afraid” project. SG fans didn’t like it very much; the perceived value was low (especially at that time).

Madacy is routinely using digi-paks now (3 CDs for $12.98) for hymns and other gospel music, and they don’t always work smoothly . . . CDs fall out of the spindles, rarely any liner notes, etc.

This sounds more like a comment on Madacy’s vendors and investment in the particular digipacks they use than digipacks generally, but this issue of perceived value seemed worth pulling out.

On the other hand, Reader Tom is no fan of digipacks, no matter the quality:

Call me an old fogey, or perhaps remind me I have OCD, but I prefer the plastic jewel cases. I’ve never had too much trouble with taking care of them so they don’t break, or getting the inserts in carefully and correctly to avoid damaging them. I agree they do tend to get cracked in the mail or somewhere en route to me, and I also share everyone’s disdain for the inventor of the hermetic seal. (Good thing you can easily buy replacement jewel cases for 25 cents at Big Lots!) But the cardboard or digipak cases are much more difficult to take care of. Without the plastic jewel case to preserve the pristine condition of the artwork, you quickly get nicks and scratches and smudges on the actual artwork itself. Anybody taken a look at the vinyl LP shelf at Goodwill lately to observe how well cardboard packaging holds up over time? Anybody up for some moderate ringwear and 4″ split seams?

]]> http://averyfineline.com/2007/05/17/slightly-ot-cd-packaging/feed/ http://averyfineline.com/2007/05/12/slightly-ot-pandora/ http://averyfineline.com/2007/05/12/slightly-ot-pandora/#comments Sat, 12 May 2007 21:41:58 +0000 Avery http://averyfineline.com/2007/05/12/slightly-ot-pandora/ A hip friend of mine turned Averyfineline HQ onto Pandora, part of the Music Genome Project (the interns are also atwitter over the Roku, but that’s another story). The basic idea is that you plug in some of your favorite kinds of music or artists and Pandora custom builds an aggregating “station” that pulls music in the style of your designated genre or artist from contributing internet radio stations. It’s not a perfect process. What the Pandora genie thinks is “related” to Bill Gaither, for instance, is often hi-freaking-larious. But if you’re a tech head or music geek, you get hours of fun out of building a custom station around an artist or two and then morphing it by adding, subtracting or changing artists in the aggregator’s base line (I added Diana Krall and Dolly Parton into a custom station built initially around Annie Lenox and suddenly started getting a bunch of big-band vocal standards sung by brassy voiced women. Hmmm). I though I’d mention it now in case the Copyright Board has its way and pretty much disappears Pandora and projects like it.

1. Turn off your cell phone.

1a. If your cell phone does ring, be very ashamed and humiliated and hope that you live long enough to repay all the bad cosmic debt you racked up in the process, but for the love of Romantic piano concertos everywhere, don’t just let it ring. If you can’t find it in your handbag or jacket pocket, stomp or punch in the general vicinity until it stops. Buying a new cellphone is a fraction of the price you should have to pay. Don’t pretend it’s not you; we all know the truth. You weren’t listening or you were late or you’re just inconsiderate and you didn’t turn your ringer off. Honestly.

I know it’s prohibitively troublesome to put cellphone jammers in concert halls, but I don’t think it’s too draconian to do a high-tech version of what happens at the U.S. Capitol these days: you surrender your pager or phone to the guard desk before entering the House or Senate chamber, you’re given a number and an attendant will come get you if ask them to when your phone rings. Why not up the octane on this idea a bit and give a house pager to those people who need one – doctors and other on-call professionals and people with sufficiently exigent circumstances (sufficiently, because if you can get to the symphony, life can’t be that exigent at the moment). If it goes off, you get up and go check it. Not perfect but better than hearing that annoying default ringtone for Cingular phones bleat on and on. Just when you think that’s the last one … DEN-UH-nuhnuh, DEN-UH-nuhnuh, DEN-UH-nuhnuh nuh.

2. Don’t wear jangly bangles to a classical music event. I attended a musical recently where there was a hardcandy wrapper scourge. But the woman behind me had on one of those sets of a dozen or so thin brittle arm bracelets that clanged like wind chimes every time she breathed and put any hardcandy wrapper to shame as noise pollution goes. It’s Brahams for piano and orchestra, not piano and metal arm jewelry. At least that’s what I told her with my dirty looks.

Though Pentecostalism, a strain of evangelical Christianity, was born a century ago in Kansas and is often associated with the stereotypical “holy rollers” of the Bible Belt, it has made deep inroads in Asia and Africa. In this hemisphere, its numbers and growth are strongest among Latinos in the United States and in Latin America, where it is eroding the traditional dominance of the Roman Catholic Church.

Experts believe there are roughly 400 million Pentecostals worldwide, and this year, the number in the city is expected to surpass 850,000 — about one in every 10 New Yorkers, one-third of them Hispanic. Precise numbers, however, are hard to come by because there are scores of denominations and no central governing body.

Although several large Pentecostal organizations like the Assemblies of God have bureaucracies, colleges and legions of missionaries, about 80 percent of all Pentecostals belong to small or independent congregations. They have aggressively courted the poor, and imparted a work ethic that is nudging their members into the middle class and beyond.

[snip]

the gloom is tempered by a noisy, collective joy born of the belief that the faithful will be blessed in this world and the next. That joy lends a sense of freedom, and often abandon, to services at the Ark, where people break into song or their own spur-of-the-moment prayers.

[snip]

Music flows through everything [at one Pentecostal church for Hispanics in NY] — not solemn hymns, but brassy Caribbean tunes. In fact, some sound exactly like the songs that hard-core members condemn — the pop and salsa on Spanish-language radio — but with religious lyrics that are repeated so breathlessly that some singers faint.

That ability to harness the local music and culture is one reason for Pentecostalism’s swift spread around the world.

“It takes in everything and absorbs it,” said the Rev. Dale T. Irvin, president of the New York Theological Seminary. “You get as a result this extraordinary emergence of churches.”

In New York, the ranks of Pentecostals have grown 45 percent since 1995, said Tony Carnes, president of the International Research Institute on Values Changes in New York City, an independent group financed largely by foundations that has been surveying churches since 1989.

Pentecostals became the city’s largest group of born-again Christians in the mid-1990s, and within a few years, a new storefront church was opening every three weeks in the South Bronx, he said. The 9/11 attacks set off a fresh growth spurt.

Another factor in that growth worldwide is the way the faith reaches out to people on society’s edges and gives them vital roles. Unlike Catholics and some evangelical Christians, Pentecostals let women preach and lead; Mr. Florian’s co-pastor is his wife, Mirian. The humblest member can take the pulpit to share testimony, a prayer or a poem. Recently, an 8-year-old girl preached excitedly to a rapt congregation, then laid her hands in blessing on a new convert.

The Christmas Warriors would have you believe that in the age of George “Jesus Changed My Life” Bush, secularism is newly on the march. Godless liberals, they suggest, have introduced the exotic phrase happy holidays into the lexicon and, in their spare time, have crassly commercialized the sacred observance of Christ’s birth. Actually, it’s these extremists who have grown newly assertive. They object to widespread holiday practices that have been deeply embedded in American life for decades.

Greenberg also points out helpfully that it was a Republican president (Eisenhower) who first made “Happy Holidays” the offical presidential greeting during this season (and that many other presidents, including Ronald “Shining City on a Hill” Reagan, followed Eisenhower’s lead). But history aside, I just always get the feeling that fighting the Christmas War is a painless way for a lot of Christians to paper over (or atone for) their own complicity in the commercialization of the Christmas holidays.

Update: now here’s a front of the War on Christmas we can all get behind: Disney copyrighting Santa Claus.  Ho-ho-horrible.