Issue 74

Regular readers of Copper, and especially of Industry News, have no doubt noticed that Ye Increasingly-Olde Editor has an obsessive streak big enough to be seen from space. I credit this to three things: growing up in a household of relentless newspaper folk, being a journalism student in the era right after Watergate, and the tendency innate to every Gemini: always forgive, but never forget.

I mention this as explanation for yet another Industry News piece on Gibson Brands. The company is significant to musicians and audiophiles alike: in addition to manufacturing iconic guitars, the holding company had significant shares in audio companies including Onkyo, Pioneer, TEAC, Esoteric, Cerwin-Vega, and Stanton amongst many others. The bewildering array of companies owned by Gibson can be seen in this chart that was part of the company’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing back in May.

Describing all the fallout of the Gibson bankruptcy would likely require a book, but one major outcome in the audio realm has been Onkyo’s loss of its reciprocal investment in Gibson, which precipitated the subsequent sale of its subsidiary unit, Pioneer Onkyo Europe (POE). Gibson still retains Cerwin-Vega, Stanton, and KRK monitors, but most of its other holdings in consumer audio companies are gone. Full details of Gibson’s reorganization can be found in the 230-page (!) joint reorganization plan submitted in October, and approved by the Federal Bankruptcy court in November.

At this point, what remains to be said about this whole tangled mess? Well, this: Gibson had previously said that the factory located on Beale Street in Memphis would be downsized and moved to a smaller (read: cheaper) facility in Memphis. It now appears that Memphis production of semi-hollowbody guitars will be shut down completely, moved to the main factory four hours east on I-40, in Nashville.

As one who lived in Memphis for 25 years, I can vouch for the longstanding, bitter rivalry between the two cities. Memphians mock the Bible-publishing and insurance heritage of Nashville, and Nashvillians view Memphis as a crude river town with scary music. I can’t imagine that Memphians will view Gibson’s departure as anything but the latest insult from the more-affluent city.

How would you react if you were suddenly face-to-face with one of your idols? I hope you’d be more prepared than I was on that day in 1984.

I remember the first time I laid eyes on Van Halen’s debut album in 1978. The front cover introduced Eddie and his Frankenstein Fender Strat, David “Diamond Dave” Lee Roth with his mic and hairy chest, and Alex Van Halen & Michael Anthony, practically blurred out. I found the album in a stack of promo records at my friend Bill Jr.’s house.

Bill Jr. was the child of a wealthy socialite family. He liked me because I was slightly older and knew all about hard rock bands – he was still into the Bay City Rollers. I was fond of Bill but loved his older sister Nicola who possessed even worse taste in music than her brother – all weepy singer-songwriters, so I could not figure out who owned that heavy Van Halen record. No one wanted it, and lovely Nicola let me take it home. As soon as I heard their version of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” and its intro “Eruption,” Eddie’s solo shredding masterpiece, I was hooked.

For the next six years, Van Halen provided my summer soundtracks. Back then, when other kids went to sleep-away camp, I participated in a bicycling program that took me all through New England, parts of Canada, as well as Northern California and Oregon. We rode all day, ate outdoors, and slept in campgrounds. On occasion, the group would have a layover at a facility that also accommodated RVs, and those places had luxuries like laundry machines, pay showers with hot water, a snack bar and rec hall complete with a jukebox! Electronic entertainment was rare on the road, so a bit of television, a movie, or some current music was a treat.

Depending on the region, there might be a lot more Molly Hatchet and Lynyrd Skynyrd on the jukebox than New York Dolls and Ramones, but Van Halen was universal. I played “Dance the Night Away” (Van Halen II, 1979) during my trip to Vermont, “And the Cradle Will Rock” (Women and Children First, 1980) in Quebec, “Unchained” (Fair Warning, 1981) in Oregon, and multiple cuts off Diver Down (1982) in New Hampshire. With so many kick-ass tracks including “Where Have all the Good Times Gone,” “Cathedral,” “Little Guitars,” “Dancing in the Street,” and “(Oh) Pretty Woman,” I consider Diver Down as Van Halen’s finest record.

In 1984, Van Halen released 1984, and it turned out to be their last album with Roth. “Jump” and “Hot for Teacher” were mainstream smash hits, as well as popular videos on the nascent MTV channel. We didn’t have MTV at my house, but I watched hours of it at my after-school job as a houseboy for a magazine publisher. In addition to walking dogs and running errands, I also worked his events which were attended by many famous people of the day. Manhattan society parties prided themselves on a variety of guests, so it was not unusual to see Andy Warhol, a porn star, and Dr. Ruth Westheimer all crowding around the sushi bar. It was no big deal. Bill Jr.’s parents had equally star-studded parties at their mansion and I followed his example by remaining calm, cool, and collected.

Due to circumstances beyond our control, my family moved from one of Manhattan’s ritziest zip codes to the edge of Hell’s Kitchen, from my own suite on the 12th floor overlooking Park Avenue to living directly above an all-night diner and sleeping on the living room floor. I stuck out in the rough neighborhood with my private school uniform as I dodged sleeping drunks, assorted tough-guys, panhandlers, and the johns who skulked to the bordello over on 10th Avenue at all hours.

My childhood dog, Amy.

One August day in 1984, I was walking our fancy Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, and a young couple appeared accompanied by a man in a suit walking slightly behind them. They had matching blow-out 80’s hairdos. The woman noticed my dog and squatted down, “Awww, what’s your dog’s name?” People always wanted to pet her, and it got a little annoying after a while – especially when they talked to the dog as if it were walking me, but this lady was so sweet, pretty, and familiar. “Amy,” I answered nonchalantly. Then, I looked up and saw the smile. “Hi,” he said through a puff of smoke. My brain was straining to place these faces. I had seen them a thousand times on TV, but I could not process their features fast enough. By the time I was done being flummoxed, it was over. I stood paralyzed as Eddie Van Halen and Valerie Bertinelli (aka Barbara Cooper, America’s sweetheart from One Day at a Time) walked away down 57th street  ̶  likely towards one of the studios that were in that area. It was like starting the best dream of your life just to be robbed of it by the cruel alarm clock of reality.

“Was that really them?” I second-guessed myself, “It was! I can’t believe I was standing right next to Eddie Van Halen and Valerie and I didn’t say anything, not a single word except my dog’s name! I don’t think I even said “hi” back to Eddie. What an idiot!” For the first time in my life, I was overwhelmed by celebrity.

I always regretted not being more engaging and quicker on my feet, but I was 18 and in a bad state. There was a fasting craze going through my school, and all I ingested for a few days was black coffee and clove cigarettes. On top of that, my high school girlfriend broke up with me preemptively in preparation for SUNY New Paltz. And then there was our shitty new apartment in a dingy tenement building. I don’t know what I could have said to Eddie anyway. In my depressed mood, I might have begged him never to break up with my boy-crush Diamond Dave  ̶  there were rumors of personality clashes and beefs over the use of keyboards. But they did break up soon after, and my childhood came crashing to an end: the original Van Halen disbanded, high school was over, my girlfriend was moving on, and I was getting too old for camp.

When Van Halen reunited with Roth for a tour a few years ago, I was there. I never got a chance to see them live, but despite the passage of thirty years, Eddie played seamlessly while smiling his way through the show. It’s amazing how distant summer days came flooding back on that humid night at Jones Beach amphitheater. As an older Dave Lee sang each song, I was suddenly transported to 1978 and hanging out with Bill Jr., since deceased, awaiting each new Van Halen record, cycling  around America carefree, and running into Eddie and Valerie. I told my concert mate the story, savoring it in retrospect. “You saw Valerie BER-TIN-ELLI up close, did you freak out?!” Clearly, my friend Ken would have made a complete idiot of himself as he drooled all over lovely Valerie.

I always wonder how I would react if I had it to do over again. Anything I can think of is so trite. The memory now is almost better because so little happened. Instead of regretting an embarrassing statement, question or action, I can just appreciate how nice that Hollywood couple was to a random dog and star-struck teen on the streets of New York City. It was great to share one quick unforgettable moment with them.

The Year of Couperin is drawing to a close. What, you haven’t celebrated François Couperin’s 350^th birthday yet? There’s still time, and I’ve even got a playlist of new recordings for your party.

Couperin was born in 1668 into a family of musicians as important in France as the Bachs were in Germany. Famed for his virtuosic organ and harpsichord playing, it surely surprised no one that he received prominent positions and commissions in French royal circles. But the most lasting contribution the monarchy made to Couperin’s career and the future of keyboard playing was a 20-year “royal privilege to publish.”

A big merci to Louis XIV for giving Couperin the chance to save for posterity his hundreds of works for harpsichord, organ, small ensemble, and voice. And Couperin’s textbook about how to play the harpsichord, focusing mainly on ornamentation, is a bible for early-music keyboard players.

So many new Couperin recordings and remasters came out in 2018 that I can only give a taste of the several genres Couperin wrote in. It makes sense to start with harpsichord music, which is the best represented in his published books and the most-often played these days. Les Muses Naissantes (Ricercar) is a recording by harpsichordist Brice Sailly and colleagues. Sailly plays a few of Couperin’s solo ordres, which were basically suites of dance-inspired movements similar to those Bach wrote for various instruments.

When you listen to Couperin’s harpsichord music, some good points of merit to focus on are clarity of ornamentation and an organic sense of phrasing. In other words, while the music should be delicately ornate, it should also breathe. It’s easy for a harpsichordist obsessed with getting in all those darn notes to end up with a heavy or robotic sound. Not so Sailly. Here is his masterful, understated rendition of the 20^th Ordre:

Les Muses Naissantes also includes some ensemble works by Couperin played by the 7-person La chambre claire. Soprano Emmanuelle De Negri’s voice has a captivating lilt in this secular song with instrumental accompaniment, which would probably have been used to entertain people at court. Unfortunately, Couperin did not write many such songs, or at least few still exist.

For another approach to Couperin’s keyboard music, try the almost frantically virtuosic playing of Bertrand Cuiller on his new release (which promises to be a series), François Couperin L’Alchimiste: Un petit théâtre du monde – Complete Works for Keyboard, Vol. 1.

Because this recording is on Harmonia Mundi, only a teaser is available on YouTube, but it’s enough to give a sense of Cuiller’s startling and ferocious playing.

You can hear the entire album on Spotify:

The record’s title, The Alchemist: A little theater of the world, refers to the descriptive names that the composer often gave the individual movements of his ordres and the sense it gives us of how colorful life was around courtiers. For example, there’s the second movement of the 11^th Ordre, which the composer titled “Sparkling, or Lady Bontems.” Cuiller is a technical wonder. It might be tempting to discount his playing as nothing but powerful flying fingers, but remember that Couperin himself was prized for his virtuosity. I bet King Louis would have loved this performance.

By no means is Cuiller’s playing all flash; he can strike a meditative mood when needed, for example in the Allemande first movement (nicknamed “L’exquise” – The Exquisite Woman – but for whom? Ooh la la!) of the 27^th Ordre. Yet it doesn’t have quite the organic breathing motion of Sailly’s touch.

These days, historically informed performance (known as “HIP” in the business) is considered the standard for approaching this repertoire. It’s surprising, then, when you hear new recordings that don’t take authenticity into account. I wanted to acknowledge one from a few years ago, newly available on YouTube, by Iddo Bar-Shaï. He plays Couperin on a modern grand piano and with a late nineteenth-century sensibility, especially in terms of rhythm.

The album is called François Couperin – Les Ombres Errantes / Pièces pour Clavecin, and it’s on the Mirare label. I find the interpretation very tender and warm, but I have to constantly stop myself from judging it by the tenets of early-music practice.

One Couperin fan who was fully committed to the composer’s special year is Christophe Rousset, harpsichordist and leader of the ensemble Les Talens Lyrique. Throughout 2018 they have been performing 350^th birthday concerts all over Europe, and they also released a new recording on Aparté of the 1726 set of ensemble works called Les Nations. This often-played collection includes four paired sonatas and suites: La française, L’espagnole, L’impériale, and La piémontaise. So, it’s not exactly about four nations, and all four sound more Italian than anything.

Rousset’s 10-member band plays with earnestness and energy (sometimes a bit too much of both). It’s fun to hear the blending of their Baroque bowed strings, plucked strings, flutes, and reeds – quite a different sound from the modern versions of these instruments. Here’s a live excerpt from L’espagnole.

And you can hear the whole album on Spotify:

Speaking of Les Nations, I would be remiss not to mention an important remastered recording that came out during this birthday year. Longtime leader of the early-music movement, Jordi Savall (viola da gamba), along with other big names like Monica Huggett (violin) and Ton Koopman, recorded Les Nations in 1983, and the album has just been re-released on Alia Vox Heritage.

You won’t find better baroque playing than this. Here’s their exquisite rendition of the Sarabande from Couperin’s First Ordre. They play with such patience and thought, and the ornamentation is so perfectly coordinated among the instruments, it’s like a single being is making multi-timbred music.

And just to prove again that older can be better, here’s a quick look at the impressive François Couperin Edition, a 16-CD set of remastered recordings on Erato/Warner Classics. Among the artists included are harpsichordist Laurence Boulay (whose Couperin has never before been on CD), Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, John Eliot Gardiner, and one of the most important conductors of Baroque vocal music, William Christie. Here is Christie’s group, Les Arts Florissants, featuring sopranos Patricia Petibon and Sophie Daneman performing a genre not often associated with Couperin – a sacred motet:

Monsieur Couperin, you were a man of many talents. Bon anniversaire!

When I was a kid, on Christmas Eve I heard my parents taking presents from an unused room next to the bedroom I shared with my younger brother. The full blown truth of Santa Claus came crashing down on me all at once and at the worst time, right before Christmas morning. I was so shocked I woke my brother, two years my junior, and broke the news to the poor little tyke.

Yes, we were tight my brother and I. 

I have a dream at least once every season where I’m coming home from work on Christmas Eve and as I walk through the door I realize we haven’t picked up a tree or gotten any presents for the kids. We run out to the tree lot (closed) and to the stores for presents (also closed). The feeling is horrid, the dread of seeing the kids in the morning and no tree, no presents. I’m actually sick, looking at the expectant faces of the kids and my wife’s disappointment. Then I wake up. It’s the only good thing about bad dreams; when you wake and realize all is well it’s worth the trip.

The trappings of this glorious holiday are, and always have been, important to my family and help bring the warmth to our holiday. We had poor years when we were kids, and sometimes we got presents that were re-wrapped from last year. But somehow it didn’t matter; it’s not about the presents anyway.

Growing up we never put up the tree until Christmas Eve, a hold-over from the days when the parents put the tree up after the kids went to bed and the story was that Santa brought it. Christmas Eve afternoon after we’d spent four hours harassing Dad he’d go outside to get the tree. Naturally we always bought a tree too big for the cellar stairs and door and often he’d have to cut off so much from the top and bottom that we ended up with more of a Christmas shrub.  The kids’ job was to get up in the weird attic and pull the decorations down while Dad puffed that tree up the stairs and into the living room, all the time broadening our language skills when he barked a foot on something we’d left for him.

We had a 6-foot wooden candy cane that Dad made in his shop that would go over the front door the weekend before Christmas. Pop would train two floodlights on it, one green and one blue. There were houses in our neighborhood that had more lights and decorations, but somehow the sight of your own house and that big stupid candy cane was warm and wonderful. Still a great memory.

Also the weekend before Christmas we’d spray that messy white stuff from a can over stencils in the windows.  That shit started falling off the window immediately and you had to listen to Mom with her ‘never again’ mutterings. The decoration boxes had all the tree stuff but also all those knickknacks that went back to that mystical land where Mom and Dad were children somehow.

We have a house-full today. It takes a full day to pull the crap out of the attic for the outside decorations and to put those up. My son Dean insists on doing this (thank you Lord) because he has his own way. His friend Nathan has been helping him since high school. Nathan lives in Omaha now but he still showed up this year.

Another day is spent on the inside. There are all those damn boxes in the basement in a closet under the stairs. Crap we’ve been gathering for 44 years of marriage. All the normal day-to-day stuff has to come down, the house cleaned and dusted, then out come 4987 Santa and manger figurines, angels, fake silver reindeer, candlesticks and festive candles. There are Christmas bears, various sleighs with reindeer flying to the ceiling. From the poor years when we couldn’t afford to buy decorations there are handmade bulbs, macaroni wise men, candy cane sleds and this tree Diane and I made at one of our first Christmases back in 1978. Still standing, if barely. There’s an Elvis Christmas tree that goes in our bedroom on a hope chest complete with a small village of Grace Mansion, the front gates, and a pink Cadillac with a tree in the back. After 12 hours the junk is all out.

I put the tree up. That includes assembly (we gave up on a live tree years ago), light testing on 15 or 16 strands of bubble lights, old C5’s, blinking candles and stars. Next is the garland, then at last the bulbs. We have two boxes of bulbs, possibly 75 in each box, so many they can’t all go up on the tree. The kids like to help with this part; the sentimentality of these ornaments is a special moment every year. There’s a bulb for each year since 1980, when we moved to Colorado. There’s a Baby’s First Christmas bulb for every child and even one dog. There are bulbs from all the family vacations in New York, Steamboat Springs, Santa Fe, Estes Park, Las Vegas, and campgrounds all over Colorado, Wyoming, and South Dakota. M&M and Coke bottle ornaments from Las Vegas. Santa riding a Harley and sports ornaments for all the teams we collect for. Two from The Christmas Story that have recorded lines from the movie. Several more Elvis’s. Old wooden eggs, ancient bells, and clear icicles.

By the time we get done the damn thing looks like a still shot of an explosion a split second after detonation.

There are globes on the mantels crammed with green, silver, and red paraphernalia. One is a globe we’ve had since the kids were little, depicting a Santa peeking in on a sleeping child. 16 years ago, it sprang a leak and I had to empty it, fill it back up with distilled water then seal it with that red gasket goop you use on engines. But before I sealed it I couldn’t resist signing the back wall.

One year, my daughter Bree made a Santa sleigh and reindeer for Dean out of pipe cleaners. It’s getting hard to move; it wants to fall apart, but it goes on the downstairs mantle every year. Santa appears to have expired 15 years ago with a bad embalming job. A little creepy, but it would have to burst into flame to not get on that mantle.

This year a little panic ensued when we were down to the last box and we hadn’t found my plastic squeaky Santa yet. This little guy sits next to my chair every season. He came from my childhood and I remember him standing on our mantel every year growing up. And as it turns out, every year. When I moved out Mom gave it to me and told me he was bought and placed in my crib on my first Christmas.

I’m 64 years old. Think what a miracle it is we still have him. Now my kids remember him from every year.

Downstairs in the family room we have the village that gets set up on Gramma’s old hope chest. Dean insists on doing this as well, and you’ll lose a hand if you move one item. I move something every year just to piss him off. And yes, he knows where each piece goes.

So why am I boring you with all this drivel about our traditions? I know you all have traditions and decorations in varying degrees. Some of you go as fruitcake as we do, some have just a few decorations, and some do none. Each unto his own. But I recently had someone come into our home and exclaim how lucky we were to have so much stuff. Well we are lucky, that is true. But we didn’t just go out and buy everything; it’s accumulated over 44 years and some even longer. The first village piece started with our first Christmas together, it’s over in the upper right. We add a piece every now and then, and somehow you end up with this hodgepodge. Same with the knickknacks and bulbs. We had plenty of lean years but we just hung onto stuff.

We do enjoy Christmas and appreciate our reminders. The reminders include the Christmases when we had no tree and no presents. One year we couldn’t afford a tree. When a sweet but criminal friend of ours found this out, he raided some rich guy’s yard and cut us a tree. We shouldn’t have kept it but the looks on the kids’ faces…In a few recent years Diane and I didn’t get each other gifts, we sent gifts to the kids but that was all the money we had. It happens. Times are rough sometimes and often for years. Keeping good memories is critical to getting through those times.

The Christmas season brings us the special memories, even the lean ones. Stress is also part of the season but we have to remember the small things that make us happy. The celebration of the birth of the Messiah has ended up being a crazy spell with the shopping, visits, family, food, and generally bad movies. But in between the mall visits and last-minute rushes is the house on the corner where the only decoration is a green porch light bulb. Love that.

Merry Christmas All.

For some reason, The Police are best known today for two particularly creepy songs: “Don’t Stand So Close to Me,” in which ex-teacher Sting references Nabokov’s Lolita while describing a female student’s crush; and “Every Breath You Take,” a favorite song at weddings even though Sting has made clear that it’s about a stalker. I’d say it’s past time for a look back at some other Police tracks!

By coming up with an original blend of rock, fusion jazz, reggae, and punk, the three members of The Police – bassist/singer Sting, drummer Stewart Copeland, and guitarist Andy Summers – helped usher in the British New Wave. They were exactly what a lot of young people were looking for: intelligent, stylish, musically skilled rebels. Hats off to A&M Records for realizing that esoteric can sometimes sell if it comes along at the right time. While the Police made only five studio recordings, all are important works of popular music, and all are on A&M.

With Outlandos d’Amour (1978) the band showed its unique voice, mesmerizing new fans with its plaintive single “Roxanne.” It’s one of the most artistically worthwhile (not to mention best-selling) debut albums ever. In large part, this is thanks to Sting’s emotional but thoughtful songwriting.

Copeland had not yet found his compositional legs, but he is given co-author credit on “Peanuts.” The frantic pace and angry mood of “Peanuts” is a good reminder of The Police’s connection to the burgeoning British punk scene in their early days. Not surprisingly, the drums take center stage in this number about being disappointed in a former hero. The lyrics sung by Sting here are also by him; Copeland had originally composed this song with different words.

It’s also interesting to hear Summers’ hysterical, dissonant scrabbling on the guitar, a style not found in any of the band’s singles. For all their originality and weirdness, The Police don’t usually sound out of control.

The singles “Message in a Bottle” and “Walking on the Moon,” off 1979’s Reggatta de Blanc, proved that Sting’s quirky worldview could consistently appeal to millions. Both of those singles hit number one in Britain and were smashes in the U.S. as well. The Police also won their first Grammy for this record.

Unlike the first album, the tracks on Reggatta are a nearly even mix of Sting and Copeland compositions. “Bed’s Too Big Without You” is Sting’s; it luxuriates in his love of reggae more thoroughly than most of the band’s catalogue. They went all-out in getting that Jamaican vibe, including the reverb associated with bands like Bob Marley and the Wailers and Steel Pulse. Rhythmically, the empty downbeat and double-emphasized second beat of each bar is a classic reggae trope.

We get to hear another side of Summers’ guitar playing on “Bring on the Night.” One of his favorite composers is Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887-1959), important for his intertwining of Western European counterpoint and the guitar traditions of Spain and his native Brazil. The gorgeous fingerpicking patterns Summers plays against Sting’s voice in the verses are meant as a tribute to Villa-Lobos.

Two Grammy Awards awaited the 1980 album Zenyatta Mondatta: Best Duo or Group Rock Vocal Performance (“Don’t Stand So Close to Me”) and Best Rock Performance (“Behind My Camel”). The latter is an Andy Summers composition and one of two instrumental tracks on the album. Although the song is in eight-bar phrases in 4/4 time, the most common configuration in rock music, the bass and drum syncopation lies in an off-kilter relationship with the guitar, making the meter seem complex and uneven. There aren’t many pop tracks with only two chords and just a single eight-bar idea repeated for over three minutes; the result is an authentic impression of trudging along an endless desert.

Zenyatta Mondatta also finds The Police showing their socially conscious side. Sting’s lyrics for “Driven to Tears” confront those who witness suffering in the world and do nothing about it: “How can you say that you’re not responsible? What does it have to do with me?” This might come off as condescending if Sting didn’t seem to be including himself in the guilt: “My comfortable existence / reduced to a shallow, meaningless party.” The rhythmic fluidity of those lines creates a sense of lamentation, like someone so distressed that he blurts out his pain in waves of rambling words.

In their first foray without co-producer Nigel Gray, Ghost in the Machine (1981) paired The Police with Hugh Padgham, who would go on to produce hits with Phil Collins, Human League, and others. The over-bright, synthy production does not do the listener any favors, unfortunately. The singles from this album are an especially energetic group, including “Spirits in the Material World” and “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic,” seemingly intent on emphasizing the pop angle.

While the album’s songs are mostly credited to Sting, there’s less use of reggae rhythms and harmonies than on the earlier records. And it seems like there’s more focus on Sting the rock star than on The Police. One of the non-single tracks features him pouring out his heart in French. He wrote “Hungry for You (J’Aurais Toujours Faim de Toi)” for Trudie Styler, the actress he was having an affair with. The song must have eventually worked: Styler has been married to Sting since 1992. Reportedly, Sting had recently learned to play the saxophone from a do-it-yourself book, and he premiered his (modest) new skills on this track.

 There’s a lot to be said for going out at the top of your game. The band’s final album, Synchronicity (1983), was their best selling and most award-winning. While it produced a pile of hit singles, including “Wrapped around Your Finger,” it’s not an overstatement to say that every track is outstanding.

Consider “Tea in the Sahara,” with its sultry, pulsing bass. Copeland’s syncopated accents on the drums and splash cymbals give this song a hint of bossa nova, diffused into a spacy coolness by the atmospheric electronic effects of guitar and synths.

And that was it for the band. Copeland and Sting were constantly at each other’s throats, and everybody had other things he wanted to do. It was time to stop. The Police took their last tour in 1986, with a brief reunion in 2007. Sting went on to a successful solo career, Copeland has focused on production and composing, and Summers is a photographer.

The Police may be gone, but you can be sure couples will continue using “Every Breath You Take” as their hilariously inappropriate wedding song until the end of time.

Politics.

“Roy, I need you to be on your best behavior,” said my friend Tony who worked for Epos Acoustics, an English loudspeaker company. “I’m going to bring Margaret Beckett to your room at CES. She’s here on a trade mission and I want her to meet companies that import British products

Margaret Becket was leader of the House of Commons under Tony Blair’s Labor Party government in the early 2000s.

“It’s really important that you don’t talk to her unless she asks you a direct question. The British ambassador will accompany her. If you’re on your best behavior, I may be able to get you invited to lunch.”

By chance, we were playing Beatles music when she arrived. So, I gave my presentation joking that as well as importing British Hi-Fi equipment, I only play British music on it. After the presentation, Ms. Beckett asked the usual general questions, and as the conversation was soon lagging, I asked her if she was here to meet President Bush, who had recently been elected.

“Oh no, that’s Tony’s job,” she replied. And then, to keep the conversation going, she added, “I have met Bill Clinton.” At this point, I saw the ambassador wildly gesticulating behind her. He was telling me to shut up. Unfazed I responded, “That’s nothing special, my Mother-in-law has met him twice.” She started to go red and the ambassador, glaring daggers at me, rushed her out of the room.

Curiously, I never was asked to join them for lunch.

Stupidity.

A few years ago, at the High End show in Munich, Germany, a company approached me offering me a way of connecting any of my products to the Internet. This was long before Bluetooth and Wi-Fi became ubiquitous, and although his product was expensive, the technology seemed promising, so I listened to his sales presentation.

He explained that there were five steps the end user would have to do to activate the module.  This seemed a lot for novices like myself, so I suggested that he, as an obviously clever software engineer, build most of these steps into the firmware. He resisted this idea and explained that it was too complicated for him to do.

I pressed him yet again and that’s when he lost his temper. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” he bellowed at me. “You and your kind will soon be dead.”

Stupidity 2.

Stereophile, the Hi-Fi magazine, used to organize shows. The whole Hi-Fi community would exhibit, and they were perfect for networking and schmoozing. One evening, I had arranged to take out a bunch of the magazine’s reviewers for dinner. It was a good group, comprised of John Atkinson (still the editor), Michael Fremer (still the analog guru), my friend Bob Reina (now sadly deceased), Wes Phillips (also gone), my sidekick Leland Leard, and I think one other journalist. We went to a restaurant in Los Angeles called AOC and had a really good meal. We also drank a lot of wine. At the end of the evening, I asked for the check. I expected it to be expensive and it was. The bill read $840, so I added approximately 20% to the bill, as a tip, and rounded the charge up to $1000. We went outside to wait for the taxi and as it had not yet arrived, I went back into the restaurant to use the toilet. My waitress, on seeing me, came over and thanked me gratefully for the generous tip. I told her it was my pleasure and that we all had a great time.

The next morning, Leland and I went out for breakfast. We were staying in Manhattan Beach and walked down towards the sand. We found a restaurant and ate breakfast outside, enjoying the bright California sunshine. When the bill arrived, I took out my credit card to pay and wrapped around it was the receipt from the previous evening. I opened it up, read it, and started laughing. In the restaurant the previous night, the lighting was dim but in that sunlit morning, everything was crystal clear. I looked at the total and the amount read $640. I had given the waitress a $360 tip. No wonder she thanked me so profusely.

What to do? Nothing. I reckoned that both of us got a good story out of my mistake.

This article is about preservation. No one exemplifies this more than the legendary Rolling Stones guitarist, Keith Richards.

Oh, sure, his survival despite years of damage from drug and alcohol use, is as startling as it is humorous. I’m using Keith here simply as a reference that very quickly and cleanly brings a visual into focus in your mind.

Preservation, in my case, covers a variety of subjects: my own body, my guitar collection, my record collection, my Beatles memorabilia collection, and by extension all things emanating from the sixties that tell the story of not only my teenage years, but the incredible period of time (cultural as well as political) that I had the great fortune to grow up in.

It begins not as a preservation story, but as an acquisition story. After all, before you can preserve you have to collect and/or obtain.

Why I thought that what I was living through needed to be to catalogued for the future, is the most intriguing question. I can clearly remember saying to myself, as I was attending one of the dozens of legendary live shows at the Fillmore East concert hall in Manhattan, that what I was watching was going to be talked about in 50 years. That’s why I kept all the Fillmore programs. That’s why I kept all my R. Crumb comics. That’s why I kept newspapers and magazines on the dates that mattered, like the Kennedy and King assassinations, the moon landing (on my birthday no less), Nixon’s resignation, the end of the Vietnam war….

I also kept the paperwork relating to my lawsuit against the NYC Board of Education for violating my constitutional rights for preventing me from handing out an underground newspaper, as well as my pretty horrible report cards.

I have extensive guitar and vinyl collections, as well, which are pretty awesome, if I do say so myself.

The guitars and the albums are always maintained.

Here is what it’s like to preserve and play an album in my house:

I have a record washing machine that I use before I play an album. It takes 6 minutes to wash one. My wife has no patience for this, which is why God created Sonos. When she wants to hear a song, she can push 2 buttons on her phone and have it instantly. Me? After a 6-minute record wash, I then place the album onto the turntable, make the speed adjustment from another piece of gear that controls the motor, set the preamp, the “phono,” and place not one, but 2 record weights on the turntable to stabilize the record so that the needle can pick up everything.

It takes about 10 minutes just to get to the point of placing the tonearm to the album, and since many of my reference albums have been remastered at 45 rpm, not 33, you only get about 14 minutes per side.

Oh, and did I mention the record washing machine cost $4,000, the turntable cost $21,000, the phono cartridge cost $6,000, and the phono preamp that allows the cartridge to connect to the stereo cost $13,000?

That’s  over $40K before the cables and power cords. Not to mention amps and speakers….

Why?

One can play an album pretty quickly and pay a whole lot less— like, say, $200!

I have been into vinyl as a music medium since I was 10 years old, and have followed its playback evolution for the past 60 years. Even after the CD was introduced in 1982, I just knew that vinyl was always superior sounding and the artwork with the album was an art form that could stand on its own.

There is a New Yorker cartoon floating around the internet in my hi-end audio world which shows 2 record collectors admiring a stereo owned by one of the 2 guys. The caption reads:

“The two things that really drew me to vinyl were the expense and the inconvenience.”

In 1825 and 1826, Ludwig van Beethoven was nearing the end of his life. He had fallen ill, was bedridden for over a month, and clearly felt his end was near. But he recovered, and almost in a spirit of gratitude for having being spared, set about composing his Late String Quartets, Nos. 13 – 16, including the Große Fuge, his last known composition. These extraordinary works are widely considered to be among the greatest compositions of the classical period, yet left the wider audiences of the day confused and bewildered. Even so, Schubert himself asked for the Große Fuge to be the last musical work he heard. It duly was … and he declared: “After this, what else is left to be written”.

Following this creative spurt, Beethoven took ill again in December of 1826, and remained weak and bedridden until he passed away on March 26^th. This, in summary, is the official history of Beethoven’s “late period.” But was there more to it than that?

Beethoven’s Große Fuge was originally written as the last movement of his 13^th String Quartet, but at its first performance audiences found it to be too long, too heavy, and altogether quite incomprehensible. Beethoven thought otherwise, and decided instead to use it as the cornerstone of a tenth symphony, one which would explore musical themes and ideas that would really push the boundaries of what was going round and round in Beethoven’s deaf, yet explosively creative head.

Over the summer and autumn of 1826, a five-movement tenth symphony began to come together. The Große Fuge was originally conceived as as the finale, but as the symphony took shape it was moved from the finale to one of the inner movements, orchestrated for string orchestra only. But he just couldn’t make it fit in with the ideas of the symphony he was constructing around it, and eventually he stopped trying to force it, and published it in its final form as Große Fuge, Op. 133.

Meanwhile, the tenth symphony was really progressing well, and if the original Große Fuge received a lukewarm reception in its incarnation as the finale of the 13^th String Quartet, it became clear to Beethoven that this tenth symphony would not be welcomed at all. It really pushed the boundaries of tonality and sonic texture. It employed unusual harmonic progressions and rhythmic extremes that would not again see the light of day until Stravinsky. So Beethoven, even on his best days a disagreeable and irascible personality, determined that he was not going to publish the symphony at all. He had more or less completed the draft score, and wrote over many of the pages how the critics were incapable of understanding true music, and how they were going to go to their own graves, denied the privilege of listening to the greatest of Beethoven’s works.

What Beethoven’s ultimate plan for the symphony was – if any – remains unknown, as his final illness prevented him from executing it, and he declined to leave any instructions acknowledging it. It seems that he was indeed desperate to keep it from his publishers, as he instructed his housekeeper Sali (Rosalie), to keep it hidden from them in the event that he passed away. It is likely he was just being bloody-minded, and had no actual long-range plan at all.

Beethoven had notoriously abusive relationships with a string of housekeepers, of which Rosalie Schott (or Schutz) was the latest. She had an older brother Hubert who worked for one of the publishing firms Beethoven had done business with. Hubert Schutz (he went by Schott later in life, but appears to have been known as Schutz at this time) had heard from his superiors that Beethoven needed a new housekeeper, and suggested to his younger sister that she apply for the position.

At some point it became clear to Sali that her master was not going to recover, and that among his papers nobody but her knew anything of the manuscript for the tenth symphony. And, shortly before his death, she took the manuscript home. Maybe she had nefarious intent, or maybe she was just following her master’s instructions…we can only speculate. But on March 26^th, 1827, Ludwig van Beethoven died, which was a huge event in Vienna, but to Sali’s delight the dust cleared with nobody looking for a tenth symphony.

By this time, Hubert Schott had taken a position with another publishing firm in Graz. Rosalie sent him the manuscript of the tenth symphony, suggesting that Hubert publish it and share the profits with her. But Hubert was horrified by the idea. He felt he had no plausible rationale to explain away his being in possession of an unpublished tenth symphony by the great Ludwig van Beethoven without it reflecting badly on him, let alone how he might profit from the endeavor. By all accounts, he was still no more than a clerk.

At this point, Rosalie disappears from history, and nothing more is known of her, or what became of her. The same would probably also be true of Hubert, except that he proved to be a diligent employee, and by 1861 he emerged as the owner of the music publishing firm H. Schutz of Graz, Austria. The firm, and its owner, had evidently enjoyed some modest success, and Hubert appears to have moved into an address in Kärntnerstraße, Graz, quite a prestigious address at the time. The Schutz family continued to occupy the Kärntnerstraße residence until only an aged spinster remained. When she passed away at the end of WWI, Julius Lichtensteiner moved in and raised a family there, including a grandson Jakob.

Eventually, Jakob inherited the property, and he continued to live there until his retirement in 1991. The property at Kärntnerstraße is (or was … I don’t know if it still exists) too large for him to manage, and he decided to move to a cottage in the countryside. As part of the process, he cleared out the attic, and among the junk he found a leather satchel containing sheafs of old music. For reasons that remain unclear, he decided to sit on this for a few years before he took any notice of what it was. But eventually, he set about examining the musical contents. Jakob was not at all musically inclined, so he could not make anything of the music itself. But after a while, he learned to decipher the scrawled handwriting, and realized that what he had on his hands was something by Beethoven, and whose title was, evidently, “X. Sinfonie.” Even Jakob Lichtensteiner, uneducated as he was in the history of music, realized that a tenth symphony of Beethoven was potentially a very hot property indeed.

Now, you would have to have met Jakob Lichtensteiner – which I have – to understand what followed next. Jakob was one of those people we have all met from time to time. He was basically a clever man, but one who over-estimated his own intelligence. At the same time, he was pathologically suspicious of the motivations of others, while consistently managing to under-estimate their abilities. So, he lived in a permanent state of having tremendous, yet devious plans, which he had no intention of sharing with anyone who might want to steal them from under his nose. Yet, at the same time, you could read him like a book. He must have either earned a tidy sum of money along the way, or inherited it, because he was clearly comfortably off. He chain-smoked, yet was defiantly tee-total.

So where do I come into this story? At that point in time I was still laboring under the youthful delusion that I could be a composer. I was a bit of a computer whiz (for that time, anyway) and I decided that rather than a lack of talent, it was the need of a software suite called Sibelius that was standing in the way of my musical ambitions. So, I bought and installed Sibelius, and a midi player. As a result, I could simply type a musical score into Sibelius, and have the sounds of a synthesized (or sampled) orchestra come out of my speakers. I thought it was just the bee’s knees.

I was doing mostly R&D in semiconductor lasers, and spent a lot of time attending international technical conferences. As part of this I got an invitation to a highly prestigious conference called the “Snowbird Conference,” an invitation-only event in Snowbird, Utah. At this conference, the technical and networking sessions are carefully organized to leave plenty of time for skiing. So, I met a lot of new friends, and did a lot of networking. In particular, I got on very well with an Austrian researcher, Jerome, who was a seriously expert skier, and he guided me through some scary trails that I normally wouldn’t have gone near. In the evening we sat in a hot tub, on the roof, in 3 feet of snow, and I told him all about Sibelius, how you could just enter all the instrumental parts from an orchestral score into it and hear it as it would actually sound played by an orchestra.

I must have made quite an impression, because Jerome’s father happened to be an acquaintance of Jakob Lichtensteiner. Jerome had apparently been fascinated by the Sibelius idea, and told his father. His father, in turn, told Jakob when the latter had expressed some kind of unspecified interest in having musical scores played. Jakob decided that he needed to get in touch with me. Thus it was that, one morning, I got a phone call in my office from a Herr Jakob Lichtensteiner.

Jakob had heard that I had this Sibelius software, and as he happened (!!) to be planning a trip to Montreal, would I be willing to meet him to see if I would be interested in helping him out with a highly confidential research project he was working on, that would require someone to input an orchestral score into Sibelius. I was quite intrigued, and said that if I had time, I would meet up with him when he was in Montreal, and we could discuss his project.

So a few weeks later we met in his downtown hotel room. To cut a very long and very strange conversation short, it eventually transpired that he thought he had the original manuscript of a previously unknown 10^th Symphony by Beethoven. When I expressed skepticism, he went through a detailed account of its provenance (much of which I laid out above). He claimed to have Sali’s letter to Hubert among the papers – the one where she begs him to publish the symphony and share the take with her. In order to protect his “investment” he was not willing to let a group of musicologists see the original score, but he thought if he could get a tape of the score played on a computer, they would be able to judge it based on that. I can’t tell you how ludicrous I thought that was, or how masterful he insisted it was. Naturally, he had left the original score itself at home, but brought with him a sheaf of scrappy 10×8 black & white photographs – one of each page – that he quite clearly had taken, developed, and printed himself, like something out of a 1960’s spy movie. But the image quality itself was very good, so props to him.

I pointed out that this was not a Sunday afternoon project. It would take a long time. And for his part, he was not going to let the photographs out of his sight throughout the entire process. So what we decided was as follows. We would take the opening five pages of music – about 2 minutes worth – and I would work on that over the course of the weekend. He could sit and watch.

So he came round to my house, and we set ourselves up on the computer, which, for reasons lost in the mists of time, was set up on the first floor landing. And he couldn’t smoke, which really irked him. Every 15 minutes, he would gather up his pile of photographs and head out onto the deck for a drag. The weekend was a success. It took all Saturday morning to get Sibelius all set up, with all the instruments and everything, but after that the input itself was plain sailing. We input a solid six-and-a-half minutes of music over the course of two long days, including fragments from each of the five movements. We played the resulting sound over the computer’s speakers (there was no way I was letting him and his tar-laced breath anywhere near my music room) and he pronounced himself delighted. We recorded the six-and-a-half minutes of music onto a cassette tape and he left with it. I don’t know if it occurred to him that I still had the fragments of the score inputted into Sibelius, but he made doubly sure to take all of his photographs with him. If the results were satisfactory, he would make arrangements to come back and complete the score.

I never heard from him again, but what can I say? It sounded like the greatest six-and-a-half minutes Beethoven ever wrote. And one day, somehow, somebody managed to delete the files.

Merry Christmas, everybody. Now, anyone for Pâté de Foie Gras?

On Sunday, December 9^th, my family and I went to Los Angeles’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, to hear the Dream Orchestra and the Opera Chorus of Los Angeles doing a couple of Handel’s shorter pieces and then, the Messiah. The evening was remarkable in so many ways — a real night of firsts.

It was the debut of that orchestra in the cathedral. It might be a stretch to say that the group is a people’s orchestra, but if so, it’s just barely a stretch. In contrast to the now mighty Los Angeles Philharmonic, organizationally it’s much more nimble. (It’s quite a bit smaller, too.) Their stated mission is “to bring classical music performances at the highest level to our communities in a way that is affordable and accessible to all. Great music is truly for everyone.”

Let me try to convey the evening from my family’s perspective. First of all, the audience: we all took note of the incredible blend of people — old AND young, Latinxs, Asians, African-Americans, Jewish-Americans, presumably many Catholic folks. It was like walking down the street during an outdoor festival, but slightly (only slightly) better dressed. This might be the usual cathedral crowd — I wouldn’t know. But it was most certainly different from the crowd that’s usually to be found at an evening concert at Disney Hall.

My daughter made the point that the LA Phil has been trying to bring in a younger crowd, and that if they want to appeal to the broke generation, they’ve got to lower their prices. She has a really solid point. I might wish that we could go see them often, but there’s no way. Once a year is about what we can manage.

Then, the building: like Disney Hall, it’s an ultra-modern statement (although mildly more conservative). I remarked that it was like a stretched Egyptian sarcophagus: long, clean-ish lines — really, really long lines. It’s over 100 feet high inside.

Last, and certainly most, the music: the orchestra began with the Royal Fireworks Overture, and then a composition called “Eternal Source of Light Divine”. The orchestra sounded good — not phenomenal, as we’ve come to expect from the LA Phil in the last 25 years, but good; solid and presentable. But the chorus — man, when they kicked in, one suddenly was aware of what these acoustics were there for.

While speech was entirely comprehensible, voices “raised unto the Lord” had a presence, a power, that’s difficult to describe. There were approximately forty voices, and they were almost invisibly miked (I presume those long conical things in the chandeliers above us were the speakers; otherwise, I have no idea where they were — the presence of the chorus seemed like it was everywhere). This, of course, is one of the purposes of the particular combination of human voices, and a really big space — and Handel, too.  But, jeez, it worked so damn well. I’ve heard bits of the Messiah in other places, but it was never as pervasive as on Sunday night. I could localize the voices if I really tried — or at least, I think I could — but when I just relaxed, they seemed to come from everywhere.

Also, let me note, Handel is extremely good for bopping along to, which I had never noticed before. I discovered myself, pretty early on, more than tapping my toes — and I noted that no one else that I could see was. No one seemed to get into the quality of the groove hurtling along in the same way. But hurtle it does.

There’s, as one would expect, a pipe organ, huge, 4-manual, all the bells etc. It underpinned climaxes perfectly — the “Hallelujah” chorus was especially dramatic, and moved a few folks around me to the point of tears.

Let me note further, for the audiophiles among us, that I was made aware, yet again, of something not quite right in the how the highs are presented to us when we listen to recordings, as opposed to the real thing. In order to penetrate our systems, mid-highs, which are somewhat elevated, sound more like the real thing — despite those mid-highs being lifted. Highs that resemble the natural order don’t present on our systems quite right. For me, the classic example is the RCA recording of Earl Wild and the Boston Pops doing “A Rhapsody on Blue”, heard on the IRS Vs. It hovers in space, like a miniature of reality, DESPITE being a bit brighter than is natural. And that’s true of all the RCAs; “realer than real”, to quote a movie, with the elevated upper midrange of Neumann mics. The event we heard, it was all very natural sounding. And yet I’m confident that if I heard the exact same event through my system, it would sound less real.

In any event: to hear the Messiah sung in this enormous, gorgeous space, felt to me a genuine privilege — one that we shared with a thousand or more of our fellow Angelenos.

It’s that time of year again; maybe you’re still in need of a few things. And so I’m offering this simple phrase (no, sorry!) uh, these can’t-miss gift suggestions, a mix of the familiar and obscure. Which also gives me a chance to mention terrific music I had to cut from previous columns. Nothing’s been freezer-burned. It’s all good.

Nelson Freire: Brahms (Decca). This wonderful collection by the veteran Brazilian pianist appeared in 2017, but I’ve only just caught up with it. Kind of a Greatest (Piano) Hits album, it begins with the symphonically-scaled Sonata No. 3 in F Minor, written when Brahms was 20:

Later in life, Brahms concentrated on short character pieces with abstract titles: intermezzo, capriccio, ballade, rhapsody. Most of Freire’s album consists of those glorious products of the composer’s maturity. Here is some of the meditative Intermezzo in E Major:

Debussy: Les Trois Sonates/The Late Works (Harmonia Mundi). HM is commemorating the Debussy Centenary with albums featuring uniform package design and their best artists. Les Trois Sonates may be especially attractive because its repertoire is less familiar. Isabelle Faust, Alexander Melnikov, Jean-Guihen Queyras, and Antoine Tamestit are among the performers. The violin and cello sonatas receive outstanding treatment, and the Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp is a welcome companion to them.

Tormented by the Great War and the cancer that eventually killed him, Debussy composed little between 1914 and ‘18. But when his depression lifted in 1915, he wrote to a friend that he was “learning music all over again.” Besides the cello and trio sonatas, he completed En blanc et noir for two pianos and twelve Études that summer (neither are on this album, which offers four less-familiar piano works). So let’s hear some of the cello sonata’s mercurial “Sérénade”:

Very inventive, something new under the sun! The violin sonata, composed in 1916 and ’17, cost Debussy far more effort but features another whimsical middle movement:

Whether you’ve been celebrating Debussy all year or you’ve purposely avoided the party, you’ll find music to enjoy here.

Stephen Hough’s Dream Album (Hyperion). I caught Mr. Hough in recital at Atlanta’s Spivey Hall several weeks ago, and it was, as always, a many-splendored treat. As an encore, he offered this, which some of you will recognize instantly:

I knew it, not because I’ve ever heard Desert Island Discs but because my father whistled it nearly every day of his life (the ascending pitch sequence is not that easily mastered!). It’s a tune by Eric Coates, beloved British composer of so-called light music, called “By the Sleepy Lagoon.” American bandleader Harry James made a hit of it in 1942.

This gives you only the merest notion of what’s on the album: you can learn more by clicking on the link above. Suffice to say these are mostly encores, but of a distinctively varied nature reflecting Hough’s own sense of humor, nostalgia, fun. Plus a few showy tracks that remind you of this guy’s phenomenal skill.

Beethoven 3/Strauss (Honeck, Caballero, Pittsburgh SO; Reference Recordings FR-728). These days my favorite “live” symphonic recordings—hot, fresh performances that don’t bust the orchestra’s budget—come from Pittsburgh and Seattle. Hearing almost any of Pittsburgh’s SACDs is the closest thing to being right there in the auditorium. Incidentally, Manfred Honeck may be on his way to offering a complete Beethoven cycle (already in circulation: Beethoven 5 & 7). I certainly liked his “Eroica,” although it may not be the most profound interpretation out there. (And yet the Times listed Honeck’s Funeral March among its 25 Best Classical Tracks of the year, along with some Messiaen and Stockhausen I’ve praised.) What seals the deal is William Caballero and his blazing rendition of Richard Strauss’s Horn Concerto No. 1.

Thousands of Miles (Kate Lindsey, mezzo-soprano; Baptiste Trotignon, piano; Alpha 272). This album was released in mid-2017, and Lindsey/Trotignon have been touring behind it for nearly as long. Though it’s a triumph in every way, I never found a way to work it into a TMT column. Lots of Weill, including five songs Teresa Stratas featured in her famous 1981 LP, The Unknown Kurt Weill. Also: Alma Mahler, Alexander von Zemlinsky, and Erich Korngold, all of whom emigrated from Europe to these shores. It’s music of exile, of bitterness and regret and unquenchable longing. Lindsey brings enviable vocal chops and a ton of style to the project. She’s superbly abetted by Trotignon, a jazz pianist who contributed exquisite arrangements and improvisation. Here is their “Je ne t’aime pas” (English translation here), because no one should die without hearing it:

Joël Grare: Des pas sous la neige (Alpha 436). Strange but comforting sounds. Beginning in 1986 percussionist/composer Grare apprenticed himself to a father-and-son team of master bell-casters in Chamonix, men who have devoted their lives to the “jingle bells and tongued cowbells that adorn [these] animals’ necks, filling the mountain with their chimes.” Over a twenty-year period he managed to assemble a chromatic set of bells with a range of nearly four octaves. The creative result of that journey can be heard on this recording, 18 relatively brief tracks bearing dedications, evocative titles, and pairings with other instruments, exotic and not. Here is a sample from Battements d’ailes dans le brouillard (“The Beating of Wings in the Fog”), of which the composer writes,

The snow envelops the countryside, reinvents it.
The fog, like a magician, makes it vanish.

I’ll cut to the chase: this is the record I’m getting this year for my near and dear. You can certainly buy it as a 96/24 download, but I loved the CD booklet’s poetic liner notes and pictures of instruments and players (though I wish people and pots had been identified). There’s a video that gives you a peek at Grare et cie:

100 Years of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College (King’s College KGS0033). This two-part collection, 27 tracks and nearly two hours’ worth of music, offers “a mix of brand-new performances and historical recordings not heard since the original BBC broadcasts,” according to the press release. Conductors include Sir David Willcocks, Philip Ledger, and the (newly-bearded) Stephen Cleobury. One Amazon curmudgeon has already noted that the title is misleading, since no lessons are read on the recording. It’s carols only, people!

Feel free to go forth and celebrate this lovely tradition anyway. May you find joy and bring it to others this season and in the year to come.