#tallis scholars

[dustedmagazine]

Christian Carey's year in review

2023 was pretty much an awful year for our world —climate disaster moves ever more quickly, violence abounds and US politics are a disaster. I would not write a thank you card to the universe for many of my own experiences during the year either. However, I am grateful for the extraordinary music I participated in, heard and wrote about: it was a great solace. A few highlights are below:

I composed three new pieces: Solemn Tollings, for microtonal trumpet and trombone, Just Like You for singing violist, and Cracking Linear Elamite for solo guitar. The latter premiered in December at Loft 393 in Tribeca, played by Dan Lippel.

In addition to editing Sequenza 21 and contributing to Dusted, I authored several reviews and a research article for the British journal Tempo. The article was on my research in narratology as a feature of Elliott Carter’s music, which I have been exploring and publishing on since writing my Ph.D. dissertation. It was great for this particular research, of character-types and interactions in the Fifth String Quartet, to finally see the light of day.

After a half-century of banged up and often unreliable used pianos, my wife Kay got me a new Baldwin grand piano for my 50th birthday. Since it has arrived, I have practically lived in it.

Post-pandemic and post-cancer, I began to dip my toe into attending live events. I went to the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, which was a mixed bag. As compensation, the Boston Symphony performances that weekend were excellent. I attended a great concert at the New York Philharmonic in November and another in December. For many years, Kay and I have made a holiday tradition of seeing the Tallis Scholars at St. Mary the Virgin Church in midtown. It was wonderful to return there. The Tallis Scholars’ performance was splendid, featuring a mass by Clemens non Papa.

After the Tallis concert, Kay was in Nashville, where her parents live, for two weeks, spending time with her brother Tom and sister-in-law Aymara, who were visiting from Qatar (Tom teaches at the Carnegie Mellon University campus there and Aymara is a yoga instructor), and celebrating Christmas with her parents. Here in New Jersey, it was just me and the felines, who were (mostly) well-behaved. To keep the holiday blues at bay, I went all out, decorating a natural tree and the house. I played every carol in the hymnal, and enjoyed old holiday standbys: Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, and Mel Torme’s Christmas albums.

There was much excellent recorded music released this year, and I will not attempt to document it all. Here are twelve records, in no particular order, that I expect will stay with me and be played often in coming years.

2023 Favorite Recordings

Yo La Tengo —  This Stupid World (Matador)

Hilary Hahn —  Eugène Ysaÿe’s Six Sonatas for Violin Solo, op. 27 (DG)

Morton Feldman —  Violin and String Quartet (Another Timbre)

Natural Information Society —  Since Time is Gravity (Eremite)

Leah Bertucci —  Of Shadow and Substance (Self— released)

Juliet Fraser —  What of Words and What of Song (Neos)

Laura Strickling and Daniel Schlosberg —  40@40 (Bright Shiny Things)

Emily Hindricks, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, and Cristian Macelaru perform Liza Lim —  Annunciation Triptych (Kairos)

Bozzini Quartet and Konus Quartett play Jürg Frey​ —  Continuit​é, fragilit​é​, r​é​sonance (elsewhere)

Matana Roberts —  Coin Coin Chapter Five (Constellation)

Chris Forsyth — Solar Motel (self— released)

John Luther Adams —  Darkness and Scattered Light (Cold Blue)

Christian Carey

[hallaslin]

It honestly seems like the things Taash knows about Shathaans experience leaving the Qun is 100% just what Shathaan told them and there's probably a longer story there. You know. Like the very many several instances of "My mother told me/ I heard once" that precedes alot of their banter (esp with Lucanis). So i don't think them saying "the Qun isn't a prison" breaks anything.

A huge part of their story is how they get qunari things wrong, pronounce qunlat wrong, stand wrong, act wrong. So.... idk it seems like really totally missing the point when I see folks using everything Taash says as proof of a retconned to hell Qun.

[sailorgrams]

When ur a breton surrounded by tall-tmer (and nebs)

bonus cary in his adorable rogue armor (nebs is there too i guess)

[onenakedfarmer]

Currently Playing

Jean Mouton (1459-1522) MISSA DICTES MOY TOUTES VOZ PENSÉES

QUIS DABIT OCULIS? (LAMENT FOR ANNA)

AVE MARIA

SALVA NOS, DOMINE

NESCIENS MATER

Peter Phillips The Tallis Scholars

[tejedac]

The Tallis Scholars & Peter Phillips

Discography: playlist Music by Carlo Gesualdo, Heinrich Isaac, Josquin Desprez, Orlando Lassus, Thomas Tallis, Nicolas Gombert, Cipriano de Rore, Tomás Luis de Victoria, Gregorio Allegri, Johannes Ockenghem, Jean Mouton, Cristobal de Morales, Jacon Obrecht, Giovanni Perluigi da Palestrina, John Taverner, William Byrd, etc

[mrbacf]

Palestrina, Missa Papae Marcelli. The Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips

[mozart2006]

Musikfest Stuttgart 2023 - The Tallis Scholars

Foto ©Holger Schneider Tra le molte proposte di valore presenti nel cartellone della Musikfest Stuttgart 2023, il concerto del Tallis Scholars Continue reading Untitled

[beyourselfchulanmaria]

Hymn 1: 0:00 Christ: 2:09 Kyrie II: 4:43 Glory: 6:47 Lord God: 9:10 Who Takes: 10:27 Who sits: 13:15 With the Holy Spirit: 15:19 I believe: 16:13 Crucifixion: 20:35 And again: 21:50 And into the Spirit: 23:35 I confess: 24:29 Saint: 25:50 They are full: 29:36 Hosanna 31:18 On high: 32:18 Blessed: 33:33 Hosanna da capo: 37:35 Lamb of God: 39:50

Love it. xoxo Thanks~*

It is hard to think of any other piece of music quite like the twelve-part ‘Earthquake’ Mass by Antoine Brumel. Both in its employment of twelve voices for almost its entire length and in its musical effects, there is nothing comparable to it in the Renaissance period, even if some of those effects may remind the listener of the forty-part motet Spem in alium by Thomas Tallis. Brumel’s masterpiece did not inaugurate a fashion for massive compositions; but it did quickly establish a formidable reputation for itself, admired throughout central Europe in the sixteenth century as an experiment which could not easily be repeated. It is tribute enough that the only surviving source was copied in Munich under the direct supervision of the late renaissance composer Orlandus Lassus […].

A pupil of Josquin des Prés and one of the leading Franco-Flemish composers around 1500, Brumel was famous throughout the sixteenth century. […] Thomas Morley was probably the last writer to praise Brumel for his skill, the only master he ranked alongside Josquin, making particular reference to his ability in the art of canonic composition. Brumel is important to modern commentators because he was one of the few leading members of the Franco-Flemish school to be genuinely French, which is to say that he was born outside the boundaries of the Burgundian Empire, somewhere near Chartres. He was initially employed in France proper at the Cathedrals of Chartres and Laon and at Notre Dame in Paris where he was responsible for the education of the choirboys. […] There is evidence that he was employed in Geneva, Chambéry and probably Rome; but the high-point of his career was the fifteen years he spent as successor to Josquin and Obrecht at the court of Ferrara (between 1505 and 1520) in the retinue of Alfonso d’Este I.

Brumel’s reputation as a writer of canons would not have been greatly increased by the simple example which underlies the Missa Et ecce terrae motus, for all that the presence of the canon plays an important role in understanding the unusual musical style of the whole. Brumel restricted his quotation of the Easter plainsong antiphon at Lauds, Et ecce terrae motus, to its first seven notes (which set the seven syllables of its title to D-D-B-D-E-D-D), working them in three-part canon between the third bass and the first two tenor parts during some of the Mass’s twelve-part passages. These statements occur in very long notes compared with the surrounding activity and their details may vary slightly from quotation to quotation (for example, which of the three voices begins and what the interval between them may be). By and large, though, the realization of this canonic scaffolding is not rigorous and many of the sections of the mass are free of canon altogether.

However, the influence of these slow-moving notes can be heard throughout the work, whether they are actually there or not, in the solid, slow-changing underlying chords. A casual listener to the Missa Et ecce terrae motus, confused at first by the teeming detail of the rhythmic patterns, may hear only some rather disappointing harmonies. Closer listening will reveal why Brumel chose to write in so many parts: he needed them to decorate his colossal harmonic pillars. In doing so he effectively abandoned polyphony in the sense of independent yet interrelated melodic lines, and resorted to sequences and figurations which were atypical of his time. The effect can even be akin to that of Islamic art: static, non-representational, tirelessly inventive in its use of abstract designs, which are intensified by their repetitive application.

[…]

The Mass is scored for three sopranos, one true alto, five wide-ranging tenors and three basses. The tessitura of all these parts (except perhaps that of the sopranos) is unpredictable to the point of eccentricity. Countertenor II, for example, has a range of two octaves and a tone, the widest vocal range I have ever met in renaissance music."

~Peter Philips

Have you heard Mass today?

Antoine Brumel (c. 1460 – 1512), Missa Et ecce terræ motus

Nicely performed by The Tallis Scholars, Peter Philips, director

[justinspoliticalcorner]

I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump. They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one. According to one journalist’s tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech they wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away “would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment” and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment. Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, AKA most of these pundits. Speaking of coups, we’ve had a couple of late, which perhaps merit attention as we consider who is unfit to hold office. This time around, Trump is not just a celebrity with a lot of sexual assault allegations, bankruptcies and loopily malicious statements, as he was in 2016. He’s a convicted criminal who orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election both through backroom corruption and public lies and through a violent attack on Congress. The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference. [...] Biden is old. He was one kind of appalling in the 27 June debate, listless and sometimes stumbling and muddling his words. But Trump was another kind of appalling, in that almost everything he said was an outrageous lie and some of it was a threat. I get that writing about the monstrosity that is Trump faces the problem that it’s not news; he’s been a monster spouting lurid nonsense all his life (but his political crimes are recent, and his free-associating public soliloquies on sharks, batteries, toilets, water flow and Hannibal Lector, among other topics, are genuinely demented). He’s a racist, a fascist and a rapist (according to a civil-court verdict). We are deciding whether this nation has a future as a more-or-less democratic republic this November, and on that rides the fate of the earth when it comes to acting on climate change. If the US falters at this decisive moment in the climate crisis, it will drag down everyone else’s efforts. Under Trump, it will. But the shocking supreme court decisions this summer and the looming threat of authoritarianism have gotten little ink and air, compared to the hue and cry about Biden’s competence.

Rebecca Solnit at The Guardian on why the pundit class is calling for Joe Biden to suspend his campaign but not Donald Trump to also do the same (07.06.2024).

Rebecca Solnit's opinion column at The Guardian regarding the pundit class's demands for Joe Biden to end his campaign over a bad debate performance but not for Donald Trump to do the same over his 34 felonies is a masterclass.

[dynamite124]

Random question that I just thought of, how does Tally feel about facial hair? As far as I know, there are only two Thalmor agents that have it (Ondolemar and Rulindil) while everyone else in the ranks is clean-shaven. Does he like how it looks on other people? Does he hate how it looks on him? Uniform habits dying hard?

Taliesin doesn't have any notable opinions on facial hair. He thinks Ondolemar's chin hair makes him look very dignified and handsome, and Rulindil's looks very befitting of an Emissary as well as a torturer, intimidating, sharp and handsome.

He personally prefers to remain clean shaven because he looks younger without facial hair.

I don't think there are many custom modded followers with facial hair other than Lucien, Inigo and Gore.

Lucien looks like a properly season scholar, well groomed and mature while still holding on to that youthful spry of any aspiring adventurer.

Inigo looks scruffy, which is purr-fect for a Khajiit.

And Gore's scruff reflects the rough life he's had to endure. Gore is a tough cookie and Taliesin respects that.

[teratocrat]

A single yellow dwarf, unremarkable, of about 1.0218 solar masses. And in its corona, dancing aurora-dragons, ribbons and feathers of nine-colored light, singing and reciting poetry to each other and hitching freezing rides on the asteroids and comets that swing close enough to the star to leap out onto.

One small, dense planet, frosted over with incandescent stormclouds that snow lead flakes onto the slopes of volcanoes whose calderas are choked with galena coral reefs, the bones of colonies of radiation-tolerant extremophilic microorganisms, and where sulfur-swamps coat the lazy tideless beaches of the planet's only ocean, stirred and tilled by people like lanky bundles of black ironstraw, who heap their storehouses high with xanthous dried fusegrass.

One larger, much cooler planet, the calcite gleam of its moon hidden from the surface much of the time by cloudcover. warm, shallow, mildly acidic seas of lavender mucous, tentative marshes of weeping fuschia ferns, translucent lapine blobs with probing antennae that could be eyes or ears or questing tongues, and in the middle of the deepest ocean, a massive gelatinous thing, a superorganism like a rose with its stem plunging down into the volcanic baths of an oceanic rift, a mind from whom all other minds on this planet came and to which they occasionally return, eager to share their stories.

One rocky planet, bitterly cold and with the merest wisps of atmosphere clinging to it. Lifeless, all its water burned off it by baleful solar glare, the vast horizon-spanning saltpan seafloors bone-bare under the violet sky, and its moon hanging above like a clenched fist of black basalt.

An asteroid belt, scattered diamond motes of ice and stone and clay and metals, with three dwarf planets in its embrace, and the largest of them bearing a banner of silver and midnight, a unicorn guarding some alien tree.

A planet one might almost mistake for Earth, for all its snake-necked tortoise-camels and gold-feathered tigermen, for all its gleaming pentagonal ziggurats of diamond and steel, its three space elevators anchored in the emerald forests that girdle the equator, the capital of an interplanetary empire founded at the mouth of an immense river lazily piling hundreds of tons of silt a year into delta marshes, its vast ports berthing wide, flat-bottomed barges hauling iron and salt and sand and cinnabar, barrels of fish and wine and oil and perfumes, tigerman janissaries and scholars and poets and wizards, all tallied and accounted for in the lightning thoughts of supercomputers domesticated by bureaucracy. spaceplanes like silver songbirds or leaping fish ferrying the nobility (who disdain regular shuttle flights from the tips of the space elevators as base transportation for commoners) from the surface of the planet to its moon above, or to any number of gleaming stations in high orbit.

A gas giant, pale as pearl streaked with delicate pink and green pastels, skirted by dozens of captured child-moons, many of them bearing the same unicorn banner, some of them mined for this or that rare earth element, cities buried under the shielding crust of a scant handful, and two of them habitiformed enough to support imperial hunting grounds - managed grasslands or forests full of imported game - and hunting lodges of squat domes and towering spires, mirrored labyrinthine greenhouse-gardens and treasure-vaults of platinum jewelry set with nebula-gems snatched from their condensation-nests in the gas giant's depths.

Another gas giant, the blues and purples of a ripe plum blushing from clouds of midnight-black marbled with gold, icy rings slicing through swirling lunar orbits, merchants and mercenaries and privateers gliding from port to port in their sapphire-hulled ships, out where the empire scrabbles to find purchase. hollowed-out asteroids house cylindrical farms or monasteries of fatalistic leonine faiths or the huddled bodies of wound-down murine clockwork eunuchs, commissioned to advise and amuse some tiger-empress whose phoenix standard had long since faded into obscurity by the time the founder of the unicorn-banner dynasty first rallied soldiers to his cause.

An Earth-sized ball of grey-green ice, glassy smooth surfaces broken up by cryovolcanoes pumping volatiles up from a sooty core to rain down again in miserable pattering drizzles of methane through ammonia blizzards.

An ice giant, the immense azure sphere its inward neighbor might have been were it not for the vagaries of fate as involved in early star system formation, accompanied by seventeen bitterly cold moons whose tides have woven something enormous and ponderous of thought out of the inner sea of supercritical fluids.

a dozen or more dwarf planets of packed stone and ice, swinging through the outer black clouds on vastly elliptical orbits, witnesses to tumbling nickel-iron visitors and alien probes relaying streams of blurry photography and other observations back to some unknown homeworld as they fall endlessly through interstellar space.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Iam not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race – providing wildly asymmetrical and inflammatory coverage of the one candidate running against Donald J Trump.

They have become a stampeding herd producing an avalanche of stories suggesting Biden is unfit, will lose and should go away, at a point in the campaign in which replacing him would likely be somewhere between extremely difficult and utterly catastrophic. They do this while ignoring something every scholar and critic of journalism knows well and every journalist should. As Nikole Hannah-Jones put it: “As media we consistently proclaim that we are just reporting the news when in fact we are driving it. What we cover, how we cover it, determines often what Americans think is important and how they perceive these issues yet we keep pretending it’s not so.” They are not reporting that he is a loser; they are making him one.

According to one journalist’s tally, the New York Times has run 192 stories on the subject since the debate, including 50 editorials and 142 news stories. The Washington Post, which has also gone for saturation coverage, published a resignation speech they wrote for him. Not to be outdone, the New Yorker’s editor-in-chief declared that Biden not going away “would be an act not only of self-delusion but of national endangerment” and had a staff writer suggest that Democrats should use the never-before-deployed 25th amendment.

Since this would have to be led by Vice-President Kamala Harris, it would be a sort of insider coup. And so it goes with what appears to be a journalistic competition to outdo each other in the aggressiveness of the attacks and the unreality of the proposals. It’s a dogpile and a panic, and there is no one more unable to understand their own emotional life, biases and motives than people who are utterly convinced of their own ironclad rationality and objectivity, AKA most of these pundits.

Speaking of coups, we’ve had a couple of late, which perhaps merit attention as we consider who is unfit to hold office. This time around, Trump is not just a celebrity with a lot of sexual assault allegations, bankruptcies and loopily malicious statements, as he was in 2016. He’s a convicted criminal who orchestrated a coup attempt to steal an election both through backroom corruption and public lies and through a violent attack on Congress. The extremist US supreme court justices he selected during his last presidential term themselves staged a coup this very Monday, overthrowing the US constitution itself and the principle that no one is above the law to make presidents into kings, just after legalizing bribery of officials, and dismantling the regulatory state by throwing out the Chevron deference.

Trump’s own former staffers are part of the Heritage Foundation’s team planning to implement Project 25 if he wins, which would finish off our system of government with yet another coup. “We are in the process of the second American revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” said the foundation’s president the other day. This alarms me. So does the behavior of the US mainstream media, which seems more concerned with sabotaging the only thing standing between us and this third coup.

“Why aren’t we talking about Trump’s fascism?” demands the headline of Jeet Heer’s piece in the Nation, to which the answer might be a piece by the Nation’s own editor-in-chief titled “Biden’s patriotic duty” that proposes his duty is to get lost. Sometimes I wonder if all this coverage is because the media knows how to cover a normal problem like a sub-par candidate; they don’t know how to cover something as abnormal and unprecedented as the end of the republic. So for the most part they don’t.

Biden is old. He was one kind of appalling in the 27 June debate, listless and sometimes stumbling and muddling his words. But Trump was another kind of appalling, in that almost everything he said was an outrageous lie and some of it was a threat. I get that writing about the monstrosity that is Trump faces the problem that it’s not news; he’s been a monster spouting lurid nonsense all his life (but his political crimes are recent, and his free-associating public soliloquies on sharks, batteries, toilets, water flow and Hannibal Lector, among other topics, are genuinely demented). He’s a racist, a fascist and a rapist (according to a civil-court verdict).

We are deciding whether this nation has a future as a more-or-less democratic republic this November, and on that rides the fate of the earth when it comes to acting on climate change. If the US falters at this decisive moment in the climate crisis, it will drag down everyone else’s efforts. Under Trump, it will. But the shocking supreme court decisions this summer and the looming threat of authoritarianism have gotten little ink and air, compared to the hue and cry about Biden’s competence.

Few seem to remember that Biden’s age and his verbal gaffes were an issue in the 2020 campaign. Biden is a lifelong stutterer, and the effort to keep his words on track means that he operates under an extra burden with every unscripted answer he gives, particularly under pressure (though he had a long, easygoing conversation with Howard Stern a couple of months ago, in which he discusses his stuttering at about the 1:13 mark).

Some speech pathologists have suggested he may (not does, just may) have a disorder that sometimes accompanies stuttering, called cluttering, which is not an intellectual deficiency but a sometimes hectic and disorderly translation of thoughts into words. In recent months, actual gerontologists have said in print that Biden appears to have normal signs of aging, not signs of dementia. Nevertheless, the amateur armchair diagnosticians have been out in packs, and their confidence in their ability to diagnose from watching TV is itself an alarming delusion. I am not giving Biden a clean bill of health; I’m saying that I don’t have a basis to render a verdict (and neither do the august editors of large publications).

Few seem to remember that Biden’s age and his verbal gaffes were an issue in the 2020 campaign

Although the Biden administration seems to have run extremely well for three and a half years, with a strong cabinet, few scandals and little turnover, a thriving economy and some major legislative accomplishments, the narrative the punditocracy has created suggest we should ignore this record and decide on the basis of the 90-minute debate and reference to newly surfaced swarms of anonymous sources that Biden is incompetent. Quite a lot of them have been running magical-realism fantasy-football scenarios in which it is fun and easy to swap in your favorite substitute candidate. The reality is that it is hard and quite likely to be a terrible mess. Nevertheless, this pretense is supposed to mean that telling a presidential candidate in mid-campaign to get lost is fine.

The main argument against Biden is not that he can’t govern – that would be hard to make given that he seems to have done so for the past years – but that he can’t win the election. But candidates do not win elections by themselves. Elections are won, to state the obvious, by how the electorate turns out and votes. The electorate votes based on how they understand the situation and evaluate the candidates. That is, of course, in large part shaped by the media, as Hannah-Jones points out, and the media is right now campaigning hard for a Democratic party loss. The other term for that is a Republican victory. Few things have terrified and horrified me the way this does.

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

[onenakedfarmer]

Currently Playing

Josquin des Prez MASSES

Malheur me bat

Fortuna desperata

Di Dadi

Une mousse de Biscaye

Peter Phillips The Tallis Scholars

[tejedac]

John Taverner (c. 1490-1545)

Missa Corona Spinea · Dum Transisset Sabbatum · https://spoti.fi/3lWZ8zU

The Tallis Scholars & Peter Phillips (dir)

* Lp info

https://thetallisscholars.co.uk

[mrbacf]

Veja "Tallis: Videte miraculum - Stile Antico" no YouTube