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12:06 AM
 
12:23 AM
Work day is 7¼ hours, so you’d work 9–5 with a(n unpaid) 45m lunch.
But only +6% for night shift.
Time-and-half for overtime Mon–Thu.
Double-time for overtime Fri and for the first 7¼ on Sat-Sun.
Triple-time for overtime Sat–Sun.
Considering how the Chicago Tribune has always been published seven days a week, I’m sure that contract settlement really pissed off salaried management, or at least the owners. They simply had to pay "all that" all the time as the cost of operating a 7×24 business.
It does seem humane, though.
Except the night shift part; that's hardly very generous. But of course they always ran it.
 
1:14 AM
@Mitch Yes, there was nothing wrong with roast. It makes carrots taste good. It's just too hot...I don't think there's much of a winter anymore.
 
 
3 hours later…
4:34 AM
@tchrist Or they hired deaf men, who were taught printing in school like it was fundamental--because it was a deafening job that hearing men did not want--and paid them as little as possible for as long as possible. My father had to quit on a regular basis (to get a living wage), usually for a few days up to a week. Hearing people couldn't take it for long. I cried and ran for the exit...after a few minutes; it was LOUD.
But my Deaf uncle was a typesetter for The Washington Post and drove a red convertible with white leather interior, so...location matters a lot, I suppose.
 
 
7 hours later…
 
1 hour later…
1:05 PM
@RegDwigнt Because it's there.
But also because the stops/pipes available in the Pedal Organ are different those in other divisions, including being placed differently in the case, which affects the soundscape available.
 
1:27 PM
@AndrewLeach yes but that's not really my point. Or rather, that's sort of precisely my point.
You can play that prelude on twelve broken bikes, or on a cello turned upside down.
That would get you a very different soundscape, too.
But you wouldn't be doing it because of the soundscape.
You'd be doing it because it's a stunt.
 
2:17 PM
0
A: "Soft-peddle" vs. "Soft-pedal": eggcorn blunder or sly play on words?

Susan WozniakI hope someone is still reading this old post because I think that soft pedal of the piano makes no sense. How about soft peddle because it it the

lolwut
Thanks for dropping by, sorry you couldn't finish your
 
 
1 hour later…
3:48 PM
TRANSMISSION ENDED
 
@It'sOver Oh good, I was worried about contagion.
 
They say 54 dead already
 
Why does 2020 suck so much already?
 
@RegDwigнt Some have asked the selfsame "But why?" question for 1007 regarding Edgar Meyer's performance using double-bass.
@It'sOver I have no baseline from which to judge whether this is more lethal than our perennial influenza strains.
 
3:55 PM
I guess that it's lethal and is spreading is enough reason to hate 2020 Jan more than it was ever possible
It's like someone pressed fast forward on the apocalypse
 
2020 is (MX)².
 
Looks down the list We have an alien invasion, a zombie outbreak, and a nuclear fallout pending.
Let's make it a zombie invasion where aliens use nukes to get rid of them.
 
Which, thanks to the miracle of Roman enumeration, is also (MX) × 2.
@It'sOver I see you've been watching The Expanse.
 
I haven't even watched the Inpanse yet.
But something tells me we got the front seat.
I already have 3D glasses on, you see
4
Q: Using elder baby clothes for second baby

NofelOur second one is due in a month or so. We stored our first baby (who is 4 years now.) clothes so we can reuse it but due to Damp in UK and clothes been stored for so long (4 years), I am afraid of reusing it. Are there any concerns or special washing that we should do or should be buying new cl...

 
Storing babies seems abusive of shopkeepers.
 
4:21 PM
@Robusto lol he accidentally the whole.
@It'sOver what video game is that that you're playing?
I just checked behind the sofa and under the carpet, and there was no aliens, zombies or nuculars.
@tchrist oh, make no mistake, Bach of all people would have probably tried that himself first thing in the morning. He was quite notorious for taking his existing pieces and then just completely changing the instrumentation.
So for all we know, he actually tried playing that cello suite on twelve broken bikes or a vuvuzela himself.
On the other hand, maybe it is with just that in mind that we can say, if there's no score of that piece for the vuvuzela, the contrabass, or the organ pedal solo, then he wasn't satisfied with the outcome of that particular experiment and we shouldn't repeat it.
 
4:49 PM
@RegDwigнt Bach scored his 1004 Chaconne for solo violin only, to the best of my knowledge. That has stopped noöne from scoring it for any number of other solo and even ensemble instruments. Do you really think the old man would not have approved of the Segovia transcription for guitar, or of the organ & harpsichord transcriptions (try those on the clavichord!), or of the Brahms one for piano left hand, or of various trio transcriptions and piano accompaniments like from Schumann and Mendelssohn?
Of Busoni though, best not to speak. :)
Of course it is easier to get a bowed string instrument to sing like the human voice than it is a percussive one. I don't know that an ensemble of variously-tuned timpani would do it justice, but who knows.
 
 
3 hours later…
8:24 PM
@tchrist well, in my capacity as someone who has arranged and re-arranged hundreds of pieces for instruments they were never intended to be played on, I take that question to be rhetorical.
 
Oh do you now.
 
With Bach in particular, you can take anything at all that he wrote and give it to any instrument at all. And play it twice the tempo or half the tempo. And it will always sound like music.
I'd go looking for quotes but I rely on the search being thoroughly broken now.
 
Chat search?
It's always been awful.
 
Yeah no, it used to work for me. I was quite proficient at it.
Anyway, that's very much my beef with contemporary, and to a lesser extent XX-century, classical music. That it doesn't allow that flexibility. Very much by design, mind.
 
I wonder nobody's ever arranged Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme for Latin.
 
8:26 PM
Because composers gradually stopped being composers and gradually became sound engineers.
You can't take a late-Stravinsky violin part and give it to a flute. It just won't work.
And don't get me started on Hans Zimmer.
It's not about the music anymore. It's about the sound.
But Bach is always all about music. Even on a vuvuzela.
Which is why he himself would constantly arrange and re-arrange, reduce and orchestrate, butcher and re-use.
 
Hard to have a tune without a melody. And if it has a melody you can whistle it.
 
The Mass in H minor, of course, being the textbook example. Basically a best-of of everything he ever wrote, re-written from scratch.
 
Some argue it's St Matt's but I'm with you on this.
 
So my point above was not that he wouldn't approve. But that quite the contrary, he would actually go and do it himself. All the time. He was awfully prolific at it, too. Wrote a cantata a day like it was nothing.
So then. If you see him settle for this instrument and not that instrument, he must have had some really damn good reason for that.
Precisely because it would actually work on any instrument at all.
In other words, in a weird twist, his choice of instrument weighs all the more precisely because it does not matter one bit.
It would work on a vuvuzela. But he doesn't give it to the vuvuzela. That right there says something.
But yeah me I don't care about approval. Not by Bach not by Chopin. I just take their stuff and run with it. Music is never made by the composer, it's always made by whoever is making it.
Plus they're all dead anyway.
 
Webern never cared.
What composer did?
Vivuzela and kazoo.
This was the one I was thinking of, where Webern passes the line around:
 
8:38 PM
Oh, by the way!
This last Thursday I finally got a copy of the Mass to call all my own.
 
You got Bach to autograph it for you?
 
I've always dreamt of becoming a real boy. Now I am one.
 
Et voilà.
 
@tchrist I haven't checked all the pages just yet. It's a rather thick opus.
Only sight-read the first couple today.
 
How does that edition differ from others?
I know for certain that I own multiple copies of the vocal score.
 
8:42 PM
Well it claims to be the most historically informed reduction incorporating all the latest and greatest state of the research.
 
Ah that.
 
Well yeah, Bärenreiter. That's what they do.
 
Anything you noticed from the first few? Is this annotated with why etc?
 
This one's SATB + piano. Which is quite awesome for me, as I have no room for an organ.
 
Yeah.
 
8:44 PM
The first thing I noticed is how not-trivially-easy-to-sight-read it is.
Thirty seconds in, I started adding pencil marks already.
 
Well but are you actually sight-reading it, given that you know the tune by heart? Or do you mean the piano score rather than the tenor line?
 
@tchrist there's no commentary and no footnotes whatsoever.
 
Ahah.
 
They just incorporate all their findings in the score proper. And then you have to trust them that they know what they're doing.
@tchrist well yes I mean the piano part. As that's the part that I actually play. The other part I just sing.
 
The Willard Palmer edition of WTC1 is especially nice in its scholarly analysis and footnoting cross-referencing all the early editions. Alas it was his lifework and he perished before he got to Book II.
 
8:49 PM
Also, firmly with the basses now. Tenor is just too high. I could sing the first bar and a half, like. Then there's a high G.
 
A=410
 
Yes and that's how we'll be performing it, too. Still too high.
 
I just don't sound good as a bass, although the first tenor lines can really get to me at A=440; can't really shine there.
 
At A=410, that very A right there is totally out of my reach.
 
Now what I am thinking of for doublechoir.
I can't wake up and hit an A. F, maybe.
But give it time and coffee....
Smooths out the vocal cords somehow. Not sure the mechanism.
 
8:52 PM
When we performed the Messiah, I doubled the basses down at the octave. Basically just sang along with the contrabass player.
 
hah
I always sing second tenor when I get the choice.
Or Lead in barbershop, same diff.
 
I can't comfortably get down to the contrabass E, mind. And certainly not to the C.
 
For SSAATTBB it's not like tenor-2 has the better lines, just the ones my voice struggles least with. For Barbershop, they get both.
 
I'm really in no man's land.
For Duruflé, I can't double. Because everyone is in unison all the time.
 
I'm happy to get C3. C2 is unthinkable.
 
8:54 PM
I did try in places, but the choirmaster almost killed me.
 
B♭3 is my last note even on a special day.
Which is lame because that means I really can't quite get a full two octaves, since I never ever can go higher than A4.
 
Well yeah. Short of transposing the entire piece, you just have to know when to keep quiet to at least not mess up what everyone else is doing.
 
Indeed.
 
But with a 100-strong choir, you can basically mime the entire performance, and the audience would be none the wiser.
 
Much harder in a 12- or 16-voice ensemble.
Do you know the Taverner recording of the Mass? One voice per part, save doubling for the Agnus Dei IIIRC.
 
9:01 PM
Well yes.
 
It's not a choral experience per se but it is interesting.
 
Herrenweghe did a historically informed recording of the Motets with just one voice per part.
That's nothing for me. That's for actual people working in the profession.
 
Yeah. We did use the Taverner to learn our own part though.
@RegDwigнt That's really nice.
 
It is fantastic.
 
I can't do it, of course. I need cover.
@RegDwigнt It really is. This one I'm going to let play out.
Thank you for your gift.
 
9:06 PM
I've listened to it a million times when I transcribed the entire score. It's my favorite motet by far.
It's a pain in the ass to listen to on YouTube, because sometimes it gets interrupted by ads.
 
Why did you transcribe it?
Oh, I get no ads ever.
I couldn't stand that.
 
That's good, then.
 
Ad Block Plus tosses out the You Tube spamverts.
 
But otherwise I could just give you the link to the transcription, where the video is embedded as an audio source, so no ads play at all.
Which is how I listened to it.
For the Messiah, I've listened to quite a few performances, and some had ads literally every two minutes.
There's a special place in hell for people who do that.
 
What was your motivation for writing out what you were listening to? It's not like you had to go to the Sistine Chapel to listen to and thence transcribe Allegri’s Miserere the way Mozart did. It's known.
 
9:09 PM
Anyway. Why I transcribed it, is a good question actually. I don't think there was a specific reason really. I just did it.
 
Interesting.
 
But it was very useful in all kinds of respects.
And good training, too. So I'm currently transcribing Duruflé's entire Requiem, and I'm now much more proficient at it.
 
Youtube always offers me choral music on Sundays.
I confess that I often enjoy having the score shown while listening.
 
Well yeah.
And like, mine is synched up with the performance, bar by bar. That's very educational.
 
Lynx?
 
Ta
 

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