Music

It’s a Small World After All

I’ve mentioned before that one of my favorite musicians is Kayla Ringelheim — who, by the way, has two new songs you should first hear on her site and then buy on iTunes (total cost: $2.00; total value: priceless).

I’ve also mentioned before that one of my favorite poets is Sarah Kay — who, by the way, has a new (to me) poem called Peacocks you should watch online.

I occasionally search YouTube and Google for new performances from some of my favorite artists (including these two), and I do often find new content there.  I’m wholeheartedly in favor of paying for the work any artist labors to create, but I’ve also learned that new music from local artists (in particular) tends to appear on YouTube long before it’s available to purchase anywhere.

In the process, I also occasionally find sites that mention a performer’s name in some other context, without offering any glimpse into recent or upcoming performances.  For example, a search for Ms. Ringelheim some months ago found a page at Brown University describing some group where she was a member.  That’s interesting to people at Brown, but when looking for new music (as opposed to… what’s that word… “stalking”) it’s not especially helpful.

Then I searched for Ms. Kay this evening and the very same page turned up.  This got my attention.

It turns out to belong to an a cappella group called The Higher Keys.  First of all, they admitted two of my all-time favorite performers as members, so I’m impressed with their standards.  Second, the samples from the group’s 2005 CD (the most recent recording listed) includes an a cappella version of Friend Like Me from the Disney movie Aladdin.  I’m now really tempted to see if I can still buy a copy just for that.

Let’s all take a moment to be impressed at the coincidences implicit in all these events.

She Wants to Date Other Guys

I can’t rave enough about the Harvard Pops, and last night’s concert may have been the best since Pops Gets Cursed in 2006, which got huge points for  introducing me to Wicked.

Sammi Biegler, whom you can watch on YouTube singing Mack the Knife from last year’s Pops Jumps the Shark concert, even came back after graduating (as Pops members are wont to do) to portray The Rules in the game of Risk.

They put to excellent use Ernst Toch’s Geographical Fugue (performed there by a different group), and I declare here that Larry O’Keefe’s short opera The Magic Futon, which the Pops commissioned and premiered four years ago, knows no rival.  Of course, you’d only be able to judge for yourself if you attended the concert.

Let that be a lesson: attend the next one.  (Then you’d also know that the title of this post is probably my favorite lyric from the show.)

Thank You, Pandora!

Pandora often plays new music I end up enjoying. That’s its job.

Yesterday, asked to play music similar to Hayley Westenra, it completely floored me by introducing Vienna Teng’s Lullaby for a Storm Night. She describes the song this way in a YouTube video from a Dusseldorf performance:

It’s a relatively old song of mine. I wrote it when I was 17 years old, when I was taking an English class where I had to write a very long paper, and I didn’t want to write the paper, so I wrote the song instead.

This is a song about a rainy evening – a thunderstorm. The thunderstorm went on all night. It rained so hard that – because my school is a California school and we’re not used to weather – it actually flooded the whole school, so I had one more day to finish the paper for English class.

The songs on Teng’s MySpace page are even better. Topping it all off, she’s a computer scientist with a BS from Stanford.

I know where I’ll be on December 5th.

That Which is Better than Wicked

One of the best musicians I’ve heard in a long time will be performing in Middleboro next week: Ms. Kayla Ringelheim.  Of course, that’s the weekend I’ll be confined nicely within the Boston city limits (for a change).  I of course already marked her October 17th appearance (with Antje Duvekot) on my calendar.

This is the music that finally got me to stop listening to Wicked incessantly – and if you know me, you know that’s saying a lot.  Of course, you should immediately buy both her albums on iTunes.