I have resolved to endeavor to write a choral work for tenor voices alongside my symphony as a sort of light, peripheral project.

At this point I'm searching for a text that would lend itself to musical depiction. As I pore through hundreds upon hundreds of lines of poems and religious liturgy, I've found that there are good (and bad) founts from which one can extract text for a choral piece. Here are my top three sources, conveniently placed under bolded headings below.

Poems

Pros: Poetry is an excellent source of material, for the plain fact that it is almost custom-built to be set to music. Most of it already possesses a built-in rhythm that eradicates the need to adjust syllables or use outrageously long melismas.

Cons: There is really no more good poetry/literature being written, so to find any suitable works, one needs to look back to the ridiculously antedeluvian works written in Latin or Middle English. Also, poetry is generally not for the individual looking to create a cutting, harsh mood. Poetry tends to stick to what it does best: sappy, overly expressive, flowery and unrealistic musings.

The Bible

Pros: The Bible, as lengthy as it is, provides a built-in storyline that can aid in the sequencing of cantatas, oratorios or operas. It is especially ideal for pieces requiring that regal, holy air that comes with inspired text.

Cons: There are just too many English translations of the Bible, so a piece using the New International Version will come across much more differently than one using the King James Version. Also, Scripture is fairly limited in its scope of themes appropriate for a choral piece. One would usually tend to stick to key events such as the annunciation, assumption, birth of Christ, and various Old Testament prophecies depicting one of the aforementioned events.

The Composer

Pros: As the composer, one is in full control of the flow of the text, and can custom fit the syllables to fit with the music being written. It is also more conducive to the creative process, since the text can be written alongside the score to fit much better than a prefabricated text.

Cons: The composer may not be all that tactful with words, and that can make for some very feeble libretto. He may also be rather scatterbrained and thus the musicality of the work will suffer as a result of too much attention to the text, or vice-versa.

WWW is now deprecated.

One group, aptly called No-WWW, is formally heading the fight against the extraneous acronym. While they're not necessarily hoping to change all URLs to exclude the www, they are seeking a means of standardizing domains so that they're accessible from both www and non-www versions.

My right sidebar now features a nifty "No-WWW" button which links to the organization's website. The code is available in the box below for use by anyone who wants it.

<a href='http://no-www.org'><img src='http://no-www.org/images/blog-button.gif' title='No-www.org' border=0 alt='No-www.org'></a>

Since we are now over the threshold of Thanksgiving, I believe it is now time to decorate for the holidays here at CrunchingNumbers.org.

As you can see (unless you're using Internet Explorer 6), I have adorned my header <div> with what I have officially christened The Holiday Wreath. In this way I am expressing my utmost tolerance of every holiday celebrated at this season.

Besides that, I have no plans of changing my color scheme to a revolting mixture of green and red, or outlining my posts with a GIF of tacky flashing lights. Hopefully The Holiday Wreath will prompt the warm fuzzies and all that every time you visit.

This morning brought with it what can be legitimately called snowfall.

I walked out the door and saw the wispy powdery stuff blowing around, and saw that a significant amount had stuck to the ground. And it wasn't just the frozen mist that people erroneously call snow. It was real snow. That was extremely important because the presence of snow makes the bitter, biting cold excusable. Because when you're occupied with throwing the stuff at passing cars and other people, you don't really notice how cold it is. And the presence of snow precludes the harshness of the cold, because you can't have snow unless it's very cold.

So today was a unique day for me. Yes, I walked to the bus stop as always (and nearly missed the bus, as always), but the snow blowing all around wonderfully completed my Charlie Brown moment for the year.

Art is wasted on the youth of today.

Granted, there is plenty of interest in so-called "art" among youth; there is nary an adolescent who hasn't tried their hand at writing music or drawing or painting. I myself can shamefully admit that I went through that phase when one invariably gravitated to those people who could so masterfully draw the characters from Pokemon and Dragonball Z, and those were the people with the talent. The people who could scratch a pen on paper and produce what we never realized was actually a contorted, distasteful representation of the human form (I believe the standard terminology is anime).

As a composer living in the bedlam of adolescence, I have realized that those with talent are extremely rare, and people are in love with the idea of being one of those rare gems. My goal isn't to show off how much talent I think I have, but as a person with an arguably decent repertory of musical cognizance, I think the primer knowledge of artistic achievement is abandoned by those seeking to become more artistically astute. We have gone down that dangerously delusional path of waiting to be "inspired" to write music or create a work of art. Music theory, form and technique are trampled by peoples' need to liberate that inner artist they often don't have.

The aspiring composers of today must realize that "inspiration" is simply a flaky facade for those who are too lazy to learn how to write music properly. I am so thoroughly irked by the fact that people openly flout the rules (yes, rules!) for writing music. Terms such as exposition, recapitulation, modulation and meter are unheard of in aspiring composers, and their counterparts in the visual arts are equally ignored. No one wants to hear about scales or form or modes. Just write down a ridiculous, overused chord progression (G-C-Em-D-G among others), and then sing in a raspy voice. You're an instant musician, no water needed.