The Daily Parker

Winter began in the northern hemisphere this morning, which explains the gray cold enveloping Chicago. Nah, I kid: Chicago usually has a gray, cold envelope around it, just today it's official.

And while I ponder, weak and weary, why the weather is so dreary, I've got these to read:

• Writing in the New York Times, Die Zeit columnist Jochen Bittner explains why Germans worry about the Republican Party's lies about the election. (Hint: Germany remembers 1918 differently than we do.)
• This year's Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols from King's College, Cambridge, will take place in an empty chapel for the first time since the BBC first broadcast them in the 1910s.
• Chicago police busted up a party of 300 people in Wicker Park over the weekend, in an effort to explain why we can't have nice things.
• Alex Ross asks, "What does it mean to 'reimagine' an orchestra season?"

Finally, if you haven't already heard our first virtual concert, go listen to it. We worked hard, and we gave an excellent performance.

The Apollo Chorus has a concert tonight (register here; you can watch any time before Christmas), so I'm getting this out a little late.

One problem with having a puppy, like Parker here at 9 months: action shots get more difficult (10 March 2007).

I would be remiss not to mention that today is the 50th anniversary of Tea for the Tillerman, Cat Stevens' best and most popular album. It's also one of my favorites.

Cover art by A&M Records (US), Fair use, Link

Fifty years ago today, the Grateful Dead released American Beauty:

There are countless versions of the Grateful Dead to tap into, hundreds of bootlegs and remastered live recordings to queue up. Many bona fide Deadheads would say it's not even worth bothering with the studio recordings. But American Beauty, released Nov. 1, 1970, and lined with back-to-back classics that earned them the title of the great American jam band, stands out from all the rest.

Meanwhile, yesterday set a couple more milestones that historians will talk about 50 years from now:

• Tropical Storm Eta became the 28th named storm of the North Atlantic hurricane season, setting a new record. Hurricane season officially ends a month from today.
• More than 91 million people have already voted in this election, about 2/3 of the total ballots cast (136.5 m) in 2016.
• The monthly average water level in the Lake Michigan-Huron system finally dipped below last year's levels, following 9 straight months of record or near-record levels.

Only 60 shopping days left until we finally exit this bizarre and horrible year.

I cracked the code on an application rewrite I last attempted in 2010, so I've spent a lot of my copious free time the past week working on it. I hope to have more to say soon, but software takes time. And when I'm in the zone, I like to stay there. All of which is why it's 9:30 and I have just gotten around to reading all this:

• The president stomped out of a 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl, and for reasons passing understanding, has threatened to release it himself.
• Pope Francis has officially endorsed civil partnerships for gays, to mixed reviews.
• NASA successfully landed a probe onto a small asteroid that scooped up some dust and gently lifted off again.
• The Lyric Opera of Chicago has officially cancelled the remainder of the 2020-21 season due to Covid-19.
• On this day in 1926, the heads of Chicago's Prohibition-era gangs signed a peace deal. (It lasted almost a year.)
• And what is "cuffing season" and why did no one inform me about it?

I'm now going to turn off all my screens, walk Parker, and go to bed. (Though I just got the good news that my 8:30 am demo got moved to a later time.)

Let's start with the good news: Julie Nolke has a new video.

OK, ready for everything else?

• The president called Kamala Harris "this monster" in an interview Thursday, because of course he did.
• The New England Journal of Medicine came a millimeter from endorsing Joe Biden in an editorial published yesterday.
• House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) have introduced legislation to create a commission on presidential capacity, without naming the person who inspired the bill.
• Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has called for an independent commission on redistricting to draw the ward map in 2021.
• The World Food Programme has won this year's Nobel Peace Prize.
• My law school classmate and friend Paul Hletko has been named one of Crain's 2020 Notable Entrepreneurs for his work creating and managing FEW Spirits.
• The Guardian has an interview with author Neil Gaiman today.

And finally, today would have been John Lennon's 80th birthday.

I'm going into my downtown Chicago office twice a week, even though I'm the only one on the floor, just so I can get some variety and also more monitors for my work laptop. Last week the building started piping classical music into the main lobby. They, or the streaming provider, have chosen pretty basic stuff: Mozart piano concerti, Haydn symphonies, the occasional string quartet.

Today the walk-on music was Barber's Adagio for Strings. Think about the movies that used this piece and ask yourself, is this what people want to hear walking into their office building at 8:45 on a Monday morning? During a global emergency? Ten weeks before the most consequential election in the last 75 years?

I will now sob briefly before coding a fun demo.

Back in May I started listening to every CD I own, in the order that I bought them, starting with Eugen Jochum conducting Mozart's Mass in C-Major, K317 (purchased in May 1988). I'm up to July 1989 now, and as I write this, I'm playing The Mama's and the Papa's [sic] If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears (1967). This follows The Beatles' With The Beatles (1963) and Paul McCartney's Pipes of Peace (1983).

And then it goes sideways.

Next up: Haydn's Piano Concerto #11 (1781), and Josquin's "Missa L'Homme Armé" (ca. 1500). I bought those five CDs on 7 July 1989.

Three days later I acquired a batch of six, including a collection of English madrigals sung by the King's Singers, Oscar Levant playing Gershwin, and the soundtrack from The Breakfast Club.

There are stretches of classical and stretches of modern throughout this list, but right now I'm in summer break after my first year of college when I was expanding both sides of my collection as fast as I could afford to.

I just did some math: at the rate I'm going, I'll be out of my university years around November 17th, in the 21st Century around the beginning of April, and through all of them in the fall of 2021. (That's a moving target for obvious reasons.)

It's a little trippy. I haven't heard some of these in a long, long time.

Who could forget?

Rolling Stone explains:

Forty [one] years ago this evening, a doubleheader at Chicago’s Comiskey Park devolved into a fiery riot when crazed fans stormed the field as part of anti-disco promotional event dubbed Disco Demolition Night. The whole thing was the brainchild of disc jockey Steve Dahl, who dressed up like the general of an anti-disco army and called his followers “The Insane Coho Lips.”

Dahl thought the demonstration would consist of simply blowing up some disco records on the field between games. It was a scheme cooked up between the radio personality and White Sox owner Bill Veeck, who was desperate to increase attendance at the ballpark in the middle of a lackluster season.

The game sold out, but thousands of additional ticketless fans showed up to voice their hatred of an entire genre. Many stormed the gates and filled the ballpark way beyond capacity, setting up a dangerous situation when Dahl blew up the disco records. Fans threw firecrackers and bottles onto the field, eventually storming onto it, starting fires and battling with police. The second game was eventually called off amidst the madness.

[F]or minority groups, the incident had highly disturbing undertones given many of the perpetrators were white men and the genre was incredibly popular amongst homosexuals, blacks and women. “It felt to us like Nazi book-burning,” Chic’s Nile Rodgers once said. “This is America, the home of jazz and rock and people were now afraid even to say the word ‘disco.'”

Not Chicago's finest hour, despite the White Sox forfeiting a game because of their own bad management.

I'm still plowing through all the CDs I bought over the years, now up to #55 which I got in November 1988. It's a 1957 recording of the Robert Shaw Chorale performing various Christmas carols. (Remember, remember, I got it in November.)

This comes between Billy Joel's Piano Man and Glenn Gould performing Bach's Inventions and Sinfonias. Then I'll get Simon & Garfunkel, Mozart, William Byrd, and Haydn.

At least part of this strangeness comes from my experience as a music major during my first year at university, when the music department announced a new requirement for every music major to take a listening exam every year. They published four lists, one for each school year, effectively giving students up to 3½ years to listen to all 100 works. The list drove a lot of my CD purchases while there.

In mid-April, you'd go to the music library and listen to a cassette with 60-second excerpts of music. (I think there were 50 excerpts.) You got one point for naming the composer, a point for naming the work, and if applicable, a point for identifying the movement. To pass the exam, you had to get 80% of the total points available.

Here are some of the works on the 1988-89 list:

• Bach, Cantata #4, "Christ lag in Todesbanden"
• Beethoven, Symphony #6
• Mozart, Requiem K626 (but only the "Introitus," "Kyrie," and "Dies Irae")
• Varèse, Ionisation
• Verdi, La Traviata

The lists got progressively more difficult, with the 1991-92 list containing obscurities like Schubert's Der Erlkönig and Bach's Brandenburg Concerto #2.

The music faculty believed, quite reasonably, that musicians should have some passing familiarity with these 100 works for the same reason one would expect an English major to know a few Shakespeare plays or a computer-science major could explain the bubble-sort algorithm to a non-major. It's called the canon.

In April 1989, I was the only music major to pass the exam. I didn't take the 1990 exam because I'd switched majors; but in 1991, the music department asked me to take the exam again as a control, because in 1990 no one passed the first time. Once again, I was the only person to pass the first time out.

I just couldn't fathom why. Each list had such variety, just knowing the pieces on them should give you 67% of the right answers without even trying. For example, the 1990 exam included polar opposites Berg's Wozzeck and Brahms' piano quintet in f-minor. You'd think someone could easily distinguish them. If I recall correctly, the department even let people bring in the list after the 1989 debacle. So you could just look at the list and decide whether the thing you're listening to is atonal singing in German with orchestra or a small ensemble with four strings and a piano. Or if it's a choral work instead of a massive symphony. Or if it's something by Bach or something by Ives.

It was about this time that I started worrying for the future of the arts.

If you're interested, here's the 1988-89 list. If you know anything about classical music, you should be able to identify most of these works.