The Daily Parker

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra has created brilliant listening guides for audiences:

Hannah Chan-Hartley is the managing editor and musicologist at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO). She oversees the production of the orchestra’s various printed programmes, from designing layouts and writing and editing content, to the creation of its intriguing ‘listening guides’ with graphic designer Gareth Fowler.

A deft mix of text and graphics, the guides can be read while listening to the performance, their layout visualising the thematic progression of the music, indicating the keys in use, what instruments feature and, using morse code-like notation, their duration.

Check out the graphics themselves on the Creative Review or percussionist Chester Englander's Twitter feed.

That said, since childhood I've really enjoyed Peter Schickele's approach:

Too many things to read before lunchtime:

• Chicago's NPR affiliate, WBEZ, has a new mobile app.
• There's a new mobile device that functions like a Babel fish.
• Republicans really don't care about your unborn baby.
• Serbian authorities colluded with a Dubai-based property developer to illegally destroy an entire neighborhood overnight.
• A snarky Republican writing for Bloomberg actually makes a good point about why the TSA may be taking much longer to screen you than before.
• It looks like your brain naturally explores associations, not just when you have enough to eat. (DT is going to yell at me for bad science reporting, I'm sure.)
• Sinéad O'Connor is safe, and is speaking out about how people treat mental illness.
• Is the upcoming Clinton-Trump battle like the 1990 Richards-Williams match-up? One can hope.
• Meanwhile, it's not just Sanders supporters who have drifted away from the reality-based community; Sanders himself is the problem.

Now, back to work.

This is wonderful:

This weekend I've had a lot going on, resulting in yet another blog miss on Saturday.

Friday was C2E2; Friday night was Whiskyfest; yesterday was a pair of rehearsals for Apollo After Hours.

Today? Errands, mainly. And catching up on stuff—like the news.

Sometimes my life is just this exciting.

Combine a full moon, a really good camera, and a beautiful church on Christmas Eve:

(The grain is from shooting a HDR photo at ISO-12800.)

Did I mention the candlelight part?

The final piece of the service is the entire congregation singing "Silent Night" holding candles. Even as an atheist, I found it moving. And the Winnetka Congregational Church, while still a Christian church, doesn't beat people over the head with religion. I'm certain I wasn't the only atheist in the congregation.

Yes, even with a new blog engine, sometimes link happens:

• A new opera about Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses is in the works
• You want this T-shirt
• Chicago Tribune transportation writer John Hilkevitch has 5 ways to improve O'Hare
• Do you like Corgis? Of course you do
• Pentatonix recently performed on the Tonight Show
• Malcom Gladwell is wrong, this time about school shooters

The new blog engine does have one key advantage: putting that list together took about 1/3 the time it used to take.

Note: These "site news" historical posts come from the original data sources in the proto-blog that debuted on the Q2 website in May 1997.

20 July 1997

New York Choral Society gets a Tenor

Make sure you see me perform this fall with the New York Choral Society. I'll be hitting people up for subscriptions and tickets soon.

The nationally-recognized chorus has an amazing performance calendar for next year, including Mahler's Symphony #8 ("Symphony of a Thousand"), Berlioz' La Damnation de Faust, and a kickoff performance on PBS's "Live from Lincoln Center" series.