The-Courier-musicalassumptions

About a dozen years ago, around the time I started writing my opera Sister Beatrice, I became interested in Hindemith's 1921 Opera Sancta Susanna, a work he set to a 1914 play by August Stramm. There were no recordings available in 2002, and, because of the sacrilegious nature of the work and non-availability of the music, nobody performed it. All I could get my hands on (through interlibrary loan) was a piano-vocal score.

Now (as of yesterday) both the piano-vocal score and the orchestral score of this unusual and brilliant one-act opera are in the IMSLP (the music is now in the public domain in America).

This recording (not a video, but it does have subtitles) of the prelude and the final scene is the best performance I have found. Since my first "viewing" of the opera was in the theater inside my head, no staging I have seen on the half a dozen YouTube videos lives up to the staging I imagined, but Hindemith's orchestration surpasses my imagination.



If you have any interest in my Sister Beatrice (which, even though it was published in 2006, still hasn't had a performance outside of the theater inside my brain), you can hear a computer generated recording (with brass instruments as the vocalists) on this page of my Thematic Catalog or through these links.

Opening [Scenes 1 and 2]
track 2
track 3
track 4
track 5
track 6
track 7
track 8
track 9 (Ave maris stella)
track 10 [Scene 3]
track 11
track 12
track 13

Words of wisdom and music of real beauty.

The Problem: The people who make clip-on sunglasses haven't figured out a way to account for glasses that have a light-weight brow bar on top and wire on the bottom.



This has been bothering me for days. I tried rubber bands, and I tried tape. Nothing worked. Then, while rummaging through my drawers in search of obsolete technology to throw away, I came across a few of these:



Here's what I did:





[The innards come out a lot more easily if you pull the inner-innards (the colored wires that are wrapped in foil) first. The wire threads will them come out easily.]





You might want to cut longer pieces and then trim them to fit, since once you put them on they will only come off if you cut them. My glasses need longer pieces on the bottom.

Here's how the temples look:





The longer pieces on the bottom do not interfere with my field of vision at all.



Voila! The fit isn't perfect, but they do stay on my glasses.

Watch this silly clip from The George Mann Archive all the way to the end (it lasts a minute and a half).



Now visit the Archive for a look at a whole bunch of Hollywood treasures (photos and films) that George Mann (1905-1977) captured with his cameras.

Here's David Rubinoff's obituary from the Los Angeles Times.

I complete my first set of six preludes for piano thirteen years ago on New Year's Day (2001). I finished prelude number seven this evening, which has the appropriate title "A New Year's Resolution," (the only one I'm making this year). You can download the music here, and listen to a computer-generated recording here (I'm not yet a good enough pianist to play it to my liking).