Church Music

My church has two different kinds of services on Sunday. One does contemporary styles, the other is more traditional; while it does not have a choir, does do the older hymns that (mostly) everyone knows and loves. I prefer the more traditional service, and I have been singing for it for the past few months.

The reasons why I prefer the traditional style are as follows:
1) Being a soprano, I am most comfortable when I can use my range. Granted most hymns don't go higher than "E" Natural, but the hymns allow for more freedom of range than the more contemporary styles of music. The latter usually features sudden octave jumps that tax my upper register. When it's not that, it's taxing on my lower register.

2) I can hear the congregation singing in the traditional service. I don't get that in the contemporary one. The music for contemporary service is too overpowering for me, I can hardly hear myself during worship! But there is only one piano in the traditional one, plus whatever other instruments people on worship team bring (we've got our own brass quartet!). 

3) The contemporary style makes worship feel less like worship and more like some popular concert, especially with the loud drums and emphasis on emotion. Making things worse is when worships leaders decide to to jazz up old hymns. Now that in itself is not bad, but the congregation has to be able to sing along. I remember getting so frustrated when the worship team did funky things to the notes and rhythm of a particular hymn that I shouted at them to leave the coloratura to Joyce DiDonato.
           With the traditional style, there is less noise to distract me. Maybe the occasional guy clapping on the off-beat, but that's only during the refrain of "Standing on the Promises" and that's only one guy.

In short, I find the traditional style of church music easier to sing. I know others will have differing opinions on this, and that's fine. I just find that contemporary music in worship gives me a major case of sensory overload, and that is not something I want in worship.

Shockers

I have taken my boyfriend to see three operas at Madison Opera and two of them really shocked him. These were Carmen (natch) and Rusalka.

Carmen is shocking by the very nature of the story. Carmen forces herself onto Jose never mind what consequences might follow. She is obsessed with power and revels in using other people to get it. In our day she's seen as some kind of champion for freedom, although I find that to be rather dubious. What kind of person goes out of her way to use people in order to maintain her "freedom"? 
          Although I had warned my boyfriend of this one, it still left him reeling; it took him two days to finally talk about it. I guess he could not believe that such a nasty person could exist. And Carmen is an enigma, both in and out of the story. The premiere caused a scandal, which only served to make it more famous. The music is iconic, and is Bizet's absolute best.

Rusalka is a tragic fairy tale where the water nymph tries and fails to win the love of a mortal prince and becomes a deadly siren. While not as famous as Carmen, it does have Song to the Moon, one of Dvořák's greatest musical masterpieces. 
          The ending made my boyfriend want to rewrite the ending of The Little Mermaid (which the opera is based off of). I for one did not find it a shocker, but the third act made me cry. It is painful watching a someone try so hard to achieve the goal only for it the evade them. And nothing is more painful than becoming a spirit of death.

 

Liberty Corrupted

Simon Keenlyside argued that Don Giovanni is thinking about liberty. Maybe. However, Giovanni's idea of liberty seems to be ruining the marriage prospects of as many women as he can. Freedom isn't freedom if you're going out of your way to hurt people.
          

Reviews

I need to do some reviews of productions of operas I have seen but never wrote about. I need to do that again.This Sunday I will do one of Don Giovanni, but this time I will not bother with a play-by-play like I did before. Because this was three years ago, I will instead focus on things that were said by various hosts and singers as it's clear that they said things that sound a little odd. But I will also look at whether or not the production itself worked. 

STAR WARS TRIVIAL PURSUIT DVD Is Cool But Shallow

I'm deviating from music to write a review of a board game I played with my boyfriend yesterday. Star Wars Trivial Pursuit DVD is another classic Tie-in version of a classic game, in this case Trivial Pursuit. 
     The idea is simple, you have the board and the various tokens, cards, and wedges. Whichever color spot you land on you have to answer a question in that category. If you land on one of the wedge spots, you get a wedge if you answer that category question correctly. And once you have all the wedges in the slots you move back to the starting point.
       This version includes as DVD which makes the game a little more tricky. It includes a time limit for how long you have to answer the question. Some of the questions aren't even questions, but visual puzzles. It uses such things pixelation, close-up shots, sound distortions, even some concept art to see if you can guess the character, vessel, or scene. Once you hit past a certain point for each category, you just use a card. Once you get back to the starting point after collecting all the wedges, you are given a final question to determine who wins.
    
On the one hand, it is a fun idea and it challenges you to think on your feet. At the same time, it does feel gimmicky. Of course it's nor so gimmicky you can't enjoy it, but it's still an issue. 
    Unfortunately, while the questions and puzzles on the DVD are very creative, the questions on the cards are very easy---especially for someone like me who knows the hexology by heart (Okay there were a few that were about nitpicky details that I could not remember, but still).
   
  I remember playing a plain version of Star Wars Trivial Pursuit when I was nineteen. This version may have had its own goofy gimmick---instead of rolling a die, you had an R2-D2 figure that gave you a random number between 1 and 6 when you pressed his dome---but the questions on the cards were more challenging. There were even cards dedicated to entire characters, planets, objects, etc.. I remember one card being entirely devoted to Oola, and all she gets in ROTJ is a swan song before being thrown into the rancor pit! I think it worked a lot better than the one with the DVD.

On a scale of 1 to 10, I'd give this game a 6. It's a very creative idea and is a lot of fun to play. But it doesn't quite measure up to expectations. I think it wants to be both a board game and a video game at the same time. If so, then I would suggest instead of making it a physical board game with a DVD included, they should go the Mario Party route and make it a full-fledged video game that you play on a console. That way you can have the challenge of moving around the board while answering some very creative trivia questions.

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UPDATE: It's less shallow is you use the cards for the none-wedge squares and save the video questions for the wedge squares.