Posts made by Newell Post

@Voltrane With the money they now have to spend, I'll bet the organ comes out of a re-build much better than it was....

@BigDub Piccolo trumpet is a harsh mistress. It seems like you should get a whole additional octave out of the deal for free. But unless you are a real master, you mostly just lose the lower octave and get tinny sound. Resist the call of the dark side. Borrow one if you must before investing.

.... more buildup to the grand battle....

@Rapier232 ... and Star Trek has become even more of a cartoon with the new "alternate time line" series of movies. That's what you get when you give the franchise to a guy who doesn't know how to do anything other than turn comic books into movies.

OK, so here is Newell's outline of the possible "Hollywood" ending:

• Jon Snow and Daenerys "bend the knee" to each other and agree to marry and rule jointly and benevolently.
• Cersei dies of complications of her incestuous pregnancy.
• Tyrion maintains his post as "hand" of the king/queen.
• Samwell Tarly becomes grand maester and learns from the ancient books that the army of the dead were created by the children of the forest and can only be defeated by an alliance between the armies of men, the dragons, and the children of the forest.
• The iron throne is melted down to make weapons for the war , since it contains Valyrian Steel. Jon and Daenerys rule from simple chairs, not the iron throne.
• In the grand battle, the army of the dead is defeated by the alliance of the armies of men, the dragons, and the children of the forest, who now realize their mistake in creating the white walkers.
• Many die in the grand battle including Jaime, Sansa, Arya, and many others.
• While the army of the dead is defeated, a few "survivors" escape back to the north. BUT THEY'LL BE BACK.
• Maybe the dragons are all killed in the war, but they left eggs!
• ...and some loose ends get resolved, but many others do not.

So, that's my take on the Hollywood ending. But, since it's GOT, it almost certainly won't have a Hollywood ending.

And for those of you who are not GOT thrones fans, but are musicians (witnesseth your presence on this site) I ask: "Is this GOT stuff really any weirder than what you see in opera?" Don Giovanni, The Ring of the Nibelung, and even The Magic Flute have plenty of supernatural elements. You can bet Mozart and Wagner would have used dragons if the props masters could have built them....

So, trumpeting hivemind, assuming you have watched GOT at all, how would you end it? That's always the challenge with these epics. They have foreshadowed many possibilities. Are there any examples from opera that would provide a precedent?

@administrator I completely agree when it comes to traditional network TV. There isn't one single program on regular TV that I watch. But some of the news, documentary, arts, and nature channels are OK. A while ago I had to spend about a half day in a hospital ER waiting room while my mother had surgery. I was the first one there, so I set the channel to the National Geographic channel or something of that sort. But every time I got up and went out to go to the bathroom or check on mom's status, I would come back and somebody had changed the channel to soap operas. OMG. People who watch that stuff are actually allowed to vote?

@administrator The first two seasons were particularly raunchy. They toned it down (a little bit) after that.

@barliman2001 Thanks, Barliman. It was that "lively corner of Africa" perspective I particularly enjoyed.

The stone vaults have collapsed at the crossing and at various places in the nave and transept. Re-building that is a completely different level of effort than replacing the wood rafters and lead roofing.

Very old buildings have been damaged, repaired, modified, and re-built many times in most cases. Some of the windows and the spire were replaced by Viollet-le-Duc in the 19th century based on conjectures about the design of an earlier spire, but le-Duc's spire was probably much taller than the original. Disasters like this are certainly traumatic events for many, but they also present opportunities to preserve original structures, eliminate badly-done modifications that have crept in over time, and add new statements about our own age. Buildings like this are not static. They evolve over time. The challenge is not to stop the evolution, but to guide it intelligently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugène_Viollet-le-Duc

@Dr-GO Too soon to tell. They are assuming the source was some kind of construction accident, but that is not yet proven.

The wood rafters obviously burned at Notre-Dame de Paris, but from a purely construction point of view, that would be manageable provided the stone vaults did not collapse. Recent photos look like most portions of the vaults survived, but there was some partial collapse in the vaults. That's a much bigger deal to fix. You don't find vault stone masons on every street corner in the 21st century. Most people don't realize that when you are standing on the floor of a gothic cathedral looking up at the "curved ceiling" (vaults), what you are seeing is actually stone that is 8" to 12" thick. The wood rafters are above that creating a large "attic" space between the vaults and the rafters. The fire just raced through that "attic" area feeding on 800-year-old timber.

@moshe OK, then let's try this musical simile..... It's not completely unlike "Don Giovanni" meets "The Ring of the Nibelung."

@Kehaulani Did you require more than one throne?

@moshe I'm an old fart of 64, but I have learned to love GOT, although it has a certain "learning curve." It's more "Dungeons and Dragons" meets "The Lord of the Rings" than Star Trek. Yes, there are some cult-like aspects, but the story telling is great.

Many old-time marching horns had that "over the shoulder" bell configuration. It was done because bands typically led the parade and marchers behind the band needed to hear the music. I've never seen a modern one, through.

It took me a long time to get into GOT. I didn't start at the beginning. I came in somewhere in the middle and there were just too many characters and too many sub-plots to make any sense of it. But then I was out sick for a couple of days and started at the beginning with HBO On Demand while I was lying around. I still had to watch some of the episodes more than once, but I finally got into the rhythm of it. Some reviewers thought the season 8 premiere was kind of dull or flat of something. But every episode can't be "The Red Wedding" (The Rains of Castamere) or "The Winds of War." That would be exhausting. The season 8 premiere needed to set the stage for the grand denouement, and did a good job of it, IMO.

....if you're thinking non-traditional, my Easter gig is with.... the Unitarian Universalists. Well OK, it's my own church, but with the "UU"s the music can be almost anything. It can be some of those great old traditional church hymns like "Jesus Christ is Risen Today" (see above) but with somewhat more abstract and less literal lyrics. Or it can more modern things.

Today (Palm Sunday) the choir did a great choral arrangement of "I am Willing" by Holly Near. Holly has shown up in person at our place and done it in the past. (But not today.)

What's on tap for Easter Sunday? Not sure. The director hasn't decided yet. (That's kind of UU, also.) Probably just playing along with the pipe organ on some of those big old, grand hymns. But we will see.....

Youtube Video – [00:27..]

My other community band is working it's way up to a Spring concert. The program is still under development, but will probably include the "Department of Homeland Security March". Who knew they had a march? But it's actually not half bad. Unfortunately, it seems to have bumped Sousa's "Golden Jubilee March" from the lineup. That's a jaunty little Sousa march you don't hear every day...

Youtube Video – [00:00..]

Youtube Video