Tales from the jar side: Beautiful seven-part close harmony, Jared Halley Music, COVID at last, and Amusing posts
OH: I got the words jacuzzi and yakuza confused. Now I'm in hot water with the Japanese mafia.
Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of December 25, 2022 - January 1, 2023. I had no classes this week.
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Ave Maria (Franz Biebl)
Hey, I made a thing (along with Jared Halley — more about him later)! And it’s really good. :)
This is the classic seven-part men’s a cappella arrangement of the Ave Maria by Franz Biebl.
The seven parts are split into a chorus section of TTBB, and a trio of Tenor I, Tenor II, and Baritone. The song was composed in the 1950s, but didn’t do well in its home country of Germany. The Cornell University Glee Club was traveling in Germany in 1970, met Biebl, and brought the song to America. Much later, Chanticleer in the late 80s made it part of their regular rotation, and the song became popular.
I first encountered it about 15 years ago, when our choir director, Cathy Rodland, introduced it to us. I loved it right away. The harmonies are gorgeous. For years it was one of my favorite pieces to make me feel better when I was down.
I eventually created a YouTube playlist of different versions. It includes a live Chanticleer performance, but also this remote virtual choir:
and even a multitrack arrangement for cello:
I always wanted to do something like that, but I never really had the range to do it myself, nor did I have the expertise to handle it all.
That brings me to Jared Halley.
Jared Halley Music
I sponsor a lot of creators on Patreon. Rather than sponsor only a couple at a high level, I like to contribute a small amount to as many as I can afford (or maybe a few more). They range from cartoonists to film critics to musicians and more.
Jared Halley is one of them. I found him on YouTube about three years ago, through his multitrack a cappella medleys. I don’t remember which one was the clincher, but his recording of Africa by Toto came out around the right time, so that could be it:
One thing that makes Jared unique is that if you check out his Patreon sponsorship levels, at one point he offers to follow you back on social media if you send him your links as well. The opportunity to make a real connection appealed to me, so I sponsored him at a higher level than I might have chosen and sent him my info. True to his word, he followed me back and was very friendly online.
An Intentional Misunderstanding
Our current project began back in May, when Jared sent me a message. It was pretty generic, just thanking me for being a Patreon during this difficult economic times. The message was very kind, but if I’m honest with myself, he probably sent the exact same message to all of his Patreon supporters.
I chose to deliberately misunderstand that, and assume me meant it just for me personally. :) That encouraged me to respond. In addition to saying I was happy to support him, I decided to ask if he took commissions, and, if so, if he’d ever heard the Biebl Ave Maria.
It turned out he does take commissions. I then decided to go out on a limb and ask if he would consider doing a collaboration on this song. I mostly expected him to say no to that. After all, he’s a professional, and while I did share a couple of my recordings with him, that’s asking a lot. To my surprise, he was happy to work together, and teach me about the process as well.
I’ll skip the intervening months, as I recorded most of my parts, got sick and was unable to finish for several weeks, and more. I do want to emphasize how easy he made the whole process for me. He digitized the music I sent him, so I could listen to the individual parts. He recorded all seven of them (!), so I could follow along and match his pitches as closely as possible. It was also impressive that he had the complete range, from low bass to high tenor, but I knew that going in. :)
At long last, the embedded audio recording at the top of the newsletter is the result. I managed to sing six of the seven parts (everything except the highest tenor role), and he did all seven. He also let me do all three solos, partly because they’re so free-form it would be tough to do them together.
I hope you like the results. In case you’re wondering, yes, we’re going to make a multitrack video as well, but I wanted to share this with you right away. You should be able to play it using the embedded player, but in case you need an alternative, I’ve also added it to my (very limited) soundcloud account.
At Long Last, COVID
I sent the final versions of my solos early this week, which is a good thing because I ran into a problem later. My wife and I had dinner reservations for Friday evening, but I’d been feeling increasingly out of sorts for two days leading up to it, and I decided it might be a good idea to take one of those home COVID tests.
Sure enough, it was positive. I’m double-vaxxed and triple-boosted, and if you measure the pandemic from March, 2000, I’d made it a full three years and nine months without catching it.
(I usually joked with friends that I was the only person in New England who hadn’t gotten it yet. If I found others, I’d say we should form a club, but of course our meetings would have to be remote.)
As these things go, it’s a pretty mild case, but it’s definitely slowing me down. In fact, once I complete this newsletter (which I’ve been slowly writing over the past couple days), it’ll be time to go back to bed. Don’t worry about me, however. I’m doing pretty well, and I’ll teach my class this week because of course I will. In fact, I expect to be fine in a few days, though I guess we’ll see.
Other Posts
One more thing…
I saw a few variations on this theme. I’m certainly not going to recount the whole Greta Thunberg owning of Andrew Tate so badly that he wound up arrested in Romania. It’s all over the web, though here’s a brief summary if you need one. It’s a story that just kept getting better and better. First, her epic response to his trolling. Then he made his idiotic video, followed by the story that the pizza box in the video allowed the Romanian authorities, who were already investigating him and his brother for human trafficking, to confirm he was in town so they could make their arrest.
Of course, she followed up with
The Romanian police then issued a statement denying that the pizza box was involved at all, which was disappointing. I should mention, however, this tweet by Don Van Natta, Jr, who is an award-winning journalist:
Works for me.
This was great, too:
Or this:
Or even this:
This one, too:
Here are a couple of unrelated posts, but great anyway:
Unlikely, indeed.
Blaire Erskine did her usual excellent job skewering Southwest and their holiday incompetence this week:
Best related quote I heard was:
Q. What’s the difference between COVID and Southwest?
A. COVID is airborne.
I’ll finish with this:
Happy New Year. Have a great week everybody. :)
As a reminder, you can see all my upcoming training courses on the O’Reilly Learning Platform here and all the upcoming NFJS Virtual Workshops here.
Last week:
No classes this week.
Finished the recording with Jared Halley of the seven-part Biebl Ave Maria. Video to come.
This week:
Functional Programming In Java, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Write Medium posts to support Mockito Made Clear
Publish video reading the newsletter on the Tales from the jar side YouTube channel on Monday.