All Things Con­sid­ered, the daily after­noon news pro­gram on National Pub­lic Radio, has a well-known musi­cal theme; when played after the news, it’s called a “trixie:”

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The theme started out in 1976 as elec­tronic music, was set for brass orches­tra in 1983, and was later rein­ter­preted and recorded for NPR by jazz musi­cian Wycliffe Gor­don in 1995. Mean­while, lots of musi­cians have writ­ten and per­formed vari­a­tions, some of which get played on air. The most “well-known” ver­sion (accord­ing to NPR) was per­formed and arranged by the Wash­ing­ton Sax­o­phone Quar­tet.

Quire Cleve­land record­ing a trixie. (That’s me on the left of the chorus.)

In the theme’s his­tory, brass set­tings are the norm. How­ever, my Dad recently got invited to com­pose some trix­ies in an early music style. He came up with some fun stuff and recorded it with Quire Cleve­land, and some fel­low fac­ulty at CWRU. You can hear them all at the Quire Cleve­land web­site — or just lis­ten to All Things Con­sid­ered!

Here are a cou­ple of my favorites: Con­tinue reading »

Tonight I had the amaz­ing expe­ri­ence of singing a con­cert with Blue Heron, one of the pre­mier early music choirs in the country.

I had an unusual week, attend­ing lec­tures on topo­log­i­cal field the­ory and writ­ing about neu­tri­nos by day, get­ting into the 1430’s groove in rehearsals by night. And the music wasn’t easy. Many of the pieces were thick with cross-relations, rhyth­mi­cally com­pli­cated, and gen­er­ally funky. I’ve had a few night­mares where I stop con­cen­trat­ing, and either I sing an incor­rect B-flat, or the see­saw mech­a­nism stops work­ing. Con­tinue reading »