“Sing to the Mountains” is really not all that bad, if you imagine it being sung by the Muppets.

From the comments here.

Here are Dylan’s improved lyrics to “Gather Us In.”

Here’s a little something for Yes fans.

An old interview with the late Martin Gardner. (Via .clue.)

Dr. Hoo. (Via Pixy.)

Public Library Ninja.

Miku does Mozart.¹

“She was warming to him, he could tell, but …”

1. Background on Hatsune Miku here.↩

Passion and sincerity are cheap. If you want to hold my attention, show me craftmanship. Write lyrics that scan, fit them to actual melodies, and sing on key. Learn how to play your guitar, not just strum chords. Maybe then I won’t passionately and sincerely loathe hearing you.

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Memo to everyone who enjoys old-time fiddle music: If you ever have a chance to hear Chirps Smith, drop everything and go.

… the more you know about music, the less income you are guaranteed to generate.

I recently discovered that John Stump, the composer of “Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz,” wrote other pieces of music, including the “String Quartet in A Minor (Motoring Accident).” A tribute to Stump, with scans of his scores, can be found here.

More remarkable scores can be seen here, here and here. Some of them have been performed.

If you have work to do, don’t click here. Or here.

(Via Frëd.)

St. Louis Strings Violin Shop

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Some Roman Catholic churchmen, meanwhile, have said that the words “hokey pokey” derive from “hocus pocus” — the Oxford English Dictionary concurs — and that the song was written by 18th-century Puritans to mock the language of the Latin Mass. Last year the Catholic Church in Scotland, concerned that some soccer fans were using the song as a taunt, raised the possibility that singing it should be prosecuted as a hate crime.

I suppose I should take umbrage at Focus, too.

Frëd Himebaugh of the Fredösphere has composed a fifteen-minute opera using Terry Bisson’s short story “They’re Made Out of Meat” as the libretto. You can purchase it here. See also Frëd’s earlier posts here and here.

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Here’s one of the more impressive videos I’ve seen recently. The characters and tune are from the vast Touhou project, but you don’t need to know anything about that to appreciate the phantasmagorical transformations.

In America:

(Via Darwin Catholic)

In Japan:

Fiddlers at Carp Camp, budget- and economy-sized.

My vacation last week started disastrously (see below), but once I arrived at my friends’ home it improved markedly. One of the highlights was an impromptu jam session with the young fiddler Roger and a couple of his friends. I just happened to have my little portable recorder at hand.

Different instruments require different micing techniques. Fiddles, I’ve read, sound best with the microphone positioned two or three feet above the fiddle. With banjos, the further from the microphone, the better — in the next room, say, or across the street, or in the next county.

Old Mother Logo:

Cluck Old Hen:

Update: Here’s Roger in action at a contra dance:

Celebrating well-groomed, cuddly predators …

Schoenberg’s Opus 11, performed by cats.

Visiting a cat cafe.

A new “Simon’s Cat.”

… and the 88 counties of Ohio.¹

(Via Frëd, Lynn and Charles G. Hill.)

1. “… this little application is not at all idiot-proofed, so my apologies if you are an idiot.”↩

Here’s the story.

This tune is part of a long tradition in music. An earlier example is No Strings Attached’s “Broken Key Boogie,” which commemorates modifications to Randy Marchany’s keyboard made by another airline (TWA, if I remember correctly).

Do you tweet? Are your thoughts expressible in no more than 140 characters? Perhaps you should reconsider. Here are a variety of philosophical arguments against using Twitter. For instance:

Natural Law Argument
(1) It is wrong to do what is not natural.
(2) There is nothing remotely natural about broadcasting the minutiae of your life to all and sundry whenever it takes your fancy.
(3) Therefore, Twittering is wrong.

(Via First Things.)

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A useful term:

A related concept is heiwa-boke (hei-WA boh-keh), literally meaning “numbed from too much peace,” which describes the state of literally being made stupid by living in a country that’s overly harmonious, like the Japanese who traveled to Iraq in 2004 to help rebuild the country only to be promptly kidnapped because, well, they were in friggin’ Iraq.

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A piece on the Montreaux jazz festival included this note about an unlikely pairing:

The pair [Lang Lang and Herbie Hancock] ended with Franz Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 — which Lang Lang says inspired him when he heard it in a Tom & Jerry cartoon at 2 years old.

Here’s that cartoon, a classic combination of music and violence. The pianist you hear is likely Shura Cherkassky.