The Friday Informer: Feel a Song Coming On?

So, maybe I just had a little too much holiday champagne or something, but I woke up this week and discovered the whole world was singing. A musically literate populous? Huzzah!

But no, that was just the ringing in my ears (music people with noise makers should be marked with warning labels). In reality, the tone of things was much less Walt Disney than initial impressions suggested. What we’re talking about here is opera, folks, and the people in that end of the art form swimming pool seem to like their medium a little more when it’s all dark and twisty. A sampling of this week’s headlines:

• An opera featuring the POTUS dancing in his underwear is canceled…no, wait, maybe not.

  
  
  

• But why wait for the presidency? William Bolcom gets started on Barack Obama—The Musical! in a bid to control the previously undervalued opera vote.
  
  
• The Vatican announces plans for a punk version of the Divine Comedy penned by (and I am not making this up) an avant-garde priest.
  
  
• Hell may be a rock song, but just to get the performers good and ready, we’ve already started testing ways to torture the sopranos.

Outside of the opera realm, the classical music folks were sticking to the usual lament that no one is really paying attention to us in the way we truly deserve. Or they are paying too much attention to us in a way we don’t particularly care for.

Still, there were those who took a look at the forest, and a look at the trees, and then picked up a few rocks and looked around under there, and pronounced it all very good indeed.

For his part, Kyle is cashing out 2007 early (as a theory prof. anyway), but is raising a glass to all the ladies in the house before he goes.

Your Friday Informer wishes you all the best in 2007. Now get composing or you’ll never catch Dennis.