The Penultimate Word

Spring is coming …

Yesterday, I went to the 31st Collage Concert staged by the University of Michigan’s Music School at the venerable Hill Auditorium. The format of these concerts is unusual - the last note of one piece overlaps with the first note of the next piece, no break for applause between pieces, with each piece being different, sometimes wildly different, from its predecessor. For example, the first few pieces of last night’s concert were:

1. Overture to Colas Breugnon by Dmitri Kabalevsky, performed by the Symphony Band
2. Kaddish from Deux Mélodies Hebraiques by Maurice Ravel, performed by a soprano with piano accompaniment
3. Samsara, performed with two sitars, bansuri and tabla
4. Gloria from The Masque of Angels by Dominick Argento, performed by a massed choir and symphony band.

I had not heard of any of those works either, but the list illustrates the wide range of music presented. There was some familiar music, but much of it was performed on unexpected instruments. For example, Bach’s famous Partita No. 3 for solo violin, was performed (fantastically) last night on a marimba. There were also jazz ensembles, some dance, Shakespeare, musical theater, and some things completely unclassifiable. The whole concert lasted around and hour and half, with an intermission about halfway through.

U-M’s Music School is one of the top schools around. All of the students enrolled there are going to careers in music, theater or dance, so the level of musicianship is very high. This is a great concert to take people who don’t go to concerts, because there is a lot going on and it is wildly diverse.

Homemade sign at the corner of Plymouth and Green Roads just outside of Ann Arbor.

The truck itself is in the background on the right.

According to an article in the Ann Arbor News,

A number of bridges in Washtenaw County are in poor condition and need to be replaced - but local road officials said Thursday that the bridges are still safe to drive on.

Umm, “need to be replaced” and “safe to drive on” seem to contradict each other, no?

And the hits just keep on comin’…

My photos of trucks that didn’t quite make it under the Washington Street railroad are up at Flickr.

The truck lost.

I overheard the truck driver saying that they ought to dig out Washington Street to make it lower. I have a better idea. Just read the sign:

Corner Brewery, Ypsilanti, Michigan
15 June 2007, 11:03pm

The tragic crash of the University of Michigan organ transplant aircraft highlights just how critical this program is. Please consider signing up to be a organ and tissue donor. You can find out more about organ donation, and register to be one, at the Gift of Life Michigan website. Make sure that your family and your doctor know you have made this decision.

WDET was once the best radio station in Detroit, and one of the best in the country. It built its greatness on the strength of its music programming. Unlike the cookie-cutter programming on commercial radio, DET’s programming encompassed jazz, electronica, bluegrass, classical, folk, blues, roots rock, hip-hop, world beat, classical, and much stuff that defied classification. Its hosts were some of the best in the business, stringing together great sets, commenting knowledgably on what they played, but never (well, almost never) getting in the way of the music. They would play new artists no one had heard of, and unfamiliar material by familiar artists. Many of the CDs in my collection I first heard on the station.

Its audience supported it. Giving to the station was among the best in the country for public radio.

Things changed in 2005. Caryn Mathes, the station’s GM for many years, left for another job in Washington, D.C. Another GM came in, and changed the station from primarily music programming to NPR news/talk. This made no sense. WUOM, the powerhouse NPR affiliate run by the University of Michigan, was already an NPR news/talk station and had been for many years. UOM’s signal significantly overlaps DET’s signal, which means that DET serves up the same programming as UOM to an audience that had already been listening to UOM for a long time. Immediately, DET began losing listeners and contributions.

DET’s core audience fought back. In blogs, protest marches, letters to the station, even lawsuits, listeners tried to get the station to change back.

The station continued down its path to irrelevance. DET, now a virtual clone of UOM, has lost listeners, contributors and sponsors. Will Wayne State, its university parent, continue to subsidize it as it continues to be a financial black hole? So far, WSU is continuing to prop it up.

It turns out that Brood XIII of the 17-year cicadas do not occur in Michigan, and we won’t be invaded by them after all. The closest they will come to us is Indiana, according to retired U-M entomologist Thomas Moore.

The University Musical Society’s 2007-2008 season schedule is out, and of particular interest to choral music types is a concert by the Russian Patriarchate Choir, and one by the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge. The Russians are coming on Tuesday, October 30, the British invasion happens on Saturday, April 5.

Rounding out the choral music schedule is a concert by the Tallis Scholars, on Thursday, Dec. 6, and a performance of the St. Matthew Passion, with the Choral Union and the Detroit Symphony conducted by Jerry Blackstone. The St. Matthew will be performed on Friday, Mar. 21. I have always wanted to do the St Matthew and am considering joining the Choral Union just for this concert.

More here.

The railroad bridge over Washington Street here in Ann Arbor is unusually low, so two or three times a year an inattentive truck driver receives a very sudden lesson in Newtonion physics.

The inattentive truck driver learns about two laws of physiscs. The first is the one which holds that two objects cannot occupy the same space and the same time. The second is the law of inertia, which is demonstrated by objects in the cargo area continuing their forward motion even though the truck has suddenly stopped, until their motion is arrested when they slam into the front wall of the cargo box. Thus does the bridge educate the inattentive truck driver.

Those of us who work near the bridge have learned to recognize the sound of the bridge giving a physics lesson. It is a metal-on-metal grinding, tearing, ripping sound, followed by an eerie silence while the inattentive truck driver contemplates Newton’s laws and his suddenly narrowed employment options.

It takes some work to extricate the truck. A large wrecker of the kind used to tow semis, is summoned. The air is let out of the stuck truck’s tires, and then the wrecker drags the truck from under the bridge. Sometimes it takes two wreckers.

Not a lot of work gets done while this happens.

In 2003, Ann Arbor Township voters passed a dedicated tax of 0.7 mils to fund the purchase of property development rights (PDR) within the township. The township recently made its first purchase by purchasing the development rights of the Kapp farm on the east side of Nixon road at Pontiac Trail. The PDR purchase was for $2.2million, with $689,500 from the US Department of Agriculture, $757,000 from the City of Ann Arbor greenbelt program, and $757,000 from the township PDR fund. The Kapp family has been actively farming in Washtenaw county since 1838, the Nixon road farm has been in operation since 1931. The purchase ensures that the farm will be farmland forever and never developed.

Across Nixon from the Kapp farm, a cluster development of 38 homes will be constructed by the Silverman company on about 200 acres. The remaining 153 acres of the parcel was donated by Silverman to the township and that parcel will be preserved as farmland. The interesting thing about the parcel to be developed is that the residences will be clustered together on comparitively small lots, instead of spread out on 5 to 10 acre lots as is normal for this development. This means that much of the 200 acres will be open land. This kind of development is a good thing, I think. The property owner can sell his property, the developer can build an economically feasible development, but much of the land remains open. Since development of the rural areas of the county cannot be completely halted, this seems like a good compromise.

More information about the Kapp PDR purchase and the Silverman development can be found in the township’s newsletter.

The Michigan Department Department ofTransportation, which gave the world the infamous Michigan Left, is gonzo for roundabouts. Several have either been built or are being planned in the Detroit/Ann Arbor area, including:

• Maple Road and Drake in West Bloomfield
• Lee Road and US-23 near Brighton (3 back-to-back-to-back)
• Four on Northwestern Highway
• Three by Skyline, Ann Arbor’s new high school (teenage demolition derby anyone?)
• Nixon and Huron Parkway (between my house and work)

M-DOT claims they are safer and more efficient than regular intersections. Many drivers aren’t so sure.

I haven’t driven any of them yet, but I guess we will have to get used to them.

Pretty soon this place will look like England. Tea, luv?

Test drive the Brighton roundabouts: