Merri and I had a couple of nights out on the town this week. Thursday night, we went to hear

Carmina Burana, by Carl Orff, performed in Popejoy Hall. From the mezzanine, crowded with friends and family of the performers, we looked

down on the densely packed stage, including bleachers spanning the entire stage and half its depth for about two hundred singers from the

UNM University Chorus and Concert Choir.

I’m not much of a concert-goer, but it is amazing to be in such a context, united with

many strangers by something beautiful and uplifting.

Even if you don’t recognize the names Carmina Burana or Orff, you know the

opening and closing of this piece. It may be the best or most rousing 5 minutes of music ever. Even if that is hyperbolic, it has to be

on the short list of greatest choral pieces of the 20th Century. Oddly, I first heard it in the stunning-at-the-time movie Excaliber.

Since then, we’ve heard it once before at UNM Popejoy and we have a couple of recordings of it.

To me, Carmina bridges pre-20th

Century and 20th Century music. It has long moments seeming plainly classical and then punctuates those with a more modern dissonance and

cacophony. Strings are plucked instead of stroked. There’s a xylophone, two gongs, bells, etc. The 5 percussionists work their asses

off.

My knowledge of music isn’t sufficient to be sure, but it seems full of humor — something Frank Zappa might have liked.

Surely Orff despised some tenor enough to require him to be on stage for over an hour and sing not 5 minutes, indeed, singing the part of

a roasted swan (O miserable me. Now I am roasted black!) Then there are the two grand pianos which don’t seem to play in more than two

of the 25 sections.

In the midst of this, I had an epiphany about what an extraordinary programming language musical notation is.

One can write a page of black dots and lines to control the simultaneous operation of hundreds of individuals. Though there must be

variations intentional and accidental, a music “program” runs the same anywhere, anytime — across centuries. The same cannot be said

about any other human-written programming language.

The story of the libretto seems fictional. A collection of poems and songs

written by defrocked priests between the 11th and 14th Centuries. Yeah, OK. The Latin lyrics are well-worth translating; much of the

non-musical humor is there.

And yet, again, that opening and closing (which was played a third time as an encore) is stunning

musically and lyrically:

O, Fortune!
Like the Moon
Everchanging
Rising first
Then declining;

Hateful life
Treats us badly
Then with kindness
Making sport with our desires,
Causing power
And poverty alike
To

melt like ice.

mjh
PS: Two little tangential items about me and music, one of which no

one else knows. First, I was the Data Processing Manager for the National Symphony Orchestra over 20 years ago. My office in the Kennedy

Center had been a broom closet which I shared with an IBM System 34. The other is that over 30 years ago I took a Music Theory class and

wrote a piece of music in a strictly mechanical manner — I don’t play any instrument. I called it “The Cacophonous Cavalier” (after the

University of Virginia’s namesake) and sub-titled it “Mund voll Kartofeln” (I was a German Major; that’s literally “mouth full of

potatoes” and an old-fashioned way to call someone dim. The TA wrote “quatscherei” (nonsense). I don’t recall the grade; I never heard

it played.