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News Archive: Page 20 of 2710/4/98: Jake Heggie cd and anthologyHold on to your collective hats, folks: the news page has real news! Jake Heggie told me that it was ok to announce that a cd and two Schirmer anthologies of his songs are in the works. Here is an excerpt from a note he sent me: The CD (no set title yet) features Songs by Jake Heggie, and is scheduled for release by BMG Classics on the RCA Red Seal label in September of 1999. It features performances by:
There are solo songs and duets to texts by Emily Dickinson, Sir Philip
Sidney, Frederica von Stade, Vachel Lindsay, Gini Savage, John Hall, Gavin Dillard and
Philip Littell. About 25 of his songs will be in the Schirmer anthology. We are hoping to have not only these published songs in the catalog, but also information on 75 of his unpublished songs and how to obtain copies of them. Meanwhile, our tour has started, and our first performance of Marriage of Figaro is tomorrow evening. I can get about two hours of work done on the van until the battery gives out, so I should be able to do work several times a week on the site. I worked on the anthology index some more today--that is a big project. 10/3/98: Site NewsTour's tomorrow. I'm rushing around trying to get everything done. I realized I had not sent the Wednesday update to the site out, so I need to do that. I've added some "special attention" marks to many of the link pages, as a solution to the problem I brought up earlier (on Wednesday below). I've also been working more on the behind-the-scenes Access database for the song catalog (so I can index by anthology), contacting the composers mentioned on Wednesday, and trying to play through some of the songs Glendower Jones sent me. The Kohn songs are almost done; when I am done with them I will update the catalog again. I've been idly pondering trying to get in touch with Chris Berg to see if he might help with a few song descriptions . . . maybe another night. I've got to get to bed! 9/30/98: Site NewsThe dress rehearsal today was my big one, and I felt it went well. Now I can relax a bit until we all pile into the touring vans this Sunday. This might even mean some time to work on the site! I have received some feedback that (while certainly positive overall) reinforces a feeling that has been growing in me for a while: I need to find a way to highlight some of the links that I think are especially noteworthy. My fear is that, by calling attention to some sites, I will imply that others are not worth perusing. This is not something I want to do. But sites like The Diction Domain, the British Song Catalog, Classical Singer, and the Nimbus Prima Voce site are "must see" sites in my opinion. But I don't want to imply that, for instance, Bassocantante's Opera Shop is any less of a site. Maybe an icon that implies special practicality, rather than merit alone, is the way to go. I will ponder this. Jake Heggie has expressed interest in adding his songs to the catalog, which is very exciting. The composers who have enthusiastically agreed to contribute (Benton Hess, John Greer, Mark Kilstofte, Jake Heggie, Richard Pearson Thomas, Mark Scearce, etc.) are as busy as or busier than I, but many have already begun contributing information and songs. As the catalog gets more and more useful it will be more and more exciting. I think that, for each few composers who get their songs all on the site, I will announce the addition to some news groups and forums. Because of rehearsals, I have not made many strides in the way of the site or even the song database design. I'll do a bit of work tonight, though, and maybe have some real progress to report by the weekend. Finally, William Vessels, the Executive Director of NATS, wrote me a nice quick note to tell me that they were adding our webpage to their links collection. That actually means a lot. Thank you. 9/28/98: Site NewsI saw our site on Netscape navigator this weekend--it looks so much better and more professional in Internet Explorer that I was disappointed. I don't have time to fix everything (and some things would be very difficult to fix, even though they are relatively small cosmetic problems) so all I can do is offer the rather lame "Best viewed with Internet Explorer at 800x600" caveat. I'll put that on the first page. My apologies to Netscape users. Everything still works well, at least. I've done some work on adding the anthology index to the song catalog (which would also eventually allow me to automate the Singers' Bibliography). I've also annotated about half of the Steven Mark Kohn haiku songs (of which there are 27) from Classical Vocal Reprints so those should be going in the catalog soon. Karyn and I coached with Benton Hess this weekend and he is still working on getting his songs together for the catalog. We are all busy, including Richard Pearson Thomas, but the project is still growing steadily. Dress rehearsals for Figaro are Wednesday and Thursday, and then we leave for tour on Sunday. I still will update and work on the site for the five weeks of tour--we have lots and lots of travel time in which we need to entertain ourselves! The battery on my laptop only lasts a few hours and there will also be many other things to do (like learn Don Magnifico!). I read one of the books on the "To Do" section of my booklist, The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman. I enjoyed it immensely and plan on moving it to the "Recommended" section and on buying the sequel.
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