George Frideric Handel & His Messiah

(One of my main problems with this blog is my inability to manipulate or change the line spaces. In my original of this material, the extract from Wikipedia came in as some kind of sans serif font, I guess Arial. I changed it to Times. All was well until my computer crashed and I had to reboot my blog. Things changed in an unattractive way that I simply cannot fix. I've tried, believe me. Why don't they give us the opportunity to adjust spacing between lines, so that wide gaps don't open up between paragraphs or lines unbidden and unwanted? Well, read on.)


Another swipe from Wikipedia:


George Frideric Handel's Messiah was "Composed in London during the summer of 1741 and premiered in Dublin, Ireland, on 13 April 1742, it was repeatedly revised by Handel, reaching its most familiar version in the performance to benefit the Foundling Hospital in 1754."


The first time I sang excerpts from Messiah I was in high school. I'd been studying voice for a couple of years, and the choir conductor at my church gave me the soprano solos, which at that point in my life, were difficult to perform. But singing the "Hallelujah" chorus was the single most thrilling experience I had ever had, and ever since then I have loved to perform this music. I'm not a formal musician—didn't like to practice—but I sang the oratorio with a local choral group in Massachusetts about twelve or so years ago. Got the timing right and hit every note. A major accomplishment for me, since timing has always been a problem for me.


Here's another quote from Wikipedia about the first London performance of the "Hallelujah" chorus:


In many parts of the world, it is the accepted practice for the audience to stand for this section of the performance. The tradition is said to have originated with the first London performance of Messiah, which was attended by King George II. As the first notes of the triumphant Hallelujah chorus rang out, the king rose to his feet and remained standing until the end of the chorus. Royal protocol has always dictated that when the monarch stands, everyone in the monarch's presence is also required to stand. Thus, the entire audience and orchestra stood when the king stood during the performance, initiating a tradition that has lasted more than two centuries. It is lost to history the exact reason why the King stood at that point, but the most popular explanations include:

• He was so moved by the performance that he rose to his feet.
• He stood out of tribute to the composer.
• As was and is the custom, one stands in the presence of royalty as a sign of respect. The Hallelujah chorus clearly places Christ as the King of Kings. In standing, King George II accepts that he too is subject to the Lord of Lords.
• He had grown so uncomfortable in his seat during the entire work that he finally stood to stretch his legs.

There is another story told about this chorus that Handel's assistant walked in to Handel's room after shouting to him for several minutes with no response. The assistant reportedly found Handel in tears, and when asked what was wrong, Handel held up the score to this movement and said, "I thought I saw the face of God."

The point I'm making with the quote is that this is a piece of music that has been revered and respected by everyone since it was initially performed. This particular part of the entire work has been singled out for respect above the other pieces in the oratorio, and for good reason. It is exalting to sing and exalting to hear. In the very best sense of the word, this is a sacred piece of music. (That last bulleted item is tongue in cheek I suspect.)


So what kind of numbnuts think it is suitable for use in advertisements? I have so far heard it used in a Charmin toilet paper commercial, for Manwich sandwich mixture, and most recently, in a commercial for Oscar Meyer's "Carving Board Turkey" sandwich meat! The Charmin commercial didn't air very many times, and I suspect because they got a lot of flak for using this music, but the food vendors didn't seem to get the same response, since I heard it used several times with their products' airings.


To say I protest is putting it mildly. Before the Charmin commercial I had no real preference about toilet paper; after the commercial I vowed never to use that product. As for the food ads, well, I never eat those kinds of things anyway, so they didn't lose either a steadfast or a possible customer. Nonetheless, I protest! The works of great classical composers, I think, should not be used to sell anything. The main reason to use this music is that it's free, so the ad agency doesn't have to pay any fees. The ultimate effect, though, is to cheapen the music. Using it also demonstrates the ignorance of the people at the ad agency and the company who pays for its services. In particular, using this piece of music seems the worst sort of tacky, kind of an anti-ad expression. I hope, for the sake of art and people's health, they don't buy these products.


Well, let's face it, I can't expect the developers of Manwich to rank very high on the evolutionary scale; much the same can be said about the makers of Oscar Meyer products. After all, a highly industrialized foodstuff is not really food at all; it's just stuff. As such it should be stuck somewhere dark, where the sun don't shine, as Dick Cavett said many years ago, bless him.

Hotsy Totsy Art Terms & Other Trivia

This is a quote from Wikipedia. I don't think it needs verification from an outside source, so I'm inserting here in toto:

Giclée (pronounced /ʒiːˈkleɪ/ "zhee-clay" or /dʒiːˈkleɪ, from French [ʒiˈkle]) is a neologism for the process of making fine art prints from a digital source using ink-jet printing. The word "giclée" is derived from the French language word "le gicleur" meaning "nozzle", or more specifically "gicler" meaning "to squirt, spurt, or spray".^[1] It was coined in 1991 by Jack Duganne,^[2] a printmaker working in the field, to represent any inkjet-based digital print used as fine art. The intent of that name was to distinguish commonly known industrial "Iris proofs" from the type of fine art prints artists were producing on those same types of printers. The name was originally applied to fine art prints created on Iris printers in a process invented in the early 1990s but has since come to mean any high quality ink-jet print and is often used in galleries and print shops to denote such prints.


About a decade ago, in viewing a show in Massachusetts, I saw this term used to describe inkjet prints, only no one knew what it meant. I went to the show—which I've forgotten the name of—with the members of one of my photography classes, since the prints on view were all some kind of photographic images, ranging from huge black-and-white prints made in a darkroom to "giclée" prints that were obviously highly manipulated digital prints. Beyond being confused, I just passed off the convention as affected and continued to call my inkjet prints as I made them, on an inkjet printer.


Now, it seems, this term is accepted usage. This entry is primarily about ramping up the terms used in the fine art world to make silk purses out of what some artist perceived was a sow's ear. But is the term "inkjet print" less high-class than "giclée"? Frankly, I see no difference, except that the former is a description of the process used and the machine used to make the print, while the latter, being Frenchified, sounds more grand than it is. I absolutely cannot abide circumlocutions of this kind. If you check out my art site, you'll find all my inkjet prints so labeled, nor will I change the terminology. At least the viewer knows, from reading the label, how I made the print. I usually name the type of printer I used, furthermore, and my printer, an Epson Photo Stylus 2200, is an inkjet printer. It isn't referred to on the Epson site or anywhere else as a "giclée" printer.


Another Frenchified term is "photo gravure." I came across this one on a site operated by a photographer I met in Massachusetts. Since I know the process he used to make his prints, besides using a special inkjet printer for black-and-white prints, I know that the process refers to what we called "photopolymer plate" printing when I was in art school.


A photopolymer plate, or sun plate as it is sometimes called, is a zinc plate coated with a photoreceptive polymer coating that, after the appropriate processing, can be used to make intaglio prints. I think it's a wonderful process, in that it allows the artist to use photographs or other digital materials to make a plate for producing intaglio prints. (For those who don't know, an intaglio print is made by laying a sheet of dampened printmaking paper or other material on top of a plate that has been inscribed in any of a number of ways with an image that has been inked. When put through a printing press, the image on the plate is printed on the paper.)


In my case, I was in the process of using photopolymer plates with many of the images I inherited from my father to make intaglio prints while I was in art school. Whether I'll ever be able to finish the series I started will depend on whether I can obtain access to a print studio to continue the work.


The process of producing the plate involves printing the image, in black, on a transparency sheet, using either a laser printer or an inkjet printer. If one uses the latter type of printer, one must be sure to print the image with a halftone screen (as you would see in a newspaper). A laser printer automatically adds the screen. The halftone screen (or filter) is needed to get the ink to adhere to the image. Once the transparency is exposed correctly (part of the difficulty of the process), then one lays it on top of a photopolymer plate in a light table. The light table lid closes on top of plate and transparency, locks by having the vacuum sucked out of the space the two items are in, to hold them together, and flips over to be exposed to light, to engrave the image from the transparency onto the plate. 


The plate is then placed in water, which as I recall is just plain water, and the person making the plate uses a soft brush to rub the image. After five minutes the plate must be left in a window, to dry and to be exposed to sunlight (hence the name "sun plate") for several hours. After that time, the plate is ready for use. One coats it with ordinary printing ink, blots off the ink as necessary to make the image, and uses it to edition a print. Because of the soft nature of the photopolymer, the plates don't last very long, so the number of legible copies one is able to make is small. I think this contributes something to the precious quality of making plates in this manner.


For me, though, the object of using the plates is not to produce a darkroom-quality photograph so much as what is obviously a manipulated photograph, which may then look "handmade" or rough in some way or another. In one of the plates I made, I hand-wrote one of the stories my grandmother told me about the family to accompany three photographs, all of which were about ninety-five or more years old. I loved the idea that my hand was visible in the work, and that the work did not attempt to emulate a proper photograph that was produced in a darkroom.


But that's my thing. In any regard I would not call this image "photo gravure." It's so pretentious! In general, I believe the artist's touch in a digital work makes that work transcend the medium used to produce it. I can't write on each individual print, but I can write on a piece of paper, scan it into my computer, then print it in an interesting way. Plus, by using this technique, I don't have to write backward, which is what one would normally have to do on a copper plate. There are steps I have to take in making the transparency and the plate that will allow whatever I write to print forward, but here isn't the place to go into a description of that process. Basically, just remember that the image on the plate must be backward in order for the writing in the finished print to be forward. And I'll probably call my image a photopolymer plate or an intaglio print from a photopolymer plate. Longer term, but plainer in its way.