Hey everyone! In case you didn’t notice, the Grammy nominations were announced this week! This is very exciting, unless you were not nominated, in which case this sucks. I was not nominated. But it’s ok! I am not bitter! It could be because I did not release any albums this past year! I will blame it on that if anyone asks why I was not nominated. But some people were nominated, and we should probably talk about them.
To begin with, I want to talk about the nominees for Best Children’s Album, so that I can say “I told you so.” The nominees are:
1) ¡Come Bien! Eat Right! – José-Luis Orozco
2) Dark Pie Concerns – Gustafer Yellowgold
3) Home – Tim Kubart
4) How Great Can This Day Be – Lori Henriques
5) Trees – Molly Ledford & Billy Kelly
I’m sure these are all great albums, though I haven’t heard all of them, and you will want to check each one out for yourself. But there is one there on that list that I recommended to you once as one of the best, and that is Tim Kubart’s “Home.” It really is a fantastic album that gets better every time we listen to it. I’m psyched that it was nominated, and if you haven’t heard it yet, that’s definitely not my fault. Good luck, Tim!
I should also, due to my extreme classicalness, comment briefly on the nominations for opera and choral albums. The operas nominated range from Monteverdi to Mozart, from Ravel to Janáček and Steffani, but out of the 5 nominated performing groups, only 2 are from the United States of America. Both of those groups are from Boston. So I wanted to take this completely unrelated opportunity to say: Eat it, Yankees fans.
In terms of the choral nominations, I would like to say that I personally know one of the singers on the Grammy-nominated Paulus recording, so I hope it wins. I am also glad to see conductor Craig Hella Johnson among the names of nominees, because I met him when I worked at Chorus America and he is a fine person. But mostly because he has the most bad-ass name in choral music today.
Who will win? Who will go home in tears? We will never know, because none of these categories will be announced on the live broadcast. But this is only because nobody cares about them, not because they are not worthy. So let’s take a moment to appreciate some great music in our lives that makes a difference in our individual worlds, because the moment is fleeting and we’ll all be forgotten eventually. But the music is immortal.