'the steady evolution of the language'

Things that fill my heart with joy: an illustrated (by the woman who did the New Yorker's Newyorkistan cover, no less) edition of The Elements of Style. I am so buying a copy of this as soon as I hit the shores of the motherland. Last summer, I spent a month teaching an intensive nonfiction writing course to two classes of fourteen and fifteen year olds. I'm not sure how much wisdom and good grammar I managed to impart, but walking into Blackwell's and ordering 25 copies of the Elements on account was a sublime moment. And now I find there's not just an illustrated version, but.....a song cycle?

The vocal writing is cast in a distinctly early-music style, the textures as pure and pared down as Strunk and White liked their sentences. There are frequent moments of disarming beauty, as if Mr. Muhly were tempting the listener to forget the jokes and simply listen.

At a rehearsal last week, the tenor Matt Hensrud stood on the elevated catwalk of the library's reading room and sang mellifluously of punctuation and orthography. "Do not use a hyphen between words that can better be written as one word: 'water-fowl, waterfowl,' " he intoned, his voice echoing in the churchlike acoustics. He was joined by the soprano Abby Fischer for some tenderly turned philology: "The steady evolution of the language seems to favor union: two words eventually become one."

It really makes me very happy to know that such a thing as a musical adaptation of Strunk & White exists. More things in heaven & earth. Now if you'll excuse me, I feel a sudden drive to go re-read Louis Menand's New Yorker essay about the Chicago Manual of Style.