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Archive for the ‘Classical’ Category

Day 98. Rossini, Paganini.

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

How did you first hear opera? If you are like just about anyone in my generation that would actually admit to listening to opera, my guess is ‘What’s Opera Doc’ or ‘Rabbit of Seville’ is somewhere in your personal viewing history. And I would also assume this is the case for people in my parent’s generation as well. Here’s a test, throw on ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ and see if ‘KILL THE WABBIT!’ gets stuck in your head.

And of course I am passing this fine introduction to opera on to my girls. Mira asks to ‘see bunny!’ and Celia has had a couple years now of occasional Bugs Bunny / Elmer Fudd opera viewings. So when I guided Mira’s box-set grabbing hands towards Rossini today, and she just HAPPENED to grab ‘Barber of Seville’, and then I just happened to put on the overture, I could tell both girls recognized it. They laughed and giggled. As well they should. Rossini is funny. And when Celia is sad at the end of ‘What’s Opera Doc?’, well, she should be, because Wagner’s ‘Ring’ is a tragedy.

Probably my favorite part of the old Looney Tunes and other cartoons that use just about any form of classical music (whether it is opera, or Liszt or Schroeder playing Beethoven) is that in those older cartoons, they are actually performances – recordings of real people playing the music, and often quite well. And, they find ways to make the music humorous (and if you can hear the humor, that also shows you know your music). Humor in music is hard, and the visual cues in Bugs Bunny certainly help, but these are cartoons that can be appreciated. They aren’t childish adult voices singing ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ is a half yelling annoying voice like so many kids toys today. They aren’t synthesized. They are arranged by real arrangers, played by real musicians, and the cartoons often focus on the music and the virtuosity it takes to perform some of it. Of course Bugs Bunny needs his ears to help out with playing Liszt – anyone who has actually tried to perform his works knows that a few extra appendages wouldn’t hurt. I have heard a couple people say that being introduced to classical music in cartoons is actually bad for kids – it makes them think that the visuals are necessary, or that it has to be funny. I don’t really buy that though.

First of all, music, as something that is performed, is VERY visual. Not enough musicians realize how important appearance and performance are, but when you ask most people what the hard part about a computer music concert is, it is the fact that ‘there is nothing to look at’. And as far as opera goes, while I do love listening to opera, it is as much a visual art as it is a dramatic and musical one. And there are a number of performers who take advantage of the visual element. Paganini used to up light his performances to make his appearance more ‘devil-ish’. Liszt faced the piano so the audience could see his fingers. The Who smashed their guitars. Music is meant to be performed and experienced, and I think way to many people think this ISN’T the case because we can buy it on sound only recordings or listen to it on the radio.

Which brings up the other part of tonight’s additions… a set of twelve, two movement pieces for guitar and violin by Paganini. These are wonderful little pieces… sweet, melodic with occasional moments of violin virtuosity thrown in.

Day 97. Grisey, Scelsi, Hosokawa, Ligeti.

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

So – no choices from the girls tonight, but I decided to rip a stack of discs that my friend Gwynne brought back. Most of the music is from the ‘spectral’ school… some Grisey, Hosokawa and some Scelsi. Then there is also the 4-CD box set of DG recordings of Ligeti’s music that the label put out after he passed away. So filling in some good late-20th century music onto the server.

I’ve learned quite a bit from this music, especially from Grisey and Scelsi. And regarding Scelsi, I also have a new feeling for what is and what isn’t dissonant. About 10 years ago, when I first heard his works (many of which consist of movements with a single pitch as a focus, and the instruments meandering around that pitch in microtonal inflections), I was stunned at how much SPACE there is between the notes of the piano. After hearing a couple of his quartets, seconds felt so consonant! Then, with Grisey, I would up going the other direction. I’m not at the point where pretty much anything other the octaves feels dissonant to me… even a perfect fifth creates some tension. But it also places dissonance, and the musical spectrum itself, into a broader context. How does a composer set up what is a feeling of stasis? Then how do they set up a way to move away from it?

Another thing that has happened in my mind as a result of that my definition of dissonance, and the negative connotations of dissonance, has itself changed considerably for me. I realized after teaching music theory for a couple of years, that we tend to pass value judgement onto dissonant intervals. They are almost seen as ‘bad’, they ‘need resolution’, you have to ‘prepare’ for them. And I think this terminology was stuck into my head as a thing to avoid. But there is so much color, rhythm and richness that can be explored in sounds with that have traditional dissonant relationships. Dissonance can be very beautiful.

I’m surprised it took the music of Grisey and Scelsi to show me this since I feel like there was a part of me that always knew this. In Ravel’s ‘Le Tombeau de Couperin’, the ‘Forlane’ has some of the most wonderful uses of minor and major seconds. They cause these sharp, little, brilliant pinpoints of light almost. They never resolve, and certainly don’t need to. I remember trying to copy these highlights of melodic sound in a set of piano pieces I wrote just after finishing up at Berkeley, but I was never able to get them to sound just right. Part of the problem was that I felt like these notes had to ‘lead’ somewhere. I wasn’t comfortable just letting a dissonant note hang there. But the real problem is that I wasn’t Ravel, writing piano music in the 1920s. Nor am I Grisey or Scelsi. But I am lucky enough to start to feel confident enough in what I do write so that, now, the notes I put down have intention. That I have an idea about what I want to achieve. I’m lucky to have started that process. Hopefully it is one that I keep working on as keep composing.

Day 96. Tim Buckley, Steve Reich, Schubert, Brahms, Billy Bragg and Wilco.

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Been a busy night working on some recordings for school, but I also managed to rip quite a bit. In the stack was a Schubert symphony box-set (Mira’s pick) with Harnoncourt conducting, some Brahms chamber music, early Steve Reich works, the first Billy Bragg and Wilco album and Tim Buckley’s ‘Happy  Sad’.

So – very little here that is not noteworthy, but the Tim Buckley album is particularily special. It is one of the albums I remember from growing up (and definitely mellower music), but it is also an album I kept listening to as my musical tastes started to drift more and more from my parents’ musical tastes (and I probably kept listening to it as their drifted from mine!). In high school, it was a quiet favorite of mine, and tracks from it wound up on many mix tapes. During my freshman year, as Tamiko and I (still friends) were coming back from a band trip to San Luis Obisopo (with a long bus ride), she and her boyfriend Matt were breaking up, and my girlfriend and I weren’t in the best of places either. As we were passing north on 101 up towards San Jose (through the area I grew up in), we were getting a sunset, and I remember telling Tamiko a few things about what I missed about living there (mostly, the fog rolling in over the hills). After a bit of time, I gave her my headphones to listen to and on the tape at the time was ‘Buzzin’ Fly’ by Tim Buckley. She cuddled up with me on my lap and listened to it. It was probably one of the most intimate moments I had ever had with anyone up to this point in my life, and it was with my best friend.

I love this song, and Tamiko and I now associate it with this moment. We were both breaking / about to be breaking up with people, and within a few weeks we ourselves would start dating. It wasn’t a great time for either of us… teenage break-ups just suck. But at this moment, we were really good friends, and we were the two that we went to for comfort. And when it comes down to it, it is that comfort and security in each other that is one of the strongest part of our relationship. The music on ‘Happy Sad’ is happy, and sad, but also lush, warm, comforting and sometimes tense. It is probably one of my favorite albums (and is also one of the more ‘out there’ Tim Buckley discs… complete with vibraphones and double bass in a quasi-jazz like setting). Pretty complex emotionally in many ways. Perhaps this is the disc all adolescents should have while they go through that confusing period of life where everything feels like so many emotions can be happening at the same time.

Day 95. Haydn.

Saturday, May 22nd, 2010

I thought I’d be able to finish the string quartet discs tonight. I was wrong. There are just so many of them…

Day 93. Haydn and Duke Ellington.

Thursday, May 20th, 2010

I’m continuing work on the stack of Haydn string quartets tonight (only got through a few last night) as well as a few Duke Ellington discs. The Haydn discs, by the way, are from the Naxos set recorded by the Kodaly Quartet. As with most things Haydn, I tend not to think about listening to something by him until I do, and once I do I am almost always struck by how good his music is. And I wonder why he doesn’t get the same amount of attention as Mozart or Beethoven. While he is often given credit as the inventor (or standardizer) of classical form and style, the virtuosic lyricism of Mozart and the dramatic pre-romanticism of Beethoven is the music that is used to complete the music history story of the classical period. Part of it, I am sure, is because it wraps up into a neater package that way. Haydn had these ideas, and Mozart, Beethoven (and Schubert, etc. etc.) expanded them, then etc. etc… But I imagine another big part is the sheer volume of work. I can literally spend two days listening to all of his symphonies without repeating a single one. The five hours it takes to listen to all the Beethoven symphonies lends itself much more to repeated listening of the whole body of work. So of course I know it much better. But with Haydn, even if I chose the top 20 and got to know them as well as I know the Beethoven 9, I would still have 4/5 of his symphonies to be surprised by! So, for now I think I will let myself enjoy the surprises when I get to them. And I will also let myself remember that if I am looking for some good music that I haven’t heard yet, I can dig into my Haydn collection and probably be pleased.

The Duke Ellington tonight is a nice cross-section of his work. There is a collection drawn from a PBS documentary about him that covers a VERY wide range of his work. Basically, it is like taking a survey course on Duke Ellington. With that disc, you get an excellent sense of who Ellington was as a songwriter / composer. Then there is the mostly amazing ‘Ellington at Newport’ from 1956 which shows Ellington the band leader, and finally ‘Money Jungle’, a trio disc from ’62 with Max Roach and Charles Mingus which shows us Ellington the phenomenal pianist.

‘Money Jungle’ is every bit as amazing as you would expect an album by Ellington, Roach and Mingus to be. The playing, all around, is superb. And in the smaller setting, you hear Ellington’s playing in sparser surroundings. This also means that you hear him filling in more space with his playing, and at times his left hand sounds like McCoy Tyner is sitting in. At times, his playing is HEAVY. And I have heard him voice certain chords like this in other contexts (most notably, in the Ella Fitzgerald ‘Ellington Songbook’ recordings), but in a smaller setting with less players, it sounds like he is giving Mingus a run for his money at times. It sounds like he is giving Max Roach a run for his money… and on top of that, he is giving his right hand a run for its money. The playing is just amazing.

But it is the playing of Paul Gonsalves on the Newport disc that is the standout. After a rough start to the festival, the band sounds a bit warn out at times in the first half or so. But by the time Gonsalves starts his solo during ‘Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue’ you think something amazing has to start happening sometime soon. And it does. The 27 chorus solo that follows is one of the most amazing 6 minutes or so ever captured live on tape. And not to diminish the amazing playing of Gonsalves, but it is also what is going on around him that adds to the moment. Duke egging him on to keep going early in the solo break. Duke and the rest of the band pushing him even further. Then the crowd gets into it. You can literall feel the excitement rise with this recording, and then it ends. Literally, it sounds like Gonsalves has possibly collapsed and is out of breath. It is one of the least graceful endings to a solo you will ever hear, but it is perfect. Gonsalves has given it everything he has got, and when the tune ends, the roar from the crowd (and the time it takes Duke to calm everyone back down to get the concert moving again) shows how just about everyone there realizes how luck they were to hear what they just heard. I’m lucky to hear it. The history of music is lucky that it was caught on tape. I still get chills when I hear this track.

Day 92. Webern and the Friends of Dean Martinez.

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

Tonight’s rips are the complete Webern with Pierre Boulez directing on Sony, and a couple of albums by ‘The Friends Of Dean Martinez’. I also grabbed the Naxos discs of the Haydn String Quartets to start ripping those. They will probably take some time.

The Friends of Dean Martinez are a quirky little group. Their first albums showed up  on Sub Pop in the 90s (if I remember correctly) in the middle of the Seattle grunge craze. But (again, if I remember correctly) this was a band from Tuscon that sounded like it stepped out of Esquivel’s world, and on the way to our CD players, picked up some surf guitars. The music is almost exclusively instrumental, and has that 1960s bachelor pad feel. Very melodic and usually mellow, mostly originals, but a few covers thrown in for nostalgic purposes. They have a great version of ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’ on their first album that fits into this nostalgia category, complete with LP surface noise, appearing as sound from the distant past. Violins playing along with the melody slowly in the beginning (with an eBow?) until the drummer counts the group in. Here, a nice latin beat complete with claves and shakers takes over, and a wonderfully rich guitar sound. One of the things that I appreciate the most about popular instrumental music is how much the sound of the music seems to be paid attention to. When vocals are in the mix the subtleties of the instrumental playing and sound too often take a back seat. The Friends of Dean Martinez had a meticulous to attention to sound and at a time when a lot of music was about volume and noise, and while the lack of vocals usually spells doom on the pop charts, I’m thankful to Sub Pop for taking risks like these when the temptation would have been, for many labels, to just find more and more Nirvana’s to record and release as quickly as possible.

The Webern Sony set was the first complete set of Webern’s works, and it is quite fitting that PIerre Boulez is directing it. Boulez was one of the strongest proponents of Webern’s work after WW II (Webern was killed by a U.S. soldier shortly after the war in what seems to have been a misunderstanding of curfew rules). While I rarely listen to Webern for enjoyment, his work was a great resource for me as a younger composer, and I use his work when I talk about timbre and texture to composition and computer music students. His attention to sound and color is perhaps unmatched in early 20th century music, and unlike his second Viennese school contemporaries, the brevity of his works shows an understanding of atonal and twelve tone techniques that others missed.

Of course, Webern is often all the craze in music theory classes. People love to count the notes, find the rows and how Webern manipulated the contours. What is surprising to me is that all the other aspects of the music are often overlooked: his attention to bow placement to vary the color of notes, the careful choice of dynamics. What surprised me most about most analyses of Webern’s work is the careful attention to the notes. Pitches and rhythm are the most precise parts of western music notation, but it seems to me that because they can be notated so precisely they have become the overarching concern for most music theorists. They are the part of the music that they can most easily re-create in their head in the absence of performance. In the op. 9 string quartet pieces for instance, we can see notes as they are written, but when the bowing and possibly even the fingering are taken into account, the resulting sound may bear little resemblance to the indicated pitch. It may be a shimmer of glassy sound filled with bow noise rather then a focused pitch. Certainly, the pitch that is written is the one that has to be played to get that sound, but how does such a note figure into the coherence of an atonal pitch set or serial row? Chances are someone may find something interesting about the notated pitch, but in performance the result may remove any sense of pitch entirely.

And while what I am about to say is an oversimplification, I have found that the idea behind it has been one of the most important ideas about composition that I have gotten from Webern: It isn’t all about the pitches. Now I say this with the realization that pitch is one of the most important parts of musical information we hear, and it is one that needs careful attention. Musicians are trained in a very pitch-centric way. But as a composer that explores new territory, I feel like this aspect is something to play with rather then something to be a slave to. I have also discovered that ideas like tonality or any sort of pitch organization has more to do with musical context then it does with what scale or pattern of pitches someone is using. I can create a sense of confusion and wandering just as easily with a major scale or a serial row, and Berg certainly showed that you can use a serial row and still have a sense of tonality and romanticism. So in my own work, I have started to figure out where I need to really care about melodic material, and what I have to do if I want a listener’s focus to be elsewhere. Like I said – I think this is oversimplification. It would probably take a whole book to really explain it in words. Or – a piece or two of music.

Day 91. A plethora of music.

Sunday, May 16th, 2010

Some pretty random selections tonight… a couple of Dufay discs, Zero 7, Kodaly, a Bobby Darin collection, Carmaig De Forrest’s ‘Death Groove Love Party’, the Rushmore soundtrack, Patsy Cline with the Jordanaires and Public Enemy. I’m glad to know that if anyone does a good search for Patsy Cline and Public Enemy from this day forward, my blog will be found.

These were all stacked together in a ‘to be filed’ stack that, well, has never been filed. Being a good white liberal, I of course have a Public Enemy CD. But how many good white liberals have Public Enemy sitting next to Dufay?

Day 89. Vivaldi, Getz/Gilberto, Pink Martini and Bach.

Saturday, May 15th, 2010

Tonight I came across a stack of CDs in my bedroom that I discovered while grabbing some freshly recharged AA batteries for my camera. There is a little magazine holder there that really is just holding a robe I never wear and, much to my surprise, a stack of discs. Included in this stack is the Anner Bylsma disc of Vivaldi Concertos that I had been missing (!) as well as Pink Martini’s second album, the Pierre Fournier Bach Cello Suites and the Getz/Gilberto classic. I happily brought the stack downstairs and immediately ripped the Vivaldi and put it on while the girls ate their dinner, and happily announced to Tamiko that I had found the disc. We played it a lot when I first shacked up with her in her apartment on Arch St. in Berkeley, and I mentioned how hearing the music reminded me of that time. She said that it reminded her of when Celia was being born, and that is when I realized that this was the stack of CDs that we took to the hospital with us for Celia and, three years later, with Mira. Not that we did much listening during Celia actually being born (I really only remember hearing Bach Cello Suites that day, early in the process… after that is mostly a blur until Celia was out and all of us had quiet moments here and there over the next couple of days). We had a couple days in the hospital after both girls were born, and the well-known music playing in the background helped prepare both of them, from day 1, for the house of music they would be moving back into.

When I had the Vivaldi on this morning, Celia did some ballet like dancing. She is just as elegant as the music is, and though she is making up almost everything there is doing, I already see a bit of virtuosity in her mind for body movement. Mira laughs as I sing along with Joao Gilberto, and I love that in their life times, my girls have heard music from five continents and over ten centuries. They have adapted it to their own, and can focus on it at times, and enjoy it in the background. The Arvo Pärt disc we also had at the hospital still puts Mira (who turns two in a week) to sleep every night, and Celia moves between Bach and Dowland.

People often ask me if when I am going to start the girls on music lessons. Often I get a shocked glance back when I say ‘when they ask’. They have their hands on instruments whenever they want to, from violins and upright grand pianos to flutes for the bathtub that you tune with water. There is a two octave kid accordion as well. They both dance, and they are both around music everyday. They sing. I’m not worried about forcing anything musical into my girls’ lives. They are already musical, and I cherish that there is so much joy in their lives because of it.

Day 88. Beethoven.

Thursday, May 13th, 2010

Wilhelm Kempff fest tonight! I have the complete piano sonatas, cello sonatas with Pierre Fournier and violin sonatas with Yehudi Menuhin. Not sure if I will get through all of them tonight (15 CDs). These are some of my favorite recordings… ever.

The piano sonatas recording are wonderful. There are mistakes here and there (and this is the case on all these recordings) but all the performances feel very much like real performances (rather then recordings). The overall shaping of movements and whole pieces is wonderful, and you can tell that these are pieces that all of these performers know in their bones. It is performed as though these are great actors who have played a character to the point where they know the past, present, future, thoughts and motivations.

The sonatas box is probably the box set I sold the most of while working at Tower in the classical room. I also had a copy of it (a ‘defective’ copy) stashed away under the counter to play during my shifts. And not only are these some of the best recordings of the standards that most people look for (the ‘Moonlight’ and ‘Pathetique’ for instance), but the late sonatas are nothing short of stunning. The set I have (on DG) was the third recording of the complete Beethoven sonatas for Kempff. And the late sonatas especially benefit from this. They are introspective and have an extreme of touch to them – very light and floaty trills, and heavy dramatic octaves in the beginning of the Op. 111. The lyrical moments between the fugues in Op. 110 literally sound like someone singing a recitative, the piano practically breathing between utterances.

And as much as I LOVE the piano sonata recordings, the cello sonatas are even more special. The recordings are live, and show how well the two performers on stage know each other, and how well they both know Beethoven. The last movement of the op. 69 is a great example of this. The whole trajectory that leads up to the big climax near the end of the movement is paced temporally and dynamically in a perfect way. The whole movement swells and swells like a tide coming in… the waves slowly get larger and larger, and if you are a musician what would probably amaze you the most is how many levels of dynamics these players have. There seem to be four or five gradations between mezzo-forte and forte, and when they finally reach the climactic moment (together in octaves) it is an amazing moment. And the two Op. 102 sonatas feel like old familiar friends coming together again to share a lifetime of experience and understanding.

The violin sonatas lack the brilliance of the live cello sonatas, but keeps the feeling of old friends coming together. The pacing of most of the recordings are a little slower then normal, but the relaxed pacing works well for the two players. Nothing feels strained. The first movement of the ‘Kreutzer’, for instance, feels like two people sharing the drama of a story, but as a retelling of the drama. Most recordings of this piece have a sense of urgency, but here the urgency is replaced by the comfort that no matter how intense the music, everything will come out alright.

Day 87. Brahms and Yo La Tengo.

Wednesday, May 12th, 2010

Tonight I finished ripping the Julius Katchen complete Brahms piano works and a stack of Yo La Tengo. The Katchen set is very well done, and I remember when it came out because Jim the manager at Tower Berkeley held the box up when it was unpacked, had a great smile spread over his face, and snapped ‘KATCHEN!’. He had been waiting for this set for a number of years (since his days playing piano in college), and he took the single copy of the set we got in and immediately purchased it. I asked him if it was good, he looked at me, held up the set and again snapped ‘KATCHEN!’. I picked it up a few weeks after that and really enjoyed it as well, especially the late sets of piano pieces.

I had already ripped a few Yo La Tengo discs early on in the project, so I went ahead and grabbed the rest that were on the shelves. Included in this stack was ‘I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One’, the album that I consider, hands down, to be the best album of the ’90s. The flow of the album goes between rockers, folk songs and out there shoegazer drones. There is a great Beach Boys cover, and the last 20 minutes (“Spec Bebop”, “We’re and American Band” and “My Little Corner Of The World”) is a great outro to a great album. And for personal reasons, it was also the album that introduced me to the band. I first heard it being played at the old Wall Berlin cafe in Berkeley (I think I heard ‘Autumn Sweater’ leading into ‘Little Honda’) one night while I was closing at Tower, and bought the disc that night. Honestly though, the first time I heard it all the way through, I thought it was a bit tough to get through. Then I listened again and probably by the fourth or fifth time I couldn’t believe how good of an album it is. From then on, it just continued to grow on me. I picked up a few more records before ‘And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out’ came out. Within those couple years, Yo La Tengo became probably my favorite rock band. I still pick up any of their releases as soon as they come out (and since the last few have been available as pre-orders on iTunes, Yo La Tengo also tends to be one of the only bands where I buy the album BEFORE I can get it).

This album still stands up incredibly well. And I see it as the start of a great run for the band. After this album, they have been releasing a new album about once every three years (with a few side projects thrown in here and there in between). And they have held up a pretty high level of consistency. As of right now, ‘I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One’ lies at the mid point of their career. So far. ‘Popular Songs’ came out last year, and I imagine the next album should be out sometime around 2012.

I can’t wait.

And if you are one of those unfortunate people that thinks that the 90s topped out with ‘OK Computer’ or ‘Nevermind’ or any of Björk’s great albums, then you should treat yourself and go pick up the real best album of the 90s.