DIGITAL TO ANALOG CONVERSION

Day 106. Jane’s Addiction, The Lively Ones … and much more.

Posted on Thursday, June 10th, 2010 at 10:32 pm in Jazz, Rock / Pop by josh

Tonight’s rips were mostly a blind grab from the front and back of the shelf… Jane’s Addiction, Jamiroquai, The Jesus and Mary Chain, Annie Lennox, The Lively Ones and Lester Young.

The Lively Ones disc ‘Greatest Surf Hits’ is mostly a compilation of covers of other surf songs with a couple originals thrown in. Lots of reverb, some tremolo, and great tunes. The Lively Ones had a sax player in the group which always made them stand out for me. My main gripe with this CD (and all their CDs, most of which I haven’t purchased yet) was the fact that they were all direct reproductions of the albums. There 12 songs on the disc (standard for US albums in the ‘60s) and it totals 28 minutes. And there are six albums of theirs to buy, and even a few years ago these were full priced. Now – I think this music is rad. I love surf music, and The Lively Ones were one of my favorite bands out of this genre. But 6 discs totally less the three hours of music for $16.99 or $17.99 a pop (and still as full priced $9.99 albums on iTunes)? With minimal work to needed to transfer them to CD? I realize they aren’t going to sell a lot in the first place, but at prices like that, they definitely won’t. It is good to see that they are on eMusic at least, so I imagine I will finally get to grab the rest of the discs. But it is pricing / marketing like this that really is still surprising to me about the music industry. Feels like robbery sometimes. And I wouldn’t be surprised if I could find downloads of this somewhere on the internet… yet this has been a path I have avoided for the most part. And something I am proud to say that I have avoided.

And part of the reason I am thinking about music theft is because of the Jane’s Addiction. About a week into working at Tower, I remember a couple kids acting strange over in the Pop/Rock and Soul racks, and I noticed that the other clerk was lazily keeping an eye on them. They left without buying anything, and when I went over to where they were, there it was. An empty longboard box for ‘Ritual De Lo Habitual’. My first stolen disc. I hadn’t heard Jane’s Addiction yet, but noticed with a grin that track 5 was ‘Been Caught Stealing’. Well – these two guys weren’t. But it made me wonder how good the music must be for someone risk getting caught stealing it. So I picked it up. And it is pretty good. I became mild Jane’s Addiction fans because a couple other kids thought it was good enough to steal. Of course, as my years at Tower would go on (and I would even spend a couple years working loss prevention) I would find out that it wasn’t just good music people would steal. There was also stealing of bad music, stealing out of boredom, stealing out of the challenge of it and stealing to support habits. All of which I saw, and all of which I tend to think about when I put on this album.

Tags: Annie Lennox, Jamiroquai, Jane’s Addiction, Lester Young, The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Lively Ones
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Day 105. David Grisman.

Posted on Wednesday, June 9th, 2010 at 10:39 am in Jazz by josh

I have mentioned once before (when talking about Django Reinhardt) that the cover of David Grisman’s album ‘Hot Dawg’ freaked me out as a kid. Sharp, angular, metallic bodies contorted around instruments make up the cover. It looks cold, and I remember thinking that this was a picture of people that had somehow been frozen into these forms involuntarily. Apparently as a kid, I was worried about being frozen into a form involuntarily. This probably came from some bad movie where a stop-motion Medusa turned men to stone, or some other magical evil… I can’t really remember. But I DO remember that David Grisman cover sitting in front of my dad’s records and those figures seemed to give me a cold scary stare. There is some irony here though, since the music on the album is highly influenced by jazz, bluegrass and folk music. Stephane Grapelli makes a guest appearance for a recording of his and Django’s ‘Minor Swing’ (the version I associated with the song until well into my teenage years). The opening number ‘Dawg’s Bull’ starts off with a quick pulse from the violin that slowly build up to the whole group playing some amazingly fast music. In unison. Very clean…

Now that I know the influences of this music much better, perhaps there isn’t such an irony to the cover art. This is 1970s jazz, a time period riddled with the cleanliness of fusion and the death of the 50s and 60s bop->hard-bop->out there jazz transitions. Not that the free jazz solo ever sold enough albums to be ‘replaced’ by another step in the evolution of jazz, but if John Coltrane had been alive during the time of Weather Report, I’d be curious to see how different the styles of jazz would have been. Probably not much different, and with recording technology (with multiple tracks and takes) became better it was probably unavoidable that jazz, as with rock, would move towards a similar slick recorded presentation. And though I still like ‘Hot Dawg’ quite a bit, and am amazed by the playing on the disc, the freer, looser feel on David Grisman’s Acoustic Disc label is the sound that I imagine he prefers. I wonder if ‘Hot Dawg’ recorded in the mid-90s would have sounded different. Little grittier, a little earthier.

Recordings are of course simply a record, not necessarily of a moment captured in time anymore, but possibly of many moments mixed together to get a performance that the artist wanted others to hear again and again. That’s hard to do. And as critical as I can be of what seems like a feeling of coldness on the part of ‘Hot Dawg’, I also have an image in my mind for some reason of listening to it in a dim room with just a fire in the fire place, and my dad laying on the floor and listening to it. Over the speakers, with the crackle of wood (and the snaps and pops of the vinyl) it probably sounded warmer then the CD I know have. And as long as I don’t think about that cover, this homey warmth is still the memory of this album that I have. No matter how many takes it took to record it.

Tags: David Grisman
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Day 104. Kempff (playing Schumann and Brahms).

Posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 9:52 pm in Classical by josh

Tonight’s rips were a 5 CD ‘Original Masters’ DG collection of Wilhelm Kempff recordings from the 1950s. I love Kempff’s playing, and this set is nicely done (from mostly mono recordings, they sound superb). Most of the set consists of Schumann and Brahms, but the last disc contains three Beethoven sonatas and a smattering of transcriptions (including some Bach, Couperin and Rameau). His playing in these earlier 50s recordings is a bit more forceful (especially his Schumann Symphonic Etudes… they are amazing). The set also brought me another recording of the late Brahms piano pieces, probably my favorite music that Brahms wrote. Like late Beethoven, there is quite a bit of room for a great interpreter. I have a later recording of these works by Kempff as well, and the differences can be pretty astounding. Just little touches here and there bring different voices to light, or make the piano resonate a little differently (which counts for quite a bit in many of these pieces where harmonies are broken apart and even smeared across the changes of bass and probably harmony). These pieces certainly share some of the tonal break down that Wagner had been experimenting with, and the tonal ambiguity at times looks ahead to Stravinsky in some ways.

The end of the 11th ‘Symphonic Etude’ by Schumann just played, and I had to back it up. The last couple of notes in the melody were some of the saddest I think I have ever heard. Not quite gasping, or resigned. It just seemed to quietly give up and almost fall apart. The dynamic Kempff plays at the end is a physical one. It sounds like he is pressing the keys so lightly that the note may not even sound. He slows down unevenly, and it is beautiful. The perfect lead into the more youthful, almost heroic beginning to the last etude.

Tags: Brahms, schumann, Wilhelm Kempff
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Day 103. The Pixies, Nico and John Coltrane.

Posted on Sunday, June 6th, 2010 at 9:45 pm in Jazz, Rock / Pop by josh

Tonight was just me randomly grabbing a few things off the shelf that were stacked up… among the discs were a couple of Pixies discs, Nico, and the Special Ultimate Über Edition of John Coltrane’s ‘A Love Supreme’.

The Pixies I mostly associate with the end of high school. Tamiko and I saw them open for U2 in Sacramento right before they broke up. I got into them more after seeing them. ‘Bossa Nova’ is perhaps part of the darkest album that I relate to my senior year of high school, a time where Tamiko and I had our most ups and downs (actually – mostly downs), my hair went through multiple colors, and my mood was often moody. ‘Bossa Nova’ fits into the mold pretty well. For some time, this dark horse of an album was my favorite Pixies disc until times got happier and ‘Doolittle’ took its rightful place at the top of the Pixies mantle. Not that ‘Bossa Nova’ doesn’t still have some good tracks, but it is just harder for me to get into the mood to hear Black Francis scream ‘Rock Music’ then it is to throw on ‘Hey’.

I have two Nico discs (not including my Velvet Underground collection). The first is ‘Chelsea Girl’ which Nico didn’t particularly care for herself. She says:

“I still cannot listen to it, because everything I wanted for that record, they took it away. I asked for drums, they said no. I asked for more guitars, they said no. And I asked for simplicity, and they covered it in flutes! … They added strings and – I didn’t like them, but I could live with them. But the flute! The first time I heard the album, I cried and it was all because of the flute”

On the one hand, I feel bad that she didn’t like the album so much. But all the things she is complaining about is also what I think makes the album so good. The second disc, a collection that contains a few tracks from ‘Chelsea Girl’, ‘Peel Slowly and See’ and more of her later work is only really strong because of those initial tracks. Both times I have listened to that disc, I’ve just gone back and put on the originals instead. Sorry Nico – I think the producers knew what they were doing. I can understand how she must have felt hearing the end result though, and I wonder why she allowed it to be released. Or maybe she didn’t have a choice?

‘A Love Supreme’ is easily in my top 10 albums. John Coltrane (as anyone who has read this blog probably knows) is easily one of my top 10 favorite artists. At the moment, it is hard to think of another album that would top it actually, but this is a fault of my own brain. Whenever one of my favorite albums comes to my mind, it tends to mask out the others that it would compete with. My mind just draws a blank about what could compete with it, and as long as I keep this brain problem in mind when thinking about my favorite albums, I will avoid saying something foolish like ‘this is my favorite album of all time!’. But there are certainly worse things to say in one’s life then ‘A Love Supreme’ is the best album ever made. It IS a masterpiece, recorded by THE Coltrane Quartet by Rudy Van Gelder. For decades, it existed only as the four tracks that make up the album, and I remember finding a bootlegged CD pressing of the single performance of the suite. I paid $40 for it, and was blown away at hearing the piece so differently. The live performance (now included in a cleaned up form on this two disc set) is from a festival in Antibes. It is just as beautiful. In some moments, even more so. In a couple of points, the playing pushes the performers to the max, and there are moments where some aspect falls apart. Coltrane runs out of breath, or the moment just gives McCoy Tyner a moment of pause. These ‘mistakes’ though are beautiful. They show these performers attempting to bring together this masterpiece in a live context, and it sounds so emotional. Those moments are their humanity, and when it comes down to it, it is humanity that this music is about. ‘A Love Supreme’ came out two years before Coltrane died. He had been through a number of hells, and had come through them a deeply spiritual and emotional man. The poetry that accompanies the work and the love that he describes couldn’t possibly have been played straight in performance, and I remember being struck when I first heard this recording how appropriate all these moments were. They made the work even more powerful. I’m so glad there is this other performance that was captured, but even more glad that there aren’t any more. A polished live performance could ruin the beauty of the one that does exist. And I’m not sure that the perfection that exists on the recording deserves to be anywhere else but on the studio one.

Tags: John Coltrane, Nico, The Pixies
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Day 102. Bach and Nancarrow.

Posted on Saturday, June 5th, 2010 at 9:34 pm in Classical by josh

I’ve spent a couple days getting through a couple of box-sets picked out by the girls. Mostly it has been a busy few days, and I’ve also been trying to stay away from the computer a bit more this weekend. So – this will be a short (though still overdue) posting.

The two box-sets were: Davitt Maroney’s excellent performances on harpsichord of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (with the Art of the Fugue and the Musical Offering thrown in) from Harmonia Mundi, and the Wergo 5-CD digital recordings of Conlon Nancarrow’s studies for player piano. Kind of a pre-piano / post-piano combination.

The Bach of course is such a standard in piano repertoire and practice, that it can be hard sometimes for pianists to think about the differences between their instrument and the one that it was written for. While the most common instrument that is thought of from Bach’s time is the harpsichord, and performances of the ‘48’ on that instrument are the most common, it isn’t out of the question to hear these works also on organ or even lautenwerk. But on harpsichord, the lack of a wide dynamic range for single notes – and the focus on texture and multiple voices for creating changes in dynamics – is usually much more clearly heard. Fugues get louder as more voices enter. The C-minor prelude from book 1, with it’s two voice continuous 16th note texture that eventually thins out to basically a single voice followed by dense chords and rapid melodic flourishes. The dynamics here come from the number of notes sounding at any one time and their orchestration, and on the harpsichord these changes to texture are quite dramatic.

The Nancarrow studies come about well over 200 years after the Bach works, and as a body of work is just as significant. The works were composed on the piano rolls themselves as Nancarrow punched holes into the paper, having measured out horizontal space as time, and calculating where the pitches he wanted needed to be punched. This liberation from both the pianists hands and the written mensural notation led to all sorts of interesting manipulations that were often based still on compositional concepts from Bach’s time and earlier. Canons are especially prominent, though they may be well outside the reach of a single pianists two hands. And they may also go through transformations that would be difficult for a human reader to comprehend, especially in respect to time. Time intervals are stretched and contorted, sometimes accelerating according to the laws of physics rather then the subdivision of the beat. And like Bach, where the popular dance music of the day often influenced some of the form and content of the Preludes in the Well-Tempered Clavier, the influence of jazz and boogie-woogie piano playing appear in Nancarrow’s works.

When I first came into contact with the player piano studies, I actually remember seeing a light-bulb go off in my head. The idea of time being measured in distance rather then simply as divisions of a measure seemed so intuitive! Our system of rhythmic notation suddenly seemed so restrictive to me! And once this occurred to me, my thinking in electronic music also greatly changed. Time and music could have pulse, and it could also disappear. Like pitch, intensity and any other musical parameter, rhythm too could be dynamic when it is thought of as a portion of time rather then just the division of a measure. It still surprises me how simple this approach can seem, and how complex the results of it can be.

Tags: Conlon Nancarrow, J.S. Bach
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Day 101. It’s A Beautiful Day, Beethoven.

Posted on Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 at 7:22 pm in Classical, Rock / Pop by josh

I spent most of last night working on a recording while ripping the Alexander String Quartet recordings of the complete Beethoven Quartets. So, blog writing took a back seat. Still have a couple of discs to do tonight, and I also added in two albums by It’s A Beautiful Day, both the self-titled first album and ‘Marrying Maiden’.

Around the time I was starting to work at Tower (almost 20 years ago!) my dad had placed a special order at the Tower on Watt Ave. for the first It’s A Beautiful Day album with ‘White Bird’ and ‘Hot Summer Day’ on . He had the vinyl of the album, but he had also heard that a CD of it had been made on the label ‘SF Sound’ which, ironically, was only available as an import. Randy Mendonza (who was the Tower regional manager, akin who I would later learn quite a bit from) found a way to get it for him. To say that he was excited would really be an understatement. The label had all sorts of other stuff as well from late ’60s SF, including Moby Grape’s albums and Quicksilver Messenger Service. I saw ‘Marrying Maiden’ come into the store as an import shortly after I started to work at Tower, and he was just thrilled to get it. It was a strange period… here was my dad, tracking down music that he already had, but was searching for it to get it again on the still somewhat new medium. As CDs now look to be on life support, it blows my mind that these albums are available now to get within minutes of searching. eMusic, iTunes… probably even as MP3 downloads from Amazon. Pretty stunning to see how CDs – the medium that would store music in pristine digital form FOREVER! has, already in 20 years, pretty much been replaced by the online database. And while things still do ‘go out of print’, I also wonder when such a notion will finally be a thing of the past.

The reason I threw these onto the computer last night though was because another friend of mine got his subsonic server also up and running, and I noticed Quicksilver Messenger Service on his library. He had gotten it from his dad, and I asked if he had heard It’s a Beautiful Day. He hadn’t, and within 10 minutes it was loaded onto my server, ready to stream. Pretty mind blowing to me that musical conversations, now with online examples, can happen so quickly (through Facebook chat no less).

The Beethoven quartet recordings with the Alexander Quartet is my favorite overall set. The group made this repertoire their sole musical activity for a number of years, and would tour with the Beethoven quartets to be played only by memory, at the request of the audience. They would start the concert by taking a poll of which early, middle and late quartet to play, then play them. This is so ideal on many levels. One the one hand, they obviously know this music at the level where they don’t need to look at the page anymore, and there is something pretty amazing about a chamber group that can truly pay attention to each other, creating a true musical conversation. Second, they were mostly supported in this by San Francisco State University where they were the quartet in residence and held chamber music workshops (workshops that I imagine produced some very fine chamber music musicians). Third, they were able to make a living by playing repertoire that is rather well-known and well-played, and the difference in their playing really stands out (the recordings have some astounding musicianship in them). Finally, to be a performer of this music and to show up at the gig and ask the audience what it wants to hear – AND have the audience be able to tell them. Wow.

The group has expanded its repertoire in the past decade or so, performing more of the classical repertoire as well as works even well into the 20th century. The other recordings of theirs that I have heard give the sense of a group that really relies on all the players to guide the performance. Their Mozart ‘Haydn’ quartets are beautifully done. But it is their late Beethoven that is really some of the best recordings of any music that I think I have heard. The A minor quart (op.132) is otherworldly. If you ever happen to see them coming to your area for a performance, make sure to get a ticket, and ask for it.

Tags: Beethoven, It's A Beautiful Day
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Day 100. Kagel, Liszt and Aretha Franklin.

Posted on Sunday, May 30th, 2010 at 8:24 pm in Celia, Classical, Mira, Rock / Pop, Tamiko by josh

Today marks the 100th day (though not quite the 100th consecutive day) of working on DAC. Since nice round numbers tend to give us pause and time to reflect (10th anniversaries, the millennium, your car hitting 100k miles, etc.), I spent part of today thinking that I should rip something special today. What should be the 100th days music selections? Well – by the time Celia was getting ready for bed, I still hadn’t thought of anything in particular to grab, so we ran downstairs as usual. And now that I think about it, I’m glad that is how it worked out. One of my favorite parts of this whole project has been involving my girls with it, and seeing what they are drawn to. It keeps things unexpected for me as well.

Celia keeping with her visual magnetism to all things pink, went for the Kagel discs I have on Montaigne (nice, bright cardboard packaging) as well as a Rhino collection of Aretha Franklin (because she liked the picture of Aretha on the cover). And next to that was a Vox Box set of Liszt’s ‘Years of Pilgrimage’ with Jerome Rose, so I grabbed that too.

Over the past 100 days, I have pulled quite a few discs onto the drives downstairs, and while not every disc has found me with something to say, I knew the music on those discs pretty well. And so, with Celia grabbing the ‘Sankt-Bach-Passion’ by Kagel tonight, we do have a special first. I have never listened to this CD. I know the story behind the piece, and have been curious to hear it (curious enough to buy the disc!), but have never listened to it. So I thought – ‘well! I’ll listen to it after I throw it on!’ and I still might, but in the mean time I am streaming a Quicksliver Messenger Service disc from my friend Daniel. Daniel has access to my server of music, and thought it was so cool that tonight he set up a Subsonic server for his music, and while I was browsing around on his I saw Quicksilver (an old face from growing up… as I type, ‘Mona’ is chugging away over the speakers. Man – what a great song, and I would be really surprised if the Kagel could top it, so I’m not going to mess with it).

The Liszt though is another one of those discs that Tamiko and I used to play in her apartment in Berkeley. Haven’t listened to it in some time, but I’m looking forward to hearing it. The recording in particular is, well, pretty bad. VERY resonant and blurry. But it is an excellent example of liking the first version you hear of something. I have another excellent recording of these pieces (the Bolet recordings I believe) and they are crisp and clean, and very well played. The Jerome Rose recordings are played well also, though I think there is a lot of pedal, and a lot of reverb (probably from the space). Tamiko and I would put these discs on as background quite a bit, sometimes for when we were eating, and the sound quality of them was perfect. At times, the piano sounds almost bell-like, almost like you are hearing it from across the street. We were also able to hear the bells of the Campanile from where she lived in Berkeley, with a similar sound quality. So even though I have better recordings of these pieces now, this would still be the ones I would put on. And will put on… because the notes might be the same, but it is this music that I remember when I think about Tamiko and I cooking together in her apartment on Arch St.

This project, and this blog, was supposed to be part escapism for me. And it has served its purpose well. It was given me great distraction at times over these past few months when things have been less then great. It has also given me a new faith in nostalgia, and brought back many happy memories. What has surprised me a little is how intense some of those memories have been. The smell of the air from 20 years ago creeps into this musical moments sometimes. Goosebumps sometimes appear on my arms as I hear something the way I did the first time I heard it.

But another aspect that was important to me with this project was listening again to music that had, for some time, just sat on a shelf. It has given me a chance to remember how much music is out there on the one hand, as well as how much I have to get to know again. And to share. Mira this morning asked to hear the ‘Bunny Music’ (the Barber of Seville overture), and tonight when Celia was getting ready for story time, she asked me to put on Bach (we listened to the lute suites). And in a couple minutes, I bet I can put on the Liszt that I am ripping right now, go sit next to Tamiko, and she will pause her typing for a minute, look at me, and smile. I’m so lucky to have all this in my life, and while I started to realize this early in this project, at 100 days, it is amazing that the coincidence of a number, and the events of the day, shows me how important it is for me to get all this music playing again in my house.

Tags: Aretha Franklin, Kagel, Liszt
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Day 99. Mahler, Mozart, Berlioz and Stravinsky.

Posted on Saturday, May 29th, 2010 at 8:48 pm in Classical by josh

I’ve been a little slow to get to CDs this past couple of days, so I took the chance to throw some recent purchases from eMusic onto the computer. After a couple of playlists of orchestral music, I realized that I had so far been pulling off music that I had played while in the orchestra at UC Berkeley under Prof. David Milnes. I got to play in the orchestra for three years. Unfortunately, this was the bulk of my orchestral playing experience. I have subbed a couple of times for orchestras here in Seattle, but these are VERY few and VERY far between. And I think it was playing orchestral repertoire that did more for my playing then just about anything else I ever did. My first concert had Berlioz’s ‘Symphonie Fantastique’ on it, and there are some seriously difficult bass parts in that piece. Or – at least they were for someone who wasn’t really that experience playing double bass. That first concert was one of the best studies in rhythm and intonation that I ever had.

So – the pieces I went ahead and transferred over tonight were the Berlioz, the SF Symphony recording of Mahler 1, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra recordings of the last four Mozart symphonies and Bernstein’s recording of ‘The Rite of Spring’. I played quite a bit more in orchestra, but these pieces were a few turning points for me. Obviously, the Berlioz being my first orchestral piece is pretty significant, but even then, while it was amazing to be part of a group so big, I still saw the orchestra as a requirement. Later that year though, we did an all Stravinsky concert that included the ‘Rite of Spring’ and the ‘Symphony of Psalms’. This was the concert that got me hooked. First – it was amazing music to play, and difficult. I hadn’t practiced so hard on a piece before ‘Rite of Spring’, and felt like I got back WAY more then I put into it. It was an amazing experience. The best part though was on the second night. The performance was as tight as I could imagine any performance could be. And with the last chord, the most beautiful sound happened. There was nothing, absolutely nothing for about 3 seconds. Then the sold-out crowd went crazy. It was the best feeling in a performance I’ve ever had, and I have wanted to create a piece of my own that could create that kind of silence after the piece was over. I’ve cheated… but I haven’t done it yet.

My second year of orchestra, I felt like I knew what I was doing and had more confidence in general. We read through Mozart #41 for an upcoming concert, and it was a blast. VERY hard, but very fun to play. i felt like it was going pretty well when one of my biggest lessons was taught to me. Two weeks before the concert, we learned that a reduced orchestra was going to be playing the Mozart, and I didn’t make the cut. I was crushed. I really wanted to play this piece, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I was playing pretty sloppy. It was a good lesson (and one I got many times at Berkeley). Mostly – it didn’t matter in music how hard you tried. If someone was doing it better then you were, they were going to get the gig. There were no A’s for effort. You had to perform to perform.

So – by the time we got around to Mahler’s 1st, I was taking my chair (near the end of the row) in the double bass section very seriously. I rehearsed and practiced when I could, and was much more disciplined about it. By the time I left Berkeley, I was still no where near where I needed to be to focus on performance on the bass. But, I was much more serious about how to prepare for pieces then I ever would have been without that education. Thanks Prof. Milnes – I learned a lot.

Tags: Berlioz, David Milnes, Mahler, Mozart, Stravinsky
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Day 98. Rossini, Paganini.

Posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2010 at 9:37 pm in Celia, Classical, Mira by josh

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.

Tags: Paganini, Rossini
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Day 97. Grisey, Scelsi, Hosokawa, Ligeti.

Posted on Tuesday, May 25th, 2010 at 9:19 pm in Classical by josh

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.

Tags: Grisey, Hosokawa, Ligeti, Scelsi
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