Recently in Music Category

Although this performance by Grigory Sokolov of the third movement of Prokofiev's 7th Piano Sonata is taken at a moderate rate and with an almost metronomic steadiness of tempo, it works. This piece, written in the midst of World War II while the German and Soviet Armies struggled for survival is one of the great achievements of 20th century writing for the piano. It will take four minutes of your life to listen to this, and it will be four minutes well spent.

UPDATE: The video previously included in this post has been removed from YouTube for copyright violation. It undoubtedly was copied from this DVD: Grigory Sokolov - Live in Paris (2002). Anyone interested in hearing this superb performance should buy the DVD. I'm going to.

The finale to Mahler's incomparable Symphony No. 2 "Resurrection"

(Click on through for the lyrics)...

Most folks know O Fortuna! from Carl Orff's Carmina Burana from the soundtrack to Excalibur. Or maybe they know that Hitler was supposed to be fond of the piece. However you've come across it, and I'm betting that you certainly have, it is a bit tough to get all of the nuances because it is sung in Latin and most of us have pretty rusty Latin skills.

Don't despair! Some kind soul has posted an absolutely stupendous ENGLISH version of Carmina Burana. (Hit reload when you reach the page to ensure proper synchronization of the music and images. From The Rest is Noise)

P.S. The post title will make more sense after you have clicked through.

It has been a while since we've touched on music. Here's some more Glenn Gould, this time from 1960 being "conducted" (as if anyone could conduct GG) by Leonard Bernstein. This performance is marked by a very stately and flowing tempo and an amazing fade into pianissimo before it takes off again for the finale.

In 1896 a new Trinity Baptist Church was erected, including an Esley pipe organ to help sing the praises of God. In 1918 the building was sold to the Victor Talking Machine Company, who were impressed with the fine acoustics and wanted to use it for a recording studio. I don't know when Victor/RCA first recorded the Esley Organ which they received as part of the bargain, but those turn of the century Baptists may have been surprised to know that their organ would play an important roll in the history of American Jazz.

The father of jazz organ playing and the undisputed master of hot pipe organ jazz is Fats Waller. The son of a Harlem Baptist preacher, Waller learned the pipe organ early in life before taking up the piano. By his late teens he was making a living as a musician, playing at rent parties and accompanying silent films on theatre organs. By his mid twenties, he had started a career as a Broadway composer and was in demand for recording sessions.

Here is a remarkable sixty-second television ad. And, not to give anything away, it is certainly the soundtrack that is remarkable. Forty years ago, it would have seemed less shocking. But even though we are all used to being shocked, there is an open question: wll it sell more shoes, or more copies of a certain CD? And, another possibility, will it sell LESS shoes?

(Thanks to Alex Ross @ The Rest is Noise for the pointer).

Given the number of wine bottles required to pull this stunt off, perhaps I should have filed this under wine tasting, but music will have to do. If I had been asked, I wouldn't have thought that your average in-line skating expert would have picked Mozart to realize in this manner, but I'd have been wrong. Perhaps this was in Germany?

All I can say is "WOW!" How long did it take to tune all of those bottles? Are they all filled with water? How much experimentation was required to get the "clappers" on the skates to have the correct tension so that they didn't knock the bottles over, or did they glue all of the bottles to the pavement? Will someone next try to perform a piece by Boulez? If they do, how will we know?

It is said that everybody has a favorite song. I hope this is true, but sadly, I doubt it is.

I like many many pieces of music, but few of them have words, and fewer still are songs. But if I had to pick a favorite song there would be no contest. Every time I hear it, I fight back tears; tears of joy for its beauty and tears of melancholy for its sentiment.

Supposedly, we are most fond of songs we listened to in our adolescence. Fortunately, though I was in my teens when "I want to hold your hand" swept over the country, today, I am most fond of the music I found in my 20's, including that of J.S. Bach, and especially J.S. Bach played by that ineffable pianistic genius, Glenn Gould.

Though Gould was a somewhat unconventional character, bundling up in coats and gloves when it was 90 degrees out, giving up live performances when he was but 32, and calling people in the middle of the night from his hermetic Toronto apartment, he was a master of Bach. He was given to conducting himself (with a free hand) and singing along with his playing. This singing, though it drove the record producers mad, is excused by Gould admirers as proof that he was so full of the majesty of Bach's music that it spilled out of him however it could: through his fingers on the keyboard and his Soto voice accompaniment.

My love of Bach inexplicitly includes a fascination with Gould himself. Before the advent of the Internet (and NetFlix), I once flew from Charlotte, NC to New York City to see the film, "Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould" as I was certain it would never show up in Charlotte. Today, with the Internet and with YouTube, you can almost get all the Gould you can stand... Enjoy.

P.S. The piece of music featured in the video is the Italian Concerto In F Major, BWV 971: third movement, Presto, which can be found at a very reasonable price here.

Cathy Berberian would have been perfect for this. Do you think the client spent their marketing dollars wisely? (Be sure to click on "Watch" and then "Watch the rehersal")

Great Performances on PBS, last night showed an extraordinary 45-minute computer-graphic film of Stravinsky's The Nightingale.

The film blends 3-D computer graphics with live action and it is simply brimming with creativity and ideas. The tips of hundreds of violin bows appear out of the mist-covered ground. We inhabit a weird yet wonderful world run by an all-powerful "man behind the curtain" who happens to be personified by two black gloves manipulating an enormous control console. "He" has hundreds of assistents sitting in front of computer screens, typing away in rhythm with the music. There are Gigantic Chinese Urns inhabited with dancing girls instead of Genii. There are courtiers who appear as heads inside of Chinese lanterns. There are crowds of black-gloves applauding wildly and pointing at the scenery to get some bit of stagecraft done. There is a cigarette-smoking death (Violeta Urmana), in league with a mad flying, clicking bar-code applier, and there is the Nightingale (Natalie Dessay) who sings most beautifully, and makes a present of a cellphone to the Great Emperor.

Does all of this sound weird? Well, I suppose it is... a bit. But it is also stunning, moving, and, yes, even awe inspiring.

Sigh, if only Dr. Atomic had risen to even a fraction of this level of excellence. Also, I am certain this must have been funded by the taxpayers of France. I am glad it was French taxpayers and not American ones, but miracles like this do make me waver in my opposition to public funding of the arts. Still, why should my pleasure be funded by taxes from folks, the vast majority of whom, would no doubt find this to be absurd?

I love Gustav Mahler's music. I didn't know he was so clever with languange, but I've just found the proof:

"Tradition is the preservation of the flame, not adoration of the ashes" ("Tradition ist Bewahrung des Feuers, nicht Anbetung der Asche").

Nice, ja?

From Decline and Fall, a blog by an American living in Iraq comes this story about music preferences in Iraq...

What do they listen to? Let's just say that there's very little sense of "cool" or "trendy" in their listening habits. One can't expect people who have spent their lives living under Saddam's thumb to have any real sense of hipster do's and don't's, but even those who have lived in America for a while and have come back here to work as linguists can almost be relied upon to be fans of Celine Dion. It's actually gotten to the point where as soon as a discussion of music begins, I say to the nearest Arab, "You like Celine Dion, don't you?" They always reply in the affirmative.
...
Then I decided to try an instrumental selection: one of J.S. Bach's Violin Concertos, played by Hilary Hahn. He had never heard anything like it before. For a moment I pondered the stark implications of a culture that had heard Yanni but not Mozart, Celine Dion but not Ella Fitgerald, Country but not Blues. "This is a much bigger clash of cultures than I had ever imagined," I heard myself say. But the look on his face as he struggled to turn the volume up on that exquisite music made it all better….

It's worth reading the whole thing. Scroll down a bit on the link to get to the relevant entry.

I used to listen to classical music on the radio. That was a long time ago though, when you could easily find classic music stations almost everywhere around the country on the FM band. When I lived in Los Angeles I used to get my classical fix by listening to KFAC and KPFK. KPFK no longer plays classical music, and KFAC went off the air in 1989. (To be fair, things have actually gotten better in LA since then -- but not as good as they were in the '70s. KUSC now plays classical music, and a new classical station, KMZT has appeared).

Kyle Gann has an interesting post over on ArtsJournal.com where he has tried to load a portable 250 Gigabyte hard disk with "...every piece I've ever used in class or even mentioned to a student." He starts out his discussion by referring to the music classroom of the future where the professor would have instant access to every piece of music ever recorded, sort of like a musical version of Borges' Library of Babel.

I think it is a fine idea. Although the Edison Cylinder was a fine invention, as was the shellac disk, the long playing record, and the CD, being able to digitize, categorize, and search our musical heritage is a tremendous improvement with far-reaching implications. I remember when William Malloch was music directory at KPFK and the long-time music director of the Mahler Society of California. Every year Malloch and the Gustav Mahler Society would set up a listening room in a volunteers home and put on an "Mahlerthon" where they would play all of Mahler's Symphonys, from the first note of the Titan Symphony to last note of the unfinished (at least by Mahler) Tenth. You no longer need the Mahler Society to do this. You can have your own Mahlerthon and you can have as many different interpretations of each work as you have recordings.

How long will it be before all of the notes are digitized? Will the instructor in the music classroom of the future be able to look up specific chords and show contrasting examples and transitions?