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Category: cello

2011

Sunday, 9/11/11

Steve Reich, WTC 9/11 (2010), excerpts
Kronos Quartet, with prerecorded tape

1st Movement 

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3rd Movement

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lagniappe

reading table

They jumped from the burning floors—
one, two, a few more,
higher, lower.

The photograph halted them in life,
and now keeps them
above the earth toward the earth.

Each is still complete,
with a particular face
and blood well hidden.

There’s enough time
for hair to come loose,
for keys and coins
to fall from pockets.

They’re still within the air’s reach,
within the compass of places
that have just now opened.

I can do only two things for them—
describe this flight
and not add a last line.

—Wislawa Szymborska, “Photograph from September 11” (trans. Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak)

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Barbarism is not the prehistory of humanity but the faithful shadow that accompanies its every step.

—Alain Finkielkraut, Le mécontemporain, (epigraph, Clive James, As of This Writing: The Essential Essays, 1968-2002 [2003]) 

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2011

Saturday, 9/10/11

lucid, adj. suffused with light, luminous. E.g., Morton Feldman’s Piano and String Quartet.

Morton Feldman, Piano and String Quartet (1985)
Kronos Quartet with Aki Takahashi (piano)

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In a world that keeps getting faster and noisier, Feldman offers a refuge.
Here time slows. Quietly.

More? Here. And here. And here. And here. And here.

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2011

Tuesday, 8/2/11

how to improve your life (guaranteed!)

Listen, each day, to one of Bach’s six suites for unaccompanied cello. I’ve been listening to them for 40 years. If I hadn’t, I assure you, my life would be even more of a shambles.

Bach, Suite No. 3 in C major for Unaccompanied Cello
Jean-Guihen Queyras, cello

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More? Here. And here.

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lagniappe

reading table

I am who I am.
A coincidence no less unthinkable
than any other.

I could have different
ancestors, after all.
I could have fluttered
from another nest
or crawled bescaled
from another tree.

Nature’s wardrobe
holds a fair supply of costumes:
spider, seagull, fieldmouse.
Each fits perfectly right off
and is dutifully worn
into shreds.

I didn’t get a choice either,
but I can’t complain.
I could have been someone
much less separate.
Someone from an anthill, shoal, or buzzing swarm,
an inch of landscape ruffled by the wind.

Someone much less fortunate,
bred for my fur
or Christmas dinner,
something swimming under a square of glass.

A tree rooted to the ground
as the fire draws near.

A grass blade trampled by a stampede
of incomprehensible events.

A shady type whose darkness
dazzled some.

What if I’d prompted only fear,
loathing,
or pity?

If I’d been born
in the wrong tribe
with all roads closed before me?

Fate has been kind
to me thus far.

I might never have been given
the memory of happy moments.

My yen for comparison
might have been taken away.

I might have been myself minus amazement,
that is,
someone completely different.

—Wislawa Szymborska, “Among the Multitudes” (trans. Clare Cavanagh & Stanislaw Baranczak)

More? Here. And here.

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2011

Saturday, 7/30/11

The four familial instruments seem to whisper directly into our ears, communing with us about our personal sadnesses and anxieties.

—Wendy Lesser, Music For Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets (2011)

Dmitri Shostakovich, String Quartet No. 14 in F-Sharp Major (1972-73)
Fitzwilliam String Quartet

1st Movement (Allegretto)

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2nd Movement (Adagio)

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3rd Movement (Allegretto)

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More? Here.

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lagniappe

musical thoughts

I think he [President Obama] needs to listen to some jazz. Maybe the entire capital needs it to calm down.

—Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, 7/28/11

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2011

Saturday, 7/16/11

what’s new
(an occasional series)

James Blake, “The Wilhelm Scream,” Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, 7/14/11

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 favorites
(an occasional series)
Hearing JB brought this MCOTD fave to mind (originally posted 11/23/09).

Here’s Arthur Russell, the “seminal avant-garde composer, singer-songwriter, cellist and disco producer” who died in 1992 at the age of 40 (of AIDS-related complications)  and is the subject of both a recent documentary, Wild Combination, and a new book, Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992. 

Arthur Russell

“Get Around To It”

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“You And Me Both”

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“This Is How We Walk on the Moon”

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“That’s Us/Wild Combination”

(Yeah, the fact that I’m posting four tracks by this guy shows how much his music, which I just encountered recently, has been getting under my skin.)

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[Russell’s] various distinctions—folkie, art-music songwriter and improviser, dance-club maven—seem incoherent until you hear several of his records. When musicians get angry about being categorized by critics, I usually feel frustrated: readers, after all, want to know what the record sounds like. With Russell, I take the musicians’ angle. Just listen to it and you’ll understand.

—Ben Ratliff, “The Many Faces, and Grooves, of Arthur Russell,” New York Times, 2/29/04

*****

For Arthur, there was no cachet to being eclectic. Rather, he played across genre because it would have required a colossal and entirely counterproductive effort on his part to stick to one sound. . . . Drifting into an ethereal, gravity-defying zone, Arthur had come to embody the interconnectivity of music.

—Tim Lawrence, Hold On To Your Dreams: Arthur Russell and the Downtown Music Scene, 1973-1992 (2009).

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2011

Thursday, 7/14/11

two takes

Arvo Pärt, Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977)

A Far Cry, live, Boston (Jordan Hall), 10/17/08

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BBC Symphony Orchestra, live, London (Royal Albert Hall), 8/17/10

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This goes, and goes, and goes, keeping you afloat, carrying you along,
then stops with stunning suddenness—is any music more lifelike?

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2011

Thursday, 6/30/11

two questions

1. Why would anyone create a piece of music that lasts not one, or two, or three, or four, or five, but six hours?

2. Why don’t more more people?

Morton Feldman, String Quartet No. 2 (1983), excerpts, Flux Quartet

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On June 12th the Flux Quartet performed this piece in Philadelphia, the finale of American Sublime, a festival devoted to Feldman’s late music. The concert, which took place in the sanctuary of Philadelphia Cathedral, began at 2 p.m.; it ended around 8 p.m. The program notes said: “Audience may come and go as they please.”

More? Here. And here. And here. And here. And here.

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lagniappe

this & that

I don’t win stuff. I don’t even enter things—contests, sweepstakes, lotteries—that would give me a shot at winning stuff. Until yesterday, that is.

Yesterday morning, driving home after dropping my son Luke off at work (7 a.m. can be a pretty brutal starting time for a 20-year-old), I was listening, as I often do while driving, to our local public radio station (WBEZ-FM), which, I learned, was in the midst of a fundraising drive. “Pledge,” they said, and “you’ll be entered in drawings for an iPad 2,” which were going to be made throughout the day. The earlier you pledge, they said, with what seemed unassailable logic, the better your chances of winning. I hadn’t sent them any money in a while so, when I got home, I went on-line and pledged. A couple hours later, a friend sent me an email: “Congratulations on your iPad.”

When bad stuff happens, particularly bad stuff that’s unexpected and outside my control (as often seems to be the case), my tendency is to try to let it go. Why invest bad experiences with ill-fitting, after-the-fact meanings? This is different. This experience I’d like to invest with all kinds of after-the-fact-meanings, ill-fitting or not. I’d like to see this as a favorable omen, one that portends all sorts of wonderful stuff—things that, at the moment, I can’t even begin to imagine. Goofy? Yeah, I suppose. But is it any nuttier than any number of other stories we tell ourselves to get us through the day?

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2011

Saturday, 5/14/11

three takes

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), String Quartet No. 15 in E flat minor (1974)
Excerpt (1st Movement)

‘Play it so that flies drop dead in midair, and the audience starts leaving the hall from sheer boredom,’ the composer told the players preparing its premiere in 1974.

—Edward Rothstein, New York Times, 5/6/11

Emerson String Quartet, live

Part 1

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Part 2

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Borodin String Quartet

Part 1

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Part 2

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Taneyev Quartet
(gave the premiere performance [Leningrad, 1974])

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lagniappe

Want to hear the rest?

Emerson String Quartet, live

2nd & 3rd Movements

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4th & 5th Movements

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6th Movement

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2011

Tuesday, 5/3/11

What to make of it—a world that includes, each day, countless acts of unspeakable cruelty but also this?

Ernest Bloch, Concerto Grosso No. 2 for string orchestra (1952)
Zuercher Akademie Kammerensemble (Christopher Morris Whiting, conductor)

1st Movement

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2nd Movement

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3rd Movement

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4th Movement

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2011

Saturday, 4/9/11

If you’re away from home, how good it is to find a musical sanctuary, as I have the last two Fridays at Harvard’s Paine Concert Hall; last night I heard this string quartet play, wonderfully, music by Brahms and two contemporary composers (Adam Roberts, James Yannatos).

Chiara Quartet, Jefferson Friedman: String Quartet No. 2 (excerpt)
Live, New York (Le Poisson Rouge), 2010

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Are we ever better—more focused, more receptive, more supple—than when we’re listening to live music?

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lagniappe

art beat

Edward Hopper, Room in Brooklyn (1932), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

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