two takes
Arvo Pärt, Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten (1977)
A Far Cry, live, Boston (Jordan Hall), 10/17/08
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
BBC Symphony Orchestra, live, London (Royal Albert Hall), 8/17/10
Vodpod videos no longer available.This goes, and goes, and goes, keeping you afloat, carrying you along,
then stops with stunning suddenness—is any music more lifelike?
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?
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
Part 2
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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Borodin String Quartet
Part 1
Vodpod videos no longer available.
Part 2
*****
Taneyev Quartet
(gave the premiere performance [Leningrad, 1974])
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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lagniappe
Want to hear the rest?
Emerson String Quartet, live
2nd & 3rd Movements
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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4th & 5th Movements
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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6th Movement
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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2nd Movement
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3rd Movement
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4th Movement
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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
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
two takes
Mozart was a kind of idol to me—this rapturous singing . . . that’s always on the edge of sadness and melancholy and disappointment and heartbreak, but always ready for an outburst of the most delicious music.
Mozart, Quintet for Clarinet and Strings in A major, K. 581 (1789)
2nd Movement (Larghetto)
Bruce Nolan (clarinet) and the Sierra String Quartet
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
Yona Ettlinger (clarinet) and the Tel Aviv Quartet
Vodpod videos no longer available.Have you heard of Brandt Brauer Frick?
—Rachael Z., the 20-something stylist who cuts my hair
The Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble, live (rehearsal), Germany (Berlin), 2010
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
reading table
Teenager
Me — a teenager?
If she suddenly stood, here, now, before me,
would I need to treat her as near and dear,
although she’s strange to me, and distant?Shed a tear, kiss her brow
for the simple reason
that we share a birthdate?So many dissimilarities between us
that only the bones are likely still the same,
the cranial vault, the eye sockets.Since her eyes seem a little larger,
her eyelashes are longer, she’s taller
and the whole body is closely sheathed
in smooth, unblemished skin.Relatives and friends still link us, it is true,
but in her world almost all are living,
while in mine almost no one survives
from that shared circle.We differ so profoundly,
talk and think about completely different things.
She knows next to nothing —
but with a doggedness deserving better causes.
I know much more —
but nothing for sure.She shows me poems,
written in a clear and careful script
that I haven’t used for years.I read the poems, read them.
Well, maybe that one
if it were shorter
and fixed in a couple of places.
The rest do not bode well.The conversation stumbles.
On her pathetic watch
time is still cheap and unsteady.
On mine it’s far more precious and precise.Nothing in parting, a fixed smile
and no emotion.Only when she vanishes,
leaving her scarf in her haste.A scarf of genuine wool,
in colored stripes
crocheted for her
by our mother.I’ve still got it.
—Wislawa Szymborska (trans. Clare Cavanagh & Stanisław Barańczak; Here [2010])
*****
five desert-island poets
You have no idea one moment what’s going to happen the next (assuming, that is, you’re not following the score).
This can be disorienting, or exhilarating, or both.
Milton Babbitt (1916-2011), Composition for Four Instruments (flute, clarinet, violin, cello; 1948)
Vodpod videos no longer available.More? Here.
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Babbit was not quite as difficult as he seemed. He may have been dealing in abstruse relationships among myriad elements, but his listeners didn’t have to digest too many at once. From Webern, Babbit learned the art of deriving a set from successive transformations of a group of just three notes (“trichord”), which becomes a microcosm of the series. With these tiny motives in play, the texture tends to be less complicated than in the average post-Schoenbergian work. Composition for Four Instruments gives the impression of economy, delicacy, and extreme clarity; flute, clarinet, violin, and cello play solos, duets, and trios, coming together as a quartet only in the final section, and even there the ensemble dissolves into softly questing solo voices at the end. Thick dissonances are rare; like Japanese drawings, Babbitt’s scores are full of empty space.
—Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise (2007)
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There was only one. There were no “simultaneities” in this particular musical equation. Milton Byron Babbitt stands alone. He will never be popular. Nor will he cease to inspire.
Some music circles back on itself, over and over, slowing time.
John Luther Adams
(not to be confused with the other John Adams)
“In the White Silence,” 1998 (excerpt)/The Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, Tim Weiss, conductor (2003 recording)
Vodpod videos no longer available.*****
“Red Arc/Blue Veil” for piano, percussion, and tape sounds (excerpt)/live, Kentucky (Lexington [University of Kentucky]), 2008/Clint Davis, piano; Charlie Olvera, vibraphone, crotales
Vodpod videos no longer available.**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
Adams talks about his music
Vodpod videos no longer available.*****
I admire a radio station where you can’t be certain when you first tune in—as happened to me yesterday afternoon, while working, when I turned on WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University)—whether they’re playing a recording or having technical difficulties.
music clip of the day 