If you’re in a dark mood, the last thing you want is something light.
Alfred Schnittke, String Trio (1985)/Moscow Conservatory, live
Want more of Schnittke’s music? Here.
crystalline, adj. Clear and transparent like crystal. E.g., Mitsuko Uchida playing Mozart.
Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, KV. 466/Mitsuko Uchida (piano and conducting), Camerata Salzburg, live, Germany (Salzburg), 2001
Part 1 (first movement)
Part 2 (first movement, cont.)
Part 3 (second movement)
Part 4 (third movement)
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lagniappe
I like to make the gestures of the piano concerto, so big and public, much smaller and intimate, as if I were sitting alone or simply dreaming.
—Mitsuko Uchida
replay: a clip too good for just one day
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.)
(Originally posted on 11/23/09.)
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lagniappe
[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
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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)
Many years ago, when I was younger than my sons are now (22, 19), I listened to this album (Forever Changes) day after day after day.
Arthur Lee and Love, “Alone Again Or,” “A House Is Not A Motel,” England (London), 2003
replay: a clip too good for just one day
I first heard this music—Bach’s Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello—nearly 40 years ago. At the local public library where I was going to college, I happened upon some recordings—a boxed set of three LPs on the Mercury label—by Janos Starker, which I proceeded to check out over and over again. In the years since, first on my turntable and then my CD player, a lot of music has come and gone. These pieces have remained.
Bach, Suite No. 3 in C Major for Unaccompanied Cello/Janos Starker, cello, live, Tokyo, 1988
1st Movement (Prelude)
2nd Movement (Allemande)
3rd Movement (Courante)
4th Movement (Sarabande)
5th Movement (Bourree)
6th Movement (Gigue)
(Originally posted on 10/19/09.)
Sheer beauty—sometimes it seems like more than enough.
Ingram Marshall, Fog Tropes II (String Quartet and Tape)/Kronos Quartet
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what a world
Until yesterday morning, I’d never heard of this guy. I happened upon him while looking up someone else (in Kyle Gann’s American Music in the Twentieth Century). Intrigued by what I read, I did a search on YouTube, which led to this piece. Mesmerized by what I heard, I listened to it several times over the course of the day. Today I’m posting it here. So the last 24 hours, in relation to this music, have gone like this: utter ignorance —> chance encounter —> first listen —> sharing with others.
I was about 16 when I had an experience that I recollect in nearly Proustian detail, listening for the first time to the String Quartet in C-sharp Minor, op. 131. I was sitting in a friend’s living room when her father put a recording of it on the hi-fi. I remember everything about those three-quarters of an hour back in 1961 or ’62: the room in which I was sitting and the direction in which I was facing; the single, exposed Bozak speaker vibrating like an exotic organism in the unfinished wooden box that Mr. L. had built to contain it; the quickly dawning realization that the first movement was the most overwhelming piece of music I had ever heard—a feeling that comes back to me whenever I listen to it, in real sound or mentally, as at this moment; and I remember (but this memory comes also from countless later listenings) the mysterious, throbbing sound of the first violin’s statement of the opening subject in that recording, made by the Budapest Quartet in the early 1950s.
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I am now several years older than Beethoven lived to be. I still think of him as my alpha and omega, but in a different sense: as the author of music that transformed my existence at the onset of adulthood and that continues to enrich it more than any other music as I approach what are often referred to as life’s declining years. His music still gives me as much sensual and emotional pleasure as it gave me 50 years ago, and far more intellectual stimulation than it did then. It adds to the fullness when life feels good, and it lengthens and deepens the perspective when life seems barely tolerable. It is with me and in me. A thousand or 5,000 or 10,000 years from now, Beethoven and our civilization’s other outstanding mouthpieces may still have much to communicate to human beings—if any of our descendants are still around—or they may seem remote, cold, obscure. But what matters most in Beethoven’s case is his belief that we are all part of an endless continuum, whatever our individual level of awareness may be. In the Ninth Symphony, he used Schiller’s words to tell us explicitly what many of his other works, especially his late works, tell us implicitly: that the “divine spark” of joy and the “kiss for the whole world,” which originate “above the canopy of stars,” must touch and unite us all. The spark is there, he said, and so is the kiss; we need only feel and accept their presence.—Harvey Sachs
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Beethoven, String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor, op. 131/1st Movement
Budapest Quartet, 1943
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Busch Quartet, 1936
Originally, Morton Feldman was commissioned to compose the score for the film [Something Wild], but when the director heard the music, he promptly withdrew his commission, opting to enlist Aaron Copland instead. The reaction of the baffled director [Jack Garfein] was said to be, ‘My wife is being raped and you write celesta music?’
Morton Feldman, “Something Wild in the City: Mary Ann’s Theme,” 1960
Some music—like, say, Emil Gilels performing Beethoven’s Waldstein sonata or Ben Webster playing “Old Folks” or Al Green singing “Jesus Will Fix It”—transports you to another place. Other music, like this, transforms the space around you.
Steve Reich, “Music for 18 Musicians” (1974-76)
Part 1
Excerpt (beginning), live, Cincinnati, 2008
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Part 2
Excerpt, recording (Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble)
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Part 3
Excerpt (ending), live, Tokyo, 2008
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I first encountered Steve Reich’s music in 1971, while in college and living for a few months in New York. At a concert at New York University, I heard Reich and his ensemble perform his then-new piece “Drumming.” Stunning, mesmerizing, it was unlike anything my 19-year-old ears had ever heard.
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lagniappe
The other day, I watched as Steve Reich walked away from Carnegie Hall, where celebrations of his seventieth birthday were under way, and out into his native city. Trim and brisk, he darted into West Fifty-seventh Street, fell back before oncoming traffic, bopped impatiently in place, then darted forth again. He soon disappeared into the mass of people, his signature black cap floating above the crowd. Perhaps I should have lamented the fact that one of the greatest living composers was moving around New York unnoticed, but lamentation is not a Reichian state of mind, and I thought instead about how his work has blended into the cultural landscape, its repeating patterns and chiming timbres detectable all over modern music. Brian Eno, David Bowie, David Byrne, and a thousand d.j.s have paid him heed. On Fifty-seventh Street, Reich-inflected sounds may have been coursing through the headphones of a few oblivious passersby.
Three decades ago, New York’s leading institutions would have nothing to do with Reich. A riot broke out when Michael Tilson Thomas presented “Four Organs” at Carnegie in 1973: one woman tried to stop the concert by banging on the edge of the stage with her shoe. Now uptown is lionizing the longtime renegade.
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Reich changed music, and he also changed how music relates to society. In the face of early incomprehension, he took a do-it-yourself approach to getting his work before the public. Nonclassical musicians were among his models: he saw John Coltrane some fifty times, and marvelled at how the great man would unleash mind-bending sounds, pack up his sax, and disappear into the night. With his namesake ensemble, Reich performed in galleries, clubs, and wherever else he felt welcome. The effects of this paradigm shift can be seen on any day of the week in New York, as composer-led ensembles proliferate.
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The Reich ensemble retains most of its original members, and they remain an awesome force, even as shaggy hairdos have given way to dignified shocks of white. At Zankel Hall, they played Part I of “Drumming,” a phase-shifting tour de force in which bongos are struck with sticks. I was curious to see how they would compare with two sharp young ensembles who had performed the same stretch of music in recent weeks—So Percussion, at Symphony Space, and four Juilliard percussionists, at Carnegie. The youngsters drummed with effortless grace, as if the score were written into their genetic code. But the veterans more than held their own, bringing to bear a kind of disciplined wildness, in the spirit of the Ghanaian drummers with whom Reich studied before he wrote the piece. The energy that blazed up at climactic moments could have powered the hall in a blackout.
Composed almost a century ago, these tiny pieces—haiku-like in their compression—still astonish.
Anton Webern (1883-1945), Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9 (1911-13)/LaSalle Quartet
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lagniappe
The 15th of September 1945, the day of Anton Webern’s death, should be a day of mourning for any receptive musician. We must hail not only this great composer but also a real hero. Doomed to a total failure in a world of ignorance and indifference he inexorably kept on cutting out his diamonds, his dazzling diamonds, the mines of which he had such a perfect knowledge.—Igor Stravinsky
