He wasn’t content with the sounds he found—so he created new ones.
Harry Partch (1901-1974), Music Studio (1958)
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
There’s a world, somewhere, that sounds nothing like this one.
These pieces—Bach’s cello suites—I’ve been listening to for over 40 years. I never tire of them. Never.
Johann Sebastian Bach, Suite No. 5 in C minor for Unaccompanied Cello, excerpt (Sarabande); Mischa Maisky, cello
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lagniappe
radio
WKCR-FM’s Bach Festival—one of my favorite musical events of the year—begins tonight at 9 p.m. (EST). It runs, continuously, until midnight New Year’s Eve. That a world so full of so much junk has room in it for this, too, amazes me.
passings
Charles Rosen, pianist, teacher, writer (1972 National Book Award for Nonfiction: The Classical Style), May 5, 1927-December 9, 2012
Frederic Chopin, Nocturne in B major (Op. 62, No. 1)
Live, Atlanta, 1985
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Johann Sebastian Bach, The Art of the Fugue, excerpts
Recording, 1967
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
A German pre-Romantic philosopher, Johann Georg Hamann, held that the sense of music was given to man to make it possible to measure time. The composer Elliott Carter’s fame comes partly from a reconception of time in music that fits the world of today (although there are many other aspects of his music to enjoy). We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates of speed. In the complexity of today’s experience, it often seems as if simultaneous events were unfolding with different measures. These different measures coexist and often blend but are not always rationalized in experience under one central system. We might call this a system of irreconcilable regularities.
In Carter’s music, things happen for different instruments at different tempos—none of them dominates the others, and an idiosyncratic character is often given to the different instruments that preserves their individuality. Carter is never dogmatic, and the different measures of time may occasionally combine briefly for a moment of synthesis. The individuality of tempo and rhythm can make his music difficult to perform as each player unconsciously responds physically to the different rhythms he or she hears and yet tries to preserve his or her own system intact. Carter is, for this reason, best interpreted by those musicians who have often played his scores. Just as, in a polyphonic work of Bach or any other competent and genial contrapuntist, one takes pleasure in the independent line and interest of the separate voices and rejoices in the way they illuminate each other, so in Carter we can often delight in a quick foreground movement heard against a mysteriously shifting background that gives the foreground a new sense.
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[T]he sense of his music is dependent as much upon tone color and dynamics as it is on pitch; the more salient aspects of the individual instrumental lines have always to be brought out.
—Charles Rosen, “Elliott Carter’s Music of Time,” New York Review of Books, 2/9/12
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Everyone needs a hobby. Some pianists collect Oriental vases. I write books.
—Charles Rosen, 1981 interview
Few musicians get under my skin like he does.
Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000), piano
Frederic Chopin, Preludes, Op. 28, Nos. 7, 13, 21, 24
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Play every note as if your life depended on it.
—Friedrich Gulda
riveting
Alexander Scriabin, Etude in D-sharp minor, Op. 8, No. 12 (1894)
Vladimir Horowitz, live, New York (Carnegie Hall), 1968
Some instruments seem made for certain seasons. Take the viola: it seems most at home when days are getting shorter, shadows longer, nights colder.
Sofia Gubaidulina (1931-), Concerto for Viola and Orchestra (1996)
Yuri Bashmet (viola), WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne (Semyon Bychkov, cond.)
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
I am a religious Russian Orthodox person and I understand religion in the literal meaning of the word, as re-ligio, that is to say the restoration of connections, the restoration of the legato of life. There is no more serious task for music than this.
otherworldly
Maurice Ravel, Jeux d’eau (1901)
Martha Argerich, live (1977)
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Alfred Cortot, recording (1920)
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lagniappe
radio
After finishing, at midnight, their 24-hour Coleman Hawkins birthday celebration, the indefatigable folks at WKCR-FM didn’t rest for even a minute. Instead they embarked on a 4-day, 96-hour celebration of pianist Teddy Wilson’s centennial.
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Happy Thanksgiving!
MCOTD gives thanks for
Lester Bowie and
Blossom Dearie and
The Dirtbombs;
for Mingus, Miles, Monk,
Bach, Beethoven, Bruckner, Bartok;
for WKCR-FM and WFMU-FM;
for Morton Feldman and
Elliott Carter and
Alfred Schnittke and
Tristan Murail;
for Hound Dog Taylor, Junior Wells, Sonny Boy Williamson, Magic Sam;
for The Ex, The Heptones, The Swan Silvertones, The Impressions, The Art Ensemble of Chicago;
for Von Freeman and Art Pepper and Vernard Johnson;
for Friedrich Gulda and Martha Argerich, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Ursula Oppens;
for Ed Blackwell and
for Phillip Wilson;
for Julius Hemphill and
Henry Threadgill and
D’Angelo and
Dorothy Love Coates;
and for all the others—singers, musicians, composers, painters, photographers, printmakers, novelists, poets—who have graced this site;
and for you, who have found your way here, somehow, from Mongolia and Slovenia and Jamaica and Saudi Arabia; from Myanmar and Syria; from Angola, India, Ethiopia; from Finland, Thailand, Ireland, Iceland, and over 100 other countries.
My heaven, I said the other day, is full of string quartets—dancers, too.
New York City Ballet, 2012
Last Sunday I had one of the great musical afternoons—one of the great afternoons, period—of my life, listening, at Chicago’s Symphony Center (across from the Art Institute), to pianist Andras Schiff play Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, in its entirety (and entirely from memory), a performance that lasted nearly three hours and could’ve kept going, as far as I was concerned, for three days.
Johann Sebastian Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier (1722 [Book I], 1742 [Book II])
Book II, Prelude and Fugue No. 16 in G minor, BMV 885
Sheng Cai (piano), live, Boston, 2010
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Books I and II, Sviatoslav Richter (piano), recording, 1970s
(For better sound quality on this and other YouTube clips, go to the “Settings” icon [lower right] and select the highest available [here 1080p].)
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is God. Without Bach, God would be a third-rate character.
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