I find it hard to understand why some folks wall themselves off from classical music. Jazz, blues, rock, classical: it’s all music. Sure, the musical lines and paragraphs—the units of expression—are usually (though not always) longer and more complex in classical music. But that’s simply a matter of form. Raymond Carver and Marcel Proust, for all their formal differences, both take you places you can’t get to any other way. So too do both Beethoven and Art Pepper, both Magic Sam and Mozart.
Bela Bartok, String Quartet No. 1 in A minor, 3rd movement
The Parker Quartet, live, 11/23/09
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.
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.
Spontaneity, immediacy, freshness—they can be as important in classical music as they are in jazz. What I love about this performance, for instance, is that he never stops searching. It’s as if he’s encountering this piece for the first time and unable to conceal his astonishment.
I am so used to it by now
that when the traffic falls silent,
I think a storm is coming.
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Lonely
No one is calling me. I can’t check the answering machine because I have been here all this time. If I go out, someone may call while I’m out. Then I can check the answering machine when I come back in.
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Nietszche
Oh, poor Dad. I’m sorry I made fun of you.
Now I’m spelling Nietszche wrong, too.
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.
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“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
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Adams talks about his music
Vodpod videos no longer available.
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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, like people, comes in all kinds. Some is easy to embrace, some thorny. I wouldn’t want to live without either.
Milton Babbitt, May 10, 1916-January 29, 2011
About Time, Alan Feinberg, piano
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String Quartet No. 2, Composers Quartet
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lagniappe
His music can be playful, too.
Semi-Simple Variations, The Bad Plus
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If you know anybody who knows more popular music of the ’20s or ’30s than I do, I want to know who it is. I grew up playing every kind of music in the world, and I know more pop music from the ’20s and ’30s, it’s because of where I grew up. We had to imitate Jan Garber one night; we had to imitate Jean Goldkette the next night. We heard everything from the radio; we had to do it all by ear. We took down their arrangements; we stole their arrangements; we transcribed them, approximately. We played them for a country club dance one night and for a high school dance the next.
Does it make it possible, with simply a click, to travel anywhere in the world?
Or is it just a vast collection of electronic wallpaper?
Are these the right questions?
Baloji, “Tout Ceci Ne Vous Rendra Pas le Congo” (Hotel Impala), 2007
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lagniappe
radio
Having just completed two days of trumpeter Roy Eldridge’s music, WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University) begins a 24-hour Memorial Broadcast honoring composer Milton Babbitt, who passed away Saturday at the age of 94.
I’ve tried listening to his recordings while doing something else, but that hasn’t worked. Whatever else I was doing, I just put aside. If it was nighttime, I turned off the light. Some music occupies every available inch of space—there isn’t room for anything else.
Alfred Cortot: Frederic Chopin, “Farewell” (Waltz in A-flat major, Op. 69, No. 1 [excerpt]); Robert Schumann, “Der Dichter Spricht” (Op. 15, No. 13 in G major [excerpt])
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lagniappe
Cortot looked for the opium in music.
—Daniel Barenboim
(Originally posted 7/13/10.)
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If you want to stay right where you are, don’t even bother with this clip. But if, instead, you’d like to go somewhere you may never have been before, well, this might be just the ticket.
Gyorgy Ligeti (1923-2006), Three Etudes, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano
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lagniappe
I listen to all kinds of music—new music, old music, music of my colleagues, everything.
—Gyorgy Ligeti (whose influences included not only the usual suspects [Chopin, Debussy, etal.] but also Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans and the Rainforest Pygmies and fractal geometry)
(Originally posted 10/6/09.)
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Want a break from music that’s busy, busy, busy, busy, busy?
To almost everyone’s surprise but his own, he [Morton Feldman] turned out to be one of the major composers of the twentieth century, a sovereign artist who opened up vast, quiet, agonizingly beautiful worlds of sound . . . . In the noisiest century in history, Feldman chose to be glacially slow and snowily soft.—Alex Ross
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Earlier in my life there seemed to be unlimited possibilities, but my mind was closed. Now, years later and with an open mind, possibilities no longer interest me. I seem content to be continually rearranging the same furniture in the same room.—Morton Feldman
(Originally posted 11/7/09.)
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mail, etc.
Congratulations on your 500th post. I don’t know how you do it but I’m definitely looking forward to receiving your next 500 posts. Thanks for exposing me to so many great artists. Keep the music coming and thanks for what you do.
music clip of the day 