Here’s a MCOTD first—music by someone who’s been featured previously (here, here, here, here, here) as a visual artist.
William Eggleston, piano
Live (Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me [forthcoming])
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Live, Japan (Tokyo, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art), 2010
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lagniappe
art beat
William Eggleston
If you listened each day for the rest of your life to a new piece of music, how much music, at the end of your life, would remain unheard?
Claude Debussy, Two Etudes (Nos. 1 & 5)/Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano, live
Want more of Pierre-Laurent Aimard? Here. Here.
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lagniappe
listening room
Last night I heard, for the first time, one of the most beautiful recordings of piano music I’ve ever encountered—a new recording of Morton Feldman’s For Bunita Marcus by Louis Goldstein, which can be heard, in its entirety, in the second half of an archived program of Alternating Currents, a weekly radio show out of Milwaukee. This performance lasts about 70 minutes. Coming out of it, I felt different than I did going in: lighter, clearer, awash in shimmering overtones.
replay: a clip too good for just one day
If you were a musician, could anything be worse than to find, one day, that unlike the day before, and the day before that, and all the other days you could remember, you were no longer able to play your instrument? That’s what happened, in 1958, to this man, the great British classical pianist Solomon Cutner (known professionally simply as Solomon). Then 56 years old and at the height of his career, he suffered a stroke. It left his right arm paralyzed, silencing him for the rest of his life, which lasted another 32 years.
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor (“Appassionata” [1804])/Solomon, piano
1st Movement
2nd Movement
3rd Movement
lagniappe
Andras Schiff on Beethoven’s piano sonatas
In London a couple years ago, pianist Andras Schiff explored Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas in a series of much-acclaimed lecture-recitals, which can be heard here.
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Thelonious Monk and Beethoven, Bach, Chopin, et al.
Thelonious Monk possessed an impressive knowledge of, and appreciation for, Western classical music, not to mention an encyclopedic knowledge of hymns and gospel music, American popular songs, and a variety of obscure art songs that defy easy categorization. For him, it was all music. Once in 1966, a phalanx of reporters in Helsinki pressed Monk about his thoughts on classical music and whether or not jazz and classical can come together. His drummer, Ben Riley, watched the conversation unfold: ‘Everyone wanted him to answer, give some type of definition between classical music and jazz . . . So he says, ‘Two is one,’ and that stopped the whole room. No one else said anything else.’ Two is one, indeed. Monk loved Frédéric Chopin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, and Bach, and like many of his peers of the bebop generation, he took an interest in Igor Stravinsky.—Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009)
(Originally posted on 11/3/09.)
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lagniappe: more
Since yesterday I’ve been listening nearly nonstop to WKCR-FM, which (as mentioned in yesterday’s post) is devoting three straight days to the music of Lester Young and Charlie Parker, in celebration of their respective birthdays (LY’s was Friday, CP’s is tomorrow). Something happens—something delicious—when you surrender your ears and yourself to someone’s music for such a sustained period of time. Little by little, that musician moves in, taking up residence in your brain. Their distinctive voice becomes, for a time, inseparable from everything else you’re hearing and seeing and thinking and feeling. If you’d like to experience this for yourself, go here (you won’t regret it).
Actually, you don’t even need a single string.
Steve Reich, “Clapping Music” (1972)/So Percussion, live, California (Palo Alto), 1/8/10 (music starts at 3:35)
More Steve Reich? Here.
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.
What do I listen to these days?
This more than anything.
Each night it’s the last thing I hear before falling asleep. Having left the Bose on “repeat” (usually Hildegard Kleeb [Hat Hut], sometimes John Tilbury [Extraplatte]), it’s the first thing I hear upon awakening. It seems, sometimes, as if it’s always playing—whether I’m listening or not.
Morton Feldman, “For Bunita Marcus” (1985)/Mark Knoop (piano), live, London, 2010
Part 1
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Part 2
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Part 3
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Part 4
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Part 5
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Part 6
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Part 7
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Part 8
Want more? Here. Here. Here. Here.
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lagniappe
Almost all Feldman’s music is slow and soft. Only at first sight is this a limitation. I see it rather as a narrow door, to whose dimensions one has to adapt oneself (as in Alice in Wonderland) before one can pass through it into the state of being that is expressed in Feldman’s music. Only when one has become accustomed to the dimness of light can one begin to perceive the richness and variety of colour which is the material of the music. When one has passed through the narrow door and got accustomed to the dim light, one realises the range of his imagination and the significant differences that distinguish one piece from another . . .
Feldman sees the sounds as reverberating endlessly, never getting lost, changing their resonances as they die away, or rather do not die away, but recede from our ears, and soft because softness is compelling, because an insidious invasion of our senses is more effective than a frontal attack. Because our ears must strain to catch the music, they must become more sensitive before they perceive the world of sound in which Feldman’s music takes place.
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Legend has it that after one group of players had crept their way as quietly as possible through a score of his Feldman barked, ‘It’s too fuckin’ loud, and it’s too fuckin’ fast.’
—Alex Ross, “American Sublime,” The New Yorker, 6/19/06
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
You could listen to his music, and nothing else, every day for the rest of your life and never touch bottom.
Bach, Chaconne in D minor for solo violin (Partita for Violin No. 2 [BWV 1004])/Gidon Kremer (violin), live
Another take? Here.
music clip of the day 