His music points toward another world—one more lyrical, more refined, more lucid than this.
Mozart, Piano Sonata No. 14 in C Minor, K. 457/Friedrich Gulda, live, 1981
1st Movement
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2nd Movement
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
3rd Movement
Vodpod videos no longer available.(This last clip does something odd: instead of ending when the third movement concludes [5:15], it starts over.)
Looking for a reason to be hopeful?
None of these musicians (or the conductor) is over the age of 18.
John Adams, Shaker Loops (1978), first movement (“Shaking and Trembling”), live
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lagniappe
John Adams, rehearsing this music:
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It is a strange business, composing music in twenty-first-century America. The job is difficult in itself: it is slow, solitary, and intensely cerebral. You have to believe deeply in yourself to get through the process. You have to be possibly a little mad. When you are done, you have in your hands not a finished object—a painting that can be put up on a wall or a novel that can be read at one sitting—but a set of abstract notations that other musicians must learn and perform. Then you step back into the culture at large, where few people embrace, or even notice, what you do. In this country, classical music is widely regarded as a dead or alien form—so much so that jazz aficionados routinely say, “Jazz is America’s classical music.” To make the counterargument that America’s classical music is America’s classical music is somehow to admit that the battle is lost. In such a climate, composers easily become embittered.
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When I visited Adams at his house in Brushy Ridge, last June, he was pondering the composer’s relationship with the mass culture. “I like to think of culture as the symbols that we share to understand each other,” he said. “When we communicate, we point to symbols that we have in common. If people want to make a point, they reach for a reference. It might be a Woody Allen movie, or a John Lennon lyric, or ‘I’m not a crook.’ When I was young, I came to realize that twelve-tone music, or for that matter, all contemporary music, was so far divorced from communal experience that it didn’t appear on the national radar screen. It would be nice to hear someone say, ‘Look at that gas station in the moonlight. It’s pure John Adams.’”
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The music of John Adams, unlike so much classical composition of the last fifty years, has the immediate power to enchant.
—Alex Ross, “The Harmonist,” The New Yorker, 1/8/01
Violins teach us what it would be like to fly.
Henry Cowell, Symphony No. 13 (“Madras,” 1956-58), excerpt (first two movements), San Francisco Composers Chamber Orchestra, live, San Francisco, 2005
Want to hear all five movements? Here.
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Henry Cowell, the all-American composer of the 20th century, did it all. “I want to live in the whole world of music,” he said. He was “the open sesame of new music in America,” John Cage said.
He was famous once and is now all but forgotten. There was a time when Leopold Stokowski championed him in New York, as did Eugene Ormandy in Philadelphia and Serge Koussevitzky in Boston. Schoenberg thought the world of him. So did Busoni. But since Cowell’s death in 1965, the musical establishment has concluded his music, and particularly the plentiful late orchestral music, doesn’t hold up.
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A century ago, he was a teenage piano pioneer in Menlo Park, Calif. He was the first to hit clusters of tones on the piano with fist and forearm (Bartók noticed) and the first to play directly on the piano strings. He all but invented the concept of world music and was on the front line of flexible phrasing, extreme polyrhythms, percussion music and mechanical music. He was a celebrated pedagogue. Cage, Burt Bacharach, George Gershwin and Lou Harrison were among those who found their own voices through him. Cowell, who was born in 1897, was known in New York, Berlin and Moscow by the ’20s. He helped found the study of ethnomusicology at UC Berkeley. He published and organized the concerts of progressive music from all over.
Cowell is primarily known for is his Bohemianism, which led to the creation of the California school of music and, sadly, for his arrest on morals charges. He was publicly shamed in a celebrity trial for having had consensual oral sex with young men and sentenced to 15 years in San Quentin.
After four years of incarceration, he was paroled and eventually pardoned by Gov. Earl Warren so that he could become a musical ambassador for the State Department. He moved to New York and taught at the New School for Social Research, traveled and absorbed the musics of Asia and Latin America, wrote 21 symphonies and much else. When Malaysia was looking for a national anthem in the ’50s, the country turned to him and Benjamin Britten for help.
—Mark Swed, Los Angeles Times (blog), 1/31/10
two takes
If God plays a musical instrument, I bet it’s the cello.
Bach, Suite No. 5 in C minor for Unaccompanied Cello, Sarabande
Mstislav Rostropovich, live
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Mischa Maisky, live
Want more of Bach’s cello music? Here.
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
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])
*****
Live, Japan (Tokyo, Hara Museum of Contemporary Art), 2010
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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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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).
music clip of the day 