Wednesday, 8/18/10
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.
music clip of the day
jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
Category: classical
2010
Saturday, 8/14/10
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.)
2010
Monday, 8/2/10
Sheer beauty—sometimes it seems like more than enough.
Ingram Marshall, Fog Tropes II (String Quartet and Tape)/Kronos Quartet
*****
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.
2010
Monday, 7/19/10
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.
*****
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
2010
Tuesday, 7/13/10
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
2010
Wednesday, 6/23/10
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.
2010
Sunday, 6/20/10
Decades have passed since the performances featured a couple weeks ago. The voice has lost some of its strength—the heart none.
Inez Andrews (April 3, 1929-)
Live, Arizona (Tucson, Mt. Calvary Baptist Church), 2007
“The Lord Will Make A Way”
*****
“Mary Don’t You Weep”
lagniappe
listening room
The other night, in the wake of posting Artur Schnabel’s recording of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata, I listened to pianist Andras Schiff’s lecture-recital on this piece, which is wonderful and revelatory and can be heard here.
*****
punctuating with pizzazz
2010
Thursday, 6/17/10
With the greatest artists, even the most familiar pieces sound as if you were hearing them for the first time.
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 14 in C# minor, Op. 27, No. 2 (“Moonlight”), 1801/Artur Schnabel, piano, 1933
1st & 2nd Movements
*****
3rd Movement
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lagniappe
The magnitude of his [Schnabel’s] creative accomplishments left technical considerations far behind. His Beethoven had incomparable style, intellectual strength, and phrasing of aristocratic purity. The important thing was that even when his fingers failed him, his mind never did. Schnabel was always able to make his playing interesting. A mind came through—a logical, stimulating, sensitive mind. And when Schnabel had his fingers under control, which was more often than not in his literature of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, he took his listeners to an exalted level. . . . There were no tricks, no excesses; just brain, heart and fingers working together with supreme knowledge.—Harold C. Schonberg, The Great Pianists (1963)
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Want more of Beethoven’s piano sonatas?
No. 21 (“Waldstein”)/Emil Gilels
No. 23 (“Appassionata”)/Solomon
*****
art beat
At the risk of repeating myself, the Matisse exhibit at Chicago’s Art Institute closes Sunday (then opens next month at New York’s Museum of Modern Art). How many other opportunities will you have to see this stuff?
Henri Matisse:
Seek the strongest color effect possible . . . the content is of no importance.
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After a half-century of hard work and reflection the wall is still there.
Bathers with a Turtle (1908)
The Blue Window (1912)
Nude with a White Scarf (1909)
2010
Saturday, June 5, 2010
replay: a clip too good for just one day
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, et al.] but also Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans and the Rainforest Pygmies and fractal geometry)
(Originally posted 10/6/09.)
2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Funeral last week.
Ill this week.
What to listen to?
Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 32 in C minor, Op. 111/Claudio Arrau, piano (1970)
1st Movement
*****
2nd Movement
#1
#2
lagniappe
A fascinating lecture-recital on this sonata, by pianist Andras Schiff, can be heard here.
*****
Speaking of the second movement, pianist Alfred Brendel said:
. . . perhaps nowhere else in piano literature does mystical experience feel so immediately close at hand.
music clip of the day 