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Category: classical

2009

Monday, 10/19/09

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)

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2009

Saturday, 10/17/09

Charlie Parker & Igor Stravinsky

Walk into any record store and one would have been over here and the other over there. But that made no difference to the kinship they felt.

*****

Jazz musicians sat up in their seats when Stravinsky’s music started playing; he was speaking something close to their language. When Charlie Parker came to Paris in 1949, he marked the occasion by incorporating the first notes of the Rite into his solo on ‘Salt Peanuts’. Two years later, playing Birdland in New York, the bebop master spotted Stravinsky at one of the tables and immediately incorporated a motif from Firebird into ‘Koko’, causing the composer to spill his scotch in ecstasy.—Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)

*****

Charlier Parker & Dizzy Gillespie, “Hot House,” live (TV broadcast), 1952

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), The Firebird (excerpt; 1910), Berlin Philharmonic (Simon Rattle conducting), live, 2005

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Want to try a little experiment?

Play the Parker clip for about, say, 10-20 seconds. Then go to the Stravinsky clip and do the same. Then back. And forth. And back. And forth.

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2009

Saturday, 10/10/09

No matter where you are, this landscape is just around the corner.

John Cage (1912-1992), “In a Landscape” (1948)/Stephen Drury, piano

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lagniappe

Music is a means of rapid transportation.

***

What I’m proposing, to myself and other people, is what I often call the tourist attitude—that you act as though you’ve never been there before. So that you’re not supposed to know anything about it. If you really get down to brass tacks, we have never been anywhere before.

***

As far as consistency of thought goes, I prefer inconsistency.

—John Cage

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2009

Tuesday, 10/6/09

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)

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