last night
I heard these folks at Northwestern University’s Pick-Staiger Concert Hall, where they played another piece by this composer (Last Round), a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient.
Osvaldo Golijov, Tenebrae; A Far Cry, Boston, 2011
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lagniappe
Here’s another take (four players, no conversation).
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musical thoughts
Nobody sits down and thinks, “I’m going to create some classical music.”
John Cage, Third Construction (1941)
So Percussion
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Is anything more familiar—or mysterious—than sound?
William Ferguson, “The Music They Made,” New York Times (12/27/12): Etta James, Dave Brubeck, Davy Jones, Levon Helm, Donna Summer, Chuck Brown, Ed Cassidy, Greg Ham, Jimmy Castor, Ravi Shankar, Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Ronnie Montrose, Jon Lord, Michael Davis, Joe South, Chavela Vargas, Duck Dunn, Johnny Otis, Whitney Houston, Jimmy Ellis, Adam Yauch, Mickey Baker, Bill Doss, Ketty Wells, Bob Babbitt, Robin Gibb, Andy Williams, Terry Callier
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
To love anything—music, literature, comedy, sports, whatever—is to be perpetually saying goodbye.
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reading table
clamoring geese—
over there is the year
ending too?—Kobayashi Issa, 1763-1827 (translated from Japanese by David G. Lanoue)
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found words
FASTEN SEATBELT WHILE SEATED
USE BOTTOM CUSHION FOR FLOTATION—Saturday morning, on a flight from Chicago to a family gathering in Lincoln, Nebraska, this was on the back of the seat in front of me
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random thoughts
Some things are better left unexamined. Like, for instance, flying on a commercial airplane. If I thought much about it, I’d never do it.
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radio
WKCR-FM’s Bach Festival, mentioned the other day, concludes at midnight.
keep on dancing
Then suddenly I could hear Q-Tip—blessed Q-Tip!—not a synthesizer, not a vocoder, but Q-Tip, with his human voice, rapping over a human beat. And the top of my skull opened to let human Q-Tip in, and a rail-thin man with enormous eyes reached across a sea of bodies for my hand. He kept asking me the same thing over and over: You feeling it? I was. My ridiculous heels were killing me, I was terrified I might die, yet I felt simultaneously overwhelmed with delight that “Can I Kick It?” should happen to be playing at this precise moment in the history of the world, and was now morphing into “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” I took the man’s hand. The top of my head flew away. We danced and danced. We gave ourselves up to joy.
—Zadie Smith, “Joy,” The New York Review of Books, 1/10/13
A Tribe Called Quest, “Can I Kick It?” (album, 1990; single, 1991)
A great singer creates, within a song, a space, inviting you, the listener, to come inside.
Mahalia Jackson, “Silent Night,” 1961
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Marion Williams, “O Holy Night,” “Silent Night,” 1959
only rock ’n’ roll
There are only a few bands I come back to often.
One of them is The National.
—my (25-year-old) son Alex, talking music the other day
The National, “Fake Empire,” live, New York, 2011
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More?
Live, Netherlands, 2011*
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Here’s Bryan Ferry talking about his new album (featured yesterday):
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*Here’s the set list (courtesy of a YouTube comment):
00:00 runaway. 06:30 anyone’s ghost. 09:45 bloodbuzz ohio. 14:40 afraid of everyone. 19:00 conversation 16. 23:20 lemonworld. 27:04 apartment story. 30:50 sorrow. 35:50 england. 42:10 fake empire. 45:45 encore break. 48:05 mr november. 53:13 terrible love.
two takes
What makes a song last?
It’s not the meaning.
It’s the sounds, the particular sounds of the particular words—sounds that singers, year after year, decade after decade, keep wanting to hear, to sing.
Why can’t I free your doubtful mind and melt your cold, cold heart . . .
“Cold, Cold Heart” (H. Williams)
Hank Williams, TV show, 1952
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Norah Jones, BBC Radio show, 2007
passings
Charles Rosen, pianist, teacher, writer (1972 National Book Award for Nonfiction: The Classical Style), May 5, 1927-December 9, 2012
Frederic Chopin, Nocturne in B major (Op. 62, No. 1)
Live, Atlanta, 1985
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Johann Sebastian Bach, The Art of the Fugue, excerpts
Recording, 1967
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
A German pre-Romantic philosopher, Johann Georg Hamann, held that the sense of music was given to man to make it possible to measure time. The composer Elliott Carter’s fame comes partly from a reconception of time in music that fits the world of today (although there are many other aspects of his music to enjoy). We do not measure time regularly, like clocks do, but with many differing rates of speed. In the complexity of today’s experience, it often seems as if simultaneous events were unfolding with different measures. These different measures coexist and often blend but are not always rationalized in experience under one central system. We might call this a system of irreconcilable regularities.
In Carter’s music, things happen for different instruments at different tempos—none of them dominates the others, and an idiosyncratic character is often given to the different instruments that preserves their individuality. Carter is never dogmatic, and the different measures of time may occasionally combine briefly for a moment of synthesis. The individuality of tempo and rhythm can make his music difficult to perform as each player unconsciously responds physically to the different rhythms he or she hears and yet tries to preserve his or her own system intact. Carter is, for this reason, best interpreted by those musicians who have often played his scores. Just as, in a polyphonic work of Bach or any other competent and genial contrapuntist, one takes pleasure in the independent line and interest of the separate voices and rejoices in the way they illuminate each other, so in Carter we can often delight in a quick foreground movement heard against a mysteriously shifting background that gives the foreground a new sense.
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[T]he sense of his music is dependent as much upon tone color and dynamics as it is on pitch; the more salient aspects of the individual instrumental lines have always to be brought out.
—Charles Rosen, “Elliott Carter’s Music of Time,” New York Review of Books, 2/9/12
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Everyone needs a hobby. Some pianists collect Oriental vases. I write books.
—Charles Rosen, 1981 interview
Few musicians get under my skin like he does.
Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000), piano
Frederic Chopin, Preludes, Op. 28, Nos. 7, 13, 21, 24
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Play every note as if your life depended on it.
—Friedrich Gulda
old stuff
Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Jeni LeGon, Fats Waller, “Living in a Great Big Way” (Hooray for Love, 1935)
music clip of the day 