Thursday, 10/11/12
Alfred Schnittke (1934-98), Concerto Grosso No. 1, live, Russia, 2004
Kremerata Baltica (Gidon Kremer & Tatiana Grindenko, violins)
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
What do we want from music—a mirror or a window?
music clip of the day
jazz/blues/rock/classical/gospel/more
Category: musical thoughts
2012
2012
Saturday, 10/6/12
my favorite 103-year-old composer
Elliott Carter (December 11, 1908-), Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux (1985); Claire Chase (flute),* Joshua Rubin (clarinet), International Contemporary Ensemble; live, Brazil (Sao Paulo), 2012
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
The “opportunity cost” of listening to something you already know, to borrow from the dreary world of economics, is that you’re forgoing an opportunity to discover something new.
*****
found words
Last night, after a concert at the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall (Takacs Quartet), I stopped at Harold’s Chicken Shack on 53rd Street, as much for old times’ sake as anything else (Harold got me through law school), and found this at the bottom of the receipt:
REFUNDS WITHIN 24 HOURS
MUST BRING FOOD BACK
**********
*Winner of a 2012 MacArthur “genius grant.”
2012
Friday, 9/14/12
old stuff
Count Basie Orchestra (feat. Jimmy Rushing [vocals] & Herschel Evans [tenor saxophone]), “When My Dreamboat Comes Home,” live (radio broadcast), New York (Savoy Ballroom, Harlem), 1937
The other day, driving to Rockford for a hearing in a murder case, listening to this for the first time, I couldn’t quit hitting the repeat button: “and once again the fields of gloom are adroitly plowed under.”
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
What music from today will folks be listening to in 2087?
2012
Saturday, 9/8/12
Sometimes more is more.
Anton Bruckner (1824-96), Symphony No. 8 in C minor; Vienna Philharmonic (Herbert von Karajan, cond.), live, Austria (Abbey of St. Florian), 1979
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
Once upon a time, before the human attention span began to shrink, people could actually sit still and pay attention to something—a single thing—for over an hour.
2012
Thursday, 9/6/12
love it or hate it
Fire Room (Ken Vandermark, reeds; Lasse Marhaug, electronics; Paal Nilssen-Love, percussion), live, Poland (Poznań), 2011
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
What Emily Dickinson says of poetry applies to music too: “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.”
2012
Wednesday, 9/5/12
Happy (100th) Birthday, John!
John Cage, composer, September 5, 1912-August 12, 1992
Today, celebrating his centennial, we revisit past clips.
*****
10/9/09
No matter where you are, this landscape is just around the corner.
John Cage (1912-1992), In a Landscape (1948); Stephen Drury, piano
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
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
*****
5/22/10
Here’s a piece that sounds different every time you hear it.
John Cage, 4’ 33” (1952); David Tudor, piano
lagniappe
***
*****
musical thoughts
I didn’t wish it [4′ 33″] to appear, even to me, as something easy to do or as a joke. I wanted to mean it utterly and be able to live with it.
***
Until I die there will be sounds. And they will continue following my death. One need not fear about the future of music.
—John Cage
*****
3/8/12
John Cage, Two (1987)
Live, Netherlands (Amsterdam), 2009
Dante Boon (piano), Rutger van Otterloo (soprano saxophone)
*****
Recording, 1991 (hat Art)
Marianne Schroeder (piano), Eberhard Blum (flute)
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
Every something is an echo of nothing.
—John Cage, Silence (1961)
*****
7/23/12
Monday, n. the day the weekly tide of confusion rolls in.
How about something simple?
John Cage (1912-1992), Six Melodies (for violin and keyboard; dedicated to Josef & Anni Albers), 1950; Annelie Gahl (violin) & Klaus Lang (electric piano), 2010
*****
lagniappe (new stuff)
radio
Today it’s all Cage all day at WKCR-FM.
***
art beat: more from Sunday’s stop at the Art Institute of Chicago
Agnes Martin, Untitled #12, 1977 (detail)
***
another birthday, closer to home
Today also marks the birthday of MCOTD—our third.
2012
Thursday, 8/23/12
Music, for some people, is no less vital than oxygen.
James Rhodes, talking and playing (2010)
**********
lagniappe
reading table
To Praise the Music
by William Bronk (1918-1999)
Evening. The trees in late winter bare
against the sky. Still light, the sky.
Trees dark against it. A few leaves
on the trees. Tension in their rigid branches as if
–oh, it is all as if, but as if, yes,
as if they sang songs, as if they praised.
Oh, I envy them. I know the songs.
As if I know some other things besides.
As if; but I don’t know, not more
than to say the trees know. The trees don’t know
and neither do I. What is it keeps me from praise?
I praise. If only to say their songs,
say yes to them, to praise the songs they sing.
Envied music. I sing to praise their song.
(Want to hear Bronk, a MCOTD Hall of Famer, read this? Here.)
*****
art beat: more from Tuesday’s stop at the Art Institute of Chicago
Roy Lichtenstein, Mirror #3 (Six Panels) (1971)
2012
Wednesday, 8/22/12
It’s impossible, sometimes, to separate our experience of music, especially pop music, from the surrounding circumstances. The other day, for instance, I was taking my son Luke back to school in Bloomington, Indiana. He was playing dashboard DJ. As we rolled through the hills of southern Indiana, nearing our destination, this came on after a long stretch of hip-hop (Lil Wayne, Eminem, Young Jeezy, Tyga, et al.), and the electronic intro, the Björk-like voice—they lit up the highway.
Ellie Goulding, “Lights”
**********
lagniappe
art beat: yesterday at the Art Institute of Chicago (after a hearing at the nearby federal court building)
Roy Lichtenstein: A Retrospective (through 9/3/12)
Look Mickey (1961)
*****
Artist’s Studio “Look Mickey” (1973)
2012
Tuesday, 8/21/12
Neneh Cherry & The Thing (Mats Gustafsson, baritone saxophone, electronics; Ingebrigt Håker Flaten, bass; Paal Nilssen-Love, drums)
Live, Austria (Konfrontationen 2012, Nickelsdorf), 7/21/12
“Cashback” (N. Cherry)
***
“Dirt” (J. Osterburg, R. Asheton, S. Asheton, D. Alexander)
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
More and more, it seems, boundaries—race, gender, country, era, genre—mean less and less.
2012
Friday, 8/10/12
summer in the city
The Black Keys, Lollapalooza, Chicago (Grant Park), 8/3/12
“Howlin’ For You”
***
“Little Black Submarines”
***
“Lonely Boy”
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
What, if anything, does it mean that, in the year 2012, not one but two of the headliners at Lollapalooza—Jack White and the Black Keys—are deeply influenced by blues?
*****
reading table
Life had begun to demand lies in order to be workable.
***
At the crest of the hill where the road went up, was an abandoned house, and beyond it the road disappeared off into the blue sky.
***
It’s odd, though, what makes you think about the truth. It’s so rarely involved in the events of your life. I quit thinking about the truth for a time then. Its finer points seemed impossible to find among the facts. If there was a hidden design, living almost never shed light on it.
—Richard Ford, Canada (2012)
music clip of the day 