sounds of India
day three
Shivkumar [AKA Shiv Kumar] Sharma (1938-), santoor
Raag Hamsadhwani, live
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Indian music calls for surrender. Of what? Busyness. Distractability. Impatience.
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reading table
[S]ince we do float on an unknown sea, I think we should examine the other floating things that come our way carefully; who knows what might depend on it?
—Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), letter to Robert Lowell
Imaginary Landscapes: A Film on Brian Eno (1989)
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
I wanted to make a kind of music that had the long now and the big here.
—Brian Eno
not like this, not like that
Nate Wooley, “Polychoral for trumpets and 8-channel audio”; Nate Wooley & Peter Evans (trumpets), live, New York (Knockdown Center), 2015
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
In 1915 no one had heard an electric guitar. In 2065 sounds we’ve never heard will be commonplace. What will they be?
Where would we be without music?
testify!
The Consolers (Sullivan & Iola Pugh), “Reach Out Your Hand,” live
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
If perfection lies in the absence of anything inessential, this is no less perfect than Bach.
*****
art beat
Bruce Davidson (1933-), Palisades, New Jersey, 1958
string quartet festival (day one)
Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827), String Quartet No. 14 (Op. 131, C-sharp minor), 1826
Alban Berg Quartet, live, Vienna, 1989
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Végh Quartet, recording, 1952
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Budapest String Quartet, recording, 1951
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
Opus 131 . . . is routinely described as Beethoven’s greatest achievement, even as the greatest work ever written. Stravinsky called it ‘perfect, inevitable, inalterable.’ It is a cosmic stream of consciousness in seven sharply contrasted movements, its free-associating structure giving the impression, in the best performances, of a collective improvisation. At the same time, it is underpinned by a developmental logic that surpasses in obsessiveness anything that came before. The first four notes of the otherworldly fugue with which the piece begins undergo continual permutations, some obvious and some subtle to the point of being conspiratorial. Whereas the Fifth Symphony hammers at its four-note motto in ways that any child can perceive, Opus 131 requires a lifetime of contemplation. (Schubert asked to hear it a few days before he died.)
—Alex Ross, “Deus Ex Musica,” New Yorker, 10/20/14
One-word review: Wow!
Paul Dresher (1951-), et al., Schick Machine (excerpts), with Steven Schick (percussion, voice, etc.), live, Davis, California (UC Davis), 2009
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
The first musician—a percussionist?
Morton Feldman (1926-1987), Patterns in a Chromatic Field (1981)
Arne Deforce (cello) & Yutaka Oya (piano)
Live (excerpts), Belgium (Kortrijk), 2013
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Charles Curtis (cello) & Aleck Karis (piano)
Recording, 2004
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lagniappe
random thoughts: New Year’s resolution #4
No matter how much I get out, it never fails. Whenever I experience live music, as I did Sunday when I heard this otherworldly piece played, wonderfully, by cellist Mira Luxion and pianist Andy Costello (Constellation, Chicago), I leave with the same thought—you really ought to do this more often.
Thankful I am, too, for the unruly pleasures of rock ‘n’ roll.
Flamin’ Groovies, “Shake Some Action,” 1976
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
The story told in “Shake Some Action” is complete in its title—though in the song it’s a wish, not a fact, a desperate wish the singer doesn’t expect to come true. The words hardly matter: “Need” “Speed” “Say” “Away” are enough. It starts fast, as if in the middle of some greater song. A bright, trebly guitar counts off a theme, a beat is set, a bass note seems to explode, sending a shower of light over all the notes around it. The rhythm is pushing, but somehow it’s falling behind the singer. He slows down to let it catch up, and then the sound the guitar is making, a bell chiming through the day, has shot past both sides. Every beat is pulling back against every other; the whole song is a backbeat, every swing a backhand, every player his own free country, discovering the real free county in the song as it rises up in front of him, glimpsing that golden land, losing it as the mirage fades, blinking his eyes, getting it back, losing it again—that is its reckless abandon, the willingness of the music, in pursuit of where it needs to go, where it must go, to abandon itself.
—Greil Marcus, The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs (2014)
music clip of the day 