piano | music clip of the day

2011

Wednesday, 12/21/11

La Monte Young, The Well-Tuned Piano

Part 1

***

Part 2

***

Part 3

***

Part 4

***

Part 5

**********

lagniappe

Minimalism proper begins with La Monte Young, the master of the drone. He was born in 1935 in a tiny dairy community in Idaho, and spent his childhood listening to the secret music of the wide-open landscape—the microtonal chords of power lines, the harsh tones of drills and lathes, the wailing of far-off trains, the buzzing songs of grasshoppers, the sound of the wind moving over Utah Lake and whistling through the cracks of his parents’ log cabin. In 1940 he moved to Los Angeles with his family. As he later said, he fell in love with California’s ‘sense of space, sense of time, sense of reverie, sense that things could take a long time, that there was always time.’

—Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007)

Leave a comment

2011

Saturday, 12/10/11

If sounds define a space as much as walls and windows, you don’t need to knock out a wall to open up a room—just play this.

International Contemporary Ensemble with Steve Lehman
Impossible Flow (S. Lehman), live, New York (Le Poisson Rouge), 4/19/11

The moment this ends I want to hear it again. Is there any higher compliment?

More Steve Lehman? Here.

**********

lagniappe

reading table

A strange old man
Stops me,
Looking out of my deep mirror.

—Kakinomoto no Hitomaro (c. 662-710; trans. Kenneth Rexroth)

Leave a comment

2011

Friday, 12/9/11

Janis Joplin, “Get It While You Can” (J. Ragovoy)
Live, TV broadcast (The Dick Cavett Show), 1970

If she had lived, what would she sound like, at 68, today?

**********

lagniappe

reading table

We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.

—Donald Justice, “On the Death of Friends in Childhood”

Leave a comment

2011

Sunday, 12/4/11

funeral service and second line for Snooks Eaglin
9/27/09, New Orleans

Irma Thomas, “Singin’ Hallelujah”

*****

Charmaine Neville, Clarence “Frogman” Henry, Allen Toussaint, et al.

“Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”

***

“Hush, Somebody’s Calling My Name”

Leave a comment

2011

Thursday, 12/1/11

No matter how often I hear it, this piece—Beethoven’s final piano sonata—never fails to astonish.

Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 32
Rudolf Serkin (piano), live, Austria (Vienna), 1987

#1: 1st movement

***

#2: 2nd movement, part 1

***

#3: 2nd movement, part 2

***

If I knew I had a week to live, this is one of the things I’d want to listen to—more than once.

***

Another take on this sonata? Here (Claudio Arrau).

More of Serkin playing Beethoven? Here.

**********

lagniappe

100

200

300

400

500

600

700

Today marks our 800th post.

*****

reading table

A Day! Help! Help!
Another Day!
Your prayers – Oh Passer by!

—Emily Dickinson, c. 1858 (58 [Franklin], excerpt)

**********

musical thoughts

If it wasn’t for the music, I don’t know what I’d do.

—“Last Night A DJ Saved My Life”

Leave a comment

2011

Tuesday, 11/29/11

old stuff

Best two minutes of the whole day?

Jimmie Lunceford and his Orchestra (with Jimmy Crawford, drums)
“White Heat,” 1939

**********

lagniappe

musical thoughts

It’s difficult to name one favorite drummer, because . . . I’ve got a lot of favorites. But Jimmy Crawford—they called him “Craw”—with the Jimmie Lunceford band? He was a motherfucker.

—Paul Motian, YouTube

*****

reading table

How should I not be glad to contemplate
The clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
And a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
But there is no need to go into that.
The lines flow from the hand unbidden
And the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
And the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
Watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.

—Derek Mahon, “Everything Is Going to Be All Right”

Leave a comment

2011

Saturday, 11/26/11

Some musicians come straight at you—others sideways.

Andrew Hill (1931-2007), live, 2004, New York

**********

lagniappe

reading table

The pebble
is a perfect creature

equal to itself
mindful of its limits

filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning

with a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity

I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth

—Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye

—Zbigniew Herbert, “Pebble” (trans. Czeslaw Milosz & Peter Dale Scott)

Leave a comment

2011

Tuesday, 11/22/11

Frederic Chopin, Mazurka in C Major, Op. 24, No. 2
Martha Argerich, live, Sweden (Stockholm), 2009

More? Here. And here. And here. And here.

**********

lagniappe

musical thoughts

When I don’t play Chopin for a while, I don’t feel like
a pianist.

—Martha Argerich

*****

reading table

Look how
we “attempted to express ourselves.”

Every one of these words is wrong.

It wasn’t us.
Or we made no real attempt.
Or there is no discernible difference
between self and expression.

*****

The outer world means
State Farm Donuts Tae Kwando?

*****

Today could be described as a retired man humming
tunelessly to himself.

*****

Any statement I issue
if particular enough

will prove
I was here

*****

It’s as if
the real
thing—
your own
absence—
can never be
uncovered.

*****

These temporary credits
will no longer be reflected
in your next billing period.

—Rae Armantrout, Versed (2009), misc. fragments

Leave a comment

2011

Monday, 11/21/11

You can’t write a song like this, you can’t play it like this, unless your ears are open to all kinds of music.

Allen Toussaint, “Southern Nights,” live

**********

lagniappe

reading table

If they find a copy of Richard Yates’s Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, they buy it. It is as if they’ve found a baby on the front step. They peek inside, examine the dog-earing, the marginal scribbles. Or perhaps it’s a clean copy, which carries its own kind of sadness. In either case, they embrace it, though they already have multiple copies. Those are irrelevant to the one they would be abandoning if they left the book behind. This is a hostess gift you can give any fiction writer, guaranteed to delight her even though she already has it. Regifting becomes an act of spreading civilization.

—Ann Beattie, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (2011), “7 Truths About Writers” (#2)