piano | music clip of the day

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

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#2: 2nd movement, part 1

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#3: 2nd movement, part 2

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

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

More of Serkin playing Beethoven? Here.

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lagniappe

100

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500

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Today marks our 800th post.

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reading table

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

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

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musical thoughts

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

—“Last Night A DJ Saved My Life”

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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

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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

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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”

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2011

Saturday, 11/26/11

Some musicians come straight at you—others sideways.

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

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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)

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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.

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lagniappe

musical thoughts

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

—Martha Argerich

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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.

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The outer world means
State Farm Donuts Tae Kwando?

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

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Any statement I issue
if particular enough

will prove
I was here

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

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

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

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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

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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)

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2011

Tuesday, 11/15/11

Often feel muddled?

Me, too.

That’s why I turn to Webern and Mondrian.

What they offer, more than anything, is clarity.

Anton Webern, Variations for Piano, Op. 27 (1936)
Glenn Gould, piano, live

*****

Piet Mondrian, Composition (No. 1) Gray-Red (1935)
Art Institute of Chicago

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2011

Monday, 11/14/11

There may yet be hope for this world: this clip, on YouTube, has nearly
two million views.

Thelonious Monk Quartet (TM, piano; Charlie Rouse, tenor saxophone; Larry Gales, bass; Ben Riley, drums), “Blue Monk,” live, Norway (Oslo), 1966

More? Here. And here. And here.

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2011

Wednesday, 11/2/11

This guy sounded so good the other day—let’s hear some more.

B.B. King with T-Bone Walker, “Bad News”/“Sweet Sixteen”
Live, Monterey Jazz Festival (Monterey, California), 9/16/1967

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2011

Thursday, 10/20/11

Joseph Haydn, Piano Sonata No. 24 in D major, excerpt (2nd Movement)
Sviatoslav Richter, live

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lagniappe

musical thoughts

Logic does not exist for me. I float on the waves of art and life and never really know how to distinguish what belongs to the one or the other or what is common to both. Life unfolds for me like a theatre presenting a sequence of somewhat unreal sentiments; while the things of art are real to me and go straight to my heart.

—Sviatoslav Richter

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reading table

After a black day, I play Haydn,
and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists
and someone pays no taxes to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
and act like a man who is calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
“We do not surrender. But want peace.”

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house
but every pane of glass is still whole.

—Tomas Transtromer (winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature), “Allegro,” trans. from the Swedish by Robert Bly