Some instruments just seem made for each other.
Ned Rothenberg (clarinet), Mivos Quartet, Clarinet Quintet (N. Rothenberg), excerpt, live, Ann Arbor, 2011
**********
lagniappe
reading table
Let there be physical suddenness.
—Michael McClure
*****
random thoughts
This morning, before sunrise, when I was out walking my son Luke’s dog, Roscoe, he stopped to inspect each blade of grass, carefully.
one thing after
another after another
after another after another after . . .
John Cage (1912-1992), Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1958); Variable Geometry (Jean-Phillippe Calvin, director), live, London, 2011
A performance like this can go wrong in so many ways. This one, to these ears, works wonderfully. Momentum, tautness, immediacy—it has them all.
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
Everything we do is music.
last night
At the University of Chicago (Mandel Hall), I heard this played by the Keller Quartet, wonderfully.
Ludwig van Beethoven, String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Orion Quartet, live, Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, 2008
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
Music, like sex, is an immersive experience—you go to be engulfed.
*****
Intermission. Men’s room. Old man, with a cane, at the urinal. I hope I still go out to hear live music when—if—I’m his age.
Feel like floating?
Steve Reich (1936-), Music for 18 Musicians (1974-76)
eighth blackbird, Third Coast Percussion, et al., live, Chicago, 2011
The other night, as Mitsuko Uchida was performing two of Mozart’s piano concertos (17, 27) with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, there were moments so pure, so open, I would have liked nothing more than to disappear into one of the spaces between the notes and stay there.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, KV. 466; Mitsuko Uchida (piano and conducting), Camerata Salzburg, live, Germany (Salzburg), 2001
last night
I heard a concert, at the University of Chicago, devoted to the work of this man, a composer, a longtime professor, a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient. The performances featured different combinations of violin, viola, cello, clarinet, and piano. The music was often thorny. Occasionally whimsical. Frequently emphatic. Sometimes beautiful. And wholly absorbing.
Ralph Shapey (1921-2002), String Quartet No. 6 (1963)
The Lexington Quartet of the Contemporary Players of the University of Chicago
#1
#2
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
To me, [it’s] very important that [the audience] can recall it as an emotional experience; as though it were something they could hold in their hands.
—Ralph Shapey
This seems, somehow, to these ears, anyway, to fit a day when the ashes of my mother-in-law are being buried.
Revolutionary Ensemble (Leroy Jenkins, violin; Sirone, bass; Jerome Cooper, drums), “Chicago” (Live at Moosham Castle, 1977)
Kidd Jordan Quartet (KJ, tenor saxophone; Billy Bang, violin; William Parker, bass; Hamid Drake, drums), New York (Vision Festival), 2008
**********
lagniappe
musical thoughts
We tend to take musical instruments for granted, as if their existence were inevitable. But the fact that something exists doesn’t mean it had to. We could’ve been born into a world that never heard a violin.
*****
reading table
“What kind of heaven is that, you can’t have your records?”
—Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue
yesterday afternoon
I took a journey that began in late 18th-century Austria, proceeded to mid-20th-century Russia, and concluded in early 20th-century France. Joseph Haydn, Dmitri Shostakovich, Maurice Ravel—they were the hosts. These folks, playing at the University of Chicago’s new Logan Arts Center, were the guides. If one day I learned that my life would be over at midnight, I’d be happy to spend the afternoon, after lunching at a Mexican restaurant (maybe Nuevo Leon on 18th Street), listening to a string quartet.
Pacifica Quartet, New York, 2009; Leo Janacek (1854-1928), String Quartet No. 2 (“Intimate Letters”), first movement
