aworks :: "new" american classical music

links for 2008-07-13

• Silliman's Blog
  "this is my 2,000th post to the blog, and I’m feeling feisty. The history of poetry, like the history of any art form, is not a procession of its “best works.” Indeed, the well-wrought urn is, if anything, the deservedly forgotten one"
• SaxNewWorks » Saxophone Quartet (SATB)
  List of pieces for Saxophone Quartet

links for 2008-07-12

• The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan - Mental Health Break
  I love the painting. The video not so much.
• Create Digital Music » iTunes App Store is Here, But Early Music Entries May Disappoint
  "So, after all these years, are we still struggling to catch up to late 90s Palm apps? Really?" My take also. The only one of note was Pandora.
• Circus Acts: Last.fm Will Pay You Royalites Once You Jump Through This Flaming Hoop
  "as long as you can get in touch with that girl who played harp on your track a few years ago and the engineer who you put down as the producer who left town last year,...and you wrote the song entirely by yourself, everything should be fine"
• Internet Archive: Details: Morning Concert: Carl Stone and Nicolas Slonimsky
  Charles Amirrkhanian gets Carl Stone to describe the fair use law in 1987 and what would happen if the composer made an enormous profit on one of his pieces. + Slonimsky says Varese was a mystic and uses the word "agglutination" talking about Arcana.

Appalachian Spring (1944-45). Aaron Copland /best American work?/

Conductor Kenneth Woods suggests Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring as greatest American work:

I came away from the concert more in awe of it than ever- it is so perfectly put together, so deeply moving and so ferociously challenging. America has produced a lot of great music (and Copland produced a lot of that), but Appalachian Spring may be the great work of American music.

Maybe, although Our Town and Four Piano Blues are probably my favorite Copland compositions. And I am still fond for the piano version of El Salon Mexico.

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aworks: rob kapilow on appalachian spring el salon mexico

links for 2008-07-11

• 13: THE 7TH VOYAGE OF SINBAD - Bernard Herrmann - "Theme & Fight Scenes" (1958)
  'So without further delay, here's the jackhammer theme from "The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad"' No idea why I'm so interested in BH lately...
• Neuromarketing » The Power of “New”
  "Neuroscientists have now determined that the appeal of “new” is hard-wired into our brains."

links for 2008-07-10

• Admit it, you're as bored as I am | Classical and opera | guardian.co.uk Music
  No, fortunately I am not as bored with contemporary music as you are.

links for 2008-07-09

• Developer blog - otto@: New Otto malloc helps spot ancient bugs
  Sorry for being off-topic but this is a fun bug report, albeit way geeky.
• Google Testing Blog: Announcing: New Google C++ Testing Framework
  I'm on a roll tonight..
• Google Open Source Blog: Protocol Buffers: Google's Data Interchange Format
  Yet another IDL? Ok, enough computer science for awhile...
• Blogging For Dollars: Sick of blogging? Data says you can quit now
  "The geeks who read blogs all day in 2003 are now following Twitter and other speedier media." Except for me as there is so little music content on speedier media.
• Leonard Link: Historic Ives Recordings on a British Label
  "shortly before the composer's death, recordings of his major works began to emerge...Three Places in New England, conducted by Walter Hendl, Symphony No. 3, conducted by Richard Bales, and the Piano Sonata No. 1, played by William Masselos"

links for 2008-07-07

• Crooks and Liars » John McCain: ‘I hate the bloggers’
  Though I don't hate John McCain. Yet.
• McCain Battles a Nemesis, the Teleprompter - NYTimes.com
  'He is speaking less out of the sides of his mouth, which can produce a wiseguy twang reminiscent of the Penguin from the Batman stories, and he is relying less on his favorite semantic crutch — the phrase “my friends”'
• Old First Concerts - Sarah Cahill
  Friday July 18th in SF: Sonata and Scherzo by Marc Blitzstein; Walk in Beauty by Peter Garland; Three Rags by James Tenney; Private Dances by Kyle Gann; Pondok by Evan Ziporyn.

aworks listening log :: bernard herrmann

"a" works

• "Echoes" String Quartet
• North by Northwest
• Psycho

I still like the arpeggios and ominous woodwinds of North by Northwest. And Psycho continues to be eerie. Echoes is a pleasant change from explicit scenes and suites, but still familiar, episodic and moody.

"other" works

• The Day the Earth Stood Still. Fahrenheit 451. Gulliver's Travels. Journey to the Center of the Earth. The Man Who Knew Too Much. Marnie. The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Souvenir do Voyage. Taxi Driver. Torn Curtain. Vertigo.

I love (most of) the Hitchcock movies. Apparently I don't like (most of) the Hitchock scores, even those whose music I remember greatly setting the tone of the film e.g. Fahrenheit 451. And the non-Hitchcock scores are particularly uncompelling and un-beautiful. They may be the opposite of "astylism." There is a film remake of Journey this month. Finally, while Vertigo is one of the best Hitchcock films, the melody wasn't so interesting although possibly I was thinking too much about Kim Novak...

links

• LaLa: Esa-Pekken Salonen. Bernard Herrmann (?)
• Amazon mp3: City of Prague Philharmonic
• MySpace: Kim Novak
• last.fm: The Snows of Kilimanjaro Taxi Driver
• Google books: A Heart at Fire's Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann. Echoes
• SF Chronicle: Vertigo's SF Locations

links for 2008-07-06

• SimplyNoise.com - The best free white noise generator on the Internet.
  Does a pleasant sound count as music?
• Music Matters: Learn by listening?
  "These studies suggest that musical competence can be improved (or altered) by mere exposure to music, without the help of explicit training. Listen and learn, indeed."

Doctor Atomic (2006). John Adams /DVD?/

The Reverberate Hills notes of a recording to come of the John Adams opera, Doctor Atomic:

I see that Opus Arte lists among its August releases a two-disc set of the Netherlands Opera production of Dr Atomic.

Opus Arte has a short clip of the DVD that looks more dramatic than I remembered.