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Cover of Giacinto Scelsi
And speaking of drone, the only La Monte Young track on rdio is For Brass on an interesting recording, Roots of Drone. Young, John Cage, John Lee Hooker, Shostakovich, Sam Cooke, Muddy Waters, Ravi Shankar, Giacinto Scelsi, Bo Diddley, Howlin' Wolf, Miles Davis...
I used to think that the music of Young was as radical as could be but this recording is good at making the link to out-there drone music.
Image via Wikipedia
Uh, the Reich piece was in my rdio queue but is no longer available for streaming, so I've still never heard it. I find streaming restrictions annoying, Nonesuch Records, but removing what I thought I was already allowed to listen to is worse. Rephrasing, I follow the law and I spend too much money on music, but surprising the consumer can't be good.
I'm headed to Amoeba/SF tomorrow but fortunately, will likely find other selections to add to my bricks and mortar legacy media shopping basket.
Interrupting my attempt at nobility, I'll speak a moment about guilty pleasures. Although I don't and won't ever subscribe to Showtime on cable, I watched Season 1 of Californication on Netflix streaming. Then, although not as instantly gratified since it was not available on my computer and involved frequent inbound and outbound post office transactions, I watched season 2 and 3 via Netflix DVD. And then I learned that Seasons 4 and 5 are not available at all on Netflix.
Not optimal but at least understandable. Hmm, maybe I'll buy my own copy of Season 4 tomorrow.
I haven't precisely zeroed in on it yet, but there's a lesson here about the abundance of interesting music versus the limited amount of video I care about versus the $112/month I continue to reliably shovel to Comcast. So, I'm still sorting through what I expect and what I will or will not pay for to satisfy the family's media consumption. There are bigger problems in life, of course.
By the way, the Keeril Makin recording is on Starkland, which also has interesting recordings like Ellen Burmeister playing Vincent Persichetti and Bimsten: Larkin Grifford's Harmonica. The latter includes Philip Bimstein's EatDrinkGambleSex which could be the theme song to Californication except that David Duchovny character doesn't gamble, at least through season 3...
It Is Time is also a new release and interesting. The composer:
It Is Time marshals the virtuosity of the individual members of So to speed, slow, warp, celebrate and mourn our perceptions of time. Each of the four sections of the piece is a mini concerto for one of the players.
I do wish more of the Cantaloupe catalog was streamable on rdio.
Heid Waleson has an interesting comparison in her Wall Street Journal review of the new opera Heart of a Soldier:
It should have all been very moving, but it wasn't. By stressing the story's uplifting qualities rather than the confusion and tragedy of 9/11, the creators left it bloodless and sanitized, which is a less than ideal condition for an opera. In contrast, John Adams's controversial "The Death of Klinghoffer," another opera about an act of terrorism, challenges its audience to engage with the material and the events it depicts. It seems clear that Rescorla was a remarkable hero. This opera does tell us something about how he got to be one. But what else do we learn, and how do we feel about it? "Heart of a Soldier" doesn't have much to add.
Nagoya Guitars is an interesting use on instrumentation i.e. Reich mallet music without the mallets:
Meerenai Shim points to a recent Old First Church concert where this was played as well, with an indication it's a transcription by David Tannenbaum. And I don't remember that I posted about it in 2007.
From the NY Times review of the new opera:
By the time the work reaches its climactic scene, the Sept. 11 attacks, it’s hard to feel invested in the characters, their losses or their sacrifices. Any effect the scene is able to muster relies not on the power of the work itself but on the ability of simple visual cues — spindly towers, radiant blue backdrop, falling paper — to jog the audience members’ own memories.
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