aworks :: "new" american classical music

beyond aworks :: feeds of the month /neo-americanism et al/

When one subscribes to too many blogs and feeds and seldom unsubscribes, one learns to ruthlessly organize. As a by-product of that organization, here are this month's top feeds.

Music

1. Red Black Window. Composer/professor Roger Bourland's tastes (and lifestyle) are somewhat different than mine but anyone with a "GRIFFES" license plate deserves to be read.
2. PostClassic. Kyle Gann knows too much about American classical music, classical music, "downtown music", portable disk drives as music archives etc. I think he's also a native Texan but he maintains our intellectual interest, nonetheless.
3. The Standing Room. Not as much about parking lately but still interesting and fun.
4. Renewable Music.  His music landmarks list is diverse and well-articulated as is his blog in general.
5. Theatre of Found Sounds. Another sophisticated take on musical truth.
6. Coolfer. Record industry news and links. I wish my industry had such an exceptional blog. Hmm.
7. Kinderkuchen for the FBI. I share almost none of her operatic interests but I'll defend to the death her right to blog about it. Ok, maybe not to the death, but still...
8. NewMusicBox. Feed here.
9. Playbill Arts. Feed here.
10. Sequenza21 news. Feed here.

Real American Life (or is it neo-American life?)

1. Whiskey Bar. Billmon turned off the comments and then basically quit posting altogether. But he's back and powerful although his mordant humor sometimes annoys.
2. reddit.com: what's new online. I try every feed aggregator around and this month, reddit was best.
3. Ask Metafilter. Sometimes mundane but always at least one question of merit. And it's surprising how important the mundane is, or whatever.
4. Daily Kos. Neo-American political view. The feed is better so you can avoid the idiots often found in the message boards.
5. Bopnews. My best source for the interesection of the economic and political. Stirling Newberry is a composer, to boot.
6. Talking Points Memo. Too "inside Washington" sometimes but was way ahead of the Social Security story last year.
7. Metafilter. The linking brother of Ask Metafilter.
8. The News Blog. Informed if sometimes raucous political commentary.
9. Once Upon a Time. I may hope that Arthur Silber is wrong but his neo-American geopolitical insight may be avant-garde and ultimately true.
10. Daily Dish. Andrew Sullivan's point of view is engaging if sometimes misguided.

Newly Subscribed

1. Counterterrorism Blog. A counterterrorism blog of note.
2. Bloglines blog search on "bitches brew". No link per se.
3. Free Money Finance. Despite the title, the blog is substantive so far.
4. Menlo Park, CA Weather from Weather Underground. Current local weather feed. For the first time in awhile, the weather was actually noticeable this month.
5. On a Pacific Aisle. Critic Joshua Kosman's new blog. I probably learn more about the classical music world from his SF Chronicle reviews than anything else I read.
   
6. Mystery Pollster. Technical blog on political polling.
7. The Skeptical Optimist. The only blog with real-time updates of the Debt-to-GDP ratio...
8. Uncyclopedia - Recent changes. "The content-free encyclopedia anyone can edit." Stupid and yet sometimes funny.
9. "west texas intermediate" - Google News. A personal project where I'm tracking the price of oil. It if hits $106 a barrel, time to panic.
   
10. 146 miles without a map. Some English bloke is recreating a historical walk.

Doctor Atomic (2005). /dvd only?/

Via Kinderkuchen for the FBI, David Patrick Stearns writes on how opera is moving to DVD rather than CD. If for example, Nonesuch plans Doctor Atomic for DVD only (someday), wouldn't it have made sense to have a download-only audio version soon after the debut? Those NY/LA Phil downloads did well, after all.

Endless Mardi Gras (2006). Chas Smith

Today's listening log:

1. Numerous Radiohead songs after buying the book Radiohead - Back to Save the Universe: The Stories Behind Every Song. I was hoping for content like Alan Pollack's notes on the Beatles canon -- form, key, discography etc.-- but this is interesting too e.g. Pink Floyd was influenced by Miles Davis' Bitches Brew. By the way, Malcolm Gladwell's review of Why? notes the difference between stories and technical accounts, which may explain my expectations.

2. Endless Mardi Gras. Chas Smith. Effective use of jet airplane noise.

3. Symphony No. 3. Charles Ives. Northern Sinfonia / James Sinclair. In the comments to a Sequenza21 post about the lack of attention paid to composer Ruth Schonthal, David Toub says this (Pulitzer Prize-winning) symphony is "insignificant." This is not my favorite Ives work nor even my favorite Ives symphony but I think this piece will endure. Coincidentally, I listened to Toub's for Philip Glass this week, all 1 hour and 58 minutes of it. Ok, my attention wandered some and it took me two train commutes to finish it but I found the propulsive minimalism satisfying. Via this podcast-like feed.

3. False Clarity. Chas Smith. Long, blurry tones, appropriately enough.

4. A selection from Philip Glass' Satyagraha among other works played on organ by Kevin Bowyer. It's hard to top the Christopher Bowers-Broadbent organ recording of Part, Glass, and Peter Maxwell Davies, though. And David Toub blogged about how, to my surprise, Satyagraha is superior to Akhnaten. I grant that Akhnaten has its flaws and is all downhill after the first act, but I find it much more dramatic than Satyagraha.

5. Symphony No. 8. Dmitri Shostakovich. Concertgebouw/Haitink. Streamed from Contemporary Classical on live365. I didn't make it through all 62 minutes. This doesn't sound particularly "contemporary" in the sense that World War II is also historical, not contemporary. If I get time, I want to elaborate on what does sound contemporary.

6. John Klemmer's Touch and the Police's Regatta de Blanc. Two nostalgia CDs from the library, neither of which sounds contemporary, nor even particularly good, several decades later.

And I didn't actually hear it but some guy speeds up/slows down video game music resulting in loops he listens to hundreds of thousands of times. His method of editing WAV file speeds sounds too difficult. I'd like a moderato fast-forward button, myself...

Raise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1927). Kurt Weill

From the LA Opera brochure of the new season:

Straight from Broadway... Audra McDonald joins fellow Tony Award-winners Patti LuPone and John Doyle, star and director of this season's smash hit revival of Sweeney Tood, in an edgy 20th-century masterpiece from the composer of "Mack the Knife."

wikipedia: rise and fall of the city of mahagonny kurt weill los angeles opera mack the knife

Symphony No. 14 "Symphony in Microtones" (2003). Gloria Coates

In case you missed these lines from the latest Wire magazine...

1. [Gloria] Coates' Symphony No. 14, Symphony in Microtones is a celebration of the pioneer spirit of early America, a tradition form which her own work has grown. /philip clark/
2. [Lou] Harrison's music had an unaffected optimism and warm glow that few other 20th century figures were able to match, a central paradox for such an instinctive radical. /philip clark/
3. Ligeti's studies were interrupted in 1943 when he was forced to work in a Nazi labour camp.
4. If you're familiar with [psychiatrist R.D.] Laing then you might also be aware that he was a talented pianist, so you might imagine a tasteful cocktail of piano suites. /luke fowler. album cover of Laing: not safe for the squeamish/
5. Ralph Ellison's idea of jazz as part of a historical "total way of life", formed in public ritual, was born not only of his own black American experience, but also from a reading of the Jessie L. Weston study of Arthurian legend that Ellison found as he studied T.S. Eliot. /tom perchard/
6. In the age of the search engine, anonymity is best achieved by aligning oneself with the commonplace and letting the viral networks of the information age assign a location far away. /jim haynes/
7. Merce Cunningham's 14 dancers perform to David Tudor's Sounding: Ocean Diary and Andrew Culver's Ocean 1-95 surrounded by the audience, who are, in turn, surrounded by the orchestra.
8. 'Contemporary music' is the wrong term, so much so-called contemporary music doesn't sound modern, it sounds based on what Anton Webern and Schoenberg did in the 1910sor 20s: it sounds like it's looking backwards, not forwards.  /biosphere aka geir jenssen. napster/
9. Perhaps it should be mandatory for all aspiring electronica producers to make a few rave-worthy Jungle records to learn how to compulsively edit drums without forsaking groove and how to manupulate texture without relying exclusively on the interplay between DSP crunch and pristine daintiness. /peter shapiro/
10. Horace Tapscott was a signal figure both in the history of Los Angeles's cultural landscape and the story of improvised music. /byron coley/

Gnarly Buttons (1996). John Adams /you'll have to pry it out of my dying hands/

Via today's daily gmail, la la users are asking that I ship them the following CDs from those I've admitted to owning. I have to say I wouldn't miss the CDs by Autechre and Aphex Twin but how come no one has asked for this?

                                     

Dimanche A Bamako by Amadou & Mariam Sleep On The Left Side by Cornershop Confield by Autechre Out From Out Where by Amon Tobin I Care Because You Do by Aphex Twin Drums Along the Pacif... by David Rosenthal, Dani...

Adams: Gnarly Buttons... by Michael [clar/cond] C... Twoism by Boards Of Canada Glass: Akhnaten / Dav... by Christina W�chtler, P... Turn On The Bright Lights by Interpol Amelie by Original Soundtrack Run Lola Run by Original Soundtrack

Piano Music of John A... by Gloria Cheng-Cochran,... Music 4 Hands - Glass... by Dennis Russell Davies... Spiderland

technical note: unlike napster, la la doesn't seem to be set up to easily share links, so clicking may not work. on the other hand, napster is working for me again (even if skype is not).
now playing on itunes (no, really): la la love you by the pixies.
napster: la la love you by the pixies. gnarly buttons by john adams et al. no spiderland by the group slint, though.

Doctor Atomic (2005). John Adams /pretend anonymity/

I'm reading New York magazine regarding some anonyomous message board. Hmm, what would I say if I were truly anonymous...

• I just have no interest in harmony. I can't hear it, I don't enjoy it when I recognize it, it's boring to read about, etc. Timbre on the other hand...
• I should feel grateful for MTT but I just don't. Is this my problem?
• Am I a consumerist because I've ripped over 17,000 tracks and still have many CDs to go?
• I haven't heard anything by Beethoven in two years.
• I own no Beatles CDs or MP3s, despite or because of heavy saturation from age four to age eighteen.
• In the MP3 era, I replay deeper into my collection and also hear much more by favorite artists and composers but probably less of any particular work. Fifteen years ago, for one month, I only listened to one Steve Reich CD and La Monte Young's Well-Tuned Piano, over and over and over...
• I'm secretly having positive feelings about "rankism."
• I just don't illegally download tracks. I tried Napster back in the day but even though hundreds of thousands of users were online, there were only maybe 20 John Adams tracks. I know of a contemporary music sharing community but I just wasn't interested. Wait, on second thought, I did download MP3s of the Radiohead concert I just attended. How cool is that? I'm sure I would have paid lots for Doctor Atomic MP3s after that opera. And anyway, are there contemporary opera bootleggers?
• Speaking of Doctor Atomic, I still think about specific music from the opera but not so much about the subject matter or the dramatic presentation of that subject matter.
• At some point, I need to come out of the closet and reveal the number of blogs I read/scan. As a side effect, I watch almost no television, gave up on Fanfare, American Record Guide, Gramophone, etc. I did just subscribe to The Wire though. I'm also a long-time Wired subscriber although their music coverage now borders on useless. I also subscribed to Goldmine -- apparently it's my guilty pleasure to read what generation jones-era bands like Supertramp and Journey are doing now even if U2/Bono make me nauseous. By the way, I can't see the Goldmine record ads without glasses. And I think I am more a baby boomer than a Gen X'er.
• As usual, interesting music at the Cabrillo Music Festival this year, but driving "over the hill" via Highway 17 to Santa Cruz is a pain.
• I've only listened to the new Thom Yorke album once and the new Radiohead songs are just ok. I still hold out hope for the former and the latter may sound better with real production values rather than as live bootlegs.
• I recently read The Real Frank Zappa Book, by Frank himself and a co-author. It was interesting and yet, profane and annoying. Just like his music.
• I'm finding similarities this summer in the music of Lou Harrison and Alan Hovhaness, but I'm starting to tire of all that trumpet melody from the latter. On the other hand, the trumpet player was the star of the DVD of Bruce Springsteen's recent Pete Seeger album.
• And speaking of musicologists/composers/fathers/step-mothers, I still wrestle with whether or not Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger should have both composed more versus their other activities.
• And most significantly, I broke the screen on my iPod because I left it in my pocket while playing volleyball.

Ok, I admit none of these would merit inclusion on PostSecret.

Spanish Key (1970). Miles Davis

WORDSANDMUSIC blogs about electric guitar and jazz including the music of Sonny Sharrock, James Blood Ulmer, Larry Young, and also John McLaughlin on Miles Davis' Spanish Key from Bitches Brew:

Chopping guitar reminiscent of Steve Cropper over at Stax in Memphis as well as James Brown's rhythm section, driving drums, bass ostinatos, three electric pianos playing tag, Miles flying over it all beautifully...The recording sound is bursting at the seams with the inter-locking activities and clashing timbres of this band – it must have been hell to mike up, but the raw freshness slaps out at you.

While McLaughlin's playing excites and thrills amidst the hubbub, I can never get enough of Bennie Maupin's bass clarinet improvisations on this track and on this album. I don't know why I have not heard much else by Maupin (other than other Miles Davis albums and The Jewel in the Lotus from 1974). Amazon lists Driving While Black and a new CD Penumbra.

And the Guardian has a list of 50 albums that changed music. Davis' Kind of Blue is included with this quip:

Without this ... no ominous, brooding, atmospheric trumpet behind a million radio plays and TV documentaries.

wikipedia: bitches brew

Summer Music (1956). Samuel Barber /cool refreshment/

I used to always pleasantly associate the music of Mozart with hot summer weather --something about being genteel and relaxed, maybe in an aristocratic way. Think the summer holiday scene in Stephen Frear's Dangerous Liasons )complete with a cast of Close, Thurman, Malkovich, and Pfeiffer).

Samuel Barber's woodwind quintet Summer Music is the American proxy for this feeling. But times (and tastes) change. This week, I found comfort from this week's heat wave in the jazz of Miles Davis' Pharoah's Dance and Frank Lowe's In Trane's Name. There's something otherworldly and soothing about both, in a frantic, woodwind-ish kind of way.

And speaking of summer escape, I'm still immersed in my Radiohead listening project. The band is clearly talented if a bit disjointed and I haven't come to terms with Thom Yorke's voice and I still haven't heard Pablo Honey yet (the only version of Creep I own is the Edmund Welles bass clarinet rendition), Still, I'm surprised at the overall quality of the body of their work. Not a single dud song, so far.

I'm also reading a Radiohead biography by Marc Randall. Some relevant notes follow.

First, their later music emphasized timbre over melody, which is part of the appeal for me. And on Kid A, Jonny Greenwood played the ondes martenot, famously used in the music of French composer Olivier Messiaen. A quote from the Alex Ross article on Radiohead is used in the book:

I heard the 'Turangalîla Symphony' when I was fifteen," Jonny [Greenwood] went on, "and I became round-the-bend obsessed with it. I wish I could have met him or shaken his hand.

Let me remember. Do I own three or or is it four CDs of Messiaen's symphony?

Randall also writes about the influence of Miles Davis' Bitches Brew, specifically the use of a Fender Rhodes electric piano also found on the OK Computer album. This time, Thom Yorke comments:

We're just obsessed by Bitches Brew or anything even vaguely like it. That's a record for the end of the world.

Back in my "thin" days, I was also captivated by the album (and am again).

As more inspiration, in this case with the string arrangements on Fake Plastic Trees, the producer of the album The Bends mentions Greenwood's awareness of Samuel Barber, although only the remnants of the string parts remain in the final recording. Yet the song captures a mood. Barber's Adagio for Strings aworks posts ad infinitum here.

I'm not yet far enough in the book where jazzman Charles Mingus' impact on Radiohead is presumably mentioned. But I'm starting to realize the pattern of how Radiohead effectively absorbs others' musical art for their own creative purposes. They don't have the virtuosity or "chops" of the jazz or classical originals but since Radiohead is "just" a band playing songs, that doesn't really matter.

Finally, even though I enjoy and respect classical musician Christopher O'Riley, his piano versions of Radiohead leave me flat. Maybe a bias for timbre is rock's greatest achievement?

frank oteri on porous boundaries. heather heise on not black and white. dave winer on why we are spoiled in the bay area

Doctor Atomic (2005). John Adams /opera geniuses?/

Via Playbill, Opera News lists "The 25 Most Powerful Names In U.S. Opera." Listed as "the geniuses" were Peter Sellars, John Adams, and Julie Taymor. Are Peter and John truly extraordinary? I don't know; let's revisit this in twenty years. As for Julie, we'll know more this year when we hear Bono singing the Beatles' I Am the Walrus for an upcoming movie musical.

rgable's top 5 beatles songs: i am the walrus. i want to hold your hand. revolution 9. paperback writer. a day in the life.