aworks :: "new" american classical music

Psycho: A Suite for Strings (1960). Bernard Herrmann /happy halloween/

AMK attends a concert in costume (along with the orchestra except for conductor Marvin Hamlish). Among the musical highlights:

Two parts of Bernard Herrmann's "Psycho: A Suite For Strings" were played: the shower music that everyone knows, and the opening credit music.

The full list of Psycho movements: Prelude; The City; The Rainstorm; The Madhouse; The Murder; The Water; The Swamp; The Stairs; The Knife; The Cellar; Finale.

you tube: shower scene music at the hollywood bowl (ruined by giggling) weird guitar/bass clarinet version of psycho psycho movie trailers animated psycho psycho with pearl jam accompaniment gus van sant remake trailer

Study No. 2a (194x/2002). Conlon Nancarrow/Evan Ziporyn

Via their newsletter, Bang on a Can publicizes an upcoming Zankel Hall concert, with among other works, an Evan Ziporyn arrangement of four of Conlon Nancarrow's Studies, as well as music by Julia Wolfe, Thurston Moore, Don Byron, Martin Bresnick, and Fred Frith. That's a stimulating set of composers.

The Ziporyn arrangement consists of 2a, 3a, 3c, and 11. I see that he has also arranged Kurt Cobain's Lithium.

Last night, I was thumbing through Christgau's Consumer Guide: Albums of the 90s and Robert Christgau had this to say about the Bang on a Can arrangements of Brian Eno's Music for Airports:

And although I pray postdance knob-twisters don't fall for the Gregorian goo goo girls who douse "1/2" with blanc-mange, the lovely textures will make them drool. Or anyway, sweat. Perspire. Exude. A-.

Having never eaten blancmange per se, I don't know if Christgau is spot on or not although I find this edition of the Consumer Guide has a rather complicated notation for ratings. I can recommend the Bang on a Can CD, though.

aworks list :: random one-star tracks

I'm scanning through my lowest-rated tracks. Here's a random selection:

• Clay Music. Barney Childs.
• Coverville-050704-Birthday Requests for Blondie and Fred, a 4th of July track and more! Brian Ibbott.
• Atomic Moog 2000 (Cornelius Mix). Coldcut.
• If I Were Only A Child Again. Curtis Mayfield/Four Tet.
• McKonkey's Ferry Overture. George Antheil.
• The Game With The Golden Apples / The Firebird. Igor Stravinsky. Gerard Schwarz.
• Abele Dance (Remix). Manu Dibango.
• Group Four. Massive Attack.
• The Tigress Inside. PantyChrist/Bob Ostertag.
• Heather Angel. Sonic Youth.

I do like other music by all of these artists e.g. Barney Child's Quartet for Bassoons, odd as it may be. And on further listening, the orchestral Antheil is better than this. I will nominate the Stravinsky CD as one of my least favorite recordings, though.

Heather Angel lyrics:

He bought books and records
I dont care about that
I just want to be alive
And go to the other...

Fanfare for the Common Man (1942). Aaron Copland /keeping score/

Steve Hicken points out Keeping Score, a PBS/San Francisco Symphony production:

Explore how three composers changed music forever, transforming their personal visions of the world around them into sounds unlike any heard before.

Clicking on "visit the Eroica web site" pops up a window where you can follow the score as the music plays. The window has quite a bit to assimilate but I might pay more attention for the Aaron Copland episode. I did like the "show key" and "show theme" features although I wish the entire movement played instead of just fragments.

Oh, and everyone's favorite Bay Area classical radio announcer, Diane Nicolini, does the preview voice-overs.

beyond aworks :: customized google search

Here's a first attempt at an aworks-related Google Search capability, loaded with 109 music blogs etc.:

 

     

Drumming (1971). Steve Reich /the emperor's new groove/

And next, David Byrne comments on the Steve Reich concert:

The music shimmers; it’s a kind of musical Brownian motion. Even when he incorporates cellos and strings the effect is percolating, bubbling.

On the other hand, he doesn't think Reich's music "grooves" in the manner of say, African popster King Sunny Adé. I never really thought about it but in my list of top concerts would be King Sunny Adé at the Catalyst in Santa Cruz as well as Kronos Quartet in Ojai where they played Steve Reich's Different Trains. The former definitely grooved but the latter had the pulse, in a notated, restrained, contemporary classical kind of way...

Music for 18 Musicians (1974). /the huffington post?!/

Sam Gustin in The Huffington Post describes the performance of Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians:

• Music for 18 Musicians may be the most important piece of music composed by an American composer in the last 30 years.
• Eighteen humans, all clad in white shirts and black pants: some singing, some playing stringed instruments, some playing brass instruments, some playing pianos, (including the maestro himself in a black hat), and then the motherlode of rhythmic memory - the vibes: xylophones and timbales.
• It is a spectacle unlike any other in modern art.

And then in the comments:

Thank you for introducing me to a musician I've never even heard of... I am eager (and a little embarrassed by my ignorance) to listen to this man Steve Reich's music.

This gets me to thinking about the first Reich work I heard. Given that I own the LP, I suspect it was Music for 18 Musicians as well.

Jornada del Muerto - Hermit Songs (1992?). Peter Garland

After listening to the electronica and idm tags on last.fm earlier today, I'm listening to Scott Unrein's NonPop Show podcast number 13. Hearing Peter Garland's piano piece Jornada del Muerto: Hermit Songs gives me a sense of clarity after all that glitch and drone. It also obviates the post I was thinking about writing on how last.fm and its ilk are so convenient and how they ultimately cut into my classical music time. Never mind.

Kyle Gann on Peter Garland:

But the fascinating dichotomy about Garland is the contrast between his angry, intransigent musicologist persona and the delicate, intuitive beauty of his music.

A Dirge - 8 Fragments from Shelley (1951). George Antheil

I recently read two books on World War II bombing, one of England bombing Germany and the other of Germany bombing London. Assessing the morality of area- bombing Germany combined with learning the personal impact of the Blitz on Londoners makes for compelling if sometimes scary reading. But these books didn't prepare me for hearing A Dirge by George Antheil for the first time. The choral text is from Shelley:

Deep caves and dreary main,
Wail! for the world's wrong.

But the piano accompaniment is even darker.

Kyle Gann just commented on another work I, at least, find distressing -- Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima:

And was his Threnody, penned at 26, anything more than a frisson of novel sounds?

napster: threnody for the victims of hiroshima aol: a dirge (clip)

aworks list :: composer play counts /in one ear and.../

I'm still playing with last.fm. One of its features is to log what you play on iTunes and last.fm itself, although not on iPod which renders it wobbly. And unfortunately, last.fm logs data by album/track/artist but not by composer.

As an experiment, I exported two+ years of iTunes playlist data and tallied the number of tracks played per composer. My thesis was that I listened to the Big Three Minimalists (Glass, Reich, Adams) more than anyone else. But the results were somewhat surprising:

1. Charles Ives - playcount of 2118
2. John Cage - 1692
3. Philip Glass - 1107
4. Aaron Copland - 966
5. "Ed O'Brien, Colin Greenwood, Jonny Greenwood, Phil Selway & Thom Yorke" - 739 (aka Radiohead, mostly this summer)
6. Michael Sandison & Marcus Eoin - 682 (aka Boards of Canada)
7. Henry Cowell - 665 (aka Menlo Park modernist)
8. Lou Harrision - 636
9. John Adams - 572
10. Alan Hovhaness - 533
11. Virgil Thomson - 499
12. Conlon Nancarrow - 497
13. Steve Reich - 302
16. Kieran Hebden aka Four Tet - 236
19. Gyorgy Ligeti - 208
29. Erik Satie - 141
34. Amadou Bagayoko/Manu Chao/Mariam Doumbia/Ousmane Cisse/Samou Bagayoko/Tiemoko Traore - 136 (aka Amadou & Mariam)
45. Bob Dylan - 95 (aka Robert Zimmerman)
46. Franz Joseph Haydn - 93
1141. Eminem - 1 (aka Marshall Mathers III)
1141. Beethoven - 1 (aka classical music's most revered composer)

Note that a majority of my non-classical tracks have no composer tag, which probably skews the results.

The impetus for this was Alan Taylor at New Music Notes asserting that minimalism is not pervasive:

It developed for good reasons, never really put down firm roots in Europe, and now is just one of the many quarries for ideas available to composers.

So, I was going to counter-argue that my listening actually did revolve around minimalism. But while I know the music of the "Big Three" better than any other composers, the data indicates more diversity.

Welcome to my world, Charles Ives...