aworks :: "new" american classical music

aworks list :: mind-bending recordings this year

10. A Ballad for Many. Don Byron. Bang on a Can. This cuts across genre better than anything I've heard in awhile.
9. Steve Reich at the Whitney 2006. For this non-New Yorker, the website downloads offered a refreshing glimpse into Reich's 70th birthday celebration and his music.
8. Birdy Nam Nam. French turntablism via the SXSW bit torrent. I still have a long way to go to listen to all 711 tracks.
7. numerous tracks via cacophonous.org.
6. Charlie Parker With Strings: The Master Takes. This recalibrated my ear for Bird's music.
5. DG Concerts - Minimalist Jukebox. Music available while buzz was still in the air --  what an idea.
4. Player Piano 1: Conlon Nancarrow Vol. 1. Jurgen Hocker. Probably the best CD of the year.
3. Rockabye Baby!: Lullaby Renditions Of Radiohead. Michael Armstrong. Thom Yorke channeled through kiddie gamelan turns out to be delightful.
2. Music in Twelve Parts - Philip Glass. Watching nidrian via YouTube grapple with this music was the moment I "got" YouTube.
1. The Soundtrack Of A People, The Encyclopedia Of Native Music. I thought this would be interesting for social and cultural reasons but I ended up liking it as music. The traditional tracks were vibrant and sometimes raucous and I only now realize Led Zeppelin and Metallica owe a debt to Native American music, specifically Link Wray's heavy metal Rumble.
   

aworks list :: most played "beyond aworks" tracks of 2006

10. Abbesses. SXSW 2006 Showcasing Artist. Birdy Nam Nam.
9. 01 You And Whose Army? Live @ The Greek Theatre, Berkeley 6.23. Radiohead.
8. Imidiwaren. Songlines 33 2005/11+12. Tinariwen.
   
7. The Harmless Dust (Excerpt). The Wire Tapper 12. David Grubbs & Nikos Veliotis.
6. Harrowdown Hill. The Eraser. Thom Yorke.
5. Best of Both Worlds (Album Version). Best of Both Worlds - Single. Hannah Montana.
4. I've Got Viking in Me. My Angel Rocks Back and Forth. Four Tet.
3. ITSM-2006-01-24-18-48-37.iTunes Signature Maker via Jason Freeman.
2. From The Ritz To The Rubble. Arctic Monkeys.
1. 9. Buddha Machine. fm3.

Only #2 and #4 came from a traditionally purchased CD (although #9 has a dubious origin). Au revoir Tower Records.

beyond aworks :: promotion has expired, nothing to see here, move on

While traveling for the holidays, we had an unplanned car rental and similar to a prior trip, I didn't bring adequate CDs and the car had no input jack for my portable player. So, a quick visit to the local Target got me the latest Beck CD and Stan Getz's Finest Hour. (The latter is better than the former.) It took the Tower clerk about five minutes to figure out how to charge me for the Getz as it never showed up when scanned.

To further annoy me, the Beck CD included a coupon for a free "exclusive" Beck download. Unfortunately, when I try to use that coupon, I get a "promotion has expired" message. The mass record/retail industry continue to make the music buying experience ever more unpleasant.

Fortunately, there are other promising outlets even though Tower Records is no more. I think emusic, the new CounterStream radio, and hopefully the future Mountain View Rasputin store will all compensate.

And I'm still ripping and listening to all the Tower bounty from the last month of sales. Right now, despite the avocado on the cover, it's the Arditti Quartet playing some very serious music by contemporary Mexican composers. And up next, a Giacinto Scelsi new release by pianist Aki Takahashi. Both happen to be on the Mode label.

I've also started ordering CDs from my lala want list, all at supposedly wholesale prices (plus shipping):

                                                                       

Ordered Items	Price	Quantity	Subtotal
Reich - Remixed 2006 by Alex Smoke, Ruoho Ruotsi, Steve Reich, Steve Reich, Four Tet	$    6.82	1	$    6.82
Greetings From Michigan by Sufjan Stevens	$    8.79	1	$    8.79
Ys by Joanna Newsom	$    9.99	1	$    9.99

dj alchemi: Quantity not quality: a year's worth of CDs and where they came from
renewable music: A Year Without Recordings

West Side Story (1957). Leonard Bernstein

Robert Hurwitt in the SF Chronicle reminds us 2007 is the 50th anniversary of the stage version of West Side Story and maybe the 400th anniversary of a Shakespeare play.

wikipedia: west side story coriolanus timon of athens

Violin and Orchestra (1979). Morton Feldman

I'm listening to some emusic downloads back-to-back. First, it was Max Richter's recently released Songs from Before and then Morton Feldman's Violin and Orchestra. The former is arty and fresh sounding; the latter is truly artful i.e. with sentimentality and artifice removed. What an interesting contrast and yet I'll want to hear both again.

The Queen's Suite (1958). Duke Ellington /counterstream/

Via Centripetal Notion, the pre-launch of Counterstream Radio (from the American Music Center) and its particularly clean playlist and look/feel:

Counterstream will be your online home for exploring the music of America's composers. We will broadcast a frequently updated general mix of adventurous music, as well as an eclectic assortment of guest-curated programs, genre-specific radio hours, interviews, and live concert recordings. Listen and discover the sound of music without limits.

Looks like it cycles through a short playlist. Despite that, this is a pleasing and coherent contrast to my recent experience with the jumbled results of social and analytical streaming sites.

aworks list :: musicovery graded

It's another web music discovery gadget -- musicovery.com. You pick the intersection of dark/positive mood and energetic/calm and then it plays tracks that match that combination (in low-fidelity for the free version). I chose 100% dark and 50% energetic/calm:

• Baby Please Don't Go. Al Kooper. Worst song I've heard in awhile. d
• Missing. Everybody but the Girl. Worst song I've heard since the previous one. d
• Let's Go to Bed. The Cure. Ok, a little bit catchy even though Robert Smith's voice and hair aren't. c
• All Along the Watchtower. Bob Dylan. Prefer the Hendrix version. I hate to say it but I can see a path from Dylan to Smith in these back-to-back songs anyway, beyond the hair and voice that is. a
• Heart Full of Soul. Chris Isaak. Rockers don't sound so good in lo-fi but still. b
• Four Days. Counting Crows. Is this the UC Berkeley guy? How come I can never remember my Bay Area rock stars? Is that Third Eye Blind guy still around? How is Carlos doing these days? d
• Mrs. Potter's Lullaby. Counting Crows. A bit of country guitar helps. b
• Tainted Love. Soft Cell. Beep beep. a
• Johnny & Mary. Robert Palmer. Low-key for Robert Palmer; very much meets the criteria. b.
• Etudes tableaux op. 39 no. 1. Rachmaninoff. Classical music included and not ghettoized. Wow. Don't like this one so much, although maybe that's because of the mundane piano timbre compared to what proceeded it. c

Oh, I see, you can filter by genre. Classical and jazz mode follows:

• Passion St Matthieu. Bach. It feels odd to give the music of Bach a grade but anyway. a
• Passion St Jean - Introduction. Bach. a
• Delta Mood. Duke Ellington. Never heard this before but it has an edge to it. b
• Messe in ut : Kyrie. Mozart. En francais. Got it. Oh no, I just clicked on le diagram and scrambled the path and Mozart has disappeared.
• Symphony No. 4 - 3rd movement. Schumann. I prefer the Schuman with one "n" I suppose. c
• Unrequired. Brad Mehldau. b.
• Moments musicaux D780 No. 4. Schubert. How I lost my love for Schubert, I'll never know. c
• Winterreise - gute nacht. Schubert. Ok, not completely. a
• Desert Winds. Kenny Burrel [sic] and Illinois Jacquet. More tasteful than I was expecting. c.
• Lonely Woman. Ornette Coleman. Ok, I skipped around to find this track. It was between Liszt and Chopin of all people. a

Rhiannon's Blackbirds (2006). Joseph Schwantner

Tim Munro of eighth blackbird plans his short summer vacation down under:

No 1 priority is to finish memorizing the flute part of Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg’s 40-minute-long atonal pot-pourri. No 2 is Schwantner’s well-nigh impossible virtuoso licks in Rhiannon’s Blackbirds.

schwantner news: The Blackbirds of Rhiannon (also known as 'Druid Dhubh' or Black Druid) possess supernatural powers that often symbolize the flight of spirits to the Otherworld.
wikipedia on schwantner: His style is accessible, coloristic and eclectic, drawing on such diverse elements as French impressionism, African drumming, and minimalism.
eighth blackbird concert review: Schwanter's piece is a quarter-hour burst of musical energy, in which sharply accented, soaring wind and string elaborations on a four-note motif ride a perpetual-motion rhythm.
tim munro bio: Composers he has worked with include Elliott Carter, Oliver Knussen, Aaron Jay Kernis, Joseph Schwantner, Tania Leon, Peter Sculthorpe and Brett Dean.

For Philip Guston (1984). Morton Feldman

David Toub suggests Morton Feldman's For Philip Guston as driving music and comments:

I've been in love with this piece for some time now, but it struck me yesterday that Feldman was able to take a four-note chromatic scale and make it sound heavenly.

He also pans a Feldman organ piece I haven't heard, Principal Sound (emusic).

aworks list :: web 2.0 - genius or inane?

After reviewing some old aworks posts on this stuff (here and here), an update:

• lala - Here's my CD collection as seen by lala. I've logged 812 CDs that I admit I own, I covet 71, I've shipped 13 and I've received 10. Lala also logs what I play on my computer. The site has the obligatory web community features as well e.g. members with collections similar to mine don't seem to have collections all that similiar.
• last.fm - I seemed to have stopped using it to play music although it still logs what I play on my computer. The artists I have played the most, on my computer anyway, are Radiohead, Miles Davis, Boards of Canada, Leo Kottke, Alan Hovhaness, Four Tet, Philip Glass, Gordon Lightfoot, Alan Feinberg, and the Academy of Ancient Music. The site also has the obligatory web community features e.g. the people who play music most similar to me seem to be young, male Europeans.
• pandora - I seemed to have stopped using it to play music although here's what I bookmarked. If you use pandorafm, it logs what I play on Pandora but over on last.fm. Don't remember if it has web community features.
• mog - This reminds me of LiveJournal for music fans as the site has more obligatory community features than any other site. It doesn't log what I play on my computer because for some reason I uninstalled "mog-o-matic." I think I was uncomfortable uploading my 70 Mb iTunes music library file but I don't remember for sure. Here's my page although the "Mog Meter" characterizes me as "chilled." The site also now bills itself as a "musical nudity colony." No idea what that means or if that's why I am chilled.
• spotdj - This site is either genius or inane and here's my page to prove either case. You record short audio messages that get added to a community library. Then, you set up iTunes to automatically play from the library a short message (aka spot) that matches the artist or track just played. It's like a radio DJ except much, much stranger due to the lack of continuity since the spots can come from anyone. It also turns out talent is helpful; my William Grant Still spot has been played the most but deservedly has the lowest rating as I was basically reciting the Wikipedia entry. I thought my John Cage The Flowers spot clever, although my written responses to the "A Bit About Me" section of my page may be too clever.
• twitter - Also genius or inane, this is not a music site per se but I am experimenting by hijacking it for my own purposes. Twitter is a social community site that allows you to send 152 character (or less) messages via instant messenger, cell phone or browser for others to see. I'm using it to record my real-time thoughts as I listen to music. It's like blogging except all discretion and intelligence have been removed. Here's my page of posts so far.