aworks :: "new" american classical music

links for 2007-05-31

• 15 Questions to Carl Stone - interviews, composer, Experimental, Carl Stone
  "True or false: People need to be educated about music, before they can really appreciate it. False. People can enjoy and appreciate music without studying it."

links for 2007-05-30

• Renewable Music: Music: here. Everything else: over there
  Since I'm primarily a listener, I don't share this perspective but I want to ponder it before I say for sure.
• SFist: Opera in Dolores Park and Free Classical Music
  Hey, I'm not the only one who didn't spell Dianne Nicolini's name correctly. Plus pictures of Susan Graham in a scarf, David Gockley's fox-dog, and Donald Runnicles deep in thought.
• KDFC - Dianne Nicolini
  "Dianne Nicolini is a fourth generation native of Oakland." Ok, that's cool. It also occurs to me I used to listen to KKHI when KDFC was automated or whatever it was.
• KDFC - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "As of 2005, KDFC had the largest listenership of any classical radio station in the United States." Didn't know that.
• Robert Hudson Walker - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Aged 32, "Walker died suddenly after being administered sodium amytal by a doctor following another supposed emotional outburst...Unused footage from Strangers on a Train was used...as well as a body double for Walker for scenes not yet completed."
• Robert Walker Jr. - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  His son who played in a Star Trek episode as well as the film Easy Rider.
• Charlie X - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  "Overview: The Enterprise picks up an unstable teenage boy with dangerous mental powers."
• Sequenza21/ » (Schoenberg + Scriabin)2 = Leo Ornstein?
  "However, what emerges as Ornstein’s greatest talent in this collection of five pieces is not any groundbreaking modernity, but rather, a passionate, Russian-Jewish lyricism."

links for 2007-05-29

• PostClassic: Postminimalism: Chapter One, Metaphorically Speaking
  "Who cares if you like these pieces?" And minimalism begat postminimalism and totalism...
• terminaldegree: Inspiration
  Bartholi, Upshaw, Mutter, Emerson SQ, Savall etc. + Hendrix
• Leonard Link: Classical Marketing Deception - Shame on Chandos
  I had this problem on a Sony reissue of Philip Glass' Akhnaten. And today at Amoeba, there were 2 CDs of Alter Ego Performs Philip Glass with different cover art but I checked and the tracks were the same.
• He Is a Rock - washingtonpost.com
  Paul Simon, winner of the first Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song

links for 2007-05-28

• POP QUIZ: TORI AMOS
  'Even by Tori Amos' lofty standards, "American Doll Posse" is a strange album...Each one of the make-believe friends also maintains a personal blog...We tried to ask Amos to explain the concept, but it only made things worse.'
• Identify this classical music please. | Ask MetaFilter
  tepidmonkey gets the first two and euphotic triggers two answers from the oriignal poster. It's been a long time since I've heard Reich's Desert Music.
• WFMU's Beware of the Blog: The Electronic Spirit of Erik Satie (MP3s)
  This is the strangest recording I've heard in awhile esp. Cinq Grimaces.
• Fanfare Magazine Archive of CD Reviews: GLASS: Saxophone Concerto (arr. Glass)... (Andrew Sterman)
  Paul Ingram: "The basic Glass unit of composition isn’t even the famed arpeggio, but a simple oscillation of two notes, often rising in pitch, and settling on the repetition of just one note. How many composers do we recognize from just a single note?"
  (tags: $)
• Fanfare Magazine Archive of CD Reviews: GLASS: The Hours (Michael Riesman)
  John Story: "The quality that Glass’s best music has always had for me is that it has seemed to capture a sense of isolation within the multitude. It can be a sad, a serene, or even a transcendent isolation, but always, finally one is alone."
  (tags: $)
• Fanfare Magazine Archive of CD Reviews: Mission Accomplished: The Milken Archive of American...
  Jerry Dubins: "From the ridiculous to the ridiculous, we proceed to one of Philip Glass’s minimalist pattern repetitions as accompaniment to the spoken text of Psalm 126."
  (tags: $)
• Fanfare Magazine Archive of CD Reviews: GLASS: Symphony No. 8 (Dennis Russell Davies)
  Phillip Scott: "The second movement is in the form of a passacaglia. It maintains an atmosphere of grandeur that recalls Glass’s iconic film scores (and which is one of the qualities of his music that attracts so many steadfast devotees)."
  (tags: $)
• Fanfare Magazine Archive of CD Reviews: GLASS: Symphony No. 6, “Plutonian Ode” (Dennis Russell Davies)
  Phillip Scott: "To me this strange hybrid confirms my contention that wordy, allusive poetry like Ginsburg’s is better recited than sung."
  (tags: $)
• Fanfare Magazine Archive of CD Reviews: GLASS: Music in Fifths. Two Pages (Bang on a Can)
  Raymond Tuttle: "Music in Fifths begins to fill at least this listener with dread, as if he were staked down and spread-eagled in the desert, and were following an approaching buffalo stampede with an ever-increasing amount of personal interest."
  (tags: $)
• Fanfare Magazine Archive of CD Reviews: Disposing of Musical Dogma, with Julian Lloyd-Webber
  Paul Ingram: "[Glass' Cello Concerto] is a fine, witty 20-minute structure, the most propulsive of Glass’s conventional concertos, and a worthy companion for the excellent Violin Concerto, and the airborne Tirol Concerto for piano."
  (tags: $)
• Fanfare Magazine Archive of CD Reviews: Want List for Paul Ingram [2004]
  Paul Ingram: "Works such as these alienate the Adorno mindset, but the CD is unpretentious, and authentically joyous. The achievement, a uniquely American reaction to the vale of tears we share, should not be undervalued or underestimated."
  (tags: $)
• Fanfare Magazine Archive of CD Reviews: GLASS, GLASS/SHANKAR (Dennis Russell Davies)
  Paul Ingram: 'In the “Tirol” Concerto, Glass meets Poulenc, Beethoven, and Prokofiev in the unlikely company of some authentic Austrian folk tunes. The result is a light-spirited concerto, perhaps a tribute to Mozart.'
  (tags: $)

links for 2007-05-27

• The Collaborative Piano Blog: The Top 50 Classical Music RSS Feeds on Bloglines
  By subscription count. I suppose there's a long-tail effect here.
• Fanfare Magazine Archive of CD Reviews: SMITH: An Hour out of Desert Center. Absence... (Chas Smith)
  Raymond Tuttle suggests Chas Smith's music sounds like Ligeti played by welders.
  (tags: $)
• Fanfare Magazine Archive of CD Reviews: RILEY: In C (Paul Hillier)
  Colin Clarke: "the use of voices (especially such a fine group as this one) brings a more identifiably human element to the experience"
  (tags: $)
• Fanfare: Classical Music Reviews
  I finally subscribed to get access to the archives.

The Bridge (1962). Sonny Rollins /we all win/

Via rifftides, coverage of the Polar Music Prize from Sweden, this year honoring Sonny Rollins and Steve Reich. Some samples of both artists works are included in said coverage; right now I'm listening to Rollins' The Bridge. It has more drive and intensity than I remember.

I'm also impressed with the list of previous winners:

Valery Gergiev, Led Zeppelin, Gilberto Gil, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, B. B. King, György Ligeti, Keith Jarrett, Sofia Gubaidulina, Miriam Makeba, Burt Bacharach, Robert Moog, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Isaac Stern, Bob Dylan, Iannis Xenakis, Stevie Wonder, Ravi Shankar, Ray Charles, Eric Ericson, Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, Pierre Boulez, Mstislav Rostropovitch, Elton John, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Quincy Jones, Witold Lutoslawski, Dizzy Gillespie, Sir Paul McCartney and The Baltic States.

I can quibble along various dimensions but I think it's an interesting cross-section of the recent Western musical world.

youtube: the bridge. wikipedia: eric ericson miriam makeba.

links for 2007-05-25

• classical music of the consciousness revolution - Google Search
  referrer of the day as I've been lobbying for a while that this is not an oxymoron.
• Charles Ives Sitting At the Opera house - Google Search
  On the other hand, I don't really know what this one is about.
• aworks :: "new" american classical music: Memories (1897). Charles Ives
  Ignore the previous link comment. *My* memory is is need of repair.
• Renewable Music: Stacking the Deck
  "the only member of either jury with even a peripheral connection to the experimental music tradition is Bernadette Speach, who studied with Morton Feldman"
• Create Digital Music » Therry Wants You: Thereminists to Descend on UK in July
  "performances, workshops, and master classes on playing and building the instruments"
• Media Influencer: How to build strawmen
  Good rebuttal to Nick Carr's argument about the track not being the "natural unit of music"
• Out West Arts: Philadelphia
  "You’d think they were playing in some large abandoned concrete warehouse like say, a Home Depot or Avery Fisher Hall."

Mood Indigo (1930). Duke Ellington, Barney Bigard, Irving Mills /got shorty/

Although retail music sales still suffer, kudos to Rasputin Music today for having a used copy of Duke Ellington's Indigos CD. As I had mentioned, the fifties recording of Mood Indigo has captured my attention. And from the liner notes, now I know about the trumpet soloist:

"Mood Indigo" is given a treatment as unusual and unexpected as that of "Solitude," The tradtional theme statement by three horns is dispensed with, and it becomes a vehicle for Shorty Baker's immaculate trumpet. Both as a section leader and a soloist, Baker was outstanding in his profession, but his gifts were more appreciated by musicians than by the public, perhaps because flamboyant, exhibitionistic exercises were not his forte. His sensitive, muted variations make this version of "Mood Indigo" a personal triumph nonetheless. "Shorty loves to play it," Ellington told Irving Townsend.

amazon: products tagged with "indigo". books mentioning "shorty baker".

links for 2007-05-21

• On An Overgrown Path: What exactly is a contemporary classic?
  Adams, Ades etc.
• Everything is Miscellaneous » Blog Archive » Nick Carr thinks it’s wrong, at least up to page 9.
  Discussion re: the natural unit of music being the "track." aworks of course chose not to follow that path but I want to read the book anyway.
• Wordie: Darmstadtium
  Hmm, this is in fact a word.
• John Adams - Music Review - New York Times
  "The composer John Adams is also a skilled and dynamic conductor."

Kamiya Bar (1992). Carl Stone

Neomarxisme blogs about the Kamiya Bar in Japan, providing me with the opportunity to quote Kyle Gann on Carl Stone's work of the same name:

a sensuous seven-movement tapestry of the environmental sounds of Tokyo

carl stone site: kamiya bar. frommer's: kamiya bar review