aworks :: "new" american classical music

links for 2007-07-30

• Textura: Theatres of Eternal Music
  I think this is the drone article originally in Wire Magazine.
• Girl in a Cage: Simpsons Movie Spoilers: Dr. Nick, Irony Dead
  "I almost wonder if the movie is a kind of cry of frustration on the part of the creators. For eighteen years they've been the keenest satirists we have, and, environmentally and politically, we're worse off than we've ever been."
• James Tata: Music talk, in three parts.
  "Prince's last three albums show a late career strength comparable to Philip Roth's late string of novels. Yeah, it is a ridiculous stretch, but bear with me. "

links for 2007-07-29

• PlaybillArts: News: Guitarist of Rock Band Incubus Writes Symphony
  '"I started working on [the symphony], and I learned very quickly that there are a lot of gaps in my music knowledge," he said.'
• Darcy James Argue's Secret Society: Truer words were never spoke
  'never in the entire history of school band programs has the alto sax ever been "the only instrument left." (More typically, school bands have, like, at least a dozen alto sax players and no one willing to even try the bassoon.) '
• History of Music in the U.S. | xtimeline
  From "The Bay Psalm Book printed" to "Napster is ordered to shut down"
• LastTube: Last.fm Meets Youtube .::. beta .::. v 0.1.... by dersteppenwolf
  Give this tool your last.fm username and it finds YouTube videos matching your recent listening.
• Cancer Patients, Lost in a Maze of Uneven Care - New York Times
  "Some doctors and hospitals may not see enough cases to stay sharp, especially when it comes to rarer kinds of tumors, complicated operations or advanced stages of the disease — all areas in which studies have shown that experience counts."
• Bernard Parmegiani - Track 03 – Music at Last.fm
  Despite being tagged as "classical can be destructive" and "concrete everything," this is interesting.Composer is unknown to me.
• The Oregon Review: Ned Rorem and the Future of Song
  "Rorem has commented that it is inappropriate to compare the new music of his generation ...to modern popular music because the former is, if you will, classical, while the latter is not."
• On Track: Shimmering vistas arrive with every musical turn - 19 Jul 2007 - NZ Herald: Entertainment News, Reviews and Gossip from New Zealand and around the World
  'The Naxos American Classics catalogue is the label's pride and joy, celebrating major names like Ives, Barber and Bernstein alongside such expressive esoterica as Zes "Kitten on the Keys" Confrey and Stephen Foster in olde-time brass-band arrangements.'

In C (1964). Terry Riley /music to frown by/

I've been listening to the Artists like Terry Riley stream on last.fm. There are some interesting, mostly European composers (Scelsi, Risset, Kagel etc.)  but it's all so dark and dour. I don't think of Californians like Riley or myself being particularly "ecstatic" but there's something missing from this other apparently related music.

links for 2007-07-28

• great classical record stores - Google Search
  Christian Classics Ethereal Library is the #1 result; that story about the Yo La Tengo record-clerk concert disaster is #7 ("I haven't seen this much senseless hipster carnage since the Great Sebadoh Fire Of '93,")
• Amazon.com: Two Hands: Music: Johann Sebastian Bach,Fryderyk Chopin,Claude Debussy,Domenico Scarlatti,Franz Schubert,Leon Fleisher
  I'm so not the target market for this album but I still like it a lot.
• Femi Kuti @ the Showbox | Line Out | The Stranger's Music Blog | The Stranger | Seattle's Only Newspaper
  Good description of the difference between Femi Kuti and his father Fela Kuti.
• in the wings: A Shiny Thing
  "Sidecar is on YouTube! How about that? Twenty seconds in: that's Anne with the radio and me with the accordion!"

links for 2007-07-27

• Renewable Music: Co-composing
  "Cage and Harrison collaborated on the percussion quartet Double Music, agreeing to an ensemble, a number of measure, a metre and a tempo, and then each independently writing two voices, with the two sets of parts later superimposed onto one score"
• if charlie parker was a gunslinger,
  there'd be a whole lot of dead copycats: The Present Day Composer #47
  Aaron Copland (1900-1990)
• ArtsJournal: Daily Arts News: Bookstores Offloading Those Comfy Couches
  'But now the availability of so-called 'soft' seating - overstuffed chairs and sofas - is on the decline at some bookstores, done in by various complications: homeless squatters, overly enthusiastic young lovers, food trash left behind."'
• Glass Notes: Misc. News...
  'Playbill Arts announced today that the Takacs Quartet will perform with Philip Seymour Hoffman at Carnegie Hall in October. On the Program, Philip Glass String Quartet No. 2 "Company"'
• YouTube - CAPTAIN BEEFHEART - Hot Head (1980)
  Probably not a good one for non-fans -- the stage demeanor is a bit strange.
• YouTube - Stevie Wonder Drum Solo
  He's obviously an excellent musician and this is fun to watch even if drum solos in general are not.
• Newsvine - Starbucks Label Signs Joni Mitchell
  "Joni Mitchell is following the lead of Paul McCartney in joining with the coffee giant Starbucks to release her comeback album." ???
• Dragoncave: Saint Coltrane
  "One of the interesting points of this is that the Church regards the post-1957 Coltrane as the Risen Trane: post-drug addiction, cleaned up, starting afresh, and beginning to openly seek spiritual experiences through music."

links for 2007-07-25

• david's waste of bandwidth...: nancarrow
  "I've been listening to all the recorded Studies lately, and they continually blow me away. The links with Ligeti's later works, particularly the Etudes for Piano, are very clear."
• Glass Notes: Days and Nights in Rocinha-Now at iTunes!
  "Jose brought attention to the jamboree of Glass music happening in the Bay Area August-September (Appomattox at SF Opera, Glass and Sutter recital, Symphony No.8 at Cabrillo, Book of Longing, and a 4 Hand Piano Recital with Dennis Russell Davies..."
• RealClearPolitics - Articles - The 'New Victorians'
  "They don't wear corsets or submit to confinement while pregnant, but they've turned against the sexual revolution, yearning for tradition in their lives"
• YouTube - Met opera soprano Carole Farley sings Menotti The Telephone
  It has the feel of a high-brow situation comedy.

links for 2007-07-24

• dianne nicolini - Google Search
  Because of my posts on local classical station KDFC and a comment by Richard Friedman, aworks is #4 for searches of radio announcer "Dianne Nicolini." I have no meta-comment to make at this point...
• ann street new york ives - Google zoeken
  On the other hand, being #2 on dutch google for Ives' Ann Street is an honor. If you are going to listen to just one American work, Ann Street offers both brevity and substance.
• Playlist for Rix - November 12, 2003
  Scroll down for a Real stream of Frederica von Stade singing Ann Street. No Pierre-Laurent Aimard calling out the cross-streets in his French accent but good nonetheless.
• Amazon.com: Ives: Concord Sonata; Songs: Music: Pierre-Laurent Aimard,Susan Graham,Charles Ives
  With a stream of most but not all 55 seconds of this definitive version of Ann Street.
• JSTOR: Perspectives of New Music: Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring - Summer, 1977), pp. 23-33
  Style and Substance: "Ann Street" by Charles Ives from Lawrence Starr in Perspectives of New Music. SF library card holders get access to JSTOR from their own computers, by the way.
• American classical music - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  This articlehas some interesting points but is still a mess...
• Woodside Terrace: Redwood City | Independent Living | Assisted Living
  A long way from Indiana but a hopeful next step as the parent/child roles reverse.
• the concert: Shop talk - arias
  "But I’m not a Coloratura soprano, because the color of my voice is warmer and rounder than one typically identifies with a “fireworks and bird calls” soprano.*"
• WFMU's Beware of the Blog: John Fahey's Mill Pond Double EP (MP3s)
  "John Fahey occupies a unique place in the history of modern guitar music. He was able to merge country blues with influences like Bela Bartok, Charles Ives, and Indian ragas and somehow make it all work."

links for 2007-07-23

• newcritics - » Stevie Wonder’s songs of “love mentalism”
  'Listening to “Songs” again, I hear a young visionary who just couldn’t contain the music pouring out of his soul. It’s all here: love ballads, funk explosions, Latin rhythms, jazz fusion, Nawlins boogie, synthesizer experiments, harmonica workout
• Edwin Outwater : Rants
  "The Captain Beefheart record was really awesome. I’d never heard it before — only his voice on Willie the Pimp, on Zappa’s Hot Rats. I think Beefheart is the Carl Ruggles of Rock and Roll. "

beyond aworks :: works of the week /i'm not a number, well, except for social security/

• Symphony No. 1. Anton Bruckner. Sporadically listening to random tracks may not be the best way to build my connoisseurship of Bruckner's music. But I continue with this the next work catching my attention. And the original stimulus for visiting came from Paul Griffiths' A Concise History of Western Music:

Bruckner's opening allegro starts with characteristic ostinatos (repetitions of short figures), as if winding up some great machine, but is almost immediately on to solid statement...

Just as Griffiths' Modern Music and After had a wealth of interesting ideas to pursue, I have 75 pages of his A Concise History of Western Music marked for followup; Bruckner and Gerard Grisey being the two so far I have explored. In a perfect world, I could click on the text in the book and have it stream from the Internet but I can live without such instant gratification.

• Not a Number. Apparat. Tyler Cowen's post reminded me that yes, I am a taster of music. This means I can usually quickly decide if I like something or not, or even if it doesn't appeal, whether the music merits followup listening. And yet, this group, picked by eMusic and prominently displayed at Amoeba, confounds me. It's a mismash of varied electronica and some Coldplay-ish vocals. Whether that combination is due to superior or inferior creativity is unclear but I do like the many of the song titles: Not a Number, Useless Information, You Don't Know Me, Face Down, etc.

---

wikipedia: definition of nan - not a number. the prisoner "i'm not a number - i am a free man"

links for 2007-07-22

• Facebook spawns first boy band - Telegraph
  "A group of four classical musicians who met via the social networking site have signed a £1 million album deal with recording company Universal." :: via Maura Johnston
• Leonard Link: Great News at the NY Philharmonic: The Gilbert/Muti Team
  "The third wonderful thing is that Riccardo Muti agreed to an enhanced guest conducting role. Since Gilbert is committed for only 12 subscription weeks on a 5 year contract, it is important that there be additional stability in the leadership line-up."
• SFist: Pete Wilson, Local Anchor And Radio Personality
  He could be annoying at times but he's probably the only local anchorperson I can name off the top of my head. Handled himself well the week of the '89 quake.