aworks :: "new" american classical music

Dropout Boogie (1967). Don Van Vliet, Herb Bermann /hodge podge of works that work/

What do Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Herbie Hancock and Milton Babbitt have in common?

They all have works on a fine album by the Meridian Arts Ensemble. From the ensemble website:

Whose music do we play (in no particular order)? 

• Frank Zappa, J.S. Bach, Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Tania Leon, King Crimson, Captain Beefheart, and Jimi Hendrix
• Mark Applebaum, Milton Babbitt, Alvin Etler, Elliott Carter, Tom Pierson
• members of the MAE (who also do their own arranging)
• Renaissance and Baroque music, Afro-Cuban dance styles, South American folk music

A rather diverse repertoire for five brass players and one percussionist, this is a surprisingly fun mix.

YouTube animated video using the original Dropout Boogie:

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meridian arts ensemble: website blog 2008 concert at stanford.

links for 2007-09-30

• YouTube - Helicopter String Quartet - STOCKHAUSEN
  Although I've only heard the piece for the first time this month, I"m surprised how much I like it. Not this video, though.
• i find this ironic - a post from September 2007 on (un)filtered, a blog by michael sippey
  "The current #1 track on Amazon's music store is 1234 from Feist. You probably know this as the soundtrack to the new iPod nano ad." :: ok, I had no idea why 1234 was #1 on Amazon but I can appreciate the irony, at Apple's expense.
• What I Want From A Classical MP3 Music Store | classicalconvert.com
  "No-one wants to buy just one movement from a symphony (unless you fancy putting together one of those ‘Most Relaxing Classical Album In The World!!!’ monstrosities, in which case I hate you), but how are things then priced?"
• Dragoncave: Collected Poems
  "I think it's worthwhile to obtain and read these compendium volumes of a poet's work, to get a sense of the poet's overall arc and career...It's worthwhile even if your final act, upon reading, was an unconvinced shrug of sublime rejection."

The Harp of New Albion (1985) Terry Riley /a northern california kind of story/

And another minimalist classic...

Music Arcades describes Terry Riley's The Harp of New Albion:

The sleeve notes also explain the concept (yes) of the album, which centre on a harp that Francis Drake allegedly left behind in Northern California when he was trying to circumnavigate the globe in an overloaded Golden Hinde. Riley's semi-improvised pieces are a meditation on what happened to that harp as the wind blew in it, it weathered, warped and re-tuned itself, and was found by Native Americans who incorporated it into their culture.

Here's a sample via a performance on YouTube. Also available for Amazon preview and download.

Different Trains (1988). Steve Reich /hey, interesting american music!/

Metafilter has a post about interesting American music. One of the links is a set of Pulitzer Foundation concert streams e.g. Steve Reich's Different Trains. Of course, since this work makes heavy use of pre-recorded sounds, it's hard to distinguish this performance from the original Kronos Quartet recording.

Wikipedia: In Different Trains, after each melody in the piece is introduced, usually by a single instrument, a recording of the spoken phrase from which the melody derives is played. The melody is then developed for a while, with the instruments playing along with the recording of the phrase or part of the phrase. In addition to speech, the piece calls for recordings of train sirens.

LIstening to this for the first time in a while, I'm surpised how much the sirens add to the piece, even the eerie European ones.

links for 2007-09-29

• Civic Center: Das Lied von Erde at San Francisco Symphony
  "the audience sounded like a tuberculosis ward in the first half of the program, coughing up a storm through Mozart's Symphony No. 34" :: winter has arrived in the Bay Area.
• YouTube - Feist : My Moon, My Man (Official Clip)
  In this case, the song is better than the video.
• oboeinsight » Blog Archive » Wow
  '...Symphonic Variations on a Song by Woody Guthrie. I was going to be playing the English horn, and would have had a fun solo … first a straight forward version of This Land is Your Land and then a jazzy little bit right after"'
• Selling Classical Music to Mormons - Portfolio.com
  "A hot-and-heavy marketing campaign tries to sell classical music to the masses—in Mormon country."
• Google Trends: classical music
  This proves the downward trend of classical music. Or not.

links for 2007-09-28

• Marginal Revolution: Rehashed hash
  "In the past most people didn't much like or listen to most of the music they bought...A relatively small percentage of our music purchases accounted for most of our listening pleasure. So if people can sample music in advance...music sales will plummet"

links for 2007-09-27

• Sequenza21/ » The Sun Also Rises
  "The critic’s first job, then, even before he evaluates individual works, is to make the reader feel uneasy about his ignorance—to convince him that the art in question is vital and serious, deserving of complex attention." I find this statement comp

links for 2007-09-26

• Beatles pictures
  1958.
• SFist: Concert Review: The Arcade Fire
  "the group's music is like some sort of 10-person raucously ad-hoc mix-up of Neutral Milk Hotel, Slipknot, Springsteen's E Street Band, and The Coen Bros' Hudsucker Proxy"
• Amazon's MP3 Store Fails To Suck - O'Reilly Mac DevCenter Blog
  "Amazon has two million songs, and at a nice high bitrate, with prices significantly lower than iTunes Plus."
• Amazon.com: Animal Behavior: MP3 Downloads: Alvin Curran
  2 long tracks for $1.98
• Amazon.com: Bang On A Can - Terry Riley In C: MP3 Downloads: Bang On A Can
  One very long track for $0.89.
• Amazon.com: Cage, John & Bach, Michael: One13: MP3 Downloads: Michael Bach
  43:33 single track.

Bacchanale (1940). John Cage /drm freedom/

Amazon's new MP3 store is up and I am pleasantly surprised with some of the composers on their featured classical composers list:

1. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

2. Johann Sebastian Bach

3. Ludwig van Beethoven

4. Franz Liszt

5. John Cage

6. Fryderyk Chopin

7. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

8. Claude Debussy

9. Sergei Rachmaninov

10. Erik Satie

11. Charles Ives

12. George Frideric Handel

13. Vivaldi, Antonio

14. Johannes Brahms

15. Leonard Bernstein

I'd recommend Margaret Leng Tan's Daughters of the Lonesome Isle for $8.99 with no Digital Restrictions Management. The Arditti Quartet playing music of California composers is only $3.96.

There are a few oddities on the website e.g. the historical periods classical list ends at 1910. I can think of several people who wouldn't see this as an error.

By the way, if you go to a composer's page, click on the preview all button to continuously hear all the music, albeit as 30 second clips. Here's the Philip Glass page. I also used this to preview Lisa Bielawa's album.

Subterranean Homesick Blues (1965). Bob Dylan /the young dylan foreshadows blogging.../

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See the full fake video on my new and sparse Facebook profile, assuming you or I figure out how to grant permission to view it.