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'Scarlett...has signed a deal to make her first record..."Scarlett Sings Tom Waits" is being recorded now...' Genius or disaster? Via Jeff Dinelli.
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January 26, 2008
String Quartet No. 1: From the Salvation Army (1897-1900). Charles Ives /father and son and thorniness?/
NemesisVex blogs about the Emerson String Quartet's American Originals:
The album starts with Ives' String Quartet No. 1, "From the Salvation Army", a work of surprising tonality. The piece has such an amiability -- based, as it is, on revival and gospel hymns -- it's tough to resolve the work's playfulness with the thorny clusters and dissonances for which Ives would eventually be known.
I'm just back from walking the iPod, and listening to Ives. This got me to wondering how much of Ives' maverick side came from his father. Do we really know what his father was like or is our knowledge via filtered anecdotes from the son?
While describing the transcendental roots of the New England Ives family, The Rest Is Noise has this to say:
Ives's father was the bandleader George Ives, about whom little is known beyond Charles' not always reliable recollections. Whether the father really anticipated the son's experiments is impossible to determine...
Michael Broyles, in Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music, also talks about George Ives. First, he suggests the father was the black sheep of the family for coming back from the Civil War and making music his profession, for example in this quote:
Many years later Philip Sunderland, three years older than Charles Ives, remembered vividly life in Danbury where he had grown up. His comments speak for his generation: "They [the people of Danbury] didn't take George Ives very seriously. He was only the bandleader."
Broyles does point out early signs of Charles' radical modernism in compositions like The Celestial Country and Variations in America, although no explicit description of his father's personality.
January 23, 2008
January 22, 2008
Sharks (1997). John Fahey /fever dream/
The late John Fahey's website describes the music as "american primitive guitar." The piece Sharks may be a particularly good example of the primitive, yet innovative sound Fahey could achieve. Songza coughs up a minute clip of it:
Derek Taylor reviews Sharks:
A collaboration with Jim O’Rourke, taped in the younger guitarist’s bedroom, the album makes extensive use of echo, loops and samples on pieces like the bottleneck-by-way-of-sine-drone “Sharks” to create music that is equal parts ambient and terrestrial, fever dream and reverie.
I've been more strenuously listening to the music of Fahey for the last year or so. I'll say the same thing I would say about Miles Davis -- he was an artist, not just an instrumentalist.
January 21, 2008
January 19, 2008
Dark Waves (2007). John Luther Adams /mesmerizing foreboding/
Steve Hicken on John Luther Adams' Dark Waves:
Dark Waves is an aptly titled piece for two pianos and electronic sounds. The piece moves through time in a series of swelling and receding sounds lurking in the lower registers of the pianos for most of the piece. The feeling is one of mesmerizing foreboding.
Stephen Drury and a former Drury student Yukiko Takagi are the pianists. The album is on eMusic.
Amid the turbulent waves we may still find the light, the wisdom and the courage we need to pass through this darkness of our own making.
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