aworks :: "new" american classical music

Summertime (1935). George Gershwin, DuBose Heyward, and Ira Gershwin /surprisingly fine/

I continue to play around with next.lala.com. I've done obvious things like subscribe at 10 cents a track to the nineties recording of Philip Glass' Music in Twelve Parts. But the biggest aesthetic surprise has been stumbling over two different but interesting renditions of Gershwin's Summertime.

The first was by African musician Manu Dibango who establishes a nice groove and has a mellow take on the melody along with some tasteful brass parts.

The other one, in a way more surprising, is by actress Scarlett Johansson. This is from an album Unexpected Dreams - Songs from the Stars. While her album of Tom Waits cover songs is interesting, I haven't had the courage to listen to the songs on this album by Jeremy Irons ("To Make You Feel My Love") or Julia Louis-Dreyfuss ("The Nightshift").

links for 2008-05-30

• Hot. (I mean…getting hotter) « countercritic
  "My only hope is that it ends with the chorus getting submerged by rising sea levels and having to sing underwater!" Also good to know Coit Tower will be one of the last to go.
• Internet Archive: Details: Interview with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela
  "Russ Jennings interviews La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela about their new collaborative work, The Well Tuned Piano."
• Ojai Music Festival will showcase Steve Reich's groundbreaking music : Cover Story : Ventura County Star
  '"Four Organs" puts one chord under a microscope and invites the audience to hear it evolve at a glacial pace. Some blissfully lose themselves in the layers of sound. Others liken it to watching grass grow.' Blissful for me.
• Lala | New York Counterpoint, Eight Lines, Four Organs by Steve Reich
  I'm experimenting with how to link to next.lala.com tracks. If you click on this link, it may start playing.
• HurdAudio: Around the Blogs: Afro-Futurism and the State of Race in Creative Improvised Music
  "As one who loves the musical traditions of Charles Ives and Thelonious Monk with equal affection this conversation raises multiple points about how the complex history of immigrants and emancipated slaves is reflected in the development of the arts."

Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings (2005). Steve Reich /next la la/

I'm at least temporarily captivated by the new version of lala (next.lala.com). They have on-demand streaming of numerous albums and tracks. The twist is that the first stream of a track is free. To hear a track again, you pay 10 cents for perpetual streaming rights or else buy the MP3 for 89 cents. After registering, it appears you get the first fifty perpetual streams free. Digital Audio Insider also points out you can later upgrade your stream to a download for 79 cents.

I don't yet have a feel for the depth of what's available. If I apply the "Wuorinen test," it looks like just 34 tracks by composer Charles Wuorinen are there (although I already own the four albums that represents).

To also gauge the extent of recordings, I count 31 stream-able Steve Reich albums. This includes the new album with Daniel Variations and Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings.

And speaking of Reich, Melissa Hughes blogs of her upcoming participation in the composer's music at the Ojai Music Festival. I'll make it back there eventually if someone can ever pry me away from the computer...

links for 2008-05-28

• If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,
  There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats: Joints #10
  "The Cotton Club" First photo I've ever seen of it.

Doctor Atomic (2006). John Adams /the making of the opera of the making of the atomic bomb/

oboeinsight points to Wonders Are Many, an upcoming documentary of the making of John Adams' Doctor Atomic. Watching the preview makes me wonder if Doctor Atomic itself would have been better as a film rather than an opera, given the rich visual material that could have been used.

The symphonic version of Doctor Atomic will be played at this year's Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz:

This is a piece considered by some critics to be “a significant leap forward for Adams as a composer.” The work includes passages from the overture, Oppenheimer’s Baudelaire soliloquy, the electrical storm music, "Batter my heart," and the culminating “Countdown” music.

links for 2008-05-25

• Dennis Báthory-Kitsz Blog for We Are All Mozart
  "Because we live in an era of recordings where repetition is its natural state...the purpose of classical repetition of exposition and development and recapitulation...is obviated."

Time's Encomium (1969). Charles Wuorinen /not suitable for novices?/

I see that Napster is now selling a catalog of 6,000,000 MP3 tracks. To see what it was like, I decided to purchase something possibly obscure -- Charles Wuorinen music I don't already own. I ended up with Lepton on the Tzadik label. The results:

• An album has to be downloaded one track at a time.
• The music is encoded at 256 kbps so the downloads are noticiably slower than emusic or itunes. Amazon uses 320 kbps.
• Unlike iTunes, but like Amazon and emusic, these are DRM-free.
• One of the downloads failed with an error message in the browser but I could re-start it. Dunno if I can re-download the music later after I log out of my napster account.
• The composer tag is empty.
• The album was $9.95 for 7 tracks. It wasn't on emusic although it is on Amazon at $9.95 as well.
  

I wouldn't necessarily recommend Napster for novices. Nor for that matter would I recommend Wuorinen for novices although Time's Encomium did win the Pulitzer (free Art of the States stream here).

Three Places in New England (1908-14). Charles Ives /boulez/

Frank Camiola has pointed out that Pierre Boulez will be conducting the Chicago Symphony next year at Carnegie Hall, playing several works of Charles Ives. Pieces by Carter and Varese are also on the program.

On the other hand, Boulez had this to say about the music of Ives:

It's music written by an amateur. You would have to rewrite things because it's impossible to do justice to the ideas because they're poorly written. He stayed an amateur all his life and he wanted to stay this way. It was a choice for him.

links for 2008-05-24

• journal.nonesuch.com: Kronos Quartet Marathon on WHRB
  And Eric Dolphy next week.

links for 2008-05-22

• If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,
  There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats: When Legends Gather #393
  "Noel Coward and Leonard Bernstein"
• Deceptively Simple: "What's Rondo?" or The Nomenklatura
  "But it's worth looking into, because it feels good to know that Mahler's Fourth Symphony shares only a title with Bruckner's, and that the similarities end there."