aworks :: "new" american classical music

aworks ordered list :: first sentence meme

Virgil Thomson via Wikipedia

Via The Madness Within, here's the meme where we recap the blog year by highlighting the first sentence in the first post for each month:

January: It's the eve of the every-four-year Presidential Caucuses in the state of Iowa.

February: Or to phrase it in English, my overly large MP3 collection (>25,000 MP3s) was causing iTunes to overheat my PC.  

March: Mixed Meters has gone to the trouble to tabulate the most discussed composers etc. in Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise.

April: 'Revolution 9,' by Alarm Will Sound -- New York Magazine Classical Music Review "Alarm Will Sound turns the Beatles’ “Revolution 9”—this is not a joke—into chamber music."

May: I've changed how I organize my reed reading in Bloglines.

June:  My Fickle Ears Dig It: Identity "we tend to accept the premise that it is better to say "do this" than..."don't do that." Nevertheless, this mode of thinking tends to go out the window when tuba players approach repertoire that predates the tuba, especially anything by J.S. Bach."

July: How Californians See America - funny-graphs-californians.gif (GIF Image, 500x380 pixels) Hah.

August: Although I proposed to actually listen to new music, today it's back to the works of Virgil Thomson.

September: Here's a list of my most played albums in the last six months, as seen by last.fm anyway:

October: Summer Shivers. Susan Glaser plays Jennfer Higdon.

November: Although Cornelius Cardew was technically an English composer, I do endorse the use of his music by Object Collection for their upcoming election night concert in New York:

December: YouTube: We invite musicians from around the world to audition for the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. San Bruno, California finally gets some culture...

aworks ordered list :: top ten tracks this year via mediamonkey

MediaMonkey via Wikipedia

How I listened to music this year changed more than the actual music I listened to.

Early in the year, I switched from iTunes to MediaMonkey after a new PC didn't remedy my iTunes woes. Then, mid-year, I washed my iPod and so I tried a succession of workarounds -- a MacBook Air synced to my windows file system, several cheapo MP3 players etc -- to finally be replaced with an iPod Classic.

Finally, and most importantly, lala uploading and streaming started to work so well that maybe half my listening is now via the cloud. To honor this change, I'll post two end-of-year lists: the most listened via MediaMonkey/iPod and the most listened via lala.  Here's my MediaMonkey top ten tracks:

1. Niobe. Caribou
   Timbral pop.


2. Like Spinning Plates. Radiohead
   Apparently, I couldn't get enough of Thom Yorke after he taught himself to sing backwards.
   
   And this just feels like spinning plates
   I'm living in cloud cuckoo land


3. Ave Christe: Josquin. Charles Wuorinen
   I went deep this year on the music of modernist Charles Wuorinen but the most appealing was a piano reworking of a Renaissance composer.
   


4. Printemps. George Antheil. Jagdish Mistry
   Simple, short, plaintive, solo violin track, in particular.


5. North by Northwest. Bernard Herrmann. Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen
   This year, I saw and greatly enjoyed the movie and score for the  original Journey to the Center of the Earth (James Mason! Pat Boone!) but of course North by Northwest is good too.


6. Gamma Ray. Beck
   The most popular track on the list (and probably the only one actually released this year). I saw some sales figures for Beck this year indicating he isn't as popular as I might have thought.


7. John McLaughlin. Miles Davis
   Bitches Brew is a perpetual favorite album. What track I like best varies from year to year, though. And I still shake my head at the Steely Dan guy who says the album was "silly."


8. Everywhen. Massive Attack
   This is a perpetual favorite track.


9. Survey of Brutality. Phog Masheen
   My noise pick of the year.


10. Green Chimneys. Scott Amendola, Ben Goldberg & Devin Hoff
    I got back on the Thelonious Monk bandwagon this year but surprisingly, it was a Monk cover by a drummer that made the list.

Half of the tracks are on lala:

aworks 2009 top 10 via mediamo...

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My most played album was Player Piano 6: Original Compositions in the Tradition of Nancarrow with music by James Tenney, Steven Schleiermacher, Marc-André Hamelin, Tom Johnson, and others. (Amazon)

Bitches Brew (1969/70). Miles Davis /vocalese/

Via David L. on lala (website here), it's a vocalese version by Eddie Jefferson of the electronic jazz tune Bitches Brew  This is weird and compelling...

Bitches Brew - Eddie Jefferson

To What You Said (1977). Leonard Bernstein

I'm catching up on my reading. From earlier this month, Alex Ross wrote a piece in the New Yorker on the Leonard Bernstein 90th birthday celebration, including the following speculation:

I wonder whether three or four more operas and shows on the order of "Candide" and "West Side Story" might have done more to advance the cause of American classical music than all of Bernstein's concerts and broadcasts put together.

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To What You Said is a setting by Bernstein of Walt Whitman (lala).

To What You Said - Thomas Hamp...

aworks five-star links and tracks :: december 27, 2008 /art and life/

courage.campaign: Don't divorce Californians! I highly recommend the flickr slideshow.

Dragoncave: Songwriting is songwriting; poetry is poetry. They are not the same art, and poets conflate them to their critical and artistic peril.

Ask MetaFilter: Was Norman Rockwell a subversive artist?

The Urbanophile: Perhaps it is time for Indianapolis to think the unthinkable. Should it downgrade the ISO to a part time orchestra that operates on half the budget, more focused on a core classical repertoire, that is sustainable in the long term?

Overcoming Biases: I don't know if this story has ever been written, but you can imagine a Devil who follows someone around, making their life miserable, solely by offering them options which are never actually taken - a "deal with the Devil" story that only requires the Devil to have the capacity to grant wishes, rather than ever granting a single one.

TBD works for solo viola and tape (2009). Nico Muhly /nico and nick and.../

The weekend Wall Street Journal asks numerous notable figures their 2009 resolutions. Here's the response from composer Nico Muhly:

PROFESSIONAL: In 2009, I am going to finally finish a long series of short works for solo viola and tape [recorded elements]. I'm into this because it's weird and specialized, like taking a year of your life and learning how to make blood sausage.

PERSONAL: I am going to wake up much, much earlier.

INDUSTRY: It would be great to see cities take more pride in their orchestras and small ensembles.

In a development also of importance to the aworks household, the president of Disney Channel suggests one of his resolutions is to help the Jonas Brothers launch a new series next year.

Wikipedia: The series is about the Jonas brothers having to cope with being pop stars while trying to live an ordinary life. The series will be set in New Jersey...

Mothertongue - Nico Muhly

A Little Bit Longer - Jonas Br...

aworks project :: contemporary jazz on lala via tom hull

Rasputin via Wikipedia

Yesterday I was at several of the legacy record stores in Berkeley. At the classical shop (with the cafe and whose name I can't think of right now), I bought some non-mainstream classical -- William Kraft percussion music and a CD by the Verdehr Trio of composers apparently affiliated with the University of Michigan. But at Amoeba and the always scruffy Rasputin, I ended up only looking through the most conventional of jazz artists, good as they may be -- Monk, Mingus, Zawinul, etc.

To rectify this, I see that Tom Hull has posted his top 10 jazz picks for the year and since I have heard of none of the artists, I thought I would check what's on lala and give them a listen. Tom's list and my comments if any and at the end, I'll try to keep updating the lala playlist with my pick of the tracks from these albums:

William Parker: Double Sunrise Over Neptune (AUM Fidelity)
None of these tracks have improvisation in the first thirty seconds so it's hard to assess. I will acknowledge I already have some other Parker MP3s. (lala - samples only)

Vijay Iyer: Tragicomic (Sunnyside)
Iyer, son of Indian immigrants, is a jazz pianist but has also composed for Ethel, the Imani Winds and the American Composers Orchestra. My track picks: The Weight of Things, Comin' Up, Becoming, and Threnody. (lala)

Nik Bärtsch's Ronin: Holon (ECM)
(lala - samples only)

Rob Brown Ensemble: Crown Trunk Root Funk (AUM Fidelity)
(not available on lala)

Scott Fields Freetet: Bitter Love Songs (Clean Feed)
Bitter love song titles as well e.g. Go Ahead, Take the Furniture, At Least You Helped Pick It Out and Yea, Sure, We Can Still Be Friends, Whatever. (lala)

Mostly Other People Do the Killing: This Is Our Moosic (Hot Cup)
(lala)

Kris Davis: Rye Eclipse (Fresh Sound New Talent)
(not available on lala)

Vandermark 5: Beat Reader (Atavistic)
(lala)

Steven Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra: We Are MTO (Mowo!)
(lala)

Randy Sandke: Unconventional Wisdom (Arbors)
(lala)

Best of Tom Hull's Best of 200...

Internet Symphony "Eroica" (2008). Tan Dan /paging richard dreyfuss/

Image via WikipediaANAblog on the new "YouTube" symphony:

The piece is five minutes long and calls itself Internet Symphony 'Eroica'. So, it's no surprise that the music is bargain basement film music. Its spiritual ancestor is Mr. Holland's 'Opus'.

And the PDF of the score is here.

aworks links and five-star tracks :: december 20, 2008 /adamo to webern/

Rush via Wikipedia

9to5Mac: Dell's new laptop to be named after composer and blogger Mark Adamo.

Flaming Pablum: I dined with Rush! Beat that, haters! 

Clay Shirky via Andrew Sullivan: What the Web does is that it does what all amateur increases do, which is it decreases the average quality of what’s available. It is exactly, precisely, the complaint made about the printing press. 

If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger...: The Present Day Composer #74. Photo of Anton Webern.

String Quartet No. 1 . Five star track by William Mathias. (lala)

The Perceptron: First, I found that if you add an Emusic user username onto “http://www.emusic.com/profile/ajax/downloads/artists.html?nickname=”, you get back a list of artists by whom the user has downloaded songs.

• For example, here are the artists I've downloaded over the years. I guess I don't care anyone can see that list.

aworks project :: lala snooping

 

RVW via Wikipedia

I'm always interested in what people actually listen to (versus what they talk about). I'm also interested in finding new classical music (of course). So my new mini-project, facilitated by the improved lala, is to snoop on some of the 80 or so lala listeners who have listened to more classical music on the service than I have. The method is simple; I click on the user, I click on their classical "Top Genre" listens, and then on the play button to stream what they have already listened to, starting from those tracks most frequently heard. I won't name the listeners -- they deserve some privacy -- but I will try to comment on what I hear, assuming in some cases I can tolerate the music long enough to think about it...

Listener A: The first track is a choral arrangement of Pachebel's Canon. Ok, quickly skipping ahead, there is a string quartet arrangement of the Beatles' Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. It's surprising how popular string arrangements of this sort are on lala. In fact, if you look at my most listened to track, it's the Vitamin String Quartet playing Filter's Hey Man, Nice Shot. I would have never paid for a full CD of this kind of fare but at ten cents, why not?

B: First up from the listener, A Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughn Williams. I had an infatuation with his music a decade ago so this is ok. There's also something called In the Fen Country, but since the composer's name is not listed on the track, I can only assume RVW again. Next, the interesting new vocal recording of Terry Riley's In C, by Paul Hillier. On the album page, the composer's name is obvious this time but it takes good eyesight to actually see the artist's. I'm adding Listener B to my "following" list.

C: The next listener's most popular genres are classical, hip-hop and R&B. (For the record, mine have been tallied as classical, jazz, and alternative). The top classical plays are traditional -- Stokowsky and Beethoven conducting Bach, Carmen etc. It's hard not to like the Bach.

D: All vocal music by Gabriel Faure. Next.

E: The most popular artists are Yann Tiersen, Max Richter, and Beyoncé. I've run across several other Richter listeners here. And the most played are nine Richter tracks plus Beethoven. This is a follow.

F: This listener's list is all Bach. Bach is good but so is variety.

G: This listener's popular genres are classical, soundtrack, and metal. The only classical album appears to be Les Miserables. I was hoping the metal might lead to Glenn Branca or something. Except for Riley and Richter, composers I already knew, this project is failing on the contemporary front. It's easy to forget how niche my interests can be, the Vitamin String Quartet not withstanding.

H: This person listens to electronic, praise and worship, and classical. For the latter, this translates into Chopin, Liszt and Bach. I can respect that.

I: On this list are Alan Jackson, Beethoven, and Chopin. One of those three doesn't really belong in the set but again, I'm sure there is a reason.

Ok, time to wind down this project as I've heard enough Bach and Beethoven for one day.

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Update: Actually, listening to more Bach today is surprisingly satisfying.