aworks :: "new" american classical music

Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (2006). Michael Gordon

The New York Times contemporary composers blog has resumed with a post by Michael Gordon on his work that uses themes from Beethoven:

Perhaps the most interesting interaction with classical music that I’ve had was a commission from the Beethoven Festival in Bonn, Germany, to write a new piece for orchestra that referenced Beethoven in some way. It was a challenging request and for a while I wasn’t sure how to proceed. In the end, I decided to take one theme from each movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and work with them as if they were my own.  

Includes a streamed excerpt, although I can't conclude anything on first listen. Via Mark Chan.

Rhythm-a-Ning (1957?). Thelonious Monk /via lala via google via kronos quartet/

Image by louisvolant via Flickr

I'm trying the new Google "one-box" search feature that allows, among other treats, one button access to a lala player for tracks of the artist you are searching for.

My comments so far:

• The lala player appears in a separate popup rather than reusing a current lala window (or stealing the google search window itself).
• All my searches so far offer lala selections. iLike, iMeem, Rhapsody, and Pandora appear more sporadically.
• The Steve Reich featured tracks are all from Music for 18 Musicians; the Philip Glass more diversified.
• 4'33" shows up in the John Cage search.
• Searches for David Lang, Michael Gordon, and Julia Wolfe all fail to use this new feature, although I know their tracks are on lala.
• I like the Kronos Quartet and I like Thelonious Monk but why would a query for Kronos Quartet feature their somewhat obscure recording of Thelonious Monk songs? And a query for Thelonious Monk doesn't reciprocate.
• I'm still thinking about the implications that the first Google search result for an artist is now a stream button rather than the traditional textual result. Venture Capital blogger Fred Wilson recently wrote on how he would rather experience new music rather than read about it and I'm also starting to feel that way.
• I can't remember the source but I recently read speculation lala doesn't pay anything to music labels for the first play. They do get a cut if you buy the track for .10. (or the MP3 or the CD).
• I'm aworks in case you get to the lala site and want to follow me...

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• Google brings online music to the masses (news.cnet.com)
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Music with Changing Parts (1970). Philip Glass /dee-dee-dee-mistake/

Alex V. Cook has an interview of Dickie Landry, a founding member of the Philip Glass Ensemble.

I particularly liked the part on helping Glass understand the value of accomplished musicians:

Landry pulls out a picture of one of the early Philip Glass Ensemble rehearsals noting the talented composers in the group but comments, “Philip and them were great composers but not the best technicians. They could play, but they really couldn’t play. We were rehearsing music for changing parts and it was like dee-dee-dee-mistake, dee-dee-dee-mistake. Oh God, I thought, this is like torture. I finally convinced him to get rid of these guys and told him I got some friends coming up to New York City; let’s rehearse with them and see what happens. We can read and play it faster and we can do this.”

Music With Changing Parts - Ph...

Keep in mind the work embedded from lala above is over an hour long.

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aworks: prior post on music with changing parts

aworks five-star links and tracks :: october 27th, 2009 /bridging differences/

Image by trainman74 via Flickr

The Transcontinental vows to be the blogosphere's Adorno defender.

Hmm, the Bay Bridge is closed again after the Labor Day repair has apparently failed. I start regularly commuting over a bridge for the first time starting Tuesday but I think/hope my bridge is more reliable. At least I don't live or work on Treasure Island. And McSweeney's is co-sponsoring an effort to investigate the new Bay Bridge.

Summer Is Coming In has discovered Operabase, a database of opera performances.

The Respect Sextet has that double bill album with the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Sun Ra. So far, I greatly prefer the Sun Ra e.g. Angels and Demons at Play.

I can't get enough of Ty Forquer playing David Lang's Anvil Chorus. Vivid, insistent percussion.

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Five Knee Plays (1976). Philip Glass /recovery program/

Philip Glass via last.fm

JerryZ reviews a well-programmed LA concert with Feldman's Rothko Chapel, Ben Johnston’s Quartet No. 4 “Amazing Grace”, and music by Philip Glass:

The Jacaranda series has recovered the “Five Knee Plays” from Einstein on the Beach, with approval of Glass and the publisher. At the time of their first presentation of the set, in 2005, only the middle work was available; three other segments had been issued for children’s chorus but were no longer available, and the opening segment had been withdrawn and had to be reconstituted...The music still grabs at you.

Update: Via delicious.pbailey68, Mark Swed reviews the same concert in the LA Times:

“Einstein” ends with a final speech about lovers on a park bench that was written and originally delivered by an elderly actor in the original. Ken Page read it wonderfully for Jacaranda, accompanied by the solo violin, organ and the children singing their one-two-threes and do-re-me's with marvelous clear voices lifted to heaven.  

philip glass :: knee plays

aworks celebration :: If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats

It's the five year anniversary of If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats. 

If there's a better photo blog capturing cultural history in all it's glory, buy it! Or something to that effect, ...

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aworks favorites: webern. agnes moorhead. cotton club. marianne faithful poses with a dalmation. robber baron leland stanford. the art of communism. mickey rooney and duke ellington. aaron copland. hubert humphrey and jerry lewis. andy warhol pumps iron. bernstein and gould. the power of the dog. bernstein and coward. peter cook. bartok. albert ayler before and after. charles seeger and his first wife, constance. abbey lincoln and max roach. frank sinatra conducts. archie shepp. don van vliet (aka captain beefheart). musical chairs. clara rockmore and leon theremin. marion davies and william randolph hearst. david tudor, john cage, yoko ono and mayuzumi toshiro. james dean and sammy davis jr. charlie parker goes to bellevue :: yikes. dean martin - pretty baby. hollywood blvd. (1955)...

Slonimsky's Earbox (1995). John Adams /i did not feel disappointed/

Axel Feldheim:

...I did not feel disappointed. John Adam's Slonimsky's Earbox is a loud, frenetic ride using the full resources of the orchestra. It begins with a rapid upward run that is a kind of leitmotif. Vänskä made sure that the orchestra kept up a tense level of energy. Mr. Adams himself was in attendance in box A for the entire evening & took a bow on stage after his piece.

For the record, the lack of disappointment was due to the fine conducting of Osmo Vänskä. Also for the record, I just did a copy/paste of the conductor's name.

The composer on earbox.com:

The new piece seems in retrospect to have pointed toward a successful integration of the older minimalist techniques (repetitive motifs, steady background pulse and stable harmonic areas) the more complex, more actively contrapuntal language of the post-Klinghoffer pieces. 

More "for the record": I still don't understand how to use copy/paste after several months with an iPhone. Also, I just admitted to the local spouse that I still miss the phone from my old Palm Treo (as I explained why I hadn't called her back). Browsing and apps were a disaster, though.

Off the record, this is not a favorite John Adams piece...

The Addams Family (1964). Vic Mizzy /1916-2009/

Image via Wikipedia

The composer of the TV themes for The Addams Family and Green Acres, Vic MIzzy, has died. Amoebablog on The Addams Family theme:

Mizzy chose to play a harpsichord to help conjure up the bizarrely unconventional air; he also punctuated the rhythm with some cool proto-beatnik finger-snapping which helped to define the peculiar humor of the show. When Filmways, the production company, refused to pay for vocalists, Mizzy simply overdubbed himself singing and looped in actor Ted Cassidy, who portrayed the butler Lurch, for the "neat, sweet, petite" section...

The local nine-year-old and I enjoyed watching old episodes earlier this year, and the theme song was among the highlights.

The Addams Family - Various Ar...

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Music in Twelve Parts (1971-74). Philip Glass /musiciens-athlètes/

Image via Wikipedia

Via Glass Notes, Music in Twelve Parts will be played in November at the festival automne en normandie:

C’est à la fois “une expérience intellectuelle et un voyage spirituel” que nous propose Philip Glass qui dirigera sur scène les “musiciens-athlètes” de son Philip Glass Ensemble.

Google translates:

It is both "an intellectual experience and a spiritual journey" that we propose Philip Glass on stage to lead the "musician-athletes" from his Philip Glass Ensemble.

I can still feel the effect from the San Francisco performance in February.

Andrew Porter on the work via wikipedia:

"A new sound and a new chord suddenly break in, with an effect as if one wall of a room has suddenly disappeared, to reveal a completely new view."

After a recent LisaH post mentioning John Adam's The Chairman Dances, I've been pondering if Music in Twelve Parts has any "narrative arc." While there is a captivating flow to three hours of all those varied structures, as suggested by Porter, I suppose the answer is no but I think it great nonetheless.

For an alternative viewpoint, here's an Amazon review from someone who didn't find the music quite as splendid:

An odd album, in that whilst it's an astonishing feat of musicianship, it's not much fun to listen to...Listened to on headphones, it will make you dive, screaming, for the 'eject' button after half-an-hour, but listened to in bits as an 'experience' it's much better - the musical equivalent of staring at clouds, or a flowing river, it changes and stays the same. 

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music in twelve parts: lala.

Men (2005). David Lang /ten cents/

Image by bpedro via Flickr

The David Lang soundtracks from the other day have reawakened my interest in his music. So I filtered through my MP3 collection to determine what music of his I own.

Something doesn't make sense to me, though. I have two of the three tracks from his album Elevated. But it appears you can't purchase the third, Men, separately in MP3 form. Both Amazon and lala allow the purchase of all three as a complete album. But emusic, which is where I got the two tracks I do possess, doesn't allow download of the third track, either as part of a full album purchase or individually.

Note that Men is a 43 minute work, which is presumably why it isn't available at the regular single MP3 download price of .89 on lala (or .99 at Amazon)

Since I can't justify paying $7.49 at lala (or $8.99 at Amazon or $9.99 at iTunes) just to be able to secure the missing track, I'll just pay lala .10 for the right to perpetually stream but not download. This outcome doesn't appear to be optimal for any of the involved parties.

John Kelman/All About Jazz on Men:

The 43-minute Men featuring the eleven-piece European Music Project under the artistic direction of Jürgen Grözinger, is filled with long tones, dark and spacious pulses, and a slowly-shifting harmonic center. Hypnotic but more intrusive than, say, the ambient music of Brian Eno—although Eno is a clear precedent—the composition's evolution is inescapable yet painstakingly subtle.