aworks :: "new" american classical music

Sunshine of Your Love (1967). Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce, Pete Brown /ella via ads/

I've registered for and now used Free All Music a couple of times. In return for watching ads, you get five free MP3 downloads per week. It doesn't work very well for classical. But in the jazz catalog, I did stumble on Ella Fitzgerald singing Sunshine of Your Love, the hit by Cream.

Do the advertisers get value from this site? Not clear; the only ads I remember thirty minutes later are a public service announcement about not denigrating gays and an ad for some kind of gadget charger pad. 

Wikipedia on the song:

Most of the lyrics to "Sunshine of Your Love" were written during an all-night creative session between Bruce and Brown, a poet who worked with the band: "I picked up my double bass and played the riff. Pete looked out the window and the sun was coming up. He wrote 'It's getting near dawn and lights close their tired eyes…'" Clapton later wrote the chorus ("I've been waiting so long…") which also yielded the song's title.

Sunshine Of Your Love - Ella F...

Turtle Dreams (1983). Meredith Monk /not as it initially appeared/

From lala listener Ed:

After listening to a few Meredith Monk albums, Bjork's career doesn't seem nearly as interesting as it initially appeared.

This captures some truth to as to why I continue to slog away at american contemporary music, despite the multitude of distractions.

Turtle Dreams - Meredith Monk ...

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• Bjork And Gondry To Collaborate On "Scientific Musical" (perezhilton.com)

Coming Together (1971). Frederic Rzweski /repeated text trinity/

Alvin Lucier via last.fm

In yesterday's links, I managed to name Frederic Rzewski as the composer of I Am Standing in a Room. Of course, it's instead Alvin Lucier.

I must have been thinking of Rzweski's Coming Together as I was watching Lucier's I Am StandingSitting in a Room. Both are monumental works based on repeated text and both are arguably each composer's best work. But clearly they are rather different pieces.

Another strange thing about my slip is just last week, I bought the Lovely Records CD of Lucier's Sferics and his Music for Solo Performer. So you'd think I would be more Lucier-aware.

I should also mention that last week, I listened to a third work in this newly-formed repeated text trinity -- Steve Reich's Come Out.

the repetitive text trinity

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• Sitting in a room with experimental music professor Alvin Lucier (avantmusicnews.com)
• Contemporary music at the Reich price (netnewmusic.net)

aworks five-star links :: march 24 2010 /this whole immanence/transcendence problem/

The Met via Wikipedia

I Am the Wife of Mao-Tse Tung from Adams' Nixon in China is in fact memorable. (Musicwhore.org)

Short video performance of Rzewski's Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room. To my surprise, I find the video disturbing. (embody the struggle)

A generally positive review of the Metropolitan Opera's The Nose. (The Opera Tattler)

"Carl Stone is a musical magpie. He'll steal music from just about anywhere he can get his hands on."   (New Sounds podcast with particularly good selections of his work)

"In the new regime of explod­ing media, where we find our­selves read­ing a review for a for­mat that we can’t even use, that we’ve never even seen, where the rec­om­men­da­tion algo­rithms haven’t fig­ured out how to make dis­tinc­tions quite so sophis­ti­cated, and where we still have this whole immanence/transcendence prob­lem that’s dogged us for cen­turies to boot – ..." (SnarkMarket)

aworks ***** links :: march 23 2010 /a little more hallucinatory/

Long Beach via Wikipedia

• Dropping the price of CDs to $10 will help the format, for awhile (Mark Mulligan's Blog)
• Indie pop and classical music influence each other (Tom Service/guardian.co.uk)
• Mason Bates' Red River is 21st century Americana (Joan Reinthaler/Washington Post)
• Long Beach Opera's Nixon in China -- "a little more irreverent, a little more fantastic, a little more hallucinatory." (Chris Pasles/LaTimes)
• BBC3 temporarily has a stream of a concert with film music e.g. Herrmann's Vertigo as well as a premiere by Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead (BBC)
• Music creativity and technology. (Elodie Lauten/Sequenza21) 
• "The very idea of music criticism — of applying some objective standard to the experience of listening to music — suddenly struck me as petty and irrelevant." (Steve Almond/Boston.com)
• "Health care reform and the Amish: What will it all mean?" (The Goshen News)

The Eraser (2006). Thom Yorke /humane version/

Trumpter Christian Scott covers Thom Yorke's The Eraser. As much as I admire the electronic experiments of Radiohead's Yorke, this version is more humane. Wikipedia on the original:

The title track, "The Eraser" was co-written with Radiohead member Jonny Greenwood, and is based on piano chords (namely C6/9 and D6/9). Yorke revealed in an interview with Rolling Stone, that the piano parts played by Greenwood were recorded on a dictaphone at his house; "A year and a half later, I had to own up that I had sampled them, cut them into a different order and made them into a song [laughs]. Is that all right? Sorry, Jonny."

03/20/10 this week's top track...

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• Thom Yorke's Side Project Announces Tour (perezhilton.com)
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• New Radiohead/Thom Yorke song "Giving Up the Ghost" is spectacular (netnewmusic.net)

Air and Simple Gifts (2009). John Williams

John Williams via last.fm

14 months later, I still like this inaugural piece by John Williams; Washington politics, not as much...

this week's top tracks 03/13/1...

Majority (1921). Charles Ives /jolting/

I'm listening to songs of Charles Ives today. The Side Show and Ann Street are delightful. But Majority is emphatic, powerful and all in all, quite dissonant and ugly.

From Charles Ives, My Father's Song, a Psychoanalytic Biography:

The Majority never quite comes to a conclusion...The point at which he decides to close is one in which fear of the Minority's power breaks out and with it an undisguised counteraggressive fantasy of murder or execution: the Minority man defeated has few alternatives.

this week's top tracks 03/13/1...

aworks unordered list :: today's top tracks /space and spacier/

Cover via Amazon

• When Will the Blues Leave? Archie Shepp
• Space. Butthole Surfers
• Liquid and Stellar Music. Paul Dresher
• Koyaanisqatsi. Philip Glass
• Ange Des Orages. Philip Glass
• Music in Similar Motion. Philip Glass

Shepp: When Will the Blues Leave? is an old Ornette Coleman tune (and happy 80th birthday to Ornette).

Surfers: Space is a rock instrumental that sounds particularly good when driving on 880 in heavy traffic.

Dresher: And Liquid and Stellar Music is what it sounds like after leaving the earth's atmosphere (or the equivalent drive over the Dumbarton Bridge after getting past 880).

Glass: My Philip Glass rotation may be morphing from last year's The Hours, Music in Twelve Parts, and Dracula to Koyaanisqatsi, String Quartet No. 2 and possibly Music in Similar Motion.

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• Music in Contrary Motion (1969). Philip Glass /it never really ends/ (rgable.typepad.com)
• Liking Philip Glass after all (netnewmusic.net)
• The Qatsi trilogy (Godfrey Reggio/Philip Glass) (bededtech.sjwc.hct.ac.ae)
• Ask Philip Glass and ye shall receive (nationalpost.com)

North by Northwest (1959). Bernard Herrmann /rabbit chasing/

Invisible Gesticulations chases a rabbit in his backyard to the tune of North by Northwest: