aworks :: "new" american classical music

'Round Midnight (1944). Thelonious Monk, Cootie Williams, Bernie Hanighen /accept the contemporary groove arrangement/

New to me, pop star Amy Winehouse recorded the Monk standard 'Round Midnight. She doesn't have the talent for this and the recording is not the best e.g. when the baritone sax moves back and forth from left and right channels. Still, I can accept the contemporary groove arrangement. Ok, to be precise, I want to accept the contemporary groove arrangement but I'm not up to it.

Someone on AllAboutJazz has transcribed the changes in this version. Here's a comment from the forum:

OTT: Her "changes " are basically watered down versions of the original changes ( I particularly miss the descending root -ma7 -mi 7 inner part in the first couple bars and her omitting the EMA7 AMA7 in the third phrase )

Worth nothing: Sting didn't mess with the original changes when he recorded this song ..

I've never heard the Sting version. Nor have I heard the version composed for pianist Emanuele Arciuli by the late Milton Babbitt, as part of Round Midnight Variations. I have heard Winehouse's F* Me Pumps, though...

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Love Is Just a Four Letter Word (1965). Bob Dylan /and other old-age wisdom/

This metafilter discussion about the good/bad of Earl Scruggs moving on from Lester Flatt leads to this Joan Baez/Earl Scruggs video, where Baez's voice kicks in after some introductory talk:

LOVE IS JUST A FOUR LETTER WORLD
Uploaded by Francis-Albert. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more.

We saw a Joan Baez concert in San Jose several years ago. It was great, Joan's mom was in attendance, and I noticed my spouse was one of the youngest audience members. Uh, oh. This may have been the point where I realized I was no longer a kid. 

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aworks unordered list :: new releases on rdio

George Crumb image via Wikipedia

I feel like I am not paying enough attention to new classical and classic jazz recordings. To remedy, here's the list of relevant titles new on the rdio streaming service this week:

• Miles & Quincy [Jones] Live at Montreux. Miles Davis
• Concierto. Jim Hall
• All Blues. Ron Carter
• Mad Music Presents Reverberating Big Bands. Various
• Prelude (40th Anniversary Edition). Deodato
• Rarities. Stan Kenton. 
• Pure Desmond. Paul Desmond
• Duke Ellington and Friends Salute Ben Webster
• White Rabbit (40th Anniversary Edition). George Benson
• Gnomic Variations. George Crumb
• The Best of Roy Eldridge
• Brillance: Ragtime to Modernism. Mathieu Gaulin
• Emergent - Integrales - Octandre - The Rothko Chapel. Zeitfluss 93

Ok, there's enough here to keep me occupied...

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The Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson (1950). Aaron Copland /too-impetuous squirrel/

Cover via Amazon

Sarah Wolfson on the songs of American composers, Aaron Copland in particular:

But I have to be truly honest, I was most skeptical of the Copland. The Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson was never my favorite work. I was always intrigued by Copland’s settings, but a number of things held me back....So what a joy to find, after struggling with some awkward text setting—how often do you sing “too-impetuous squirrel” in your passaggio—that I fell in love with this set.

Take the "A" Train (1939). Billy Strayhorn /via shipp/

Matthew Shipp image via Wikipedia

Wire Magazine has some free streams from the new Matthew Shipp jazz album, Art of the Improviser. The most interesting so far is Take the A Train. The melody occasionally peeks out amidst less tuneful but still interesting improvisation.

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Diacritcal Marks (2011). Nico Muhly /brevity is en vogue/

Nico Muhly

Evan Kuchar comes to terms with the eight movements in Nico Muhly's new string quartet:

So in the 8 movements, there were only 5 movements worth of musical ideas. At about the 6th or 7th movement, I had an epiphany; this is not only a viable form but a contemporary one, an apt response to those forces that shape our musical unconsciousness, specifically film scores and twitter. In a time when some people's music critic of the year is a twitterer (Muhly, like Kanye, has quite the twitter presence), brevity (and therefore usually clarity) is en vogue.

While I started out skeptical, Muhly made a convincing argument. Instead of a few organically unfolding movements (like I generally prefer), Muhly paints a pointillistic picture with each short movement contributing to the whole like different scenes in a movie. Better than just a usurpation, it was an intelligent and interesting response to it. 

Zachary Woolf in the NY Times on the work:

It was the kind of pretty, tightly constructed music that this 29-year-old composer has become known for, but with subtle edges: an ominous plucked cello line in the first movement, and the way the sustained tones in the slow sections didn’t quite connect, a hint of dislocation amid the sweet smoothness.

In 2009, Nico Muhly complained about how the New York Times screwed up the diacritical marks in Icelandic words. He also had this to say about unusual renderings:

Think about the movie Koyaanisqatsi. The eye is intrigued by the inscrutability of those a’s, that q without its u! If that movie had been called “Life Out Of Balance,” you had better believe it would not have done nearly as well. 

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ralph lichtensteiger ordered list :: primary, significant, insignificant composers

Cover of Samuel Barber

Ralph Lichtensteiger offers his well-considered list of composers. The inclusion of classic jazz artists adds to its credibility. I'll take the liberty of filtering that list for purposes of this blog. See the full list here.

Primary

• Samuel Barber — subtle elegance, italophile beauty and depth
• John Cage — the biotopes of sound and silence, celestial music of mushrooms, universal vibration
• Elliott Carter — simultaneousness and dialogue
• John Coltrane — energy ad infinitum
• Aaron Copland — perfect simplicity, the father of the 'american style'
• Duke Ellington — absolute coolness
• Charles Ives — parallel worlds, made audible
• Charles Mingus — organized improvisation
• Thelonious Monk — different, inimitable, sphere (circle)
• Steve Reich — urbanity, clarity, pulse, the dummy head microphone
• Arnold Schönberg — think outside the box, NOT to please everybody
• Igor Stravinsky — elegance and perfection, the universal brain of style
• Edgard Varèse — organized noise, big city rhythm, sound science, sound stream

significant

• John Adams — Gustav Mahler of minimal
• Georges Antheil — scandal, scandal! happening artist
• Milton Babbitt — mathematics for ears, synthesized rhythmic precision
• Earle Brown — experiment, the laboratory
• Paul Bowles — cosmopolitan
• Ornette Coleman — harmolodic etudes
• Alvin Curran — freak sound layouts
• Miles Davis — electric airiness, super cool
• Morton Feldman — pssst! (pppppp)
• Kenneth Gaburo — compositional linguistics and lemon drops
• Lou Harrison — american gamelan
• Andrew Hill — free mental activity
• Keith Jarrett — invented momentarily, master of ceremonies
• Scott Joplin — joy
• Conlon Nancarrow — the manic mechanic, yesterday's machinery
• Harry Partch — extended instruments, the composer as a tramp
• Terry Riley — sound vagabond, to be intoxicated
• David Tudor — amplified sensual orgy
• La Monte Young — time as a sound carpet, meditation exercise
• Frank Zappa — enlightenment as experimental rock, perfectionist, workaholic, missionary

insignificant

• Philip Glass — mass production, melancholy and pomp
• Mikis Theodorakis — agitation

I also liked his summaries for Satie and Strauss.

I would quibble with his slotting of Philip Glass, I might add Albert Ayler and Eric Dolphy (and Busoni on the full list), I'd delete Paul Bowles and I'd like to substitute Alvin Lucier for Alvin Curran. Finally, I'm unfamiliar with the music of Kenneth Gaburo. But all in all, the list is fun and illuminating, unlike say, something by the NY Times...

Laideronnette, impératrice des pagodes from Mother Goose (1910). Maurice Ravel /herbie, lang lang, obama, and hu/

Lang Lang and Herbie Hancock played for last night's US/China state dinner at the White House. US journalist and former China resident James Fallows describes the scene:

And for the "win-win" concept? There was this improbable bit of showmanship: Herbie Hancock and the young Chinese-born, US-trained pianist-phenom Lang Lang, doing a four-hands rendition of a piece by Ravel with a Chinoiserie theme. They enjoyed each other, and embraced when it was done. Again, it doesn't prove anything, but it was a good choice. Lang Lang on his own then played a Chinese song.

Wikipedia on Ravel's Mother Goose:

Ravel originally wrote Ma mère l'oye as a piano duet for the Godebski children, Mimi and Jean, ages 6 and 7. Ravel dedicated this work for four hands to the children (just as he had dedicated an earlier work, Sonatine to their parents).

Nixon in China (1987). John Adams /unlikely operatic material/

Image via Wikipedia

Amidst Santigold, Sex Pistols, and (Lisa) Stanfield among others, musicwhore likes Nixon in China:

Nixon in China is engaging, sometimes even exhilarating, even if the idea of a US diplomatic trip to a Communist country during the Cold War seems like unlikely operatic material.  

This reminds me that I was on a walk in a Palo Alto neighborhood back then and saw a TV showing the opera.

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Canon in D major (1694). Johann Pachelbel /comes at a price/

USF image via Wikipedia

I'm still bewildered what to think about KDFC, San Francisco's last remaining classical music station, going non-commerical and moving to the frequency of KUSF college radio:

The move bodes well for the future of classical music radio in the Bay Area, but it comes at a price. In the near future, at least, KDFC's signal strength will make it difficult or impossible for many listeners to receive - especially in the South Bay. Meanwhile, University of San Francisco radio station KUSF, which had been broadcasting on 90.3 since 1977, lost that frequency on Tuesday morning, in a move that blindsided many of its staff and volunteers. 

Since I don't think I've listened to the station in a couple of years, I thought it appropriate to tune in again tonight, via the Internet. So of course, the last hour's programming included Pachelbel's Canon. It's enough to go back to the Busoni and Reich I've been listening to all day via MP3s.

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