aworks :: "new" american classical music

aworks five-star links, tracks, and questions :: november 13, 2010

Jackson image via Wikipedia

• The Albongo (1933). John J. Becker. Raymond DesRoches. Early and loud percussion work.
• Un grand sommeil noir (1906). Edgard Varèse. Mireille Delunsch. I don't know what to make out of the fact that my favorite Varèse work is the only conservative piece still in existence.
• 3 Hommages (pno)/3: à Ravel (1972). Robert Helps.
  
• Hey Boy, Hey Girl (1999). Chemical Brothers. "Here we go..."

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• Forensic musicology and Michael Jackson. slate
• "Kronos remembers Gorecki." File Under ?
• Hard to follow Anthony Braxton recording from 1986, Five Compositions. Music Arcades
• Cindy McCain is a puzzle to me as well. Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Amoeba 20th anniversay celebration tomorrow. Facebook

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• why do i find that photo of michael jackson sad? 
• do facebook links actually work outside facebook? 
• am i going to get back in the habit of linking to blogs and not just reading them?

aworks five-star tracks and links :: september 1, 2010

Image via Wikipedia

tracks

• Money (That's What I Want). Buddy Guy. All of a sudden, the casual approach of this blues guitarist is a good remedy to all that clockwork music by Glass, Reich, Herrmann etc.
• Rain Forest. John Fahey. From his album Rain Forests, Oceans and Other Themes. |Wikipedia|

links

• Speculation about the future of the iPod classic, which happens to be my favorite device of all time. On the other hand, I don't know what to make of "ping." |AskMetaFilter|TechCrunch|
• Free Jazz recommends the pianist Stéphane Oliva's recentrecording of Bernard Herrman movie music, as do I. |Free Jazz|
• A review that  pukes all over a recent Philip Glass album. |Vice Magazine|
• An alternative scoring of Glass' Powaqqatsi? |Glass Notes|
• Someone looking for a copy of La Monte Young's Forty-Two for Henry Flynt, a work currently streaming on Radiom. Best gong music I've heard all day. |AskMetafilter|Radiom|

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)

aworks five-star links and tracks :: november 14th, 2009 /jazz and not jazz/

Image via Wikipedia

100 best jazz albums of all time, including three from this century. (Martin Gayford/Telegraph)

#100 from that list, a 2009 recording. Yawn. (lala)

Chamber Music American to honor Chick Corea (NewMusicBox)

Chick Corea's entry on the top 100 jazz list. (lala)

Alvin Lucier says he wasn't good enough to play jazz so he studied classical instead. It occurs to me his music may be as far away as you can get from frenetic jazz improvisation. (Weslyan Argus via Avant Music News)

Henry Cowell/Open Minds coverage in the Wall Street Journal. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend either concert this week. (Brett Campbell/WSJ).

"Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman is, we hear, a sumptuous documentary about the accomplished Californian architectural photographer who captured the work of nearly every modern and progressive architect since the 1930s including Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra, John Lautner and Frank Gehry." (BerkeleySide)

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• Eric Bricker: Visual Acoustics: Studying the Lessons of Modernity from a Master (huffingtonpost.com)
• Movie Review | 'Visual Acoustics': A Man With a Camera and an Architectural Eye (movies.nytimes.com)
• What's hot at the London jazz festival (guardian.co.uk)
• Architecture Review: Modern Lines for the Eternal City (nytimes.com)

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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• Naughty Bay Bridge Worker Graffiti Spotted in Hi-Res Photo (sfist.com)
• Behold the Empty Bay Bridge (sfist.com)
• Westbound Bay Bridge closed by big rig rollover (sf.metblogs.com)
• Monumental Project to Give Bridge a Seismic Update (nytimes.com)

aworks five-star links and tracks :: july 23, 2009

National Symphony to twitter music notes in real-time. Let's not pre-judge. (Baltimore Sun).

"Help me understand atonal music." No great answers yet although one responder claims to be the parent of a contributor to NewMusicBox. (AskMetaFilter)

DJ Spooky remixes the Grand Valley State version of Terry Riley's In C. Odd yet familiar. (djspooky.com)

The Azica Records page. I'm listening to Ives' Prelude for Organ on "Adeste fidelis." Also, Knee 4 from Einstein on the Beach on guitar. (InstantEncore)

Photos from the pre-concert preparations for tonight's Koyaanisqatsi at the Hollywood Bowl. (Glass Notes)

aworks five-star links and tracks :: june 13, 2009 /notes from my summer vacation away from "real" classical music/

Image via Wikipedia

"Later, the Malian band Amadou et Mariam tore into a modal African rocker that would have been equally at home as a Celtic Appalachian fiddle tune." (Jon Pareles New York Times)

Elvis Costello to play at LA and SF Amoebas. (Chal Pivik la.metblogs)

Summer Breeze by Seals & Crofts includes a toy piano part. Just noticed this. (Wikipedia lala)

Some guy asks why he hates jazz after 1940. Yikes. I happen to love modal playing as well as "melodic lines that are sporadic and broken by abnormally large tonal gaps, which I think some people really struggle to find any sort of beauty in." Answer turned out to be chordal extensions and parallel movement. (AskMetaFilter) 

Tone Dialing by Ornette Coleman. Not recommended for certain AskMetaFilter people. (no lala track available, unfortunately ,but found it on GrooveShark)

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• Bonnaroo Preview: Amadou & Mariam (outtheother.typepad.com)
• Pink Floyd's David Gilmour joins Amadou & Mariam (idiomag.com)

aworks five-star links and tracks :: june 6, 2009 /past and future greatness/

Aaron Copland via last.fm

if you don't own the live recording of Aaron Copland's Clarinet Concerto that Drucker made with Leonard Bernstein and the Philharmonic in 1989, you're missing one of the all-time great musical experiences. (Terry Teachout)

Obama Hieroglyphic: Your president's End The Hate 2009 Tour included a visit to an Ancient Egyptian tomb, where he spotted this 4600-year-old little guy. (Buzzfeed)

Polka gets booted from the Grammys. (New York Times).

Well You Needn't. Thelonious Monk. (lala). Includes the part two minutes into it where Monk calls out "Coltrane! Coltrane".

This doesn't necessarily imply that the parents have to play an instrument. Just having an environment in the home where lots of music is heard helps, and the more diverse the music, the better.  (Byzantium Shores). The aworks parenting team has this well covered, between the drummer-spouse and the guy with rather eclectic listening tastes.

Mr. President, we have such high hopes for you, because you, with your moral vision of history, will be able and compelled to change this world into a better place where people will stop waging war. (ABC News)

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• Ending a 60-Year Clarinet Gig (nytimes.com)
• Music Review | New York Philharmonic: An Evening of Accolades for a Clarinetist (nytimes.com)

aworks five-star links & tracks :: may 11, 2009

Image via CrunchBase

I find the story a bit too melodramatic, with its misunderstood artist on his deathbed surrounded by bourgeois blockheads.  (The Fredösphere) Regarding Menotti's The Unicorn, the Gorgon and the Manticore.

So to write the Oxford History of Western Music on Twitter would require 579,360 Tweets (4,080 X 142). (Deceptively Simple)

Whoa, 99 "essential" classical music songs on mp3 for only $7.99 at Amazon. (kottke.org)  Barber's Adagio at #43. I don't see any equivalent CD.