“You practice and you get better. It’s very simple.”
Tag: music
“ConnollyÄôs Number, the largest number of songs that you can realistically maintain a meaningful relationship with: 1,000.”—from a footnote to a thoughtful essay. Thankfully I hate clutter enough that I never amassed much of a cd or vinyl collection.
DCPD Bangerz, Vol. 1
I get a kick out of nerdcore rapper ytcracker‘s album DCPD Bangerz:
my friend mikey pasted me a link in skype to this police departmentÄôs site –
EVERY page on this website was filled with the most banging beats i had ever heard. whoever picked these beats for this website seriously needs to be an a&r for a major record label.
i decided to make a concept album using some of the hot beats on these pages and creating a backstory for the song based on what information was on the page. the songs are all named after the .html you can find the beat and story on.
I live in DeKalb, so it was a nice surprise to come across this. I think index_home.html [mp3] is my favorite, but executive_command.html is a very close second. [via decatur metro]
Philip Glass is coming to Atlanta, and giving a couple talks just a few miles down the road from me. Awesome.
The Joanna Newsom Transcription Project is pretty awesome. Lots of sheet music pdfs for harp and piano.
Alex Ross is coming to speak at Kennesaw State University before an eighth blackbird concert, just a short drive away. OMG. This might be the first time I get to be that guy that shows up to get his book signed.
Tonight I was thinking I’d love to hear hip hop that samples bluegrass music. I looked around and came across Gangstagrass. So far, so good. (Also reminds me of The Gourds’ cover of Snoop’s “Gin and Juice”.)
Illustrations of Gustav Mahler conducting, by Hans Schliessmann.
The twelve composers of Christmas. I love the Stravinsky and Beethoven bits. [via mmmusing]
Favorite Albums of 2008
I’m not limiting myself to 2008—I’m never that up-to-date, and you already know about Fleet Foxes and Bon Iver without my telling you. I spent some time sorting through my iTunes and came up with albums that I bought or first gave a serious listen to this year. I made selections month-by-month:
January
Stardust is a Willie Nelson album from 1978. It’s a collection of old standards, like Stardust, All of Me, Moonlight in Vermont. I love those good songs that have such a rich history. Some of them are 60, 70, 80 years old, and they’re still good, and there’s probably many more good covers to come.
I had a 4-way tie for favorite Radiohead album until In Rainbows came along. Easily my most-played album this year.
February
I pretty much flipped out when I first listened to Ainadamar. I spent a nice Saturday afternoon playing it very, very loudly following along with the Spanish libretto. The music has a cool mix of Cuban and Moorish influences.
Jeff Buckley, Live at Mercury Lounge. Hard to find, google it. Lots of goofy stage banter. He plays Buckley standbys and also the childhood classic 3 Is a Magic Number, Nina Simone’s The Other Woman, and the old folk tune Dink’s Song.
Moon Pix is one of the early Cat Power records. I love the loose, sliding feel to the whole album.
March
Johnny Cash at San Quentin. I’d rank this over the Folsom Prison recordings. It’s a barn-burner. The audience is so fired up.
Saxophonists Paul Desmond & Gerry Mulligan have some lovely things to say on Two of a Mind.
April
Glenn Gould: A State of Wonder collects Gould’s famous recordings of the Goldberg Variations—the 1955 recording that helped make his name and the 1981 recording shortly before he died. Great stuff.
Elvis: 2nd to None. A nice compilation. I have such fun with this one, I just wanna dance and swagger all Elvis-y. Listen to Bossa Nova Baby. And come on, If I Can Dream? Goose bumps every time.
I was too cool for Fiona Apple’s debut when it first came out. Now that I’m older and wiser Tidal has gotten a good bit of play.
May
Speaking for Trees. I’ve never seen the movie that goes along with it, but the sounds are great. There’s some guitar noodling, crickets and bugs buzzing in the background, Chan Marshall’s singing. That’s about it.
Bach: Cello Suites. Pierre Fournier performs. Great music for background, deep listening, or dancing if you know your gigues, menuets, courantes, gavottes, etc.
Shostakovich: The String Quartets. The Fitzwilliam String Quartet plays the 15 quartets. It’s a lot to take in.
June
A bit of a weak month, but I liked string quartets of Leoš Janáček and Maurice Ravel. The first time I heard Janáček’s String Quartet No. 2, “Intimate Letters” was on NPR while I was driving. One of those tunes where you have to stay in the car until it’s over.
July
Iron Maiden – Somewhere in Time. A nostalgic pick. I hadn’t listened to this album since elementary school, but I stumbled across it in our office iTunes network. It still sends me off to air guitar land. See: Wasted Years, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and the mini-history lesson in Alexander the Great.
Rush – 2112. Sucker for prog rock.
August
Ibrahim Ferrer – Buenos Hermanos. I’m convinced one of the best reasons to work with other people is for the intra-office music sharing. A co-worker introduced this album to me. My favorite pick by far is Boliviana, I emailed her: “The last minute of the song makes me want to be on the patio of a little coastal villa somewhere in Central America, dancing with all my friends while the sun sets.”
Soul of the Tango: The Music of Ástor Piazzolla. Yo-Yo Ma plays passionate Argentinian dance music.
September
Went on vacation and didn’t listen much. Didn’t find anything fantastic when I got back home.
October
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s Ask Forgiveness is a really great, much-too-short album of covers, including Bj??rk and R. Kelly. His cover of Sinatra’s Cycles might be my favorite song this year…
Almost Alone. A late Chet Atkins collection of mostly solo country guitar. Listen to Jam Man or Big Foot.
Southern Country Gospel. I love albums like this that make you remember how much that gospel, bluegrass, blues, country, and folk are so intertwined. And I love the common emotional elements: love, struggle, desire, hope, etc.
November
Ella and Louis. Fitzgerald and Armstrong. A great collection of duets that was a long time coming. Give a listen to They Can’t Take That Away from Me and Cheek to Cheek.
Blood on the Tracks. I’m a latecomer to Bob Dylan. I’ve forgiven myself and I’m working on it.
Charles Mingus wrote The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady as a ballet, set to jazz suite in six parts.
December
The month is still young, but this one is great. Talking Timbuktu brings together Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Touré for an African blues jam. Good stuff. Check out Ai Du.
Emmet Connolly collected a bunch of worthy quotes from reading Brian Eno’s book, A Year with Swollen Appendices. I didn’t figure him to be so cantankerous. My two favorites:
I gave a talk about self-generating systems and the end of the era of reproduction Äî imagining a time in the future when kids say to their grandparents, “So you mean you actually listened to exactly the same thing over and over again?”
and
Once we get used to the idea that we are no longer consumers of “finished” works, but that we are people who engage in conversations and interactions with things, we find ourselves leaving a world of “know you own station” passivity and we start to develop a taste for active engagement. We stop regarding things as fixed and unchangeable, as preordained, and we increasingly find ourselves practicing the idea that we have some control.
“I have learned throughout my life as a composer chiefly through my mistakes and pursuits of false assumptions, not by my exposure to founts of wisdom and knowledge.” —Stravinsky
Doctor Atomic at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra
Doctor Atomic is a new-ish opera about Dr. Oppenheimer, his team, and the first test of the atomic bomb at Los Alamos. I saw the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s semi-staged version on Friday night. It was all played and sung well enough. Parts of it were good. Some parts were outstanding—Oppenheimer’s aria on John Donne’s Batter my heart, three-person’d God was an incredible piece of music, if not storytelling (here’s a recording and a video of the solo). And the gut-wrenching countdown carried by the orchestra in the second act was a ton of fun. What suspense!
But some parts on the journey were just dreadfully boring. People sing about the weather and scientific devices and stand around and smoke. There’s no real look inside their head and they don’t seem to have motivations. The final seconds of the ending—recorded voices of a victim asking for help coupled with the image of a Japanese mother and child projected against the backdrop—just seemed plain old tacky and self-congratulatory in a dangerous way. When you omit the few weeks that happened between the first test and the first bombings, the ambiguity and the wonderful moral dilemma of the time gets washed out.
Awesome? No. Worth seeing? Mostly. Read Greg Sandow’s comments on Doctor Atomic and Ron Rosenbaum on why he walked out.
Though I’ve been a percussion player/enthusiast for a number of years, I’d never heard of a hang drum until I got clued in at Crushing Krisis last week. Hang is like a hybrid of a steel drum, gamelan, and an udu. Here’s a video of some hang playing. It’s a pretty sweet instrument and it’s too bad that the only manufacturer is on hiatus right now. Can’t find the thing anywhere.
I recommend Wieland Samolak’s 1993 album, Steady State Music:
When I was a teenager I used to sit on an empty field listening for hours to the sounds of distant cars, railroads, helicopters, and other motorized objects. These sounds, which are very rough and noisy when they are near, attracted me from the distance because they had merged and diffused into a continuum when they reached my ears. By this experience it came to my mind that it is more satisfying for me to listen to continuous changes within one sound than to the combinations of discreet sonic events usually found in music.
RjDj uses your iPhone and the environment you’re in to make soundscapes, etc. It’s some sort of sampler with echo and reverb or other scenes that makes life more like you’re on something. There’s a couple good videos of RjDj on geobloggers. [via funkaoshi]
To celebrate its 120th anniversary, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is giving away a symphony every day. Yes, please. Here’s the selection:
Franz Schubert – Symphony no. 8 ‘Unfinished’
Ludwig van Beethoven – Symphony no. 2
Felix Mendelssohn – Symphony no. 4 ‘Italian’
C?©sar Franck – Symphony in D minor
Gustav Mahler – Symphony no. 1
Anton??n Dvo?ô?°k – Symphony no. 8
Camille Saint-Sa?´ns – Symphony no. 3 ‘Organ’
Jean Sibelius – Symphony no. 2
Anton Bruckner – Symphony no. 8
Johannes Brahms – Symphony no. 2
What a nice surprise. Since you asked my opinion, I’d download the Schubert, the Dvo?ô?°k, and definitely grab the Sibelius—one of my favorites, period. Mahler, Bruckner, and Saint-Sa?´ns would be next if I had to choose. And if you get 6, you might as well get the rest… [via classical convert]
NPR’s 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century, with excerpts from each.
A Romance on Three Legs (review: 4/5)
Spoiler: Katie Hafner‘s book, A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano, is one of the most enjoyable I’ve read this year, a really nice little page-turner.
Glenn Gould was one of the great pianists of the 20th century, known as much for his personal quirks as for his musicianship. Gould’s eccentricities are pretty well documented. His increasingly reclusive, kind of paranoid personality led him to eventually abandon the concert stage in favor of the recording studio:
Gould had come to hate the risk-taking associated with live performances and grew tired of what he called the “non-take-two-ness” of the concert experience. He believed that people were just waiting for him to mess up, and he resented it. ‘To me this is heartless and ruthless and senseless. It is exactly what prompts savages like Latin Americans to go to bullfights.’
The new-to-me, perhaps even more interesting character in this book is Verne Edquist. Edquist got cataracts as a child. Surgery didn’t work and he lost most of his sight. He was sent to a school for the blind to learn a trade, where he took up piano tuning. His ears were very good, and he gradually worked his way up the ranks from basic tuning, to regulating the piano action (tweaking the mechanics), to tone regulating (tweaking the timbre and tone color across the full range of the instrument).
The third character in this book is CD 318, a Steinway concert grand piano. Gould was an extremely sensitive musician. His enviable technique and his own neuroses made it especially hard to find a decent piano. After flirting with a couple other pianos, the light, fast touch of CD 318 won him over. Edquist would become the primary tuner to understand Gould’s needs and service his instrument. The book tells their story.
Along the way, there are a couple nice digressions that lead into how pianos are made, how piano tuners work, the origins of sponsored musicians with exclusive company endorsements, and the history of Steinway & Sons (during wartime they were forced into making coffins and airplanes, among other things). And there are a couple nice tidbits like, “in the early twentieth century, piano tuners outnumbered members of any other trade in English insane asylums.”
I was listening to my last.fm library this afternoon and noticed that Johann Sebastian Bach is on tour, 300+ years and still going strong.
Mark Larson 