The first “real” baritone I ever heard was Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. He had a quality to his voice that I had never heard before (or since, for that matter). He had a powerful element to his voice; however, he was always able to keep it light. Unfortunately, he’s gone.
DFD was known for singing Schubert. This recording is one of the deepest cuts of the Schubert lieder and it’s the only song for which Schubert also wrote the text. Fittingly the translation means “Farewell”. Of all of Schubert’s great and important songs, this 1:47 is my favorite.
I can’t quote anything from Jeremy Denk’s most recent post about his experience (in the macro sense) with the last three Schubert Sonatas. It wouldn’t do it justice.
Let me just say that while Denk is writing about an experience with a piece of Classical Music, what he’s really writing about is art and life. All concert reviewers take note.
Sometimes the universe converges to a single beautiful pinpoint.
In an epic chat [full text] with David MacDonald I learned about a new (to me) method of experiencing music in which the music is all in your head. This is Cage taken to the next level. Well, today, while pruning my wildly overgrown RSS feeds I read this article about Cage’s music that concluded with a paragraph about David Dunn’s Purposeful Listening in Complex States of Time. This piece is akin to, if not exactly, what David MacDonald described to me.
The piece is a virtuosic composition for solo listener. I played/listened (???) to the first couple bars. I love it.
I don’t think this idea needs to be confined to silent pieces. I could see this idea working for audience and musicians where the audience is directed to listen to certain areas in the hall, frequencies, or whatever while a score that is crafted to enhance the audience experience is performed. Not only does this idea engage an audience in a way that is badly needed; but, it also translates to a recorded at-home performance. The latter opens an opportunity for a composer to sell copies of the score to the audience as well as the performing ensemble, which addresses yet another problem of within classical music.
German artist Markus Reugels specializes in high-speed and macro photography. By isolating the basslines from techno tracks, Markus captured these incredible (and brief) moments of explosive colour.
These are beautiful and interesting. I wish there were audio samples.
This reminds me of what John Cage said about his listening experience in the anechoic chamber:
Going into the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, I expected to hear no sound at all, because it was a room made as silent as possible. But in that room I heard two sounds. And I was so surprised that I went to the engineer in charge … and said, There’s something wrong, there’re two sounds in that room, and he said describe them, and I did, one was high and one was low, and he said, the high one was my nervous system … and the low one was my blood circulating. So I realized that … I was making music unintentionally continuously.1
Marc Weidenbaum, “Quotes of the Week: John Cage, Tom Phillips” (accessed 5 April 2012) <disquiet.com>. ↩
I mentioned my system on this week’s episode of SoundNotion and it was met with the normal snickering and jokes. Some might think I’m tightly wound. They may be right.
As I sit here working on importing a forty-gallon bin of CDs before I ship them off to the great CD bin in the sky (Amazon), I’m confronted with my complete collection of Michael Brecker’s catalog. Until tonight I’ve had mp3 versions of Brecker’s music in my iTunes. I owned the CDs and I knew I could just pull them out at any time. Those are the thoughts from a man of days gone by. I don’t “pull them out” because CDs are a hassle. I don’t even have a disc player (of any kind) in my stereo system any more.
The future of recorded music is bits and bytes, not atoms. I am shameful that I have been missing more than half of the bits of my most revered musician.
So, snicker as you will. Michael Brecker isn’t coming back. What’s left of him is in these artifacts. And I don’t want to miss another bit.
So although they call this the “2012 Biennial Conference of the North American Saxophone Alliance,” what they really have here is a festival of contemporary music (albeit a saxophone-centric one). After all, what else would you call a four-day music event that involves multiple venues, dozens of concerts, top-notch performances of solo, chamber, and concert music by world-class players, and no less than 76 (!) world premieres?
This is, to my knowledge, the first time that a major music news outlet has covered the biennial saxophone conference.1 Lias forewent my performance to hike in the northern Phoenix mountains, a travesty for which I am willing to forgive, because he covered so many of my friends and colleagues from Michigan State University. I hope he makes it out to the next one!
Searching is one thing, but what if you could just open an app on your Mac (or PC, if you must) and have access to all of the music on your computer PLUS all of the music on Spotify, Grooveshark, Last.fm, Soundcloud, YouTube, Ex.fm, etc.1
The Tomahawk “Project” (I’m calling it that) is an open-source, cross-platform solution to plugging the holes of each service’s catalogs. There’s a social aspect baked in as well, if you’re into that.
Right now it’s a desktop-only solution. I would really like to see where this went if there was a mobile version. That would be huge.
You’ll need a paid account at Spotify and Grooveshark to use those services. ↩
From the Wall Street Journal’s Michaeleen Doucleff:
Twenty years ago, the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a simple experiment. He asked music lovers to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps. Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an “appoggiatura.”
Doucleff is explaining this in the context of discovering why Adele’s Someone Like You has a physiological effect on many listeners (not me). The tension-release paradigm is old hat for most musicians. But this physiological response to dissonance resolving to consonance explains something to me about the way I hear non-tonal music.
When I first encountered non-tonal music I had a resistance to accepting that much dissonance. It was difficult to make sense of music that did not have the foundation of tonic and dominant. Nonetheless, tonality was something I could get over. It was the lack of emotional connection with the music that I really missed.1
Not too much later I discovered non-tonal music that does not strictly avoid consonance, and my ear got very good at leaping from consonance to consonance — or dopamine squirt to dopamine squirt as Dr. Sloboda concludes. Music with drones, such as Berio’s Sequenza VII, or music with non-western scales such as many of Giacinto Scelci’s pieces, or music that combines both such as Masakazu Natsuda’s West or Evening Song in Autumn became, and in many ways still are, my favorites.
Something about serial music always left me cold. I always gravitate toward Karel Husa, Charles Ives, Chen Yi, rather than the Second Viennese School or the integral serialists. I think that may be because any consonance at all triggers my endocrine system to fire some pleasure juice into my brain. I am willing to go a long time without consonance, and I’m willing to let that moment of “resolution” be very brief, or possibly imagined. All I know is that when it happens the feeling is rapturous and addictive.
Only now do I realize that the music to which I was listening — Schoenberg, Babbitt, and probably Cage — was designed to remove the emotional connection in lieu of mathematical or chance practices. Except Schoenberg, who was merely failing at writing non-tonal Romantic music. ↩
Aside from the spectacle of the GRAMMY awards, I find little use for them as a consumer of music. They frequently reward established artists, which is to say, it’s essentially a popularity contest. But, everyone knows that. So I watch to see Dave Grohl eschew computers in music and then play with a completely synthesized-music group.1 I still don’t understand the Adele phenomenon; but, it sounds like she’s singing with healthier technique. So there’s that.
There’s also The GRAMMY Awards you didn’t see, which, if you didn’t know, include sixty-eight awards presented in the afternoon before the televised portion.2 Therein lies my, and likely your, main area of focus: the classical, recording/production, and jazz awards. It’s unfortunate that the networks won’t televise this part of the day too. And the rich get richer, etc., etc., etc..
My final impression regarding the music that matters (to me) is that I fondly recall the days when the NAXOS label was producing budget-friendly discs of music outside the normal cannon. Today they do all that; but, they win GRAMMYs for it.
This should not undermine Grohl’s larger point, with which I completely agree. Grohl said:
To me this award means a lot because it shows that the human element of music is what’s important. Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that’s the most important thing for people to do.
It’s not about being perfect, it’s not about sounding absolutely correct, it’s not about what goes on in a computer. It’s about what goes on in here [your heart] and what goes on in here [your head].
For the past week, Santorum has been using his campaign to take aim at an issue he feels to be the single most dangerous force in America today: Satanism in heavy metal. “If you listen to the radio today, many of these brand new, so-called heavy metal music bands like Black Sabbath, Venom, The WASP and Iron Maiden use satanic imagery to corrupt the minds of young people,” announced Santorum at a 10,000 dollar a plate sock-hop in Valdosta, Georgia on Thursday.
I would like to post the whole article, because it’s all so frighteningly good. Just go read it.
For the Facebook-Moms and the otherwise concerned citizens, there’s no credible study that definitively links violent imagery with acts of violence or crime.