Author: Matthew Eilar
Just a dude with a stereo, a computer, and a brain.
Another Great Blog
I’ve been meaning for a while to update my blogroll (I’ll get around to it when I can), but I recently came across Letters of Note, a cool blog that consists of letters from different people in time and history. It’s basically a grab bag of interesting primary sources, and a very fun place to kill some time. Here are a couple examples of the stuff they have:
1. A letter from Richard Nixon to President Reagan:
I don’t know if I’ve blogged about my irrational fascination with Richard Nixon, but I loved reading that. The man had balls.
2. A letter from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol
Go check it out! All notes are transcribed on the blog.
Links
I’ve been way too busy to update this blog. But here are some links that have been cluttering up my bookmarks:
1. “Even a Radiohead fan can appreciate Mozart”
I wish I could like this Boston Globe op-ed by Harvard sophomore Matt Aucoin. I really like the idea that younger people should be more receptive to the idea of attending classical music concerts, and not feel intimidated by the… old.
But I don’t know what it is that rubs me the wrong way. It might be the smarmy, self-congratulary tone. It might be the lame joke about Twitter and NYC Prep. It could be the headline (which I will admit Aucoin almost certainly had nothing to do with): Radiohead is actually fairly sophisticated pop music. A better lede would be “even a Lady GaGa fan can appreciate Mozart.”
2. This arrangement of “How Great Thou Art”
3. The Biggest Baby You’ve Ever Seen
A 19.2 pound baby. Story here.
Samuel Barber
Reed’s chamber choir is doing the Samuel Barber choral song set “Reincarnations” this semester. I had heard the pieces last year at the Chanticleer concert I blogged about last year. At the time, it didn’t make much of an impression on me, but as I have been listening to the pieces these past couple of days, I’m appreciating how good they are, and exactly why I love Samuel Barber’s music (it must be said that I think one of the reasons I didn’t think much of the piece at the time was that Chanticleer is an all male chorus. I really think that something in the piece is lost when there aren’t sopranos screeching in the ether.).
I’ve always found vertical harmony more interesting than voice leading. I guess there’s something to be said for the idea that those two things cannot be separated, but one of my favorite things about the late Romantic period and 1930’s-50’s Americana is the big, meaty, interesting chords they use and the sudden changes in tonality they bring. I sometimes wonder if that perspective is an artifact of my immersion in rock and pop right as I gained critical maturity. Barber’s use of vertical harmony is always interesting. His most famous piece, Adagio for Strings is basically just beautiful chords moving from one to another.
Barber also makes me think about what it means to be a genius. I’m taking a class on Minimalism right now, and one of my teacher’s favorite aphorisms is that, “All great composers have been avant-garde.” Barber was never really avant-garde. His music used all of the techniques available of the time (according to Wikipedia, he even wrote some atonal music late in his career) but he was never known for pushing the boundaries of the tonality of his time. He worked in traditional genres and orchestration arrangements. And yet, I think some of his music is truly sublime, and near-perfect. Now, it’s possible that it’s just too early to say that Barber will be remembered by music history. It’s also true that he is probebly not the first name that pops up in someone’s head when talking about 20th century composers. But I do think that to ignore him becuase he wasn’t avant-garde would be a mistake, because his music is well crafted, unique, and genuine.
This is a little bit of a non sequiter, but that last idea reminded me of an article that I once read somewhere that framed the conflict between Schoenberg-style serialism and Coplandesque simplicity as one between straights and gays. Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Berg, all straight. Barber, Copland, Berenstein, huge queens. It’s not a serious argument, but sometimes I wonder if that delicacy and sensitivity to aesthetics found in their music is a wierd expression of the person. Probebly not. There were/are gay serialists, and the whole idea rests on stereotypes. Still, I wonder if my aesthetic preferences have something to do with the way that they wrote their music.
*The CD that the above YouTube video steals from is The Dale Warland Singer’s Reincarnations, which is top notch. I cannot reccomed it highly enough. I would have embedded the other pieces in the set, however they are not all available on YouTube, and the live versions there are a little inconsistent. Here’s the two other pieces in renditions that are not too bad:
Reincarnations I: Mary Hynes
RIP Alicia De Larrocha
Spanish pianist Alicia De Larrocha has died. When I was about ten, I recieved a CD of Romantic classics. Totally cheezy album art (it was called Dreams of Love: The Ultimate Romantic Piano Collection) and packaging, but it was really good for me at the time. It was my first exposure to some of the biggest solo piano standards of that period, and definitely reinforced my love for rubato and the pedal-heavy virtuosity of that literature.
One of the tracks was Alicia De Larrocha playing one of Grieg’s Lyrics Pieces. I remember imagining what she might look at. Alicia De Larrocha is one of the greatest names ever; it is stacatto in the given name and a precipitando in the double r building toward a climax. I imagined that she was thin, with dark hair and an inscrutable expression that spoke to the depth of emotion that she accessed to play her music.
Of course, De Larrocha was a short woman that looks like she could be a cool granny. But still I feel like we have a connection, and I am sorry to hear that she has passed.
hammer & jack 