web log (late 20th c. – early 21st c.)
Via Noble Viola, this kind of wacky chamber version of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune:
It’s amazing to me how the different orchestration creates a completely different piece; the string section in the orchestral version does so much to create the impression of a verdant, secluded glade (that’s always where I imagine the piece taking place).
Despite my infrequent updating, November and December of 2010 were the most successful months that Mouth of the Beast has ever had. The blog has now passed 20,000 pageviews. Thank you for visiting!
I don’t actually know that you’re all men,and it’s been more than a year.
December flew by this year due to the combination of an unusually busy finals week and the fast-paced holiday season. Still, I managed to watch, read and listen to quite a few things.
TV is what I’ve paid the least attention to this break. Just after Thanksgiving, I finally finished the fifth season of The Wire, which killed my appetite for TV dramas. I did watch the third season of In Treatment, which I liked immensely through about the middle of the season, then lost interest in. I don’t think I’ll go back and watch the first two seasons. In other kinds of TV, I enjoyed the first season of Darker than Black, an (English dubbed) anime series available through Netflix. It was a worthy contender in my ongoing quest to find a series that can stand with Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, which is my favorite anime series and my favorite animated show, period. Less worthy, but also good was Fullmetal Alchemist, which I somehow hadn’t seen before. The only series that I’ve watched over the break has been season two of Parks and Recreation. Many of my friends like P&R, but I’m having a hard time getting in to it. It’s an awkward hybrid between realistic, observational office humor (à la vintage The Office) and absurd wacky hijinks humor that I get really tired of. Part of my problem with the show is that I really don’t like Amy Poehler, I find her really annoying and not funny. I am enjoying Rashida Jones, Aubrey Plaza and (in small doses, because the show leans on him way too hard) Aziz Ansari.
I haven’t been listening to much classical music–I usually give my ears a break after finals. One new work that I’ve enjoyed very much is William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony from 1934. Dawson was an important arranger of spirituals and one of the preeminent black composers of his time, but I love the symphony for the gorgeous orchestration and colors. Another piece that I’ve been trying to grapple with is Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Times. Messiaen is one of the composers that I’ve constantly revisited over the last three years because I always feel like I’m gaining a new appreciation for what his music does, even while not completely understanding it.
I’ve been catching up with a bunch of my favorite pop artists this break, as well as discovering or re-discovering new artists. The most random rediscovery has been Fleetwood Mac’s album Tusk. I’m not familiar with much of their other music, so it might be that all of their music is like this, but this album is a great blend of tight harmonies, heterogeneous song styles, 80’s production, and these little musical details that I seem to discover again every time I listen to the album. After taking a break of three or four years, I started listening to the music of Owen Pallett, formerly Final Fantasy. I discovered him around the same time as I started listening to Andrew Bird, but I have always thought that Pallett was the better songwriter. Bird’s songs always seem like novelty songs, even though his musicianship and arrangement skills are better than that (I should confess that one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to was an Andrew Bird concert). Pallett has continued to push himself, and his 2010 album Heartland is really interesting and really good. Another band that I’ve been looking back on is The National. Boxer is one of my favorite albums, and I’ve been trying to listen to their two other critically acclaimed albums, Alligator and High Violet.
I’ve spent a lot of time the past few weeks grappling with two enormous, deeply interesting albums, Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and Sufjan Steven’s The Age of Adz. I don’t think these albums are that dissimilar, and they’re interesting in similar ways. Sufjan’s album was surprising, and perhaps upsetting, so some people because it incorporated a lot of electronic elements and seemed to turn it’s back completely on the formula that made him popular through the album Illinoise (although this turn in his music was not surprising to anyone who heard “You Are The Blood” on last year’s compilation album Dark Was the Night). Even more, by using T-Painesque Auto-Tune, he seems to be poking a stick at those of his fans who use “Auto-Tune” as a shorthand for the moral decay of modern music that Sufjan’s bardic banjo-and-flutes music was supposed to be a corrective against. Still, the differences between Illinoise and Age of Adz are more superficial than aesthetic, and I think any fans put off by the glitchy noise are going to misremember their opinion of the album in 10 years. I feel pretty unqualified to write anything about Kanye’s album, as I don’t listen to much rap, nor have I heard his other albums (except the near omnipresent “Stronger”). Still, I’m critiquing the album mostly as pop music. Although it’s not as dramatic a stylistic shift as the Sufjan album, MBDTF is a rejection of a formula as well, something that I only began to appreciate after listening to his 2007 album Graduation. There’s no trace of the good-natured cockiness of “Good Life” or “Champion.” Instead, everything–from the album’s unwieldy title to its obscene and weird cover to the filthy Chris Rock routine at the end of “Blame Game”–seems calculated to dare listeners to pull away. And like the Sufjan album, it’s polished, it’s catchy as hell, and it’s great.
Posting has been a little light of late. The school year has started, and that means that I’ve been scrambling around trying to figure out where my time should be going each week. As of yet, this has not included the blog, but I do like to blog to procrastinate, so I hope that things will pick up again soon.
This year will be a big change from last year. I’m only taking one music class, a big change from last year which was almost all music classes. The class is on 20th Century Modernism, and I signed up for it mostly because of the discomfort that I have with that period of music. It’s a vast body of work, and it spans from things that I consider some of my favorite music (the ballets of Stravinsky) to things that go completely over my head (Pierrot Lunaire). Modernism is something that is easiest for me to accept in abstract terms–I love modern architecture and visual art–than in any ideological sense (I’ve never been able to understand why a Modern novel is considered as such). Music falls somewhere in between those art forms to me, and I’d like to learn what the intellectual framework of Modernism is at the same time as studying the major works.
So imagine my surprise when the first assigned piece was Maurice Ravel’s Bolero. A whole week. No assigned readings, just listening.
It’s kind of weird for me to think of Bolero as a Modernist piece of music at all, if only because I tend to associate Modernism with “difficult music.” This partly has to do with the way that Modern things are dismissed in our culture, but also with the belief that I have that some composers worked at making their music as inaccessible as possible. Perhaps that’s not true, and I may move away from it. But Bolero is not inaccessible.
I was worried at first that there would not be enough to say about the piece to last three classes, and to Ravel’s credit, that wasn’t true. At the same time, this week has been an exercise in close listening more than analysis. My professor tried to steer us towards analytical clichés like portrayals of the “other” in the second theme versus the “familiar” first theme. The repetition inherent in the piece shut down many analytical avenues, and I thought that the most valuable discussions centered on the orchestration of the piece.
Whatever the dividends, I’ll never again dismiss Bolero as a boring joke.
I love this video of Yeol Eum Sun performing Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze,” from Cantata 208.
I’ve just discovered the lectures, archived at The Guardian, that Andras Schiff delivered covering all 32 of the Beethoven piano sonata. They’re fascinating, showing the way that a performer approaches the sonatas from both a theory and performance perspectives. They have already made me much more familiar with these genius compositions.
hammer & jack 