Tag: Music

Opinionated

Matthew Eilar2 Comments

1. james rhodes

The Guardian has a short profile/interview of the first classical soloist to be signed to Warner’s rock label. He sounds like a swell guy, and I don’t want to make any judgments on his music without hearing it, but a couple things mentioned in the interview make me curious.

Rhodes is also currently presenting his own primetime music show, Piano Man, on Sky Arts, in which he plays his favourite composers, all the while peering at sheet music on his iPad through trendy spectacles.

If he uses the iPad to explain the pieces, or reference the score, to the televised audience, then I think that’s great; I think it’s incredibly valuable for musicians to be able to explain what they’re thinking about as they convert a piece of written music into sound. If he’s just using it as a score…what the fuck does he need a score for?

The other thing that’s kind of bothering me is something that Rhodes probably can’t help. I’m all for changing the uptight appearance standards that soloists and conductors are held to, but if that becomes the conversation about you in place of your music, you come across like a Christian band trying way too hard to prove their “alternative” credentials. His album covers do not inspire confidence. This probably has nothing to do with Rhodes, and everything to do with lazy journalism. I suspect this is the case because of the way that the writer describes Rhodes: “Clearly, this is a man who has no need for added stimulation: it is barely 11am and he is already bouncing off the walls, a tightly wrapped bundle of tics and jitters.” I feel like I read a version of this sentence every time I read about a young (read: under 30) classical musician in a mainstream publication–it’s almost like they go in to the interview barely expecting a pulse, so anything more feels like a revelation.

2. tommasini’s hall of fame

Anthont Tommasini, classical music critic of the New York Times, has compiled his list of the 1o greatest composers of all time. His list:

  1. Bach
  2. Beethoven
  3. Mozart
  4. Schubert
  5. Debussy
  6. Stravinsky
  7. Brahms
  8. Verdi
  9. Wagner
  10. Bartók

I had a couple initial reactions to this list. The first was an appreciation of the long tradition of Western notated music–a tradition so long that you can make a top 10 list like this without saying anything remotely controversial. Of course, not everyone would pick this particular list, however it would be hard to take seriously an argument that any one of these composers does not deserve to be on the list because their music was insubstantial, or there wasn’t enough of it, or that it didn’t distinguish itself from the other music of its time. All of these composers had exceptional, rare talent and it’s only because we have centuries of music to pick from that we can make a list like this.

My second reaction was just awe at just how much music is out there, and how much I have to learn. Beethoven has always been one of my favorite composers, and I was extremely pleased that Tommasini placed him above Mozart. I’ve been blown away by Bach’s music over and over in the context of organ and compositional studies. But about half of the other composers only exist as uninformed, vague impressions in my consciousness. Brahms? Stuffy and heavy. Mozart? Monotonous and empty. Schubert? A complete unknown.

3. miami gets a new, gehry-designed concert hall

At first, I was all fired up to rant about Gehry becoming the go-to starchitect for concert halls, and why don’t we give other architects a chance and blah blah blah…then I actually read the article about the fundraising and construction process and decided that I was being a little bitch.

The picture above is actually the interior of the building. Miami blog Miamism gives a really good overview of the design of the building, what its goals are, and how it fits into the area.

4. conservative conservatory

The NYT published a story that looks a little more in depth at the New England Conservatory’s decision to sever ties with the fledgling El Sistema U.S.A. I’ve gotta say, this stinks to high heaven of an organization underestimating the extent of its commitment, then getting cold feet and backing out.

I think it’s important to keep in mind that El Sistema is supported by the federal government of Venezuela. It was always going to be a challenge for any music institution, or nonprofit organization, to provide the same level of support to a U.S. organization that is provided by the federal government in Venezuela.  The decision to focus on training graduate students rather than directly establishing youth orchestras already was a compromise, and this public vote of no confidence by the New England Conservatory leaves the movement in a weaker position than before the Abreu Fellowship program was established. The program has only been in existence for two years, and that the NEC wants out of the partnership so quickly is a joke, and I can only believe that either the NEC severely underestimated the support it would need to provide to the program for it to have a hope of being effective, or that the organization was acting in bad faith from the beginning. I do not see a way that this does not reflect poorly on the New England Conservatory.

Above all, though, this is a missed opportunity. The NEC had a once in a generation chance (and it’s possible that another organization will take up this mantle) to radically redefine the mission of a top level conservatory. The conservatory’s president, quoted in the article, makes it clear that he wasn’t interested in that, “We really felt this was outside our mission altogether.” Music education has always been a part of the conservatory because so many professional, performing musicians also teach. This was different because it was an attempt to rebuild the musical infrastructure of the country on a societal level. It’s a shame, a shame, that the NEC had so little commitment to this organization in its crucial first years, and such a lack of follow through to see this vision realized.

5. on a lighter note

David Stabler, critic for The Oregonian, writes about an effective use of the second movement of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony in the movie The Kings Speech. I think I’ll always associate that movement with the great children’s audio program Beethoven Lives Upstairs, but I think that it’s best use in film is in the opening credits to Tarsem Singh’s masterpiece The Fall:


The Month in Review: TV and Music

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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.

 

Björk Project Part 2: Debut

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They’re terribly moody
And human behaviour
Then all of a sudden turn happy

But, oh, to get involved in the exchange
Of human emotions
Is ever so, ever so satisfying

-Björk, “Human Behavior”

Listening to Björk’s Debut in the context of her other records, as I did, provides several modes of interpretation. I was struck by how essentially Björk-y it sounded; from the very beginning, she seemed to have her own aesthetic that is consistent throughout all of her music even as they are all different in sound. It’s a little less polished of a record, and also doesn’t have the coherence of her later albums. Unlike Vespertine, for example, which has its own sonic signature and seems to be working with the same musical material, Debut seems to have three different threads running through it:

Continue reading “Björk Project Part 2: Debut” →

Björk Project Part 1: Prelude

Matthew Eilar2 Comments

Like most thinking people, he admires Björk…

-Alex Ross, writing on Esa-Pekka Salonen

That extraordinary statement is found in Alex Ross’ new book, Listen to This. In another chapter, he profiles Björk, presenting her as a rare artist with a unique aesthetic that borrows freely from many musical traditions while still retaining its own identity. Ross observes her working method during the creation of her 2004 album Medúlla. She seems to work as both a composer, holding an idea for a piece in her mind, and as an Eno-style studio technician, blending a multitude of tracks and takes into a whole. Yet still the boldness of the statement surprised me. Not only do thinking people admire Björk, but most thinking people admire Björk. I recognized that the statement is hyperbole, yet I was eager to discover the music that would lead someone (much less a critic that I greatly admire like Ross) to make that hyperbolic statement. So I decided to listen to her catalog.

Björk was an artist that I only knew at the periphery. She existed more in my consciousness as a pop culture figure than as an artist. Before embarking on this project, I was only familiar with three of her songs: “Hyperballad” from Post, “Jóga” from Homogenic and “The Dull Flame of Desire” from Volta. I liked all three of these songs, but they seemed to exist in a musical space that I couldn’t quantify, and for whatever reason, I didn’t pursue the music further. The only other time I remember listening to her music was to play Medúlla once during high school. I didn’t get it, and since I didn’t get it, I assumed there was nothing to get.

Maybe because I’m more musically mature this time around, maybe because I didn’t start with the most difficult and abstract album first, but I’ve completely fallen in love with Björk. Her music is vibrant but frequently profound, always interesting, and can withstand close and repeated listening. This week, I’m going to go through Björk’s catalog, from 1993’s Debut to 2007’s Volta.

[EDIT: It’s inevitable that I write that I’m going to post these all in a week, then get completely behind. These posts are taking a little longer than I expected to (in a good way!).]

Seal

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The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost. – C.S. Lewis

It is an under-appreciated truth that listening to music changes your ears. With every new piece of music you listen to, you gain more points of reference that you can then apply to pieces you have never heard before. This is not a controversial view in other media; few people would argue that knowledge of the Bible is irrelevant to the experience of reading Paradise Lost, for example, or that one’s knowledge of kung-fu tropes affects the experience of watching Kill Bill. This is not always true of music. There is something threatening in the idea that we can grow out of the music that we like, which is, after all, an important part of the way that we express our identities both online and among our peers.

I try and keep my snobbery in check, and in fact, this post has nothing to do with the conclusions and opinions I have come to at this point, but rather about my first foray into the world of popular music.

My childhood home was both full of music and strangely devoid of music. I studied piano from a youngish age, so the sound of me practicing was common. Neither my mother nor my father, however, played music much around the house. Music was mostly something that we all listened to in the car. When my mother drove, that meant oldies radio. I can still sing along to most of the big Motown hits. When my father drove, it was classical music. This meant that I had little engagement with the music of the day, beyond those that were so ubiquitous that I heard them in stores, or at school. I had no musical identity apart from the music my parents listened to and the music that I heard on the radio.

There were a couple of signs that things were going to change–acquiring a small radio that I could listen to in my room, the CD I bought at a church-sponsored concert, access to the internet–but as sometimes happens, there was a particular song and a particular artist that I liked completely independently of my parents. I’d like to say that that artist was someone like Radiohead, or the Pixies, or Sonic Youth. Hell, I’d take the Beatles. But no, although now my present snobby self is somewhat ashamed to admit it, that artist was Seal, and the song was “Kiss From A Rose” (perhaps even more embarrassing, my first encounter with the song was through the soundtrack of Batman Forever).

Continue reading “Seal” →