Classical Convert

Still Away, Back Soon!

Hi everybody! I’m still in the land of not really any web access to call my own. It’s absolutely fantastic that the first time I’m back in the UK for a summer - as opposed to winter - vacation, it turns out to be the wettest month ever recorded and the entirety of Sheffield is under about seventy feet of water. The power was out for five hours yesterday.

I did finally get my lost luggage back, which is nice. However it was after I had left for the continent and replaced a bunch of stuff I thought was gone for good. This trip is one headache after another. I have yet to fully bitch about it.

Anyway, a quick bit of music. This piece is an interesting read about the playing of “live” operas in cinemas, and the rather spectacular attendence this draws, along with the usual “classical music is saved!” type commentary.

I’ll be back and writing soon, if nothing else horrifically awful happens…

Vacation

Yeah… no updates recently. That’s because I’m in the middle of travelling and dealing with Delta losing my luggage and delaying me for a day. Sleeping on the floor in JFK really isn’t much fun….

I Hate Shuffling (and Labwork)

Oooh look, I’m all stressed out and vaguely frustrated (in a sort of muffled, undirected, stubbed toe kind of fashion) this evening. Largely this is due to returning to lab until 11 o’ clockish because I feel horribly guilty about skiving off work to go home to England next week. That and my supervisor apparently wasn’t aware that it’s next week I’m leaving, and not next-next week. That, and she sounded annoyed that it was for such a long time. Or at least, that’s how I read the undertones of her eMail this morning. So much guilt… I should convert to Catholicism. Then I could buy the domain catholicconvert.com.

Oh, wait, that one’s already taken.

Anyway, I wasn’t just going to bitch and moan about work. I was also going to bitch and moan about listening to music on shuffle. I hate listening to music on shuffle. Both classical (which clearly is more ridiculous as it’s bloody painful to hear isolated movements. Usually.) and pop. I like to choose my own program. If I’m in a particularly flighty mood than I’ll search through forty seconds before the current track ends, but my musical near future is way to important to trust to a second-rate pseudo-random-number generator.

My sister is completely different. She always randoms up everything in her playlist. That’s probably why she’s in the arts and I’ve stuck myself in sciencey land. She’s the wild flighty type and I’m the type who complains about a button on their music system at 11:57pm instead of going to bed.

Hmmm. Perhaps I shouldn’t have gone back to lab quite so late, it appears to have a tad of a detrimental effect.

On a more positive note, these Schoenberg Orchestral Variations are sounding better and better. That doesn’t mean I believe in atonalism though…that’ll be yet another moaning session, comign soon. Aren’t ya excited?

The Beauty of Limited Musical Capacity

I don’t have much space for music, not when I’m moving around all over the place. I “only” (my oh my haven’t we become spoiled for storage) have space for the equivalent of about 10 CD’s on my ever so cute little iAudio, pictured delicately on the right, but I quite like it that way. I think there is something powerful and resourceful and necessity is the mother of invention-ul about restricted disk space when it comes to portable audio.

With only 10 CD’s worth of music on me at any particular time, I can’t always listen to the first piece which pops into my head, because it’s probably sitting at home instead of on my MP3 player. This means I listen to something else instead, something actually on hand and available, and so ironically carrying around a reduced selection of listening material results in me listening to a broader selection of music.

I used to have one of those massive oil-tanker style jobbies that held (most of) my music collection at the time, around 200 CD’s worth. At that time it was mostly full of non-classical stuff, since it was a first grad school summer purchase, and my classical collection consisted of about five CD’s. When it finally died I was kinda loath to get one with less space, it’s hard to reduce the size of your portable library. However, I was even more loath to spend 300 bucks on a new MP3 player, so instead I shelled out 1/3 of that for 1/20 of the space, but in a sexily compact 1/4 of the volume.

I’ve never regretted that decision.

I love being limited. With my old massively spaced player I’d get slightly bored of something and go sliding through all the songs until something caught my eye. Not too oddly, it was usually something I already knew pretty well, and so those kept getting reinforced. Nowadays when I get bored I usually have to settle for something less ideal than the instant fix would be, getting me to more thoroughly explore things which have been languishing for attention, and generating new favorites quicker than before. I think I actually like it better this way

So if you’re ever worried about carrying around less music in a smaller package, it might not be nearly so bad as you think. Having said all that, I’m pretty concerned at the thought of choosing only 10 CD’s to take with me when I go back to England for two weeks… It’s kind of a different story when you can’t swap out all the music at the end of the day!

Things currently on my MP3 player:

Shostakovich - Symphony No. 4 and No. 14, Rostropovich (I’m really getting into both of these, especially the last movement of the former. The Russian version of 14 kicks arse, also. I like it way more than Haitink’s)

Bartok - String quartets 2, 4, 6 - I haven’t quite worked these out yet. Actually I haven’t quite worked out my general feelings about Bartok, I like his stuff, but it also always leaves me kind of cold.

R. Strauss - Four Last Songs/Songs with Orchestra - I like these quite a lot. They really feel like they’re straddling the old and the new. I need to listen to them a tonne (yep, metric) more though.

Shostakovich - Marina Tsvetaeva and Alexander Blok - God I love these two so much. They’re both dreary as hell, like Sunday evenings when I was a kid. The memories of the day in the countryside with my family fading, and Monday weighing in like lead.

Schoenberg - Serenade/Variations for Orchestra - Hmmm. I think I might actually like this but I’m not sure yet. I’ll get back to you. It probably deserves a whole post.

Schubert - Trout Quintet/Death and the Maiden - Schubert’s one of the few big guys I don’t know too well, but these bad boys are pretty wild.

Prokofiev - Symphony No. 1 and No. 6 - The former is pleasant and playful and charming (especially the sexy Gavotte), but the latter is amazing, particularly the bleak, shivering, dissonant start to the second movement.

A Quickie

This is pretty amusing: “To: Guy Who Screamed Obscenities at the Ballet the Other Night“