Barbie Girl (a la Cello Quartet)
This sounds about ten billion times better then the original (which isn’t exactly hard, admittedly):
The Stupidest Music Lawsuit Ever - Infringing on Cage’s 4′33″
The internet is riddled through with music copyright infringement lawsuits, like a great big illegal swiss cheese; so you’re probably pretty used to reading about people ripping off music and getting sued for it. Well this might still shock your lawsuit-jaded self: in 2002 the composer Mike Batt made a six-figure, out-of-court settlement for infringing on John Cage’s 1952 work, 4′33″.
Yes, that 4′33″. The silent one.
It started when Batt and his band The Planets released a crossover classical (I hate that term) album called Classical Graffiti. Apparently Batt wanted to separate out the slightly differently styled tracks towards the end, and thought it would be fun to do this with a track called “One Minute Silence (after Cage)”. This was credited to Batt/Cage.
Shortly after the album was released (and went to number one in the UK classical charts) Mike was contacted by Peters Edition, the publisher of Cage’s work demanding one-quarter of the royalties from the sale of the song.
They argued over this for a while - interestingly provoking the kind of discussion which Cage had originally intended when he first performed the piece: does it truly qualify as a work? If not, why? There was even a side-by-side concert performance of the two pieces in London, so that the, errr, differences could be clarified.
Eventually, Batt settled out of court for an undisclosed six-figure sum. However, he indicated that Peters had acknowledged they probably didn’t have much of a case, and he was donating the money out of respect for John Cage, to the John Cage Trust.
I suppose the real issue wasn’t so much the copying of silence (otherwise there’d be a hell of a lot more lawsuits…) but the fact that Batt credited Cage as a writer. Still, you would hope that Peter’s would have had a bit more of an open mind. That’s probably way too high an expectation for the music-suing business of today.
Incidentally, Batt ended up re-registering the track using his pseudonym “Clint Cage”. Also incidentally, Batt was the guy who came up with the theme tune to the Wombles, as well as the music for the famous Art Garfunkel “Bright Eyes” track in Watership Down.
Lessons in Listening
Ooo I kind of like this. These two musicians have decided to run “lessons in listening” out of their home: they pump you full of light refreshments and then play classical music at you. Well sort of. The idea is to experience classical music without the snobbery, but with a pretty expert guide leading the way a bit. Now if they could stick some of their classes up online it’d be pretty great and I’d gush over it.
And if that isn’t an incentive I can’t possibly conceive of what is.
Admittedly their webpages could do with a little tad of touching up - the text is all overlapping everything when I view it in Firefox, but that doesn’t really detract much from the niceness of the concept. I hope it’s successful. Also, The Green Hornist is a pretty cunning name.
You can read a bit more about their aims an, errr, stuff where I read about ‘em originally, on Kenneth Wood’s blog here and here.
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On a completely unrelated note - I just listened to Prokofiev’s violin sonata no. 1 for the first time and it kicks arse. I think it has certain standard Prokofievy elements to it (there’s something frequently common in the scales he uses, and of course there are the omnipresent slow-fast changeups) but instead of sounding all “Ahh yes, Sergei’s at it again. How cute.” it’s a little more biting, a little sharper. It has a mouth packed full with a little more teeth.
When my new headphones get here tomorrow I’ll be able to listen to it a lot more, they bloody died by accidentally getting crushed into a knot in my hand luggage on my recent Trip of Doom and Despair.
Shosty’s Symphony No. 4
Blah blah blah Shostakovich. A while ago I was wondering if this piece was going to move off of my “monopolizing mp3 listening time” and onto my “top x favorites of all time” list. Well, it’s pretty much there I reckon. Here’s a youtubefied bit of probably my favorite section from the last movement:
[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCS2OI4j2LM[/YOUTUBE]
I think it’s Gergiev and the LSO. The playing is a bit dry and uninspired sounding in a couple places (particularly the stringy section which goes on for a few minutes before the huge old banging climax) but it’s a pretty decent rendition. I like my Rostropovich version better though.
I love the first section in particular. It’s flitty and flighty and playful right at the start, and almost lets itself get out of control - but then there is that wonderfully ominous interruption about 12 seconds in, which then fades back into a ridiculously lighthearted bassoon theme. The section which follows is then a sort of loose and messy bunch of variations on that cheeky bassoon section. Then, after a couple of minutes of this (at about 2:05, and again at about 5:50) it switches gear into a weird circusy sort of waltz. Fantastic (and schizophrenic) stuff.
When you listen to the whole symphony this section is smack in the middle of the last movement, which comes in at almost 30 minutes. This is a frickin’ huge symphony. The first movement is almost the same length, and the middle one is an additional 10 minutes. It’s a huge orchestra as well. I’d love to see this one live.
I remember the first time I listened to this I thought all the mood changes sounded completely stupid, and that the playful bits were completely over the top and out of place. Now after listening to it repeatedly I think their out of place, contrasty nature makes it even better. It’s funny how that works out. Often the things which seem most appealing at first end up fizzling out very quickly, whereas the uncomfortable, unappealing stuff ends up growing on you.
The rest of the symphony is on youtube at (broken up because youtube can’t handle videos longer than 10 minutes):
1st movement: 1 2 3 (third part includes start of 2nd movement)
2nd movement: 1 (includes start of third movement)
My (Non)Classical Music and the Future of Poppy Pop
Since I spent a good proportion of the first section of my life not really listening to classical music at all, I have a pretty decent chunk of my music collection devoted to that genre. Well it’s not really a genre is it, kind of more a genre-absence or something. You know what I mean though. Lets see how much classical versus non-classical I have:
“Classical” = 20 Gigabytes
“Modern” (well, I had to come up with some kind of directory name) = 18 Gigabytes
I’ve managed to amass more classical music in the last three years than I managed to collect non-classical in the previous 10 years. I’m doing pretty well, I reckon. It’s reassuring, exciting and slightly intimidating that I still have a reasonably long time to discover all kinds of musical gems over the rest of my life. I want to be able to identify every movement of every reasonably major work of every reasonably major composer. Not too big a goal is it?
I think it’s easier to build up classical quicker than non-classical though, as every CD I get is pretty much filled up right to the brim with quality music, whereas tonnes of the Non-C (saying non-classical all the time is so bloody unwieldy) CD’s are around 50 minutes or so in length, and a good proportion of those 50 minutes ain’t that great.
That’s a big difference for me between C and Non-C music, with the former you frequently get 4o minutes of engaging, ten-out-of-ten music, whereas that hardly ever happens with the latter. I’d have trouble thinking of ten non-C albums which I think are universally superb - which I would regularly be happy to listen all the way through to.
Maybe that’’s a reason why the CD selling industry is dying a slow death. Instead of people being obliged to buy albums crammed full of filler just because they want the two decent singles which bracket all that rubbish, people now can download those two singles online. I doubt it’ll be too long before the poppiest popstars purely release online singles, and don’t bother with albums at all anymore.