Classical Convert

Busyness

Well well well, what a busy little weekend we’ve been having over here. There’s been a fancy mix of things which are required (such as shipping g back and forth to Syracuse for exams) and things which are fun (such as spending g’s one hundred dollar gift certificate on copious amounts of alcohol.) In fact, just ten minutes ago we arrived back from an exclusive wall-size movie viewing session. One of the perks of being a grad student is that we can “borrow” things such as HD projectors from the lab.

Given the huge-assed nature of the screen we can spray out of the projector, the film choice was a toss-up between Aliens (one of my absolutely favorite movies of all time) and Children of Men (which most of us had not yet seen). We ended up choosing the latter, and saving the former for when we have some surround-sound action.

So CoM is a somewhat harrowing watching experience, but a pleasurable one. It’s pretty kick-arse, to use the technically correct critical language. Its also rammed full of sneaky highbrow type references, which most of us probably failed to pick up because the cultured parts of our minds have been corrupted by all the science we do daily.

I did manage to pick out a couple of the classical music references though, particularly the Shostakovich 10 and Prokofiev violin concerto which get about half a minute of airtime when they run into the Russians in the refugee camp. Like I mentioned last week, when you know a piece of music well it really jumps all up in your grill. My non-classically inclined friends probably didn’t notice anything much about the music during those scenes, but for me it was like doing that snapping awake thing when you are falling asleep in a lecture. A bit of your brain goes from fuzzy to focused after a few familiar notes.

Oh yeah, it also had “Omgyjya Switch7″ by Aphex Twin. Extra awesome.

Tags: children of men, music, soundtrack

The Continued Death of Physical Media…

Alright, so it’s really about movies, but the concept applies just as well to CDs:

Historic Blockbuster Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past

I’ve been getting back into the Onion again recently. Perhaps I am just running out of websites to browse while doing “work” in “lab”.

Tags: CDs, movies

Anybody Wanna Take A Final?

Oh god - can’t focus. It’s the last exam for the class which I have to take for my stupid grant on Thursday, so I have to remember large unnecessary diagrams full of acronyms and numbers and crap:

When what I really want to do is go play Mario Kart write sexy articles about classical music for you all to read.

Incidentally, the first google image result for “sexy classical music” (which I am sure is a frequently conducted search) is this album cover in which the model has failed to notice that the dragon has escaped from her left breast and is now attempting to steal her violin:

Which is clearly a cheap trick to entice non-classical listeners (as it is blatantly one of those lame “Best Of!!!!!!” albums featuring the unique two minute versions of various pieces) into buying. In fact, if you take a look at the Amazon page for this, you will find there are whole series of these covers:

The 2nd in the series also claims to be “The Greatest Moments Ever” which would be a pretty devastating revelation had you bought the first feeling sure that you owned all of the good bits in the classical repertoire.

Then we have Sexy Beethoven Lady going for the ever-fashionable melting-piano-on-torso look:

“So, like, how do you want me to pose for this one?”, “Well, just hold onto this baton while I draw a piano on your stomach with my injured left hand. Perfect. That *screams* Beethoven”

My god. I just spent half an hour discussing naked Best-Of chicks instead of studying. That’s it. No more. If you want to see the covers for the Mozart and Opera ones scoot over to Amazon.

Tags: classical music, p53, sexy

Prokofiev Through the Phone Line

On Friday I did one of those guess the piece competitions, which was guessed almost immediately, so in revenge I did one which seemed like it would probably be a lot harder. And it was. No-one guessed it. Well the answer is the opening notes of Prokofiev’s 2nd piano concerto, one of my favorite pieces:

Now, I wanted to put up a bunch of other Prokofiev openers up for me to blab on about. However, the ease of doing this is greatly reduced by it all having to squeeze down the rather small and rather invisible tubes connecting my laptop to the internet through my cellphone. So that’ll have to wait.

The point I wanted to make was that the 2nd piano concerto is one of Prokofiev’s fairly rare calm openings. A lot of his pieces start out totally in and all over your face, sort of like he wants to ensure that you get how wild he is right from the get go. Some of those I enjoy (e.g. the 5th piano concerto and the 2nd and 4th symphonies) but sometimes it feels all a bit too… well, predictable in all it’s deliberate unpredictability.

Unpredictability isn’t quite right. Barely in control is perhaps more accurate. Prokofiev liked to make his music sound all wrong notey, like tonality is barely holding a slippery grip on a piece (and according to the authoritative source of “some book I flicked through in the music library” he would in fact write out a “regular” melody and then adjust some of the notes afterward to wrong them up).

That technique makes me like a lot of his stuff, but it also prevents me from loving it. Most of my favorite pieces of his are ones which use it in a more restrained fashion, R&J, the 6th symphony, and the 2nd PC above. Conversely though, I love the all-out fury of it in the 2nd symphony, a piece which no-one ever seems to talk about.

Man, this would be so much more awesome with samples to listen to. I need a 3G phone, pronto.

Tags: classical music, guess the piece, prokofiev

Windows Hearts Beethoven

The latest Windows update refuses to install if it senses a lack of Beethoven’s 9th:

Thank you Microsoft for insisting that Beethoven’s MOTHER ********** NUMBER 9 NEEDS TO BE INSTALLED ON MY MOTHER ********** COMPUTER before Service MOTHER ********** Pack 3 can be successfully installed.

Your programmers are morons. Go to hell, the lot of you.

If Windows prefers Beethoven, I bet baroque old Linux likes the intricacies Bach better. What about Apple? Somebody who has form as an utmost priority I suppose… Webern? Nah, that doesn’t feel right. It has to be universally accessible as well. Any suggestions?

Tags: apple, beethoven, classical music, composers, linux, windows sp3