Classical Convert

A Bit of T and V

Not tele- and vision, but that sexiest of movements, the theme and variation. I fucking love theme and variation form. It’s got this ultra self-confident air to it: “Check it out guys, one theme! In your FACE, sonata.” It’s even sexier when it’s paired up with one single other movement to make a complete piece. Examples: Beethoven’s last Piano Sonata (No. 32, Op. 111); Prokofiev’s 2nd Symphony. Both of these are favorites, and their monumental movemental construction I think plays a role. They are different. Standoutish.

A new addition to my dual movement/T and V collective is the 4th symphony of a mostly non-existent Russian composer called Ryabov. I came across him via the Naxos radio streams and, having stored his name in the mental like-to-buy box for a few months, recently purchased the one and only CD of his I have found which is easily available. It’s going well so far. He’s got Russian right through him, and he’s experiemental without getting too far from Romantic traditions. In other words, he reminds me of a more modern (he’s 58 years old) Shostakovich.

Aside from the Naxos CD, basically the only other information I have on him is through his rather horribly dysfunctional website. Be prepared for cyrillic 404s.

Which day is it again?

Body clock confused. The zeitgebers are, have been, and will be all over the place. This is due to little dalliances off to the city in the middle of the week, and returns on the weekend, instead of the other way around. Oh yeah, and weddings. One wedding. A wedding located temporally twenty minutes away from the time at which I slipped up the driveway. Automotive lessons learned today: 1) I380-by-Scranton is full of cars and single lanes, especially on Saturdays 2) It’s really easy to get lost looking for petrol in Rockaway (but the scenery is nice) Happily, spatially, the wedding was only a ten minute drive away.

While on this edition of semi-vacation me and G dipped our (my, minimally) virgin feet into the application of soundtracks. For her architectural adventures, G created a stunning little video showcasing her building, and it needed musical accompaniment. It’s quite fascinating setting mechanical stuff to music. You automatically read intent into the motions of the building, when it fits the pulse.

Motion and music are intricately bound together. A musical crescendo is such a natural sibling to a physical crescendo: a rising mass of pillars, for example. Thinking about this makes me immensely intrigued in how people have illustrated music. Not so much the automatic visualizations, but more the Fantasia style interpretations. Has anyone famously built a short film around a symphony, for example? I feel like that has to have been done about 5,823 times already, but don’t know of any iterations of it. Perhaps my more-cultured-than-I (i.e., all of you) readers can tip me off.

Orchestra Sea, Orchestra Do

This might be all up in everyone’s grill already, but I’m not a big TV watcher and so plead ignorance if you have seen it a thousand dozen times this hour:

My favorite character is a toss-up between the cheerfully obese killer whale and the slightly Gigeresque octopus. I guess all octopi are Gigeresque. Or perhaps we should really say that Giger was Octopusesque.

Off Sabbatical

Hello world. I’m still existing, see? Just being a tad slack and regrouping. A break is always useful, in almost every pursuit (except maybe for things like air traffic controlling, or life-support machine running, or other such hundred-percent essentials) in order to function properly and not go crazy and caught up the wrong way around. Beside the standing back aspect, it’s been another particularly crazy, stuff-filled week featuring (but not limited to) giving two presentations and taking an ultra-short/ultra-intense course in biochemistry.

I also got a well-fancy new phone, which brings up an interesting dilemma. The ringer one. Do I destroy for all time my appreciation of a piece of music, by using it as a ringtone? Because it’s all fancy and not three years old, I can stick whatever piece of music is desired into the ringtone slot. This is not only a privilege but a necessity, since all the built-in ones are annoyingly noodly. However, from past experience, whichever piece of music undergoes this will cease to have certain musical properties in the future. It will forever be a ringtone, a harbinger of the “reach for the pants pocket” move.

In the end it was decided (by a large and ineffective committee consisting of me) that we could sacrifice a ballet to the ringtone gods, since those movements are brief and independent of each other (so the whole piece won’t be destroyed even if one movement is). The “winner” of the competition is:

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Which is fairly obscure, I think. Anyone recognize it…?

Now I’m feeling guilty about using it as a ringtone. Eugh. I feel dirty even typing that word. Ring-tone. Maybe I’ll switch back to using the one that sounds like an old fashioned telephone, in order to preserve my classical karma.

Another Return

Another return from another weekend away, I’m a busy boy. And a tired boy. Here’s another cop-out Youtubey post dedicated to anyone who has ever tried to (and failed to) play a melody on their phones beeping keypad: