Classical Convert

Beet Farming

I’ve been craving, CRAVING, the Liszt piano orchestrations (isn’t that backward? De-orchestration?).  Unfortunately they were left standing, wailing at the altar of my other computer: the old, crummy, dusty leviathan of a desktop hiding in the undertable dust. It’s a scary proposition to boot that baby up. I’d have to grease the wormgears and prime the pumps and lower the cooling rods, and that’s too tiring after another 11-hour workday (boo-hoo me).

So instead I redownloaded them off of eMusic, which (I bloody hope) you get to do for free. Or at least, I downloaded the one that was really rattling the bars of it’s cage: number 6. Despite the classical music hivemind selecting 5 and 9 as THE SYMPHONIES, I prefer 6 and 7. Especially the first movement of 6. The introductory bars are so… well… what’s it like? It’s like the satisfaction you feel when given a beautifully wrapped parcel, or spectacularly presented desert. It’s the anticipatory x-factor. The mouth whetting.

After satisfying THAT von-Beethoveney urge, I moved over to the Appassionata, which also has a stupendously awesome first movement. That trill, man, it rocks. It sounds so stereotypically classical and prissy, and then those plundering, pounding octaves blast the hell out of it. I love the way Arrau plays it, doing the trill in a really precise, delicate, prompt fashion. It’s almost — not quite — sarcastic.

And musical sarcasm is the quickest way into my heart. And/or pants.

Tags: beethoven, classical music, liszt, symphony

A Debauched Galop

Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of this:

I feel a bit naughty because I don’t actually know the other movements at all. I’m not really a big fan of 5-8. This movement though… there is something entrancing about it, in a sort of benevolently disturbing kind of fashion.

You know how sometimes you get seats on a train which are facing in the opposite direction to how the train is traveling? And sometimes you don’t realize that you are facing the wrong way until the station starts falling away from you.

That’s how it makes me feel, like I am being rushed very rapidly backward. Especially the last few bars — I’m convinced it is deliberately arranged to sound like a skipping record.

Tags: classical music, shostakovich, youtube

Over the Understory

Remember that YouTube Orchestra announcement? I remember reading the title and getting all giddy over the idea of a hugely interactive, distributed orchestral experiment. And then it turned out to pretty much be a glorified video audition. Ever since I’ve had a little collaborative-music shaped hole.

Well I just discovered this, which is so much more awesome, despite the no frills webpage and MS Paint style frontend. It doesn’t quite fill the hole, but it’s helping to wad up the edges.

The concept is that users submit loops all at 180bpm (or a sensible fraction of that number, 180 is chosen so it’s nicely divisible). When you go to the “listen” page, the site chooses several of these loops with similar harmonic keys and mixes them together. As you listen to the loops being played, they are randomly swapped with others, and the likelihood of being swapped is based on the current rating of the loop.

It’s obviously in a really early stage, but it’s well promising.

Tags: canopy 180, collaborative music

I Am The Very Model Of A Web 2.0 General

I’m a first-class citizen in the eyes of the internet again: I got me a brand spanking new Twitter feed. Twitter is what all the cool bleeding-edge kids have been chatting about, but up to now I’ve ignored it, because it sounded kinda dumb. Streams of little 140 character max. messages? What’s the point of that when you have texting and blogging? Well this quote from their front page convinced me to do more than just dip me little toesies in:

If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, it is one of those things, like MySpace, that sounds totally ridiculous and stupid when you first hear about it. But once you start using it, you realize how much fun it is.

They used my negative preconceptions to draw me in; and lo and behold, the quote is right. One of the main strengths is actually that 140 character limit. The idea of writing a big old chunky blog post can be intimidating (the activation energy is large, to use the biochem lingo). Being coerced into trimming it down means you can throw out thoughts as they arrive, without having to compound them into something more structured. It’s like a public idea-jotting notepad.

I’m hoping to use it partly as a pre-post breeding ground, where little kernels of concepts store and mature, until one day they sprout into grand old oaken blog posts.

(You can see the latest Tweets on the right hand side of my blog ->, or you can get to my feed here)

Tags: blogging, twitter

Melody Unresolvement

You know what is absolutely beautiful? (Aside from my hot bod?) Listening to a poor sound quality YouTubey type recording, and then immediately listening to the same piece in high quality. The first few bars are like the heavens expanding and exploding over shafts of sunlight, or stepping from a shivering, poorly heated room into a shower shimmering with steam. It’s freakin’ delicious.

The story behind this particular revelation is wrought out of blood and tears and toil. You see, earlier today I was simply GASPING and/or GAGGING to hear one particular piece of music. My old true love: Shostakovich’s 2nd Cello Concerto, Op. 126.

But I was at work, where only a few little escaped scraps of music live. “Still” (I thought naively, pacing the corridors and byways of the basement back to my office) “I MUST have a copy of that on my work computer — it’s always on my MP3 player. It must have been copied over at least once”. Oh foolish Ben, whiling the way back whistling the melody from movement one, plonking down on the blue spinny chair with the broken pneumatic cylinder. Ennhh wrong. It wasn’t bloody there.

If only I had found these excellent videos of Rostropovich performing the piece:

Mvt 1:

Mvt 2:

Mvt 3:

They don’t have the best sound quality, and the 1st and 3rd movements have tragically early deaths. But Rostropovich is gold. His performance of the lyrical bit (6:00-7:40) in the 3rd movement  is particularly devastating. I love how he’s got this kind of coarseness, as if each of the notes is just about to fall off of it’s proper tonal place.

After listening to that I put on a CD performance of him performing the same piece. Wow. Clarity like nuts.

But… something is missing without being able to see him play.

By the way, does anyone know if that could possibly be the premiere performance of the piece?

Tags: cello concerto, rostropovich, shostakovich