Ruben’s Tube
Ahhh… this brings me back to the heady days of Introductory Mechanics at Bristol:
Champion Rower
While Weberning around for one of her classes, G discovered this nifty little tone-row matrix generation tool:
The real point to it is as a reference for all the permutations, retrogrades and inversions you can apply to the initial tone-row you initially enter. Which isn’t any use to me really, since my days as a 12-tone composer are all lost in the haze of youth and also never existed.
Instead, I’m a fan of this applet because of its tasty music-geek aesthetic. It’s a bit mysterious, but with the promise of unlocked secrets skulking around in the background. Kind of like an Ordnance Survey map key. It also reminds me of the decoding systems for substitution ciphers which everyone played with as a kid.
Incidentally… anyone care to guess the piece that particular tone-row is from?
The Day The Muzak Died
Muzak corporation, the purveyor of only the finest elevator and on-hold music has filed for bankruptcy. I didn’t even realize Muzak was a proper noun until I read that.
The tagline on their website reads:
“Twenty-four hours a day. Seven days a week. Seventy-five years and counting.”
What a terrifying thought…
Mario Monday
A bit of a while ago I did a retrospective on that most ubiquitous and influential of modern compositions: the Super Mario Brothers theme. Well, maybe it wasn’t a retrospective. What the hell is a retrospective? Aha! I was totally and impressively and unarguably correct in my choice of vocabulary after all. GO TEAM!
Well guess what the fecund soil of the internet sprouted up? Another delicious slab of Mario pie, and this one is a beaut:
I love hearing reworkings of familiar pieces. One of my ultimate life goals is to hear what EVERY SINGLE composer from Bach to Schnittke would have done with Baby One More Time. Yes, I realize that’s a pretty lofty goal. But, errr, where there’s a will…
Barock and Roll
Over in that post over there, R J Keefe left a comment in which he praised Baroque music for providing workable background music. I’d never come across this point of view, but can totally see where he is coming from — despite the risk of being burned at the stake for talking about Bach like that.
Baroque music (or Barock, which is how it’s been thrust in front of my eyes recently, during the reading of the Baroque Cycle books — yes yes, the title and interior spellings don’t match) has way less dynamic range and change than Classical, Romantic, etc. It doesn’t have strain-your-ear solos cascading into destroy-your-ear total orchestra devastation. It’s mostly all at the same volume. Also, the tempo doesn’t change very much.
It’s not the kind of music where you are hanging on the edge of your seat waiting for the story to unfold. There isn’t as much of a story to hear.
Or is there? Does anyone fancy arguing this one? I’m not tremendously experienced with the Baroque genre, but from what I’ve experienced it seems less like a narrative and more like word games: puns, acronyms, anagrams, palindromes. This can be beautiful, but in a more abstract, clever way. It doesn’t drag me in and tie me up like my favorite, later pieces do.
HOWEVER: I know that a lot of people totally cream their pants over Bach. What I don’t know is if they feel the same way about him as… say… Beethoven or Brahms (the stereotypical 3Bs favorites list).