Friday=Shostakovich
I love it when YouTube videos are more than 10 minutes long. Of course it has to be something good, not 10 minutes of webcamateur babble. Like this one: a string quartet of siblings playing Shostakovich’s 7th string quartet straight through. No rude click-to-change-videoing halfway through, just three seamless movements.
I just freaked G out by playing this with the cat behind her. She thought the introductory strokes were a particularly insistent meow.
Eire I Go
There’s a very nice article in the Irish Times about getting into classical music for the first time:
What has really struck me in the last couple of weeks is that these works – classical standards, and mainstays of the BBC Proms – are less accessible to me than Bach and the early Baroque music. I hear that huge orchestral sound and I start to think about what I’ll have for dinner.
Once upon a time, I would have decided they weren’t for me, end of story, but I’m beginning to realise it takes repeated, concentrated listening to really hear music so superficially lovely. In a funny way, I think I’ll only truly like classical music when I know why I dislike it.
It’s always really interesting to read about other classical newbies getting into the genre, especially since it’s been a while since I switched over, and it’s nice to be reminded of the tricky bits.
(And the fact that she mentions a certain website as a good starting point is pretty awesome, too!)
Taking the stairs
How do you persuade people to hike up the stairs instead of conveying up the escalator? Make it noisier:
Although trying to play a melody on it would involve some serious hazards to the lower limbs.
The Piano Speaks
Freakin’ Awesome!
What this guy has done is take a recording of a kid reciting that European (that’s the language they speak in Europe) speech thingy and then analyze the tonal content of it by applying a Fourier Transform. That sounds fancy (and it is, it’s full of math and shit), but basically it tells you how much of each note there is in a sound, how much C, D, E etc. Readers who have been around for a while will remember when I made some animated videos of this process:
What the guy in the first video did was a to wire up a robotic piano player to his computer, and to feed the analyzed sound into this machine. The robot looks at the analysis and can see how much of each note is around at each point in time. If there is mostly middle C, F and G then it hits those keys. The trick is that it can do this really fast, and it can also hit lots of notes at once. A human pianist could probably never do this quickly enough to work. Plus they don’t have enough hands.
If you did this with piano music it would be really boring, it would probably just play back the original piece. That’s because the music that got analyzed would only contain sounds made by a piano. But if instead you analyze some kids voice, then the robot will try to reproduce these sounds using only the frequencies available on piano keys.
Unsurprisingly this isn’t perfect — which is why it’s hard to recognize the words without subtitles — and that’s because a piano only has notes which are in the chromatic scale. On the other hand, a human voice contains lots more frequencies. This means that if you reproduce it on a piano there will be lots of missing frequencies.
But it turns out there are enough of them that you can actually recognize it as speech, which, I shall restate is really freakin’ awesome.
Performance Today
Here’s a moody dose of music for Tuesday: Yuri Bashmet playing Schnittke’s Viola Concerto, with Gergiev conducting (with a toothpick):
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
Part 4:
Typically I can’t really listen to much of Schnittke’s music before I feel like a poorly lubricated locomotive is careening through my earholes. I guess my love of the modern ouevre doesn’t extend to microtonal caterwauling. Yet. Perhaps it’s a hyperacquired taste. Something I haven’t yet understood how to understand pleasure in, like juniper berries, and capers.
That middle movement is pretty awesome though. Especially the melodramatic Psycho moment, and the spiralling away love-scene. I wonder what that weird wiggly percussion instrument is called. And where I can get one.