Listening Post
Recently I’ve been listening to Copland and Bocolm, both on a bet that I’d (against my will) enjoy modern American composers. Well that’s not entirely true, since I already enjoy John Adams. Really it was about not liking Copland. Until very recently I stereotyped all of Copland’s music as part of one big circus and/or Western soundtrack. Well it turns out that isn’t true (somewhat expected revelation thanks to this CD). I’m going to write more about this soon, but in the last few days I got sidetracked by accidentally discovering a rather different piece of music:
(That’s Valentina Lisitsa, a “pianist electrifying!” and rising classical superstar, playing the last movement of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” piano sonata, Op. 106)
There is so much Beethoven I don’t know, or don’t understand. This was a piece I had heard mentioned dozens of times (it’s one of the most famous sonatas, and I think one of the more famous Beethoven pieces), but I never really liked the first two movements enough to listen all the way through. I must’ve always skipped to a different sonata after a couple minutes (I have the Claudio Arrau boxset, and Beethoven wrote 32 sonatas, so it’s way easy to skip to one I know I like better like No. 32, or the Appassionata).
But now I am totally in love with the Hammerklavier. Especially the last movement, with the crazy fugue, which conveniently lasts exactly as long as it takes me to walk into lab!
Ranking Beethoven
Remember that post from Monday where I kindly provided you with a crap-load of Beethoven videos on YouTube? Well since all those videos were posted at around the same time — two years ago, yeah it took naive little ol’ me that long to find them — you can get an angle on how popular each of Beethoven’s symphonies are, relative to one another:
| Rank | Symphony | Views |
|---|---|---|
| 1. | No. 9 | 4426281 |
| 2. | No. 5 | 3914515 |
| 3. | No. 7 | 2769380 |
| 4. | No. 3 | 1292489 |
| 5. | No. 6 | 873106 |
| 6. | No. 4 | 281157 |
| 7. | No. 8 | 265051 |
| 8. | No. 1 | 238895 |
| 9. | No. 2 | 216598 |
Interestingly they seem to divide into three chunks. The big three are 9, 5 and 7, all with comparably high views of 3-4 million. Next come 3 and 7, with large but significantly less views, closer to one million. Rounding it up are the less popular four: 4, 8, 1, 2. All with less than 300,000 views each.
The top five do not surprise me — however the separation between the top three and the next two do. Especially number 6. I would have thought that would be up there with number 7. Maybe that’s because my personal ranking of the top five is: 6, 7, 5, 9, 3.
Also interestingly (but unsurprisingly) there are about four times more views for the first half of No.9 than there are for the second half. Number five is even more pronounced (eight times more!) — perhaps because most viewers just want to hear the famous beginning.
Unbrokenup Beethoven
Now I’m not *exactly* the first to find these — 870,083 happy campers got their noses in before I did — but the novelty of full-length classical music vids has yet to wear thin. Here’s symphony No. 6 ‘Pastoral’:
And dancey No. 7:
And No. 4:
And the in-betweeney No. 8:
There are also some chopped ones:
And the two everyone kinda ignores:
Hoorah! Beethoven symphonies for everyone!
Crisper Unmolding
OMG. WTF. ETC. When one doesn’t move apartments for five years, one forgets all the crap one has to deal with. Like the horrors lurking within a refrigerator that the ex-residents left closed, with a nutritious pool of liquid food fermenting below the bottom shelf. Nothing a solid dollop of bleach can’t deal with though. Even in our biophysics lab we use regular household bleach to totally wipe out little colonies of beasties before disposing their asses. That makes us pretty confident it can take out whatever is living in the toilet.
Here’s what we were listening to while cleaning:
(the rest of the movements are here)
Which I’ve already been listening to a crapload recently (like on the plane trying to drown out the people in front of me…) but it turned out it was the only piece of music on the laptop after the dramatic hard-drive swapping out.
Still, the Grosse Fugue is pretty invigorating to scrub behind the oven to. I’m pretty sure that’s what Beethoven had in mind when he wrote it.
Right?
Scandalous
I think — (hope) — the scanner we have in lab is one of these bad boys:
The instructions, for the lucky scanjet owners:
1. Turn off scanner
2. Set SCSI ID to 0 (using dial on back of scanner)
3. Hold down green button
4. Turn scanner on
via eeggs