Classical Convert

Hot Pre-Retreat Thursday Type Linkage

Well, my presentations are sort of done and I am half packed. And we are leaving tomorrow morning. Clearly this is an excellent time to be blogging! I dunno how internetty it will be out in the Catskills, so there might not be anything new up here until Sunday. In the meanwhile, get your teeth into the following morsels:

• There’s a piece in the Guardian about what makes a good riff (From Beethoven to Deep Purple) which seems particularly relevant given the comments in one recent post.
• Also related to that post (the bit about classical music relying on scores whereas pop/rock relies on performances) is this story about a band called Deerhoof deciding to “leak” the sheet music in advance of the actual recording. The video is kind of annoying, but the idea is kind of interesting.
• Speaking of Deerhoof, NPR has a stream in which a performance of theirs was paired with “The Rite Of Spring Remixed” by the Metropolis Ensemble. The concept behind this Rite of Springing is that the sound from a live orchestra is altered in real-time via laptops. Although I think the idea is really neat, I have to admit that on the whole the sound seems a bit too spiky and unbalanced. There are some stand-out moments though (like around 8:40-9:30, and 18:00ish). You can listen to a stream of it on NPR here.
• The Chicago Sinfonietta are doing a concert-by-vote. What if everyone writes in 4′33″ and the helicopter quartet?

See write/you all again soon…!

Tags: chicago sinfonietta, deerhoof, metropolis ensemble, rite of spring remixed

Hot Wednesday Linkage

Whoah there tiger, we haven’t had Wednesday before. Are you excited yet?

• Nintendo announced the impending arrival of Wii music. Well, impending in about 5 months. I know some of you are pretty familiar with the system, but for those living in caves and under rocks and stuff, the Wii lets you control stuff on screen via the motion of your hands and (recently) feet. This will allow you to virtually “play” various instruments, or more accurately, as one commenter put it: “you can just spaz around, and the game makes it into music”. If it’s anything like Wii sports it’ll be completely unrealistic, but hugely fun. Did I mention that there will be a conducting game in there as well?
• There’s a new (?) classical music video site in town. The styling looks very sexy and Web 2.0, but after discovering that everything costs a very un-Web 2.0 sum of money I promptly ran away. Those of you who aren’t stingy graduate students might be interested, though.
• We’re proud to be number 29

Tags: classical music, linkage, wii music

Timbre!

Timbre is a beautifully dyslexic word. It is also the subject of a recent post over at Black Dogs (one of the rare blogrolled blogs I really regularly read, and not just for the food and gratuitous cleavage) in which R.A.D. Stainforth discusses the topic of orchestras covering rock songs, and vice versa. His particular complaint is that whoever orchestrated Queen for the RPO decided to do it in a fairly mundane fashion. Instead of rearranging the songs in a musically interesting way, they decided to simply let the novelty of the re-instrumentation sell the performance.

The thing that really interested me was the issue of timbre. Stainforth reckons that whoever orchestrated the music failed to recognize that this is a defining feature of much rock/pop music. Or maybe that shouldn’t be rock/pop… perhaps a more appropriate description is music which is primarily heard in a pre-recorded fashion.

It’s probably exactly because the music is pre-recorded as opposed to being performed live that there are such possibilities for a varied sonic palette. Sounds can be layered, altered, edited, without needing to conform to the requirement that live performers with instruments must be able to reproduce the sounds.

As Mr. S points out, this overabundance of timbre in non-classical music means that listeners who come to classical from this direction (like me) can have a hard time adjusting to the relatively limited amount of sounds an orchestra can produce. After a year or so of listening your ears adjust and it’s easier to pick stuff out, but initially everything just sounds kind of “orchestra-ey”.

Is there any particular reason why “classical” music has to be able to be performed live? It seems in a sense that this is a defining feature of the genre, that it must be reproducible. The unit of classical musical creation is the score, not the recording. This reminds me of the process (a bit too close to my heart) of writing science papers, where an experiment (and thus a publication) is totally useless unless it contains enough information for someone else to reproduce it. Classical music is fundamentally open-source.

Can anyone think of examples of music considered “classical” which doesn’t conform to this conception? Or alternatively, examples of music which might be considered classical if only they did conform to it?

Tags: black dogs, classical music, music

More Hot Friday Linkage

Here’s a roundup of the poor abandoned news items this week that didn’t quite make it into posts of their own:

• Rhapsody starts selling DRM free MP3s. However the classical selection is rather limited, and their unfortunate $10/album pricing plan means that the usually cheap Naxos CDs are about 50% more expensive when purchased from them. I’ll stick with the eMusic/DG combo for now, thanks.
• In Seattle, a karaoke singer was attacked after selecting “Yellow” by Coldplay as his song of choice. The accoster — thoughtfully described by an eyewitness as “a little hippie girl” — seems to have decided that the most effective way to halt the rendition of this particular tune was a combination of verbal abuse and physical beating. Favorite comment on the story from reddit: “Charges should be dropped immediately. This was clearly self defense.”
• Geneticists pinpoint specific DNA sequences which are connected with the ability to perform certain musical tasks such as keeping a beat or identifying pitch. They found that these sequences are also involved in determining whether an individual is dyslexic, hinting that our music and language centers are closely related.
• Researchers uncover the secrets of what makes a Stradivarius sound so good. Again. No, it’s for real this time.

Tags: classical music, coldplay, rhapsody, stradivarius

Awesome Beethoven Transcriptions

Guys! After all of the mentions of transcriptions in the last week, and JonJ and Yvonne commenting that there is a well established history of transcripting stuff, I got off my internet arse and discovered several very joyous things. Firstly, the clavier-wunderkind Liszt did piano transcriptions of all of Beethoven’s symphonies — this is probably exceptionally common knowledge to all the seasoned classical listeners out there, but news to me. Secondly, there is a box-set of these available on Naxos, which is itself available on eMusic (see: cheap, good quality, DRM-free MP3s). Hooray!

So far I have listened to the ones I know the best: 6, 5, 9, 7. Only once each so far, as it all just got downloaded about an hour or two ago. Aside from noticing a bunch of stuff which apparently had been completely obscured by my ears during the myriad previous symphonic listens (key changes and modulations seem way more obvious, for example), it’s striking how similar certain sections sound to the (Beethoven) piano sonatas. I don’t yet know if that’s due to Liszt deliberately orchestrating them like that, or if it’s pure Beethoven shining through… or if it’s me trying to be clever. I’ll try and keep you posted on that one. Hopefully it’s the middle one.

Tags: beethoven, liszt, piano, symphonies, transcriptions