Classical Convert

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?

Tags: beethoven, bleach, cleaning

Intransit

Here I am all atravel. I’m sitting in a hotel bar in Manchester airport, after negotiating the frustration of a one hour, no change train ride turning into two hours with a transfer at Manchester Piccadilly. Lightning got into the signalling system.

Despite the sitting still parts of the trip, it was poetry, partly. The storm set a bit before the sun, and the latter burned the former into mist and rainbows over all the little peak district villages we passed. That is when I miss this country, that view.

But now it is dark, and I am surrounded by Mancunian couples with fake blonde hair, and hoping the two overpriced beers I just had will help me fall asleep so I’m not too shattered for the 6:50am flight to AMS tomorrow morning.

Lituus Play

A graduate student (Who seems to actually accomplish things. Bastard.) recently helped to re-introduce an extinct, and ridiculously unwieldy instrument back into the wild. The impractical device in question is called the Lituus, and it’s a basically a really long horn. Over 8ft long, in fact (that’s two-and-a-half-ish meters, metric folk). Can you imagine trying to pack that baby up at the end of a concert? Yeah. That’s probably why no-one has been using it for the last 300 years.

Despite not having a drawing of what the thing looked like, or even a proper ye olde description of it, the researchers used vague hints about it’s shape and tonal range to come up with a design using witchcraft and/or simulation software. And it works. They even played BWV 118 with two of the little beasts this year. No YouTube video yet. There is a short clip of it over on the BBC website, though.

I’m curious about the software they used to design this thing. I wonder if instead of optimizing it to be a simple straight line, they can make it really, really complicated instead. Like with TONNES of twisting and spiraling and turns and crap. Maybe you could fold it into a sphere, or a cube. You could have a whole set of platonic solid shaped horns.

Reason number 5,183 why I want a metal-working shop in my garage.

Tags: lituus, musical instrument

Comp. Abbrev.

Yo what up! I’ve been, like, slightly in absentia recently due to retrieving G from deep within the midsts and/or mists of graduation. Now she has been plonked back in this area code for good, for now. Hoorays all round. Good job.

Despite the near weekly gap in posts, there was some vigorous commenting on my dubious abbreviation of Tchaikovsky from last Thursday’s post, in which some of the regular commenting crew (thanks dudes) shared their abbreviations. So far we have:

• Prok
• Rach
• Shosty/Shost
• Tchaik

for the Russians. Extrapolating this, does anyone use Strav? Or, errrr, Khat? Or… RimsKors? (RiKo?)

I feel like the Russians get extra special abbreviation priveleges, because their names are so syllable-heavy. And unwieldy, at least for non Cyrillic mouths. The abbreviations are actually practical, since it saves about ten minutes everytime you type or say the shortened version. So far the only (potential) non-Russian name abbreviation has been Wolfy for Mozart, which is an affectionate shortening instead of a timesaver.

So, any more meandering around out there?

Tags: abbreviations, classical music, composers, names

Varying

Oh yeah. Forgot to stick this in the very exciting and meaningful and touching discussion about acquired tastes yesterday… the ROCOCO VARIATIONS. Mister Tchaikovsky. Here’s the youtubey experience for you crazy kids who can’t concentrate without some audio/visual accessories thrust in front of their grinning face:

Part two:

Aaaaaaand part three:

T’sky (c’mon, his name doesn’t abbreviate well, give me some slack) is one of the ultra-famous composers who I don’t mesh with so well. If he was in my class at school I’d probably hang out with him, but when it was just us, without anyone else, it’d be hard to make conversation. I can see why people might get really into his music — and there are some pieces I really like: certain movements of the symphonies, Marche Slave, etc.  — BUT in general, ennnnh…. he doesn’t really do it for me.

BUT (again), recently the rococo variations have slipped and slided and skidded into the front bit of my perception. The first time I heard the piece properly (as in, not as an incidental piece on a CD which got glossed over as background music) was at the ROM in Toronto with G, when we got given free tickets to an unexpected concert on a Friday night. There were kids crying and people walking around the museum about 50 feet away, but that performance sowed the seed of future recognition.

You know how sometimes there is particular mote which catches your eye in a piece? A snippet of melody, or a key modulation, or weird orchestral texture — something small which ends up being the spoon on which the rest of the piece gets fed to you? Well with the Rococo variations it’s the orchestral bit at the end of the variation. Or is it? I can’t tell if it is the end or the beginning (but then, I’m fairly musically retarded) and that sort of adds to the mystique…

It’s the bit between 2:35 and 2:50 in the first video above. Particularly the last three seconds. It rocks!!!

Tags: classical music, rococo variations, tchaikovsky