“We don’t listen to enough Shostakovich…”
“We don’t listen to enough Shostakovich…”, G. said to me, recently, within the hour.
This was prompted by Harry Dean Stanton, who stars as the aurally challenged lead cowboy in this David Lynch shortie (“The Cowboy and the Frenchman”) we watched the other night, while putting the last few brightly colored marmosets and monkeys and minnows into a jigsaw puzzle:
Which at the time reminded me of his appearance as the owner of the Fat Trout trailer park in Fire Walk With Me:
(Which G did not remember, hence the Youtubing tonight. I don’t see how she forgot it really, it’s one of my favorites in the movie… “I’ve already been places”). Which brought us to one of the major atmospheric forces in Lynch’s movies, the soundtracks of Angelo Badalamenti. Like this piece from Blue Velvet:
Badalamenti’s soundtracks are always luscious and dissonant, in a wandering, stringy sort of way. That’s exactly why I both love the music, and think it’s perfectly appropriate as a landscape for Lynch’s movies to live in. It is also very similar to some of Shosty’s brooding melancholia, especially that last piece, which was explicitly styled after his 15th symphony:
Which is of course how we wound down to the comment up there, at the top of this meandering blog post.
Getting Smutty
SmuttyNOSED that is! Ba-dum tssch. It’s the guy over there on the left, one of these. This is basically my bestest, most favorite brand of beer, and there is one sitting next to me right now. Unfortunately it’s now a bit empty — about 99% empty, and I’m not touching the lukewarm dregs. Back in the glory days though, with knights and such, about fifty minutes ago, it was full.
It’s hoppy as hell. It drips IBUs like a wet cat.
Here I am tonight enjoying two acquired tastes. Hoppy beer and classical music. For the first unperformance of the evening I listened to that old standby, Shosty’s CC#2. It’s one of my oldest and deepest favorites, one which will ALWAYS shove a warm dagger directly between my cerebral hemispheres. SLICE, goes the first morose saw across the cello; ignore everything else but this.
Here is Rostropovich playing the first movement. Well sort of. The video cuts off right in the middle of the big climax, and there is no part 2 for the first movement. Aggggh! Well, what you do get is frickin’ sweet. He’s got this kinda coarse, throaty, push-it-to-the-last-millisecond way with his playing. It’s sexy stuff:
Transformational
My laptop is scorching my lap. It’s pushing 70C on both cores. Like me, it gets hot and confused when forced to think too hard about math all in one go. Unlike me, it doesn’t scribble all over it’s work and swear at the obnoxiously curly integral symbols.
Why the laptop torture sesh? Well, I’m back on the wildly careening Fast! Fourier! Transform! bandwagon (the exclamation marks are for extra excitement). FFTs are a way to break down a raw chunk of sound (for example, an MP3) into all of its individual frequencies. So for example, if you had a recording of a pure C chord, running an FFT on it would show that it had C, E and G tones in it.
It looks a lot more interesting when there is more stuff going on than that…
…but than it is also harder to see what is happening.
I’m excited about this again because I came across this page, in which they have an algorithm that can calculate the spectrograms waaaay faster than my old crummy one. I haven’t had time to pick apart why that is yet, but it’ll for SURE result in some sexy animations. Otherwise I want all my money back.
Libre Libretto
One of the flopping fresh fish hauled in this morning by the eMailman featured a classical music query, which I’m going to submit to the ultimate crowd wisdom of You Guys. The question in question was whether there is a good location for not only free opera librettos, but also their English translations. It looks like there are options for the former (e.g. Karadar; the Aria Database) but the translation part is trickier.
Any suggestions?
Oops, almost forgot about the (ultra-descriptively titled) Lied and Art Song Texts Page, which is where I go when trying to remember the approximate words to the last two Alex Blok songs. (Which is what I’ve been listening to all day, either in my head or via real, honest compression waves into the ears).
A Debauched Galop
Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of this:
I feel a bit naughty because I don’t actually know the other movements at all. I’m not really a big fan of 5-8. This movement though… there is something entrancing about it, in a sort of benevolently disturbing kind of fashion.
You know how sometimes you get seats on a train which are facing in the opposite direction to how the train is traveling? And sometimes you don’t realize that you are facing the wrong way until the station starts falling away from you.
That’s how it makes me feel, like I am being rushed very rapidly backward. Especially the last few bars — I’m convinced it is deliberately arranged to sound like a skipping record.