Shouldn’t they force him to ADD an audio track?
It took a while, but unfortunately the copyright police are now rampaging all over the YouTube classical music community. I first noticed this while checking up on the status of the embedded videos I used over at GetIntoClassical, and finding that half of them were “unavailable due to terms of use violation”. Basically, If an orchestra or record label finds out that one of their performances is on YouTube without their authorization, it’s gonna get wiped. This is really unfortunate — they are losing a wonderful way to reach a potential audience — but it’s not exactly unexpected either. Sometimes if it is not a video of an orchestra they will just disable the soundtrack.
A hilariously appropriate incident of this was just brought to my attention via the always awesome reddit:
This is a “recording” of John Cage’s 4’33″. If you try to play this video you will see that:
NOTICE: This video contains an audio track that has not been authorized by WMG. The audio has been disabled.
Hah! The joke’s on you, Warner Music Group!
Of course, this wasn’t the first time that 4’33″ has been the subject of copyright dispute. You can read about how Mike Batt was sued for infringing on the same copyright here.
Not the 9th
Beethoven is a tough little nut to crack. I remember once reading that you should get through all of Shostakovich’s string quartets before even attempting to understand Beethoven’s. Beethoven is so famous that it’s sort of overwhelming when you first start listening to classical music, because it seems like all of his music should sound amazing right away. And a lot of it doesn’t. I remember it sounding surprisingly… old fashioned. I suspect that at a lot of people claim they think the 9th is the epitome of great music, when in fact they don’t like it that much at all, they’re just playing to its reputation.
I’ve been listening to classical music for just over six years now, and I still only know a small portion of Beethoven’s stuff well. Every couple months I’ll inch into a new (“new”!) one of his pieces, either deliberately or accidentally. The latest incarnation of this was the 24th piano sonata, in particular the second movement:
This came through my headphones halfway up the march up the slope to work. It grabbed my attention because the first few bars instantly made me think of “Rule Brittania” in a somewhat cheesy fashion, and then right as I was about to skip the track it abruptly slipped into that crunchy dissonance. I love that kind of contrast, especially when it was composed such a long time ago. This is the kind of piece that makes me truly appreciate what a pioneer Beethoven was: things like the last movement of the Hammerklavier sonata, and the Grosse Fugue. Not the 9th.
A Chamber Full of Beethoven
This morning, as I sat nursing a cup of coffee and procrastinating starting work, a sudden Beethoven-related thought appeared: are there arrangements of his symphonies for string quartet? The answer is: sort of.
Theses ones aren’t for quartet, but quintet. I discovered these via this thread, which contains a wealth of information about chamber arrangements of Beethoven’s works.
It turns out that in the days before CDs and MP3s and 8-tracks, chamber arrangements were the shit. Apparently, music publishers in the 1800s were limited to selling only a certain number of copies of a hot new symphony. However, they could get around this by publishing versions arranged for smaller groups of instruments instead. This had the added bonus that the public were probably more interested in the chamber arrangements, because they could play them when their friends were over (unless you happened to be friends with a full symphony orchestra). This resulted in lots of subpar, unauthorized arrangements of famous pieces (and a few good ones, too).
From liner notes reference in the thread above:
… The present recording of two well-known works by Beethoven affords an example of … [a] practice that was once very common: that of transcribing large-scale orchestral works for chamber resources. This was a popular practice during the Classical era, when successful new symphonies or concertos were offered for sale by publishers in all manner of additional arrangements suitable for performance within a domestic setting, not only in the form of piano reductions, but also in transcriptions ranging from duets to septets and even nonets. Most of these arrangements were the work not of the composers themselves but of arrangers who specialized in this task. But in the case of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 2 in D major op. 36 we have an “authentic” arangement that Beethoven himself prepared soon after the first performance of the symphony in 1803. Whereas the majority of these transcriptions were intended on the whole to insure a wider and quicker distribution of the music, the chamber version of the Fourth Piano Concerto in G major op. 58 that was recently rediscovered and reconstructed by Hans-Werner Kuthen seems to have been intended primarily for the private use of Prince Lobowitz, one of Beethoven’s music-loving patrons in whose town mansion the concerto had first been heard in its original orchestral version in March 1807. Beethoven was involved in this transcription too. Although he entrusted a tried-and-tested acquaintance, the court violinist Franz Alexander Possinger, with the task of reducing the orchestral lines to five-part strings (two violins, two violas and cello), he himself reworked the piano part and in the outer movements alone changed more than eighty passages in order to bring it into line with the new sororities, while at the same time considerably increasing the virtuoso demands on the soloist….
Which is describing this CD
Phew. That’s a lot of information.
I;m not sure how much I like the versions in the youtube videos above. The phrasing feels a bit too over-Romanticcy. I do really like the Liszt piano transcriptions
What do you think?
Fluted Vocals
Here’s what you do if your flute playing skills exceed your vocal ones:
(For those who don’t spend hours of their leisure time shifting around ones and zeros, this chick is supposed to be singing along to the music. The game processes the notes being sung and gives you points on how well you match the melody. However, the software doesn’t care about timbre or anything fancy, it’s just looking for pitch, so really you can use anything that can produce a tone. Like a flute.)
I tried this once by whistling. It turns out I’m not so hot at holding whistled pitches either.
The oldest electronic drum machine
Here she blows:
Man, I love suff with cogs and pulleys and gears and stuff. It’s so fascinating watching little mechanical things moving sinusoidally. I used to be fascinated by street organs as a kid (and actually, I still would be if they ever existed on the street still). That’s why this is cool. It might be more efficient to pipe everything through CPUs and ICs and ETCs, but it isn’t as pleasing to the eye. I think we need to start incorporating analogue wheel and pulleys and stuff into digital electronics.
Or at least have a few pistons around the house. Doing their thing. With steam.