Classical Convert » youtube

Shouldn’t they force him to ADD an audio track?

Me — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 20:30:24 +0000

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

Me — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 02:38:05 +0000

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

Me — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 02:52:12 +0000

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.

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 of chamber arrangements of Beethoven’s piano concerto No. 4 and 2nd Symphony.

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, though.

What do you think?

Fluted Vocals

Me — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 04:15:23 +0000

Here’s what you do if your flute playing skills exceed your vocal ones:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(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

Me — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 02:33:44 +0000

Here she blows:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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.

Suck juice from moose

Me — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 17:14:45 +0000

When I was about 8 years old my dad bought me a copy of Carmina Burana on cassette tape (remember them?). It turns out I didn’t really like anything except for O Fortuna!, that staple of medieval action movie trailers. I do remember being excited by the tightly compressed liner notes, which included both the Latin and English translation of the poems. “Velut Luna” has been what I’ve heard when it plays ever since.

It might have been different if I had seen these lyrics first, instead:

Click here to view the embedded video.

On The Pitch

Me — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 04:06:25 +0000

I wish I could tell what note the ceiling was playing when people in the apartment upstairs make the floor hum:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ranking Beethoven

Me — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:49:20 +0000

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

Me — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 03:35:07 +0000

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’:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And dancey No. 7:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And No. 4:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And the in-betweeney No. 8:

Click here to view the embedded video.

There are also some chopped ones:

No. 9 (part 1, part 2)
No. 5 (part 1, part 2)
No. 3 (part 1, part 2)

And the two everyone kinda ignores:

No. 1
No. 2

Hoorah! Beethoven symphonies for everyone!

Terzetto

Me — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:28:15 +0000

This was on NPR during one of my beloved musical-accompaniments to falling asleep on top of the duvet a few weeks ago. In the interim period between over-then and over-now it had been sitting around as a note in my phone, quickly keyboarded out before all the sleepiness slipped away. Despite a total wipe of my phone, and a huge amount of hauling and installing furniture, my little nighttime notation managed to shove itself back into attention a couple of days ago: “dvorak terzetto”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dvorak I’ve never been crazy about. He seems too suspiciously late romantic. This is sneakily chromatic, though. It’s got some crunchy off-key sections. It reminds me a bit of the late Beethoven quartets. It’s also got a pretty sweet name — turns out a terzetto is like a trio, except instead of the plain-salted violin/viola/cello it’s configured violin/violin/viola. Which is, uhhh, pretty awesome I guess. I was hoping for a definition involving giant metal dinosaurs or something, but two violins is cool too.

The L.A. Phil. have liner notes about the piece here. And there are like ten different version on eMusic.