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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’:
And dancey No. 7:
And No. 4:
And the in-betweeney No. 8:
There are also some chopped ones:
And the two everyone kinda ignores:
Hoorah! Beethoven symphonies for everyone!
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”.
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.
Ok! I’ve got internet dripping off of my eyelids again. I’ve got music streaming wirelessly from the ‘office’ aka ‘north wing’ aka ‘disaster recovery zone’ into the living room, courtesy of the software titan we love to hate: Microsoft. Yeah, I’ve been a hardcore free-software lovin’ flower child for the last ten years, but now that there is an XBox sitting underneath the TV it requires about three clicks and a few wireless password entries to get everything pumped out there. It makes me feel dirty, but it works so nicely.
Unfortunately it makes you feel that MP3/Classical culture clash like BAM.
Still, we had piping hot, fresh Saint-Saens plummeting into the room during our introductory househeating meal of eggplant parmesan and freshly picked cherry pie. Good old Saint-Saens. He’s the bloke that got me into the genre. We were actually listening to the very piece that did the dirty, the 2nd piano concerto:
But the one I really like is the 4th. Anyone got any hot youtubings of that one? It’s so sparse, I love it. It’s like Shostakovich CC2 (another fave), in that there are rarely lots of groups of instruments playing at once. I remember intially thinking “what a waste of an orchestra!”, like if you’re paying ‘em all to sit there playing you wanna get the most bang for your buck. Everyone, full blast, all the time. Now I relish these unpopulated pieces. They’re pensive, cautious. The phrasing is more like equations in a quantum mechanics textbook than the bloody emissions of a sore heart.
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?
This is a 3D printer:
It’s frickin’ awesome. It builds up layers of polymer into an honest-to-god pokable structure. And I want to use it to make a musical instrument.
I thought of this after yesterday’s daydreaming-about-metalworking post, realizing that I probably am not likely to a) get a metalworking shop into our rental apartment without some serious landlord hassles; or b) acquire the necessary expertise to squish a tuba into a cube (A CUBA! Hell yes!) without squishing its tubes totally shut. I’d probably just kinda whack a bit of copper pipe with a hammer and then get all mopey when it doesn’t even let any air through, let alone make noise.
However, G. already has mad autocad and 3d printing skillz (architects have ALL the fun) which combined with my slightly less useful — but more geeky — experimental physics, could totally result in the realization of all my Platonic-solid instrument dreams. Or at least a really, really weird looking kazoo.
Now there is just the tiny problem of, errr, getting our hands on a 3D printer.
