Moved
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.
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?
Cubism
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.
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!!!
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:
