One Below B
This. This is the link of today, not quite really writing properly. It’s collaborative AND in B flat. I think… I still can’t determine keys without plinky plonking on a keyboard, or (if it’s in C major) blowing down the harmonica I found in my bottom desk drawer a few days ago. I’ll trust the wisdom of the URL.
This is a beautiful step. With all of the interconnection in the internet, I don’t think we’ve had a really killer appy collaborative music web 2.0/3.0/n+1 site yet. This isn’t IT, exactly, and IT might not exactly exist; but this is a pillar under the pyramid. A stepladder.
Aaaahh screw the postulating. It’s just pretty neat.
An old favorite – Saint Saens PC4
Here is one of my oldest favorites: the stunning two-movement piano concerto #4 by Saint Saens, with Stephen Hough performing. Protip: it gets (a bit) louder after the first ten seconds or so:
Part 1 (beginning of 1st movement):
Part 2 (end of first movement, beginning of second):
Part 3 (end of 2nd movement):
Keep Away From The Pigs
Especially when they look like this:
I have a huge crush on this style of illustration. I want to teach myself to draw like this. All Medievaly (I’m pretty sure that’s the academically established term for it, amirite?). This particularly undelicious looking hunk of pork was taken from here, through which I have spent about the last 10 years browsing.
Of course, this is all in reference to the media frenzy and general panic over the potential H1N1 flu pandemic. Something which people seem not to mention when trying to sell the fear is that ordinarily there are about 36,000 deaths in the US from regular seasonal flu, every year. So it’s a little premature to get so riled up over the 20 confirmed cases in Mexico.
Ah crap, I lost my segue. It was going to be: While on the subject of ye olde stuff, here’s the last thing I heard on NPR last night, before the 1 o’ clock news forced my remote hand into the off position:
I think I either liked the version they played on NPR more, or I liked the way it sounded through pre-sleep. The latter is kind of a recurring occurrence. I remember really liking how the, errr, violini lines wrenchingly blurred and pulsed into each other, and how that and the modality made me think of more modern pieces, in places. It’s still got some of that, but without the remembered near-violent intensity. Maybe I’ll listen to some of his other stuff while (inevitably) churning out PowerPoint slides tomorrow.
I Have an Auto-Tuned Dream
OMG guys, auto-tuning *everything* is the latest internet meme of the minute:
Discovering the Sunday Composer
Last night I heard a Borodin piece for the first time. He’s one of these guys whose music didn’t manage to weave its way into the general-purpose classical music hivemind. That is, if you haven’t deliberately tried to hear his music you probably haven’t heard it at all. Or at least that’s my extrapolation from the statistically significant pool of me.
Here’s the last movement from the 1st string quartet:
I like it. It’s not sappily romantic, and he’s got some good Russian vigor going on.
Plus, it turns out Borodin’s day job was being a scientist — how can I possibly not like him after finding that out?