Classical Convert

Connection Errors

Ben is in a bad mood. Perhaps this is because my supervisor is back from jaunts to places which are not lab, and is “looking forward” to “catching up” with us tomorrow. Or maybe it is due to the innumerable scraps of fabric, sequins, tufts of feather and other Halloween detritus littering my floor in indoor imitation of the fallen fall leaves. It might also be because of my 4am trot to the North campus bus station, and subsequent failure to fall back asleep for an hour or two.

I am trying to inspire pity. Is it working?

When I listen to music in a bad mood — as I have been while cleaning up the crafting scraps — it sounds like a recording. It is a bunch of notes, not music. Normally music patches itself into somewhere a bit behind my ears, it doesn’t have to go through all the run-of-the-mill channels that regular sounds do. It connects a little deeper, down by that reflex that makes you kick when your knee is hit with a hammer. But that connection can get broken when the rest of you isn’t feeling cheerful.

It’s a bit like when you have insomnia, and are horribly aware that you are lying around with your eyes shut. Normally, closing your eyes is a bit mysterious. It magically moves you somewhere which you aren’t in when your eyes are open. But when you can’t sleep it doesn’t work, instead of sticking you into limbo, all shutting your eyes does is make you are stare at the inside of your eyelids.

Fortunately, the days when you lose it are usually the unusual ones.

Tags: music

Hot Sunday Linkage

Some links for you to start off this extra-political week, and for me to ease back into blogging after a dry bunch of days…

• The economic crisis is hitting violin funds. Yeah, violin funds exist. Puts a damper on that wood investment scheme me and Miss M. wanted to pull off.
• A bunch of the earliest ever classical music recordings will be released within a couple of months. Watch out for the audiophiles who diss the quality of MP3s to suddenly forget their fidelity concerns.
• There are a whole load of beautiful visualizations of classical pieces on YouTube, which I managed to not notice after finding one of them last year.

I hope everyone had a good Hallowe’en!

Tags: classical music

Winter Weather Advisory

This was the weather in the Catskills this morning, as I was driving back to Ithaca:

Aaah! Prius and F150 owners alike had skewed off the road into ditches, but my brave little ‘95 Civic kept chugging. That was mostly due to driving at a grandpa-like 30mph instead of the posted 65mph.

It takes huge globs of concentration to drive in untreated road conditions like that. Normally you can psyche yourself up for it as the winter tenses it’s fists, but today the snow popped out of nowhere. We were walking around central park in T-shirts a day ago, for crying out loud.

Well that sunny weather is over with: the Catskills are getting wiped with 15 inches of snow tonight.

At least I didn’t get stuck in that.

Tags: snow

Look what the mailman dragged in…

Check out what I got today boys and girls, hommes and femmes, cowboys and cowgirls:

Do you like the sexual backdrop? Those are my own handmade curtains. I’m SO domestic.

Haven’t had a real listen through yet. I played the first couple of movements and it sounds pretty awesome: I’m definitely a cello concerto (cf. violin) kind of guy. I’m probably skipping off to NYC tomorrow, so it might be a few days until I give it a proper listen, but I shall definitely keep you up to date in the most exciting fashion conceivable.

Tags: classical music, vasks

Slow Music

CDs are as dead to me as Yangtze river dolphins. They are functionally extinct, but still pop their head up for air occasionally. Plus they have fins and eat fish.

This state of extinction has been stealthily advancing for the last half-year or so. I became aware of it’s extent after getting recommended that CD of Vasks the other day, and seriously debating if I could stomach buying music on a physical format. Electrons can kick polycarbonate’s arse any day. There’s still life in the old format yet: I ended up buying the CD.

The biggest disadvantage of ordering a CD is the waiting. The urge to purchase is almost always there because you’ve suddenly gotten excited about a new recording, or piece, or performer. When that happens you want hear it now, not later. It’s ain’t fun to have to wait for a week. Perhaps you could argue that like slow food, the anticipation is a benefit. You savor it more. But… if you had to wait for your food for a whole week, you’d probably feel more like the navarin d’agneau than the gaeng keow wan (check it out, I’m an elitist) by the time it arrived.

Another big difference between downloading and CDs is something I’ve frequently harped on about: liner notes. This time around I don’t want to call the lack of liner notes a bad thing because it is making me experience something interesting — I have absolutely no clue what the pundits think about the pieces I am listening to. It’s a little bit scary.

For example, the other day I said that I wasn’t getting hot for the shorter pieces — Viatore and Musica Dolorosa — on the Vasks CD, because they sounded musically cheaper than more hefty pieces. Shortly afterward, Zoltan commented that there is a very sad story behind Musica Dolorosa, which then made me start worrying that I had been prematurely dismissive. It’s fascinating how the non-musical aspects of a piece affect the way you listen to it. That one comment immediately made me more receptive to the music.

I still haven’t tried working out what the sad story behind Musica Dolorosa is yet — I want to listen in ignorance a bit more first.

Tags: CDs, classical music, vasks