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.
Madécasses
I heard these on NPR last night, and for a few minutes thought they might be late Shostakovich songs that I hadn’t heard before:
It turns out they are by Ravel. They are the chansons madécasses. It’s the sparse orchestration and off-white tonality which reminded me of late Shosty — but these dudes are from the 1920s instead of the 1960s.
This was the the first time I had listened to anything by Ravel since a certain wannabe love interest tried (and failed) to get me pumped up about the rapsodie espagnole.
A Debauched Galop
Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of this:
I feel a bit naughty because I don’t actually know the other movements at all. I’m not really a big fan of 5-8. This movement though… there is something entrancing about it, in a sort of benevolently disturbing kind of fashion.
You know how sometimes you get seats on a train which are facing in the opposite direction to how the train is traveling? And sometimes you don’t realize that you are facing the wrong way until the station starts falling away from you.
That’s how it makes me feel, like I am being rushed very rapidly backward. Especially the last few bars — I’m convinced it is deliberately arranged to sound like a skipping record.
Mario Monday
A bit of a while ago I did a retrospective on that most ubiquitous and influential of modern compositions: the Super Mario Brothers theme. Well, maybe it wasn’t a retrospective. What the hell is a retrospective? Aha! I was totally and impressively and unarguably correct in my choice of vocabulary after all. GO TEAM!
Well guess what the fecund soil of the internet sprouted up? Another delicious slab of Mario pie, and this one is a beaut:
I love hearing reworkings of familiar pieces. One of my ultimate life goals is to hear what EVERY SINGLE composer from Bach to Schnittke would have done with Baby One More Time. Yes, I realize that’s a pretty lofty goal. But, errr, where there’s a will…
Bloody Treadmilling
There was a dramatic face-off between me and the Russian imperial guard in the gym today. It ended with me turning the treadmill speed down to 4mph and holding down the play button on my mp3 player, which rather unintuitively turns the thing off:
That’s the spark igniting the battle.
Ordinarily classical music kinda sucks to listen to while exercising, and so I stuff my mp3 player full to the brim with audio-books. That movement rocks for working out to, though, even if it does put me in a close to bawling kinda state. It’s a musical reenactment of the 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre, from the 2nd movemnt of Shosty’s 11th symphony.
Today it totally took my mind away from the running, as I was scheming out a very dramatic, and cinematic, and award winning-scene from a movie, with this movement as the soundtrack. Someone needs to CGI it up.
It’s a spectacular soundtrack to a non-existent film. That huge, slow crescendo breaking into dissonant full-orchestra machine-gun fire… oooo. Chills every time.
Unfortunately the YouTube sound quality leaves a lot to be desired; even more than usual. This is one of those pieces that deserve to be blasted at high fidelity through a decent pair of speakers, with the volume cranked way up.