Hot Friday Linkage
It’s Friday. It’s snowy (Shush. It is here.) It’s nearly Christmas break. Time to wind down the workday clock with bits and pieces from teh internets:
- This guy has put together a wonderful selection of modern classical music on YouTube. It ranges from recognizable names (Carter, Cage, Boulez) to people entirely new to me (Saariaho? Scelsi?). Even better, he has added real-time descriptions to some of the videos, describing the history and structure of the piece. It’s one of the best uses of the (frequently annoying) video annotation feature on YouTube that I have seen.
- Got restless legs? This device will turn your spasmodic limbs into… errr… “music”. I think I’ll stick to tapping awfully synchronized drumming patterns, thanks.
- Finally, one for these challenging economic times: Thank goodness FDR didn’t bail out the US piano industry
The third doth rage: and roughly brayth
Because of my desire for a more ascetic life, I can listen to NPR again.
Last week, in a fit of panic at having too much crap cluttering my room I whipped out the old hatchet and scalpel. As — depressingly — always happens, this resulted in piles of dustbin bags full of crap being chucked out and/or donated to charity. It also resulted in a bit of room rearrangement, which led to a cascade of phosphorylations, which led to my radio getting moved back to where the power cord can reach a plug socket
I had forgotten how nice it is to fall asleep to NPRs Classical Music Through the Night. I find that focusing on the melodies helps me to avoid thinking about stress-dream rich material, like lab-work, or programming, or saving the planet. I turn off the lights and lay on top of my duvet (a proper English style one, not that pale American imitation) until I start losing track of the music, and getting cold. Then I fumble the off switch on the remote and get under the covers, and seem to fall asleep very quickly.
The only problem is when something really good which I haven’t heard before comes on. Then I want to force myself to stay awake long enough to find out what it is.
This is what I heard last night:
It’s been AGES since I heard this (it’s the Tallis Fantasia by Ralph V-W for those of you who didn’t click on play) and I don’t remember liking it that much. This time it yanked my listening muscles right out of their sockets. I only caught the last couple of minutes, so it’s really the Tallis melody which caught my attention, and not the Fantasia.
Tallis was around a looong time ago, in the 1500s — way earlier then any music I’ve gotten into. The particular melody which RVW used was the third of a series of nine tunes that Tallis wrote for Archbishop Parker’s Psalter, whatever one of those is. The descriptions of the tunes are absolutely frickin’ stunning:
The first is meeke: devout to see,
The second is sad: in maiesty,
The third doth rage: and roughly brayth,
The fourth doth fawne: and flattry playth,
The fyfth deligth: and laugheth the more,
The sixth bewayleth: it weepeth full sore,
The seventh tredeth stout: in froward race,
The eighth goeth milde: in modest pace.
Isn’t that beautiful?
A Distributed Youtube Orchestra
The almighty and benevolent gods of youtube are putting together an orchestra. You sign up, download the score, and record a performance of your part. Then the LSO mix together all the best ones and make some kind of funky uber-video from the submissions. However, that’s kind of just a promo for the main event. The really cool kids get sent to Carnegie Hall to perform “The Internet Symphony” (eugh) live under Michael Tilson Thomas.
I can’t decide if this is completely awesome or just a really elaborate way of arranging a regular audition. I think it’ll actually be more interesting to see how the video turns out than the live performance. That’s the part which is technologically new.
Of course, now I’ll probably find out that like fifty avant-garde composers already did this.
Main site here, PDF details here.
Score Processing, Part II
No-one exists here. We are still within the midst (or midsts? Which is it? Well, given that it is from the 15th century I guess I can get away with either. That’s how they used to roll.) of thanksgiving. No-one is here. Except me. I think my supervisor would have murdered me if I left this weekend, given that I was skipping around NYC for most of last week.
I did have some time to play around a bit more with the score processing. Here’s my standard guinea-pig type piece, Beethoven Op. 111:
Do you love the glorious widescreen? Oh wait… the embedded player doesn’t work with widescreen yet. Well, if you (like me) are hot for 16:9 you can watch the full thing here. HOWEVER. It still won’t have any audio. Why not? It turns out that synchronizing the audio is actually the real crux of this score analysis malarkey.
You see, the notes in the video are a literal transcription of the score (extracted from MusicXML versions of MIDI files), but no-one ever plays a literal transcription of the score. The tempos vary all the time. So making the audio match the notes is a much more difficult problem than getting the notes themselves. I have about five different ideas for getting this to work, but all of them are several day long programming sessions.
Still, the video looks kind of pretty, right?
Vurther Thoughts on Vasks
All day, all labtime, I have been looking forward to sitting around on my arse on this Friday night. And that — by a supreme combo of hard work and precise timing — is exactly what I have accomplished. But secretly, in my sloth I have been doing things. Like this. Type type type. And other things, like manufacturing my second-ever YouTube contribution:
This extremely well-produced and soon-to-be-multi-award-winning video features a melodic similarity between Vasks and Shosty that I noticed today. I’ve listened to the Vasks Cello Concerto a bunch now, and parts of it are starting to grind themselves into the understandingy parts of my head. One of those parts is in the video above. Today, humming it while wandering between lab-rooms, I found myself slipping into the middle snippet in the video, from Shostakovich’s cello concerto #1.
I like noticing stuff like that.
Vasks is getting good. The fast movements (like the one the video clip is from) are the best for me so far. By best, I mean that I am starting to remember the melodies and understand the flow of ideas a bit. The two outer movements are not working out as well, especially the last, but that’s sort of expected because they are slower and build-uppier, and those always take me longer to work out.
I like how he combines Romantic type tonality with all kinds of interesting bits of percussion and brief bizarre outbursts from the orchestra. And it doesn’t have that “deliberately wacky!!!111!” feel Schnittke almost always does. It fits together.