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MUSIC
NEW:
July 30, 2010: How to play "The Moonlight"
- like Gianluca Cascioli. Alla breve, two beats
per bar. Here he is playing it for a masterclass: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnvb4_02ZmE
Gianluca also points out in his Decca recording interview
(ok, conducted by me) that the piece has nothing to do with
moonlight on a lake; the starting point for Ludwig was the Commendatore's
music in Don Giovanni (here's a powerful version
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK1_vm0FMAU
- the music Gianluca refers to starts 17 seconds in - listen
to the triplets underneath, and compare the rhythm of "Don
Gio-VAN" to the tenor line in the piano sonata to hear
what Gianluca means: ) The meaning, he adds, was transformed
in Beethoven's new creation, but think "supernatural"
as your starting point and you're off to a good start.
NEW: July 26, 2010 Very nice obit of Wendy Allanbrook
in today's NYT; a person who embodied the word "humane."
NEW: July 19, 2010 I should be worrying about whether
it's a jobless recovery or outright deflation, but instead I'm
speculating about whether
it's Levine or ??? at the Boston Symphony - as I'm sure,
are all kinds
of Bostonians .
New: July 15 2010: Very sad to hear of the death at
age 67 of Wendy Allanbrook (Wye
J. Allanbrook), a great musicologist and great human
being.
July 2010: RIP Sir Charles Mackerras, at age
84. Alex Ross, as usual, says
it perfectly: "He had a gift for leading a kind of
performance in which nothing out of the ordinary seems to happen
and yet everything goes radiantly right." Nice ideal in
many areas.
NEW June 2010:
So that February From the Top in Iowa City - you remember,
the one for which I provided a laugh-line? The full
broadcast is now online. Alternatively, you can
hear just my 46 seconds of fame
- my voice comes in after 55 seconds of set-up, in which
Christopher O'Riley interviews the incredible 16-year-old cellist
Allan Steele.
March
2010: That article from last November - on the state of period-instrument
Brahms, for Diapason France - I finally have an English-language
version up, at
this link. ["Mûrissements
d'époque" and "Brahms et le cor" -
were published in the October issue of Diapason France
(Diapason,
Octobre 2009, pp. 34 - 37. This is the first of the two. The
second appears in triply-expanded form in Early Music America,
Spring 2010, as "Brahms, the Horn, and History")]
February
2010: From
the Top
did a show in Iowa City on Feb. 24, 2010;
for some reason they interviewed me the day before to get a
laugh line. Apparently it worked: listen in to the full
broadcast (or, if you prefer, here
are my 46 seconds of fame).
February
2010: The
legendary conductor Bruno Walter
did not like modern flutes, and
he did not like the power of postwar clarinet playing. Martin
Mayer, in 1960, quotes him: "Think what the flute has
gained up top of the range," he says, "but it has
lost its beauty. Jean Paul wrote of 'the moonshine of the
flute.' Who would now say, 'the moonshine of the flute"?
[ILet me note that German and Austrian flutes were still made
of wood during Walter's early career; German-speaking flutists
resisted metal flutes and the Boehm key system precisely because
the French had adopted them].... As for modern playing:
"That is just a gentle clarinet," he said [of
a clarinet solo in the Schumann Piano Concerto]. "But
today they all play trumpet." Quoted in the excellent
biography, Bruno Walter: A World
Elsewhere, by Erik
Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky, p. 404.
February
2010: My article "Brahms, the Horn, and History" is
coming out in this month's Early Music America. I was
interviewed
[at this link] about the topic by Jonathan Ahl on Iowa Public
Radio's "Talk at 10"
(November
2009): My articles on Brahms and period instruments - "Mûrissements
d'époque" and "Brahms et le cor" -
were published in the October issue of Diapason France
(Diapason,
Octobre 2009, pp. 34 - 37). A note said that the original English
text would be posted at this Web site, with footnotes. It was,
but no longer is. Let me just say that I am stunned by the beauty
of the graphic design of the magazine; would it be Chantal Vilaire
who is responsible? Many thanks also to Gaetan Nalleau, the
editor who asked me to write the piece. I am honored to be there!
And to Nicolas Southon for his excellent translation.
April 2009: Good Times for Big Think What
happened in music in the 20th Century? To have any idea, it
helps to be in the 21st. And to be very smart. Consider: Alex
Ross's masterful The Rest Is Noise, which has changed
how we think about classical music's 20th C. Here are two other
carefully researched, intellectually daring reconsiderations,
both released in 2009.
1) Elijah Wald's history of what actually happened
in American pop music in the 20th Century (misleadingly titled
"How the Beatles Destroyed Rock and Roll") - I endorse
the review in the New York Times book review and recommend
the book highly.
2) Daniel Leech-Wilkinson's book on what actually
happened in 20th-century classical music performance:
The
Changing Sound of Music: He's brought research
methodology to new levels of accuracy, and is intellectually
fearless and original. And his book is available free
online at http://www.charm.kcl.ac.uk/studies/chapters/intro.html
NEW:
February 15, 2009 - My interview with Stephen Paulus
and Michael Dennis Browne, the composer and librettist
of a new oratorio-meditation on the Shoah, To Be Certain
of the Dawn. A group of Iowa community choruses are
coming together to perform it (twice) with the SE Iowa Symphony
Orchestra, led by Jamie Spillane, the director of choruses at
Iowa Wesleyan. They are performing it today at Indian Hills
in Ottumwa at 3 PM. Here are some interview clips: (1) First,
I asked Michael Dennis Browne about the origins of the
work. He said it was commissioned by his family priest in St.
Paul, Minnesota, Father Michael O'Connell, for
the following reasons (2) I asked Browne how
he and Paulus approached such a project once it was commissioned,
(3) I asked Paulus and Browne about the work's
multimedia use of photos.
NEW:
January 24th, 2009 - This Is How People Listen to
Classical Radio - in terms not of the "importance"
of the piece, but of the emotional effect. Kudos to Greg
Sandow for being able to put himself in the ear-space of a listener.
This is how it's heard. I also appreciate that my failure to
program high-dissonance modernism could be seen not as a lack
of responsibility, but a quest for "a fuller view of life
than screams alone can give." I also appreciated the comments
by radio professional William Lang. Like him, I'm constantly
looking for new music that will not drive listeners away. Observation:
such music is far more likely to come from West of the Atlantic
than East, probably for reasons involving funding and peer pressure.
NEW:
January 14th, 2009 - You have been reading Greg's five-part
posts on where Classical Music is in 2009, right? Read it:
http://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/
RE: post 1: I wrote the following comment
to Greg: "Just a loose thought about yet another possible
reason why the [classical-music] audience has aged [over the
last half of the 20th c, relative to the population as a whole
- Greg demonstrates it carefully and has some excellent ideas
on why. I suggested adding one:} "(1) music became more
and more a marker of group membership - it had been that for
centuries, but became more so; (2) people had increasing numbers
of options about which group to become a member of: more mobility;
(3) crucially- "the young" increasingly became a group
you could identify yourself as a member of. Having one's own
music (to mark off "us," the young, from "them,"
the old) became increasingly important (4) having lots of different
"musics" to choose among became increasingly possible
(recording being a big part of this? And prosperity/leisure?)......
None of this is to replace anything you [Greg] said - it'd be
just one more element."
January
14th, 2009
- Instructions
for Puck: - oxytocin for Helena and Hermia; vasopressin
for Lysander and Demetrius. [re "Anti-love
drug may be ticket to bliss" - John Tierney's angle,
in the New York Times]
December, 2008
- So... year-end roundup time. Entry #1: the winner of the
Pulitzer Prize in music, David Lang's The Little Matchgirl
Passion. Beautiful. The committee is no longer in an
uptown ivory
tower. It's also telling that no CD is out - the piece was distributed
free online
here. No waiting. The age of Youtube.
December - Entry
# 2 Newspapers are dying and music-critic gigs disappearing,
but I'm struck by how good the critics in the USA are in 2008.
Having Anne
Midgette on the staff of the WaPo is a prime example.
November
- I gotta get back into this - haven't touched
this site since April. Wanna think about 2 things: (1) why
we like the music we like; (2) the question of music
affecting life/personality/behavior. The latter strikes
me as politically fraught, complex, nuanced, easy to get wrong.
But it's what jumped out about me in this story
from NPR. (3) Felix Mendelssohn. Strongly recommended
background reading: Deborah Hertz's brilliant How
Jews Became Germans.
It's
scientifically
designed to be the most unpopular song ever written.
Naturally, I love it. Especially the rapping opera singer -
April 2008
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Clap
Your Hands Say Bravo!
The
above reminds me of a previous question about whether It's
OK to Applaud between movements at a classical concert.
The proscription against that sure chimed with the proscription
against "histrionics." Anyway, I hold with those
who say Express yourself! See: Alex's short essay
and Greg's post
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Essential:
the 2nd edition of Lydia Goehr's The
Imaginary Museum of Musical Works
(published in 2007). Our core sense
of what music IS (at least for classical fans) turns out to
be about 200 years old.
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Why
not just give Alex
Ross his Pulitzer right now and be done with
it? (for
The
Rest Is Noise.)
So I wrote in October. I'm delighted that the NY Times
has since put it on its "10
Best Books of 2007" list and that the Washingon
Post, LA Times, Economist, Time,
Newsweek, and Slate put it
on their best-of-year lists. His writing has by itself improved
the future of music.- Jan 1, 2008 |
.
The
tone of moral outrage sounds Wieseltierian, and he bullies the
defenseless, but Richard Taruskin
on the
state of classical music
is not to be missed. (Much more essential, though, is his
Oxford
History of Western Music. There he had to seek the
tone of the balanced observer - although his difficulties with
that role are part of what make the book so compelling.)-
Nov. 2007
Recordings on my mind these days: here

.
some notable online radio/
lecture sources:
NPR's
Planet
Money often succeeds in making the arcane intuitive.
authors@google
- amazing series of invited lectures at the corporate
campus.
academic
earth.org
- online Ivy League courses by people like Michael Sandel.
MIT
courses free online, with no registration!
Thinking
Allowed with sociologist
Laurie Taylor on the BBC - great title, eh? Great
show, too.
WGBH's
"Forum" trove
-huge collection of lectures and interviews from the
Boston area.
bloggingheads.tv
- political
argument on a higher level than the Sunday talk shows.
TED-
online talks by edgy smart people from many fields.
Thoughtcast
with Jenny Attiyeh -
master interviewer at work.
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recordings
I liked at the time (been forever, like a year?, since i updated
this)-
.
Why do people still record Bach's solo cello suites?
Because they are Jean-Guihen
Queyras, that's why. (I also love Bylsma and Yo-Yo
Ma, especially the first time around. I'd like to hear Steven
Isserlis, but Hyperion charges $50. For now Queras is my go-to
recording.)
I admire Taruskin's famous review of the pioneering Casals
recording: Casals was striving to make them heroic and marmoreal
- Bach from the age of Wagner. Anner Bylsma was going for
a radically different ideal - rooting them in Baroque dance and
the style of Baroque lute improvisers.Queyras? He's one of those
young artists who has all of history behind him (he studied with
Bylsma); but he has gone beyond the oppositions (and the examples)
and has made the music his own. He uses a modern cello, but you
might not be able to tell. Natural in spite of being so informed.
Glorious to hear such intonation, tone, bowing. UPDATES:
Isserlis is down to $25. And I gotta read Allen Winold's Bach's
Cello Suites: Analyses and Explorations. I greatly enjoyed
Eric Siblin's very different book The Cello Suites.
.
Isabelle
Georges and the Sirba Octet, Du
Shtetl a New York, a joy. Check out this Youtube excerpt:
Bei mir
bist du scheyn.
.
Barenboim
on Beethoven - a
6-DVD set from EMI, On Discs 5 and 6 Barenboim gives masterclasses
to young pianists, including Alessio Bax, Jonathan Biss, and Lang
Lang.
Sample this
Youtube excerpt. E.g., the part about a piano crescendoing
on a single note.
.
Suzanne Vega. Genius.
Leonard Cohen.
Genius.
.
I love The
Shins.
I like the way James Mercer's lyrics play with cliches
- evoking them then subverting them. (E.g., in Saint Simon,
"Mercy's eyes are blue [evoking cliche, but then.... ]/
when she places them in front of you [were you expecting that
image?]/ Nothing holds a Roman candle to ["Roman"
transforms the "holds a candle to" cliche, making it
resonate with the song] etc... ) I like how the music works
with the words - sometimes by opposition. (Try A Comet Appears
- the line "let's carve my aging face off/ fetch
us a knife/ start with the eyes/ till all that's left is a grimacing
smile "- such
a violent image, such
tender music. And the two adjectives earn their keep; the verbs,
like "carve" and "fetch," do more of the work.
As they should.)
I like how he undermines the potential repetiveness of the strophic
song by meaningfully varying the returns [Australia: "damned
to be one of us, girl/ faced with the dodo's conundrum/ i felt
like I could just fly/ but nothing happened every time I tried"
--- later in the song becomes "dare to be one us, girl/ facing
the android's conundrum/ i felt like I should just cry/ but nothing
happens every time I take one on the chin..." - with a beautiful,
surprising new harmony at "take one on the chin..".]
I like his control of metaphor (in the same song - Australia
- early on, the line "keep your wick in the air and your
feet in the fetters" is a striking set of verbal sounds,
but seems obscure; but much later in the song it connects to "you
don't know how long I've been/ watching the lantern dim/ starved
of oxygen..." And the last line: "so give me your hand
and we'll jump out the window.." -- that chimes with the
dodo's conundrum, maybe?) Above all the music... the man has always
been known for his ability to write a hook, and his music is inventive
way after the hook. Australia uses a polka rhythm, begins with
a hook full of syncopation, and then has the melody start in the
same non-tonic harmony that the hook reached up to. Similar invention
right through to the end. Here's an interview with Mercer on the
craft of songwriting: http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/40237-interview-the-shins
My top-10 Shins list, in alphabetical order: Australia;
A Comet Appears; Kissing
the Lipless; New
Slang;
The Past and Pending; Phantom
Limb;
Pink
Bullets; Saint Simon; Sleeping
Lessons;
Those
to Come.
.
j'aime beaucoup Ravel.
I'm into his piano trio and piano concertos. On
Youtube you can watch the Beaux
Arts Trio playing this Trio and Leon
Fleisher play the Left-hand Concerto and Martha
Argerich play the G Major! And Rattle/Berlin
in La
Valse ! - a You Tube not to be missed.
.
Ludwig
won't roll over: In fact, he's never had it better. Yes, I
love golden-age masters like pianists Claudio Arrau, Béla
Bartók, Ernst von Dohnanyi, Annie Fischer, Leon Fleisher
(ok, a modern), Wilhelm Kempff (sometimes) and, of course, Artur
Schnabel, and conductors like Wilhelm Furtwaengler, Otto Klemperer,
George Szell, and Bruno Walter, the Quartetto Italiano
and Busch Quartet, etc. But not the concept that we live in
a lead age in which nobody can play it like the greats once did,
and that younger artists all sound as if they were shaped by cookie
cutters. My view: so many of my fellow oxygen-consumers devote
so much of their lives to this music that we shouldn't be surprised
that some of their playing is from the top. Examples: Andras Schiff's
Op. 109; Ronald Brautigam in the Waldstein; Mitsuko
Uchida and Helene Grimaud (both) in the oh-so-manly
"Emperor"; Garrick Ohlsson's op. 2 no 3; Perahia
and Paul Lewis's Op. 10 no 2; Jonathan Biss in op.
13; Peter Serkin in op. 27 no 1; the Takacs
quartet cycle; the Vanska symphony cycle; the Barenboim
symphony cycle; Angela Hewitt's Op. 7 and her cellos sonatas
with Daniel Muller-Schott;; .... more to come as I think
of them. [BTW, I oppose Vanska's extreme literalism in principle,
but the results shut me up.]
As
of April 2008 I was excited about Trevor Pinnock's
return to the Brandenburgs on Avie; Peter Watchorn's
Well-Tempered Clavier book 1 on his own Musica Omnia label;
Rene Jacobs's Don Giovanni on Harmonia mundi; Marc-Andre
Hamelin's Haydn sonatas on Hyperion: the the the
Shahams playing Prokofiev on their own label; Yevgeni
Sudbin playing Scarlatti; Hausmusik playing Mendelssohn;
Pierre Hantai playing Scarlatti. [I'll update this one
of these days.]
Handelian
bliss, part 1: Andrew Manze and the Academy of Ancient
Music's recording of Handel's
Op. 6 concertos - and btw, this opus is not just another set
of Baroque concertos, but a cornucopia of invention (some of which
is plagiarized, but who cares?) And this is not just another recording.
Try the effortlessly overdotted rhythms at the beginning of op.
6 no 10; you can hear how to these players this style has become
a natural language. And try the unhurried Allegro Moderato in
the same concerto - the vitality comes from within, not from mindless
briskness, and the performance makes you feel the music's almost
childlike delight. The group plays with (and in) character throughout.
And you can download it.
Handelian bliss, part 2: Don't hold Gramophone's
enthusiasm against it: the
Messiah by the Dunedin Consort and John Butt really is inspired.
Ideal for those who've heard the thing way too often and don't
care if they ever hear it again (because it's the first attempt
to record the Dublin premiere version, and it makes the "small-chorus"
ideal so intimate); just as ideal for someone coming to it for
the first time.
.If
you like the idea of Ira Gershwin and
Kurt Weill performing "The
Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria" et al., you
gotta hear them. Available at emusic.com and on a CD, "Tryout."
(Also:
don't miss their musical/ operetta Lady in the Dark.)
.
I love Ben
Folds. If Sasha Frere-Jones hates it, it's
probably for me. Contrary to John McWhorter, of whom I'm a fan,
there is a kind of verbal intelligence available in the pop world
even now. More on this later.
.
Nigunim
by Frank London, Lorin Sklamberg,
and Uri Caine - moving, beautifu, (Thank
you, LK.). Even though I don't
romanticize the Chassidim as they seem to. Also: Srul
Irving Glick's A
Night at Heaven's Gate And, in a different vein,
the Klezmatic's Woody Guthrie CDs.
.
I love
Rene
Jacobs in Haydn's symphonies 91 & 92
on Harmonia mundi - check out 92's
opening . What
is more beautiful than a string section playing superbly and perfectly
in tune? - Which brings us to....
.
...another
exclusive! - sample
Simon Rattle and
the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the Brahms
Tragic Overture. Rattle, who's often
dissed as superficial, proves otherwise. I've heard other conductors
project these inner voices but make them sound like too-precious
detail. Here they are meaningful - and moving. Beautiful phrasing.
(also: the strings in Rattle's new Berlin Mahler 9th on
EMI. Phew!)
.
Eric
Ewazen's Down
a River of Time is heartfelt. I like so much
of what I hear from this unabashedly neo-romantic composer.
.
When old means new: the Debussy
release
from Andante.com (early recordings, e.g., Coppola's La
mer) . And at emusic, Sibelius bud Robert
Kajanus conducting the Sibelius Fifth.
Kajanus and Coppola bring a lightness, volatility and spontaneity
to the music that would be hard to regain once the works became
Classics.
.
Mozart
- Benjamin Britten and Sviatoslav
Richter playing the first movement of
the duo sonata in C, K. 521 (iTunes) strikes me as a mind-blowing
synthesis of imagination, finesse, and wild energy. The musical
equivalent of the right stage of hypomania. And Rene
Jacob's recordings of Mozart's Don Giovanni (at
youtube, here's a documentary), and Figaro and
Cosi - no "hypo" to this mania!
.
What's
on my iTunes? Aside from the above?: Ray Charles,
I Don't Need No Doctor; Martha and the Vandellas,
Jimmy Mack (the stereo version), Miriam Makeba's
The Click Song, Mahler Adagietto by Bruno
Walter with the New York Phil,. (and his Mahler Fourth from
Vienna in 1955, from the Andante set); Paul Robeson (anything
I can get my hands on, but above all Balm in Gilead); Louis
Jordan (Look
out, sister, look out!);
Neal Young's Harvest Moon; Death Cab for Cutie's
Plans; Joni Mitchell's Hejira, Paul
Simon's Only Living Boy in New York City; and lots
of Handel and Bach (two opposites, really). And a lot of
Bob Dylan (notably Blood on the Tracks, and John
Wesley Harding, and Modern Times, and odd songs like
Isis, and Tears of Rage, and Visions of Johanna,
and It's All Over Now Baby Blue and and...) and of the
Beatles.
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my
news
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recent-ish publications.
My
articles on Brahms and period instruments - "Mûrissements d'époque"
and "Brahms et le cor" - were published in the October
issue of Diapason France (Diapason,
Octobre 2009, pp. 34 - 37).
I've put up an English-language translation of the first at
this link. The second appears
in triply-expanded form in Early Music America, Spring 2010, as
"Brahms, the Horn, and History"
My
review of John Butt's Playing
with History is in the autumn 2006 issue of The Journal of the
American Musicological Society .
I
guest-edited the fall 2006 issue of The Journal of Musicological
Research (on 20th-c performance)..
The
BBC Music Magazine liked this website: "[A]
refined voice... intriguing articles
on early music and performance from a wide variety of publications. A
cleansing experience after all this mud-slinging." - April 2002
(may
I also mention my modesty and avoidance of self-promotion...?) This
means that at least one person has visited this site!
My
chapter on "Conducting Early Music" appears
in The Cambridge Companion to Conducting (ed. Jose
A. Bowen, 2004). Kind review here
.
.
My archived shows
The
Wisdom of Crowds with
James Surowiecki and Joyce Berg. Better: just read The
Wisdom of Crowds. My followup read will be Cass Sunstein's Infotopia.
His review
of The Wisdom of Crowds is well worth reading: http://www.powells.com/review/2004_06_24.html
. BUT - see this new study http://palmdesert.ucr.edu/conferences/economica2007/erikson-gdi.pdf
- showing why prediction markets are LESS successful than polls at
predicting election outcomes.
my interview with Daniel Altman
about his first book, Neoconomy
(now available for $0.01 at Amazon...)
And
an mp3 of Studs Terkel (on
his book And They All Sang) - WFMT called with the opportunity
to do a short interview with Studs, and everyone was on vacation, so...
I did it. What an honor.
And
I just interviewed the brilliant Rebecca Sheir of Alaska Public
Radio about her Third Coast-award-winning documentary, The End as Beginning:
An Audio Exploration of the Jewish View of Death. I'll play parts of it
interspersed with the documentary on KSUI tomorrow. Here's the interview
itself (17 minutes) rebecca mp3
.
How
to Invest- revealed! - a short transcript
from when I used to host radio shows on this. Still pretty timely. (TIPS
are yielding a little less, but not enough to make a difference to what
Larry says.)
.
Beta: a wiki for classical-radio producers in English-speaking countries,
who need to think about ratings as well as musician: what pieces from
the last 30 years would work in our format? (Not: what are the most important
pieces, or the greatest pieces? Just... what will fit into the sound of
classical radio?) Here's a beta
version.
Contact
me: sherman.bd at gmail
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