Here is the recording of my piece, The Cure at Troy being performed at Le Poisson Rouge. Hopefully I’ll soon have parts to upload for the site along with some analysis for how I constructed the work. I’ll also have a video for you all.
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I ran across a really interesting break down of occupational claims created in a data visualization platform called Flare. In it you can search for a specific occupation and the percentage that occupation takes up in the work force. If you search for “musician” you find that the number of people claiming this (or music teacher) as their job begins to take a huge tick up in 1970. I wonder what the cause of this labor shift is. In general, budgets for the NEA seem to have been held constant with inflation or even declined since the 1980s, so it is surprising to see an explosion of people claiming it as their career if we understand the paltry arts support our country gives as limiting educational opportunities or grant support. On the other hand, we can perhaps understand this explosion in people claiming to be musicians as growth in the commercial industry of music, the tape cassette was invented in 1961, but only really caught on by the end of the decade.
Here are the parts, score and recordings to Schubert’s Trout Quintet Rehosted from IMSLP.org. The Beginning of these video recordings on Youtube are really cheesy: Schubert Quintet Op. 114, “Trout” A week ago Tom Loveless and Michael J. Petrilli had an Op-Ed article ran in the New York Times called “Smart Child Left Behind“. In it, they make the case that high-achieving students are left out of the equation when it comes to academic gains as demanded by the No Child Left Behind Act.
It’s a fairly compelling case to make that the structure of testing limits our measuring capabilities for the progress of advanced students. As Mr Petrilli says, how can we measure to progress of gifted students when the bar we are measuring them with is meant for an average student? This isn’t the only problem with the testing mandated by No Child Left Behing. I have railed before, the testing doesn’t even cover all liberal arts subjects. Music and the visual arts are things that can’t be tested (and don’t necessarily need to be) but are critical to the development of students. So as schools continue to scale back their arts programs to meet ever increasing demands for progress by The Act, we get students with a less diverse foundation of knowledge. I don’t need to go through why cuts in arts programs are bad (you can read my previous post for that), but what frustrates me about this Op-Ed is that the discussion is entirely limited to people who over-achieve in the areas that are narrowly focused on by the No Child Left Behind Act. Hello everyone, thanks to all those who attended Circles and Lines last night, and apologies to those who visit to read articles or download sheet music. To the article/sheet music viewers, I’ve been focusing all my attention on that concert for a while now, hence the extremely light posting. But I did get a review in the New York Times, which you can view here.
In other words come see Circles and Lines at Le Poisson Rouge at 9:30 on Tuesday! Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune which was first premiered in 1894 is considered perhaps to be the birth piece of the modernist movement. Though wikipedia says “It is a work that barely grasps onto tonality and harmonic function,” It is actually an incredibly tonal work, in that it has very prominent key areas. This is not functional tonality but it’s much closer to that than the way tonality manifests itself in the gestures of some Second Viennese School music. The work sounds visceral and fleeting, just as the poem it is based off of is. In the poem:
So the work is about dirty dreams. I love the video below because Stokowski is so old he can’t conduct. Prelude a L’apres-Midi D’un Faune: Prelude a L’apres-Midi D’un Faune Score I’ll try and get all the parts up as soon as I can !!!!!!! Recording from 1923 !!!!!!! Sides A & B, really cool. I recently chronicled attending an avant new music concert at Teatro IATI where Bora Yoon would run what she sang/played through a looping pedal. She would layer harmonies, melodies and pulses on top of each other to create a whole texture. She is not the only one to be using this technique. Here is a different take, content-wise, on how a composer might use a looping pedal in their electronic works. Jeremy Forbis is a percussionist and pseudo-minimal composer and the great thing about his works, especially when compared to Ms. Yoon’s performance, is the density of the texture. There is a lot more going on. Take a listen to a few of these videos:
On his website, he also has a really nice recording of him playing unaltered vibes, using over-laying technology called When You Strike Gold … Vol 1 When does music stop being non-minimal and become minimal? Here we have the example of Regina Spektor’s “Us”. If you listen to the piano part, most of the beginning of the song has it sitting on a C# Major, and then going up to a IV6-4 chord, an inverted F# major. Other than the fact that the piano part changes slowly over the verses and choruses, there are comparative reasons that we can effectively label the beginning as a minimal texture (even with Regina’s singing of a melody over the accompaniment). Listen to this movement of Glassworks, Islands and you’ll find that over Mr. Glass’ very minimal texture, there is a soaring melody: Ms. Spektor is using static textures in a very interesting way to maintain a certain affect through the entire song. This is very different from most other pop songs (even if the result isn’t totally original) which sink or swim mainly on their hook, which is built up to through a verse. In Spektor’s song, I cannot identify a clear hook (this may be due to my lacking of knowledge in the pop side of the music industry). |
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