The website for the composers group that I am a part of is now online. There you can find composers profiles and updates on our activity as we approach the concert date.
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Soundtracks are an integral part of a movie. Many movies just use current pop songs or older classics, but as I am sure you know a large segment have a composer write a score. Aside from people liking music, and thus the reason to put it in movies, music provides an emotional underpinning for a scene. Say I would like a chase scene to be more thrilling, we add some music with a tempo that is on the quicker side, generally music that is thrilling, tempestuous, etc. Watch the car chase scene from Quantum of Solace. The music really starts at around 1:00. Now, the music from James Bond in this case is largely based on themes written by composers from earlier movies (who doesn’t recognize the Bond trumpet flare?). But most movies and their composers do not have this luxury. Many movie composers, even the most famous ones have to write themes from scratch, a task they don’t always do. This isn’t necessarily wrong, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and their is nothing illegal about using themes that are in the public domain. Take John Williams, one composer who has probably profited to most from lifting emotive patterns from predecessors. Star Wars’ imperial theme could be straight from Holst’s Mars of The Planets: John Williams is not the only famous movie composer to mimic the orchestration and colors of an earlier composer. Here we have Howard Shore in Lord of the Rings imitating Orff’s Carmina Burana. Listen to the following clip to where Sauron has waded into the battle field (2:55). The great thing about both these composer’s works is that they are able to achieve the same affect as the work that we would label as “generative”, while using new themes and motifs. Then again, they have wholly sacrificed using their giant soapbox to create new interesting art music and introduce it to the largest audience any classical composer will get. It is always interesting the hear how a composer works, and how they envision the feelings that a piece of art from a different medium express. Here we have Philip Glass writing a work that shares the title of Allen Ginsberg’s Wichita Sutra Vortex: Take a listen to the work and hear the beautiful harmonies, the fresh urgency of the piece, and then read Ginsberg’s poem:
The poem is starkly anti-war, pleading, preaching to everything, everywhere to stop the (Vietnam) war. The Nation has a wonderful analysis/reflection of the work:
In Philip Glass’s piece he mimics not only the structure of the work, by beginning the piece with the simple chorale texture, much like Ginsberg begins and end the poem with the simple reflections of being in the US, in a car. But the piece grows in emotional intensity, building to reflect Ginsberg’s poetic crescendo into his shout out to the entire world, “I here declare the end of the War!”
Everyone knows and loves La Boheme. It was the second most performed opera in the entire world (in 1994), a statistic that is likely to hold true today, and also the second most commonly produced opera in the US. Listeners are treated to aria after aria of incredible melodies, key changes and colors. The general story is as follows:
I know I am leaving out Marcello and Musetta, but really they are supporting rolls. If you want to find out more about the opera, head over to wikipedia’s article. Warning, Huge File! Ben Lear was a fellow student in NYU’s music program. He’s playing at Monkey Town tonight with me and three other string players as back up to his band. Here are the details:
Though he is in the composition program, he is a singer/songwriter. Here’s his myspace page for a sample of his songs. This post is for all of the pianists out there. These works are famous for how gnarly they are, technically. In them, pianists often discover how much bigger Liszt’s hands are than everyone else’s (save NBA stars and Sergei Rachmaninoff). I’ve put links to recordings of 2 and 13 below the fold. Here is what wikipedia has to say about the set of works:
On Tuesday September First, the composer group Circles and Lines, will be performing at Le Poisson Rouge. What is great about this performance, other than the other four composers all being awesome, is that my piece, The Cure at Troy will be on the program. A description of the work and some of the logistics on how I’ve managed to put the piece together are here. This is a wonderful opportunity and I thank the people at Le Poisson Rouge for taking chances on new music. It is currently a niche market and there is still a large stigma against contemporary classical music in the general population, making it seemingly a risky business. Here is the link to where you can buy tickets for the show. As I get more materials for LPR together there will be a description on the page etc. Once our group gets a graphic together for our website’s front page, I’ll put up a link to that as well. Wish me luck in the rehearsal and organizing process! Here are recordings of the Brahms Sextets and the sheet music and parts to them. Note: I had to degrade the quality of Op. 36’s score a little bit because the original file from IMSLP was 27 megabytes. I turned it into a greyscale and lowered the ppi. Brahms Sextet Op. 18
Brahms Sextet Op. 36 Last night I was invited to see a show that is part of Teatro IATI’s Performing Arts Marathon. The program was made up of two electro-acoustic acts Sabrina Lastman and Bora Yoon. Both used elements of electronics in concordance with their voice, though Ms. Lastman’s fell more on the acoustic side of the spectrum. Ms. Lastman’s performance was called Dialogues of Silence and was in Spanish (which is unfortunate for this listener because any referential aspects that the words my have had were lost because of his mono-lingual capacity). Even so, most of the work involved Ms. Lastman exploring all the different colors and timbres the human voice can create without modification through electronics (rather, as little modification as possible, the performance was mic’d). Additionally, she would use simple sonic objects, like claves, an acoustic megaphone (like this), chimes or her hands to supply a simple rhythm section. The effect was interesting and a great exploration in what sounds a single person can make. The piece was split into different sections, some which were explorations of the a fore mentioned sound creation and others were latin sounding songs (some without words) that incorporated the timbrel exploration of the voice to a lesser extent. This work was really fun to listen to but it was also less approachable at certain points. This is due to its straying towards a certain Cageian aesthetic where any sounds are appreciable for what they are. This is an alright ideal, but sometimes just a bizarre experience in this sense:
Here is Ms. Lastman’s Youtube Channel and a video of her work: Bora Yoon started her performance off stage using a piano behind the hall and singing into two different sets of walkie-talkies. The output side of the walkie-talkies were positioned at the back left and right of the concert hall and every time she would take her finger off the “talk” button it would make that Nextel Walkie-Talkie sound. This was jarring, especially after hearing her distorted voice lustfully beckon from the one walkie talkie or the other. After the opening piece she played a series of songs very different from the first which were more indie, electro-pop (though one of the songs was a straight up hipster, coffee shop song). I thought that her take on electronic music was really cool. She combined effects that only a computer can make with her own voice and other physical instruments in a way that was stunningly beautiful. Listen to the video below (PLINKO was one of the pieces on the program) and you’ll hear how she combines a delayed echo that is repeated over and over to create a rhythmic and harmonic pattern for her voice to soar over. Over all both performances were a pleasant surprise. Many times, my going to avant works is accompanied by bouts of hair pulling and head aches, but these acts were refreshing and deserve a larger audience than the one they recieved last night.  The Pacifica Quartet has mastered playing as a unit. Last night I saw the Pacifica Quartet perform at NYU’s Frederick Loewe Theater. As a quartet on the younger side of the classical music business they showed why they are Musical America’s ensemble of the year and Grammy winners for best chamber music performance. Their playing was lucid and vibrant and the quartet’s ability to play as a unit is incredible. The communication between the bottom three voices was particularly remarkable. The program included Mendelssohn String Quartet in Eb Major, Beethoven Op. 74 (Harp) and finally Shostakovitch 8th String Quartet. This Mendelssohn String Quartet was never assigned an opus number, as the first violinist Simin Ganatra kindly described. It was written when Mendelssohn was very young and never published during his life time. Ms. Ganatra then went on to mention the great lengths that the quartet had gone through to find a copy for them to play (it isn’t in print), taking them to the University of Chicago Library. The performance of the Mendelssohn was the most accomplished quartet playing of the evening. The music suits the playing of the quartet very well and the humor of the work was brought out to its fullest extent. The Beethoven was also play very well, but for some reason the dynamism that the quartet had in the Mendelssohn was lost. This could be due to the length of the second movement of The Harp, draining the attentiveness of this listener. The first movement is always appreciated, and the tempo choice after the introduction kept a well worn piece fresh. I am afraid to say that after that, the same energy didn’t return until the last movement. The Shostakovitch is always an incredible listen, and I would like to give my applause to Sibbi Bernhardssohn for giving a great explanation to the audience on what the work is about, it’s not easy to give a pre-performance discussion that makes sense and is just the right length (I imagine he would rather I laud his music making though). The first and last movement were the most polished of the work, and the style of these movements certainly lend themselves well to a quartet that has become so much of a single organism. That being said, the biggest problem with the middle three movements was the tempo. And by tempo I do not mean just their tempo choices, but the integrity of that tempo choice. In the rough, insufferably fast second movement, their tempo would slow down until Ms. Ganatra would pick the tempo back up to its original pulse at one of her entrances. This is not a matter of artistic choice, which is concerning. Having played this quartet before it’s an understandable flaw to occur, but an audience’s ear is not as forgiving, especially if they’ve been spoiled with good recordings. Their articulation, dynamics, or any other facet you can think of were all marvelous, but the slowing down and sudden jump up in tempo was shocking, and not in a good way. The third movement’s character, a biting macabre sound, was nailed. But again tempo was an issue, but this time I have to fault the quartet’s choices. At the ends of every phrase and also at the beginning of them they would slow down or speed up by huge margins, which is fine in select points. The problem with doing this every damn time is that it destroys any sense of pulse in a waltz, one of the most recognizable meters for a listener. Not only does this wild swing in tempo break down the feeling of one, but when Shostakovitch changes the meter, the effect is less pronounced as their isn’t any rhythmic integrity to jumble up in the first place. Finally, in the fourth movement, and this is a personal preference, the tempo was a bit too fast. I prefer to allow time for the cello to expand out the one filament of hope that Shostakovitch has injected into the work. Taking the tempo a bit too fast caused a wonderful moment to rush by. The quartet encored with Astor Piazzolla’s Tango for Four which was universally loved. A recording of the work is below (unfortunately not the Pacifica). |
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