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I’ve been having a busy semester with auditions for grad school and what not, and now I just got my top two wisdom teeth out (Long story short, I got the bottoms out when I had surgery for an impacted canine). So don’t expect too much over the next few days as I OD myself on Ibuprofen and eat apple sauce and ice cream (I’d much rather have a steak). The knees in Einstein on the Beach act as introductory material to the act it precedes and intermediaries between movements. The term “knee” is supposed to refer to the joint-like qualities it exhibits. All of the knees in this work are quite striking to me as they are frankly the most interesting sections of the work. They are short enough that the casual listener’s attention span isn’t exploited and they have a variation in material that probably comes from the functionality of moving between acts. These are accurate descriptors of the knees in the middle of the work, but what about the knees that are on the outside? Eventually we’ll look at how all the knees work together. The first and last movements are practically the same, save for the addition of one more speaker in the final knee. Since they are the same, and the first movement is the more basic of the two first movement, I’ll begin here. Philip Glass is kind enough to write out a brief description of the structure he created in the program notes that are included in the CD, so some of this analysis is coming straight from the man, but I’ve expanded on what most of anyone can read by owning a copy of the opera. « Continue reading “Philip Glass Einstein on the Beach, Knee 1” » Brahms Piano Trio, Op. 8 Update: Links fixed. Here are the score and parts to Schumann Piano Quartet. This work is absolutely lovely and underplayed relative to it’s relative the Piano Quintet. The third and fourth movements are absolutely stunning. The third has a gorgeous, wistful, bittersweet and nostalgic feel spun out of an incredible melody that would make any romantic composer jealous. The fourth recombines motives from all the earlier movements and is very difficult to put together as an ensemble, but is a great finish (I believe that the finale to be much more exciting than the quintet, not to put that work down). Here are Mendelssohn’s Six String Quartets…Minus the parts to the 5th. As always this batch is re-hosted from IMSLP. As soon as I can I’ll go hunting for the rest of the parts. Other than the missing parts to the 5th quartet, all of the PDF’s are of a lovely quality. Happy playing. I would like to take a little bit of time to express my opinion on how rehearsals and programming should be done. A key to good rehearsing starts with good organization. This primarily includes:
To make an easy update on content, I am happily posting most of my complete, original compositions for the general public to download and enjoy. I entreat any composers who wish to have free hosting of their work to send me an email at elemmon@opensourcemusic.org and I would be happy to post them up here for you! Einstein on the Beach has been one of my favorite Post-Modern works and as far as my limited theoretical mind knows, not much analysis has been performed on the Opera. Currently many of our tools for approaching music are geared towards looking at the music that came out of the modernist era before the 1950’s, which is great and hopefully those that I’ve learned will be helpful as I explore this gargantuan work, but I suspect that some new ways of looking at music will have to be developed to look at this work. Now the biggest problem with this analysis (if I can just get the meta-critique section over with before I even begin) is that I have no score, if I were able to obtain the score to this opera, (by shoveling out a ton of cash being robbed just to rent the part) I would more than likely be enjoying my time sipping on some pomegranate soda in the Caribbean because I’d be a rich man. This not being the case, the principal source I’ll be using is the 1993 recording. This does severely limit my ability to perform pitch class analysis, which I think would have been fairly useless in this work anyways, but I’ll make due by highlighting the large structures of the work and then zooming out of those to see the even larger structures. This is what minimalism is about anyways, an intense focus on micro-changes only serves to bore the listener. Come on back intermittently (between sheet music downloading of course) and check out this journey I am about to begin on and see where Philip Glass, his Knees, Trains and Spaceships will take us. « Continue reading “Analysing Einstein On the Beach, Bit by Bit, Little by Little” » Here is my first upload and I’d like to make it clear that this work is not my own, the folks over at IMSLP have a huge database of all sorts of public domain music. I have simply taken their uploads and rehosted them here, in what I hope will be a much more organized fashion. For now, as I upload, my focus will be on string quartet music (as giggers are constantly looking for works that they can just sight read at their uncle’s cousin’s wedding). Even though IMSLP has a wonderful catalog, it has some fairly serious holes where many of the scans are just scores rather than parts that musicians can use. That being said, here are the scores and parts to Mozart string quartets 1-23. IMSLP has a few of the quartets after No. 23 missing and then a has few of the last ones, once I fill in those gaps I’ll rip the last few Mozart quartets from IMSLP, so head on over there if you are looking for the last ones. |
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