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Posts tagged music

Christy:
from "For the Homeless, Music that Fills a Void," by Daniel J. Wakin, The New York Times, 18 December 1009

Just three blocks from Lincoln Center, they arrived at the concert on Thursday night by shelter bus, not taxi or limousine. They took their seats around scarred, round folding tables. The menu was chicken curry and rice served on paper plates.

These concertgoers were eight tired, homeless men who had been taken to the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church shelter for the night. They listened to the latest performance by Kelly Hall-Tompkins, a professional violinist who has been playing in shelters for five years under the banner of Music Kitchen.

Ms. Hall-Tompkins is not the only do-gooder in the classical music world. Orchestras nationwide took part in a food drive this fall, and Classical Action raises money for AIDS programs through concerts and other activities. Hospital Audiences brings musicians and other performers into wards. But most classical music institutions — orchestras, opera houses and conservatories — pour their philanthropic efforts into large-scale music education for children, supported by hefty fund-raising and marketing machines. They organize youth orchestras; play concerts in poor, urban schools; and provide lessons.

Music Kitchen has a catchy motto (“Food for the Soul”), T-shirts with a logo and a pool of donors. But the operation is essentially Ms. Hall-Tompkins, 38, an ambitious New York freelancer who plays in the New Jersey Symphony and has a midlevel solo and chamber music career.

“I like sharing music with people, and they have zero access to it,” Ms. Hall-Tompkins said of her homeless audiences. “It’s very moving to me that I can find people in a place perhaps when they have a greater need for, and a heightened sensitivity to, beauty.”

from "Always in the Season," by Pomplamoose, 2009 :: via Boing Boing
Nate:

Christy:

"Low Rising," from the album Strict Joy, by The Swell Season, 2009 :: via Boing Boing
Nate:
excerpt Uncool no more
Nate:
from "The death of uncool," by Brian Eno, Prospect Magazine, 25 November 2009 :: via The Morning News

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.

I think this is good news. As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.

Nate:
from "The Menace of Mechanical Music," by John Philip Sousa, Appleton's Magazine, September 1906 :: via Ars Technica

Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul. Only by harking back to the day of the roller skate or the bicycle craze, when sports of admitted utility ran to extravagance and virtual madness, can we find a parallel to the way in which these ingenious instruments have invaded every community in the land. And if we turn from this comparison in pure mechanics to another which may fairly claim a similar proportion of music in its soul, we may observe the English sparrow, which, introduced and welcomed in all innocence, lost no time in multiplying itself to the dignity of a pest, to the destruction of numberless native song birds, and the invariable regret of those who did not stop to think in time.

On a matter upon which I feel so deeply, and which I consider so far-reaching, I am quite willing to be reckoned an alarmist, admittedly swayed in part by personal interest, as well as by the impending harm to American musical art. I foresee a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue—or rather by vice—of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines.

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"Ljósið," by Ólafur Arnalds, from the album Found Songs, 2009 :: via My Contracrostipunctus
Christy:

 

"Popular Names in Popular Music," by very small array, 20 October 2009
Nate:

"Ibarra Quartet and Makoto Fujimura at Le Poisson Rouge (Part 1)," by Ty Fujimura, 27 August 2009
Christy:

"Grocery Store Musical," book and music by Anthony King and Scott Brown for Improv Everywhere, 20 October 2009
Nate:

from "Single Ladies - Beyonce," by Pomplamoose, 17 September 2009 :: via kottke.org (how does he find all this incredible stuff anyway?)
Andy:
embed Straw sounds


"etude no.7" (English here) by Mamoru, 2009
Christy:
Andy:
from "The Music of Eternity," by David B. Hart, First Things, 5 October 2009

The symphony’s first movement—Feierlich, misterioso—announces in its opening bars, with their dark string oscillations and mournful horn melody, that this is sad music, twilight music, coming at the end of things; even the first great crescendo to which the opening builds is oddly elegiac, and yields to a lighter, more canorous, but still wistful middle section, which then in turn dissolves into a movingly melancholy D major theme.  The second movement is the scherzo, though whether music as drivingly propulsive as this initially is should still be called a scherzo is open to debate (is there such a thing as a “sublime scherzo”?).  Whatever the case, it is powerful music, moved along on driving string figures, which bracket an interlude of extraordinary sweetness, and it leads beautifully—almost by exhausting itself—into the adagio.  That final movement, with its opening, ascendingly chromatic theme—the Abschied theme—and its meltingly lyrical secondary themes, and its hugely dissonant climax, and then its final, artfully fragmentary descent into silence, is full of sorrow and rebellion and resignation and, finally, perfect peace.

There are some pieces of music that, by their nature, should remain unfinished.  No fourth movement that Bruckner could have composed this side of death would have fulfilled the deeper design that unfolded throughout all his work.  That last adagio is already so otherworldly, and so overflowing with a sweet hunger for God, and so deep a longing for the timeless within time, that only eternity could bring it to its proper completion.  And there are some artists who, by all rights, should write themselves into eternity.  Bach is obviously the most perfect example, leaving that final great fugue on B-A-C-H in Die Kunst der Fuge abruptly unfinished; one senses that it had to be taken beyond time in order to be made perfect.  But Bruckner too was an artist who required more of his art than time could supply.

Andy:
from "Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary Dies at 72," by William Grimes, NYTimes.com, 16 September 2009

Mary Allin Travers was born Nov. 9, 1936 in Louisville, Ky. When she was 2 years old, her parents, both journalists, moved to New York. Almost unique among the folk musicians who emerged from the Greenwich Village scene in the early 1960s, Ms. Travers actually came from the neighborhood. She attended progressive private schools there, studied singing with the renowned music teacher Charity Bailey while still in kindergarten and became part of the folk-music revival as it took shape around her.

“I was raised on Josh White, the Weavers and Pete Seeger,” Ms. Travers told The New York Times in 1994. “The music was everywhere. You’d go to a party at somebody’s apartment and there would be 50 people there, singing well into the night.”

Nate:
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The conductor Will Crutchfield, who specializes in bel-canto opera and doubles as a musicological detective, recently sat down to compare all extant recordings of “Una furtiva lagrima,” the plaintive tenor aria from Donizetti’s “L’Elisir d’Amore.” Crutchfield wanted to know what singers of various eras have done with the cadenza—the passage at the end of the aria where the orchestra halts and the tenor engages in graceful acrobatics. Donizetti included a cadenza in his score, and later supplied two alternative versions. Early recordings show singers trying out a range of possibilities, some contemplative, some florid, none the same. Then came Enrico Caruso. He first recorded “Una furtiva lagrima” in 1902, and returned to it three more times in the course of his epochal studio career. After that, tenors began replicating the stylish little display that Caruso devised: a quick up-and-down run followed by two slow, sighing phrases. Out of more than two hundred singers who have recorded the aria since Caruso’s death, how many try something different? Crutchfield counts four.

Promotional performance for a Belgian TV program, 29 March 2009
Christy:
by Nate Barksdale for Culture Making

There’s a cheap/free good music convergence happening at Amazon.com’s mp3 store this week: Emmylou Harris’s splendid, splendid album “Wrecking Ball”, a brilliant sonic reinvention of songs by Gillian Welch, Lucinda Williams, Bob Dylan, Steve Earle, Neil Young, Jimi Hindrix, and Daniel Lanois, is on sale for just $2.99 for the full download.

And as if that weren’t enough, they’ve got a dozen or so world music sampler albums available for free download, including this eight-song compliation from the always-inspiring Soweto Gospel Choir. Did I mention it’s free?

video Les was More

"Les Paul & Mary Ford on Alistair Cooke's 'Omnibus,'" 23 October 1953 :: via Boing Boing
Nate:
Christy:

The recession has been a painful “rite of passage” that has caused people to re-evaluate themselves and what they want out of life, he said. Other indications of the transformation besides greater honesty about finances, Blinkoff said, are greater interest in hands-on activities such as gardening and in simple pleasures such as playing the ukulele.

“Ukulele sales are through the roof,” he said. “The last time they were this high was in the 1930s. The ukulele is a perfect metaphor for these times.”

Christy:
from "A Hymn for Ordinary Christians," by Bob Kauflin, Worship Matters, 3 Aug 2009

Thomas Chisholm, who sometimes described himself as “just an old shoe,”  was born in a Kentucky log cabin in 1866. He was converted when he was 27, became a pastor at 36, but had to retire one year later due to poor health. He spent the majority of the rest of his life as a life insurance agent in New Jersey. He died in 1960 at the age of 93. During his life he wrote over 1200 poems, most of which no one will ever hear.

But back in 1923, at the “beyond his prime” age of 57, Thomas Chisholm sent a few of his poems to William Runyan at the Hope Publishing Company. One of them was “Great is Thy Faithfulness,” based on Lamentations 3:22-23.