Music from Nowhere

Leon Kirchner - Piano Concerto

2011-04-05T19:27:00.000-05:00

Leon Kirchner - Piano Concerto (1953)
New York Philharmonic, Dimitri Mitropoulos cond.
Piano: Leon Kirchner

Virgil Thomson - Soil Erosion and Floods, The River

2011-03-27T13:45:00.006-05:00

"During the second half of the 1930's, the United States Government embarked on unique project, a public relations campaign to keep the American people informed about the New Deal and the necessity of its programs. Under the direction of the Resettlement Administration, the Government first sponsored radio and photography campaigns, which produced some of the most famous work of artists including Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn. Some of the photographs that Evans took went into the critically acclaimed book that he worked with James Agee to produce, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men...

...In 1935, the Resettlement Administration decided to produce films as a method of getting its message to a wider segment of the public. The films produced under the auspices of the Resettlement Administration represent the only peacetime production by the United States Government of films intended for commercial release and public viewing ever. They also heralded a new direction for American documentary filmmaking because of the sophistication with which they were made. These films were known as the Films of Merit, and the first of them were directed by Pare Lorentz.

The Resettlement Administration was founded on May 1, 1935 as part of the second phase of the New Deal. Dr. Rexford Guy Tugwell, the Under-Secretary of Agriculture, was appointed as its administrator. The goal of the Resettlement Administration was the relocation of impoverished farm families and poor city families. It also focused on the prevention of unprofitable farming techniques and improper land use, as well as the preservation of natural resources. Finally, it was responsible for the creation of three "Greenbelt" communities, suburban housing developments outside of Washington D.C., Cincinnati, and Milwaukee, intended to provide improved living conditions for city dwellers. Like many other New Deal agencies, it was founded on the belief that a control of social conditions would produce better lives for American citizens.

The Resettlement Administration chose Pare Lorentz to be its film consultant. In Lorentz, the RA found a perfect match to its purposes. Lorentz was a passionate patriot and a staunch supporter of Roosevelt and the New Deal. He believed that the American people had a right to expect the American government to provide them with information. And he also believed that the government should take advantage of the film medium to present the public with more truthful information than he felt they were receiving from the commercial media.

Lorentz came to the project with the first film already conceptualized. Dr. Tugwell originally envisioned that the Resettlement Administration would produce a series of eighteen films, the first of which he suggested should deal with the Tennessee Valley Authority. The TVA had been created in May of 1933 and was charged with building dams and establishing flood control, projects that dovetailed with the Resettlement Administration's commitment to environmental conservation. But Lorentz wanted to make a film about the Dust Bowl, an idea that he had unsuccessfully pitched to the Hollywood studios a year earlier. Lorentz was able to convince Tugwell to make this film, which became The Plow That Broke the Plains. But Lorentz' second film for the RA would explore Tugwell's idea. The River, which many film critics argued was an even greater artistic success than The Plow That Broke the Plains told that story of the great rivers of the American continent and the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority."

The Symphony of the Air, Leopold Stokowski, conductor.
The Drought and Erosion paintings are by Alexandre Hogue (1898- 1994).
The Flood and Storm paintings are by John Steuart Curry
(1897- 1946).

The River, in Quicktime Part One Part Two

Reaping the Golden Harvest: Pare Lorentz, Poet and Filmmaker
Created by Kathleen M. Hogan for the 1930's Project

Michael Harrison - Tone Cloud II, from Revelation for Piano

2011-03-26T01:33:00.003-05:00

From Michael Harrison's website, the composer describes the concept of "just intonation" (a system of tuning which is subtly different from the standard equal temperament of modern Western instruments):

“ 'Just intonation,' or 'pure' tuning, is the universal foundation for harmony which is constructed from musical intervals of perfect mathematical proportions. Pythagoras and other ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians discovered that musical harmonies arise from mathematical relationships based on whole numbers. The most consonant harmonies are created when two strings or other musical bodies vibrate in simple musical proportions. For example, the two notes comprising an octave have a 2:1 relationship, where the higher note is vibrating exactly twice as fast as the lower note. A perfect 5th is a 3:2 relationship, a perfect 4th is 4:3, a major 3rd is 5:4, a minor 3rd is 6:5, a “septimal” minor 3rd is 7:6, a whole step is 9:8, and so on. Every different set of whole numbers corresponds to a different set of musical intervals. My music uses many of these simple combinations, as well as more complex relationships such as the “celestial comma,” or extremely minute interval of 64:63, which forms the nucleus of my work Revelation..."

Mr. Harrison makes use of an extensively modified grand piano to realize his compositions.

Penderecki - Passacaglia from Symphony No 3

2011-03-21T20:43:00.005-05:00

Krzysztof Penderecki (born November 23, 1933 in Debica) is a Polish composer and conductor. His 1960 avant-garde Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for string orchestra brought him to international attention, and this success was followed by acclaim for his choral St. Luke Passion. Both these works exhibit novel compositional techniques. Since the 1970s Penderecki's style has changed to encompass a post-Romantic idiom.

Vincent Russo - Postlude

2011-03-20T19:19:00.006-05:00

Long Island composer Vincent Russo is representative of a new generation of musicians completely at home in a wide range of musical styles. Russo, like many other composers of new music, doesn't rely on commissions from orchestras or performance ensembles. Instead he works with a variety of like-minded musicians to perform and record his music

vincentrusso

Djam Karet - A City With Two Tales

2010-05-09T13:59:00.002-05:00

Djam Karet is an instrumental progressive rock band based in Topanga, California. The band was founded in 1984 by guitarists Gayle Ellett and Mike Henderson, bassist Henry J. Osborne, and drummer Chuck Oken, Jr.. The band's name is an Indonesian word (pronounced by English speakers as 'jam care-RAY) that translates loosely as "elastic time".

Website

Djam Karet is usually referred to, for lack of any better descriptive adjective, as "progressive." Don't let this throw you off. This Topanga-based group of musicians follow their own particular muse, and it takes them in some really odd places.

A case in point is the 1991 album Suspension and Displacement. It has everything from an anatomy lecture surrounded by ominous phasing rhythms ("Consider Figure #3") to dawn-of-man shuffling rites with exotic percussion ("A City With Two Tales"). The only adjective you can eliminate with certainty is "predictable."

King Crimson - The Sheltering Sky

2010-03-12T23:22:00.008-06:00

King Crimson have gone through too many line-up changes to enumerate here, but the early eighties version that debuted with the album Discipline remains one of its most potent. The long instrumental The Sheltering Sky eschews the Gamelan rock of the rest of the album, and pours forth a flowing and inspired lyricism.

One of Fripp's best instrumental creations.

Fred Frith - Music for Prepared Guitar

2010-01-31T23:18:00.001-06:00

Recorded at "Mózg" in Bydgoszcz (Poland) on 24.06.2006

Fred Frith (born 17 February 1949) is an English multi-instrumentalist, composer and improvisor.

Probably best-known for his guitar work, Frith first came to attention as one of the founding members of the English avant-rock group Henry Cow. Frith was also a member of Art Bears, Massacre and Skeleton Crew. He has collaborated with a number of prominent musicians, including Robert Wyatt, Brian Eno, Lars Hollmer, The Residents, Lol Coxhill, John Zorn, Bill Laswell, Derek Bailey, Iva Bittová and Bob Ostertag. He has also composed several long works, including Traffic Continues (1996, performed 1998 by Frith and Ensemble Modern) and Freedom in Fragments (1993, performed 1999 by Rova Saxophone Quartet).

Frith is the subject of Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel's award-winning 1990 documentary film Step Across the Border. He has contributed to a number of music publications, including New Musical Express and Trouser Press, and has conducted improvising workshops across the world. Frith's career spans over three decades and he appears on over 400 albums. He still performs actively throughout the world.

Frith is also one of the subjects of the Canadian documentary Act of God, from the director of the award winning Manufactured Landscapes. The film is about the metaphysical effects of being struck by lightning.

Currently Frith is Professor of Composition in the Music Department at Mills College in Oakland, California. He lives in the United States with his wife, German photographer Heike Liss, and their children, Finn Liss (born 1991) and Lucia Liss (born 1994).

Frith was awarded the 2008 Demetrio Stratos Prize for his career achievements in experimental music. The prize was established in 2005 in honour of experimental vocalist Demetrio Stratos, of the Italian group Area, who died in 1979.

Frith is the brother of Simon Frith, a well-known music critic and sociologist, and Chris Frith, a psychologist working at University College London.

Carl Ruggles - Angels (original version for trumpets)

2010-01-30T16:28:00.003-06:00

From Presser Online:

Carl (Charles Sprague) Ruggles was born in East Marion, Massachusetts, on March 11, 1876. Trained as a violinist, he also studied theory and composition in Boston with Josef Claus and John Knowles Paine. (Plans to study composition with Dvorák in Prague were put off when a financial sponsor died).

In 1907, Ruggles moved to Winona, Minnesota. In this small city on the banks of the Mississippi he founded, and for a decade conducted, the Winona Symphony. He also gave lessons, composed, and began painting during this time.

Ruggles moved to New York City in 1917 and, supported by teaching and private patronage, became associated with Ives, Varèse, Cowell, Slonimsky, and Seeger. Most of his major works were begun and first performed during the years in New York (1917-37).

After a period (1938-43) during which he taught composition at the University of Miami, Ruggles settled in a converted schoolhouse in Vermont, where he had been spending his summers since the ‘20s. His musical activities during this time consisted mostly of ruthless and painstaking revision of his earlier works. (He started few new works; the only one completed is the short hymn tune Exaltation, written in 1958 as a memorial to his wife). He turned mostly to his painting - which grew increasingly abstract - during the Vermont years of his life.

A crusty, cigar-smoking, classically independent Yankee, Ruggles was described by Henry Cowell as "irascible, lovable, honest, sturdy, original, slow-thinking, deeply emotional, self-assure, and intelligent," and by Charles Seeger as "the most delightful character in contemporary American life."

Ruggles’ unique music - atonal but not serial, and filled with shifting lines and rhythms - is difficult to describe. The New Grove’s Dictionary sees his music characteristically moving in "mounting declamations of heroic striving" varied with sparser, more settled textures, and finds "his aim was the clearest and boldest presentation of the features that were most important to him: line and polyphony." Ives called it simply "strong masculine music."

Carl Ruggles died in Bennington, Vermont, on October 24, 1971.

Ruth Crawford Seeger - String quartet (1931) Terzo e quarto Movimento

2010-01-27T21:13:00.007-06:00

Ruth Crawford Seeger (July 3, 1901 - November 18, 1953), born Ruth Porter Crawford, was a modernist composer and an American folk music specialist.

In the twenties and early thirties, Crawford Seeger wrote atonal works influenced by Alexander Scriabin. These works favored dissonance and post-tonal harmonies; they also utilized irregular rhythms and meters. Her technique may have been influenced by the music of Schoenberg, although they met only briefly during her studies in Germany. She was encouraged and guided by her teacher-then-husband Charles Seeger's dissonant counterpoint, as well—and also developed her own methods of composing.

Ruth Crawford was born in East Liverpool, Ohio, and began her music education at age 6 with her first piano lesson. Later she studied with her mother. She studied with Madame Valborg Collett later on, who was a student of Agathe Grøndahl. Later, she continued at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago with Heniot Levy and Louise Robyn. She learned composition from Adolf Weidig, whose instruction accelerated her skill. But her study under Djane Lavoie Herz, a disciple of Scriabin, was important for the social and intellectual world it opened for her. During this time, she met Cowell, Rudhya, and the leading Chicago poet Carl Sandburg whose writings she eventually set to music.

Later that year she became the first woman to receive the Guggenheim Fellowship and went to Berlin. (Hisama 2001, p. 3). Despite being in the heart of German modernism, she chose to study and compose alone. Yet, through letters, Seeger’s ideas were crucial to the development of her style and selections. She and Seeger married in 1932 after her second Guggenheim award and subsequent trip to Paris. Notably, at the ISCM Festival in Amsterdam (1933) her Three Songs for voice, oboe, percussion and strings was the only piece by an American performed that year.

The family, including Mike Seeger, Peggy Seeger, Barbara, Penny, and stepson Pete Seeger, moved to Washington D.C. in 1936 after Charles’ appointment to the music division of the Resettlement Administration. While in Washington D.C. Crawford Seeger worked closely with John and Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress to preserve and teach American folk music. Her arrangements and interpretations of American Traditional folk songs are among the most respected including transcriptions for: American Folk Songs for Children, Animal Folksongs for Children (1950) and American Folk Songs for Christmas (1953) Our Singing Country and Folk Song USA by John and Alan Lomax. However she is most well known for Our Singing Country (1941.) She also composed Rissolty Rossolty, an ‘American Fantasia for Orchestra’ based on folk tunes, for the CBS radio series American School of the Air.

She briefly returned to her modernist roots in early 1952 with Suite for Wind Quintet. She died the following year, from intestinal cancer, in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

Crawford began her career as an experimental composer, but the label only truly applies to her early works. Her work in traditional music preservation may have come from her interest in Eastern mysticism and the musical complexities of Native American music. Her conceptual palette was affected by American literary transcendentalism as well. As a composer, she may be thought of as the musical bridge between the modern and transcendental movements.

Carlos Chavez - Xochipilli (An Imagined Aztec Music)

2010-01-23T23:50:00.001-06:00

There is no certainty of the style or aesthetic nature of the music of pre-Columbian civilizations. We deal with hypotheses, though these can be based on somewhat sensible considerations. At least two main genres can be distinguished: music for sacred festivities and that which accompanied poetical expressions of a deep lyrical or religious character. The latter were sung and must have corresponded to the same poetic expression of the lyrics, which fortunately have been transmitted to us, and which we admire for their deep poetic content. Being vocal music, we must surmise that it corresponded to a continuous melodic line more or less varied, although undoubtedly based on the repetition of simply musical phrases. In contrast to this lyrical expression, the music of the great sacred festivities was preponderantly rhythmical and active, meant to accompany enormous ensembles of dancers. It must have been rather tremendous music, implacable in its rhythm, strong and obstinate.

In the first and last parts of this three-part work, percussion and flutes suggest the great sacred festivities in the large squares of the teocalli, full of fervor and dread. The middle part could very well confirm the melodies of inner concentration which parallel the deep lyrical poetry.

Authentic musical quotes being impossible, Xochipilli is the result of my thoughts on topics of Mexican antiquity and of my unlimited admiration for pre-Cortesian sculpture and painting. Although referring to different arts, there is a common denominator in the various expressions of a given culture so that it is not impossible to derive from plastic arts a sensitivity that can be transcribed to music. Also, many times during my childhood I heard in the country Indian ensembles deeply rooted in the old traditions, something that is now lost, which made it possible for me to delve in the aesthetics of those cultures: sobriety, conciseness, purity and vigor.

--Carlos Chavez

Igor Stravinsky - Zvezdoliki

2010-01-08T21:51:00.003-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

The Russian title of Stravinsky's cantata King of the Stars (1911-1912) is Zvezdoliki, literally "Starface." The work is scored for male chorus and full orchestra (including celesta and two harps). The text, by symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont, is in Russian; Stravinsky, as was often the case, was more interested in the text on a purely sonic level than for its content or semantic sense. "Its words are good," Stravinsky noted, "and words were what I needed, not meanings."

King of the Stars was composed at roughly the same time that Stravinsky worked on the score of his ballet masterpiece The Rite of Spring (1911-1913). The choral writing, predominantly in four parts, is characterized by close spacing and triad-based harmonies with the addition of sevenths, ninths, elevenths, and thirteenths. At times, Stravinsky sets phrases in unison to accentuate certain parts of the text.

As with many of Stravinsky's early "Russian" works, King of the Stars has a fundamentally bitonal harmonic structure, often employing the choral and instrumental bodies as distinct harmonic entities superimposed upon one another; the final sonority, for example, consists of two distinct chords, a C major dominant ninth chord in the orchestra and a G major seventh chord in the chorus. Debussy, to whom the work is dedicated, was among the many who deemed the work essentially unperformable, targeting its bitonality as a likely cause of serious intonation problems in performance. The work was first performed in 1939, more than a quarter century after its composition.

Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question

2010-01-02T13:12:00.001-06:00

A Question is Better than an Answer

In Charles Ives's most famous work The Unanswered Question, a miniature he called a "cosmic drama," one finds distilled his revolutionary means, and more importantly the ends of his singular art. The piece is a kind of collage in three distinct layers, roughly coordinated. In the background a quiet and hauntingly beautiful chorale of strings represents, said Ives, "the silence of the Druids." Over that silence a solo trumpet proclaims, again and again, an enigmatic phrase representing "the perennial question of existence." In response to each question, a quartet of winds Ives called the "fighting answerers" runs around in search of a reply, becoming more and more frustrated until they reach a scream of rage. Then the trumpet proclaims the question once more, to be answered by silence.

From the beginnings of his public career, Ives was proclaimed a prophet in discovering on his own, before anyone else, most of the devices associated with musical Modernism: polytonality, polyrhythm, free dissonance, chance and collage effects, spatial music, and on and on-most of them already on display in The Unanswered Question, written in the first decade of the 20th century. It was a long time before people began to ask whether Ives was innovating for the sake of innovation or getting at something deeper.

He was indeed getting at something, and that too is part of The Unanswered Question. Entirely with tones and a simple dramatic program, Ives makes a philosophical point: a question is better than an answer, in the immensity of creation. And those determined to force the answers are apt to look foolish in the face of that immensity. In all his work Ives was getting at something, always in his singular way. In The Unanswered Question we see the elements of his art in a nutshell: a work at once timeless and revolutionary, spiritual and concrete, comic and cosmic.

On a larger canvas one finds the same kind of point in the grand pandemonium of the second movement, called Comedy, of Ives's masterpiece the Fourth Symphony. In the vertiginous climax of the movement he stacks up a brass-band march, Yankee Doodle, bits of The Irish Washerwoman, snatches of ragtime, atonal fistfuls of piano, and an assortment of other freelance manifestations. In the concert hall, those masses of sound tumbling and crashing in air are sui generis and jaw-dropping. The whole movement feels rather like being transported into the moil of Manhattan in a particularly riotous rush hour. Such a cityscape, as a matter of fact, is the picture Ives the long-time Manhattanite intended to paint. It is a memorable specimen of his singular Impressionism. Debussy's Impressionism is about nature, wind and waves; much of Ives's music, busy or simple, wild or sentimental, is about scenes in the life of families, communities, and nations: cityscapes, holiday parades, barn dances, camp meetings, football games, the polyrhythmic patter of feet passing on the street. Ives composed all those and a good deal more-including a number of sweet songs right out of the Victorian parlor.

In the Fourth Symphony's Comedy, the astute listener will notice something remarkable about this apparent bedlam: in its outlandish fashion, with sometimes a dozen and more separate parts roaring along together each on its own path, all this grand and glorious noise is somehow going somewhere, moreover going somewhere together, in the same direction. It's an epic pandemonic chorus of individual voices in an unaccountable but unmistakable march toward the same transcendent somewhere. Each part marches in its own way, own style, own tempo, own key, and maintains that individuality in the climax – here The Irish Washerwoman, there a brass band, in the distance a ragtimer, and Yankee Doodle in the middle.

In the mystical finale of the Fourth, just before the coda's evocation of an old tune, myriad murmuring voices coalesce around a chord progression such as an organist would use to introduce a hymn. Then a chorus enters on "Nearer, My God, to Thee" in a cloudy D major, that key and hymn the foundation of the symphony, those words its essential goal – to bring us Nearer. The chorus is wordless, because Ives wanted us to recall the words in our own hearts and minds, to complete his thought. At the end the music seems to evaporate into the stars, still searching.

In his personal life Ives was a churchgoer, and he had unbounded faith in the redemptive power of art. Ultimately he was aiming, he wrote, for a "conception unlimited by the narrow names of Christian, Pagan, Jew, or Angel. A vision higher and deeper than art itself!" Though like The Unanswered Question some of the Fourth Symphony is wonderfully comic, the whole is nonetheless one of the most serious and ambitious works of the twentieth century, offered as a step toward the universal religion Ives conceived.

Ives believed it is a divine law that the human spirit evolves along with the rest of nature, toward perfection. Each of us is engaged in a heroic individual journey of growth and discovery that is part of the upward journey of all humanity. And music, Ives believed, plays an essential role in those journeys large and small. Whether the music is coming from a symphony orchestra or a band on the march or a ragtime piano or a stonemason bawling a hymn, the essence is the same, if it is earnest and authentic. "The Music of the Ages," Ives called them all, because an external sound is the imperfect manifestation of the eternal inward spirit. "Music," he wrote, "is life." Ives determined to echo that music of the ages. Thus his unique and irreplaceable merging of high European tradition with the everyday voices of everyday Americans.

Perhaps some of Ives's ideals appear outmoded. But so much of Ives's vision remains prescient and vital. And in a time when in the West many seem to resist the idea that music ought to have depth and substance, it's worth recalling how much Ives believed in its moral and spiritual importance. Meanwhile if he wrote some works of Wagnerian ambition, Ives rejected the Wagnerian model of the artist as high priest in the religion of art. He simply played his part in the parade.

One finds the same modesty and the same boundless democratic faith in Ives's day job, the life insurance business. A founding partner of Ives & Myrick, the dominating insurance agency of its time, he was no ordinary boss. His employees remembered Ives as an unforgettable figure who somehow, in his shy and retiring way, was able to galvanize them with his ideals. "When [Ives] talked with someone," recalled one employee, "he elevated them.… It's very hard to describe, but he made everyone feel important." He preached to his employees that "There was not a service that I could render to my fellow man that was more important than the business of life insurance, because it instilled in the soul and mind of my fellow man the responsibility of meeting his obligations."

Community for Ives began with family and ascended from there to towns, countries, the insured, the globe, the universe. Many of his artistic and spiritual ideals started in business, especially as he studied actuarial science and began to see human life in large terms, in masses of people from the cradle to the grave. In famous paragraphs he wrote,

"My business experience revealed life to me in many aspects that I might otherwise have missed.
In it one sees tragedy, nobility, meanness, high aims, low aims, brave hopes, faint hopes, great ideals, no ideals... And it has seemed to me that the finer sides of these traits were not only in the majority but in the ascendancy.
The fabric of existence weaves itself whole. You cannot set an art off in the corner and hope for it to have vitality, reality and substance. There can be nothing exclusive about a substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of experience of life and thinking about life and living life.
My work in music helped my business and work in business helped my music."
The latter paragraph in particular deserves to inspire generations of artists. In all his works large and small, complex and simple, radical and traditional, Ives pursued that ideal. We have been describing here a paradoxical man, and paradoxical is a word long attached to Charles Ives. In paradox, he found more than simple contradiction. Paradox is a dialectic of opposites. You can get somewhere with paradox. A simple apparent truth is narrowing, encourages you to sit down and stop searching.

So Ives thought and composed in paradoxes, all founded on those in his own life: a young organ prodigy who practiced hard but would rather be out playing baseball, a socialistically inclined businessman who got rich in the insurance industry, an individualist who exalted community, a fierce democrat who sometimes wrote fiercely challenging music, a Romantic idealist who conceived a music of the future. As has been written, the best description of Ives is Ivesian.

And yet nowhere but in America could somebody like Ives have turned up and made such a splendid go of it. We are a paradoxical people with paradoxical ideals. In his ideals, in his business and his art, Ives was the quintessential American-only more so.

He is the ultimate democrat, the musical Whitman embracing any and all as long as they're real, a model of pluralism, a prophet not only of Modernism but of Postmodernism. And in all those respects Ives is still himself, still forging beyond any ideology, still ahead of us-but looking back to encourage us all with a shout or a laugh to find our own way.

Even if we've forgotten what community used to mean in an era of small towns, forgotten many of the words to the tunes Ives quotes in his music, we can still catch, if we're open-eared and open-minded, the gist of what he is getting at. And even if he created his greatest work in isolation, it is impossible to imagine contemporary music without him. Composers all over the world draw from Ives's vision and his courage. He took on the mantle of the European tradition went after the ambitions of Beethoven and the others, but did it, as he liked to say, by finding his own path up the mountain. He is the great maverick of Western music. In that, Ives is American to the core. We admire our mavericks, and we need them.

-Jan Swafford

Jan Swafford's books include Charles Ives: A Life With Music (W.W. Norton and Company, 1996) and Johannes Brahms: A Biography (Vintage Books, 1999).

Laibach - Hymn to the Black Sun

2009-12-25T14:52:00.006-06:00

Laibach - Hymn to the Black Sun

I shine bright and shed light from afar
93 million miles to be explicit
(8 light minutes if you're planning a visit)
See I'm the big daddy and this is his system
My turn to burn so keep on listening
I give light when all around is dark
Your choice get sparked or mark my remarks

Sea ice couldn't hold me back
I fall through forty feet in one minute flat
Meet a solar controller, 'cause that what I was meant to be
'Cause I was a mystery

Decade is null
Decade is null!
(It's hot, it's hot, it's very hot)

I'm burning up now!

(It's bright, it's bright, it's very bright)

I'm burning up now!

Decade is null, decade is null, decade is null
Check it out while I burn your skull

I'm burning up now!

Decade is null

Hold and praise your nearest superstar
I shine bright and shed light from afar
93 million miles to be explicit
(8 light minutes if you're planning a visit)
See I'm the big daddy and this is his system
My turn to burn so keep on listening
I give light when all around is dark
Your choice get sparked or mark my remarks

Decade is null, decade is null, decade is null
Check it out while I burn your skull

I'm burning up now!

Decade is null, decade is null

From one to all, hear this poem and
Try to understand the greatest power known to man
Am I a nuclear bomb, I'm that I make you look like a firecracker
Alpha and Omega, beginning and end
How can you claim I ain't God, my friend
My atomic magnitude is explosive
I could keep a planet in motion or roast it!

Decade is null, decade is null, decade is null
Check it out while I burn your skull

Into the sun!

I emit energy, over all wavelengths
From x-rays to radio waves
Being the most dominant body of the Solar System
I am the Earth Star

I'm burning up now!

Hold and praise your nearest superstar

I shine bright and shed light from afar
93 million miles to be explicit
(8 light minutes if you're planning a visit)

I'm burning up now!

See I'm the big daddy and this is his system
My turn to burn so keep on listening

I'm burning up now!

I give light when all around is dark
Your choice get sparked or mark my remarks
Sea ice couldn't hold me back
I fall through forty feet in one minute flat
Meet a solar controller, 'cause that what I was meant to be

I'm burning up now!

'Cause I was a mystery

Chain of carbon and nitrogen
Witness the power of chains
Everything dies in fiery heat
Everything dies in fiery heat

I'm burning up now!

Everything dies in fiery heat
Everything dies in fiery heat...of the sun

I emit energy, over all wavelengths
From x-rays to radio waves
Being the most dominant body of the Solar System

I am the Earth Star

More Laibach

Charles Mingus - Epitaph (excerpt)

2009-12-24T18:24:00.017-06:00

Charles Mingus via last.fm

Mingus: Epitaph

Epitaph is a composition by jazz musician Charles Mingus. It is over 4000 measures long, takes more than two hours to perform, and was only completely discovered during the cataloguing process after his death. With the help of a grant from the Ford Foundation, the score and instrumental parts were copied, and the piece itself was premiered by a 30-piece orchestra, conducted by Gunther Schuller. This concert was produced by Mingus' widow, Sue, at Alice Tully Hall on June 3, 1989, ten years after his death, and again at several concerts in 2007.

The New Yorker wrote that Epitaph represents the first advance in jazz composition since Duke Ellington's Black, Brown, and Beige which was written in 1943. The New York Times said it ranked with the "most memorable jazz events of the decade". Convinced that it would never be performed in his lifetime, Mingus called his work Epitaph declaring that he wrote it "for my tombstone." Conductor Gunther Schuller said that Epitaph is "among the most important, prophetic, creative statement in the history of jazz.”

There was one ill-fated attempt to record some of this during Mingus's lifetime; a Town Hall concert on October 12, 1962. The title of the original album is Town Hall Concert and has two tracks marked "Epitaph Pt. I" and "Epitaph Pt. II", and other tracks including "Clark in the Dark", for trumpeter Clark Terry who played in the band. However, the endeavor never yielded a coherent whole like that achieved posthumously.

Official Site
Buy Mingus Epitaph

Wallingford Riegger - Music for Brass Choir

2009-12-23T17:45:00.008-06:00

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Wallingford Constantin Riegger was a fascinating and prickly figure in the history of American music. Today, his music is almost totally forgotten. Yet works like his Music for Brass Choir, Study in Sonority, and Dichotomy remain powerful and uncompromising pieces. Making use of serial techniques before it later was the vogue in academia, Riegger's twelve-tone compositions were quintessentially American in their aggressiveness and rhythmic drive...a far different sound than the dry atomistic serialism of the fifties and sixties. It was Riegger's misfortune to have composed in a style that doesn't appeal to today's fads.

He was born in Albany, Georgia in 1885. He learned the violin and the cello as a child and in 1904 went up to Cornell University but the following year transferred to the Institute of Music and Art, later known as the Juillard School. Between 1907 and 1910 he was in Munich and Berlin continuing his studies. He made his conducting debut with the Blüthner Symphony Orchestra in 1910. On his return to America he earned his living as a cellist in the St Pauls Symphony Orchestra in Minnesota. Surprising he returned to Germany from 1913-17 when the Great War was in progress. Here he conducted several opera and symphony concerts.

The circumstances of Riegger's death were as unusual as his life and music. One day in 1961, he became entangled in the leads of several dogs who had escaped from their master. The resulting fall resulted in brain injury and death soon after.

Wallingford Riegger was a consummate craftsman. A precision watchmaker of a composer, he deployed every note with care. Music for Brass Choir, although completed later in his career (1949), exhibits the vitality that was his trademark.

Arnold Schoenberg - Pierrot Lunaire, No. 8 (Nacht)

2009-12-18T20:57:00.005-06:00

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Pierrot Lunaire:

Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds 'Pierrot lunaire', ("three times seven poems from Albert Giraud's 'Pierrot lunaire'"), commonly known as Pierrot Lunaire ("Moonstruck Pierrot" or "Pierrot in the moonlight"), Op. 21, is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of twenty-one selected poems from Otto Erich Hartleben's German translation of Albert Giraud's cycle of French poems of the same name. The première of the work, which is between 35 and 40 minutes in length, was at the Berlin Choralion-Saal on October 16, 1912, with Albertine Zehme as the vocalist.

The narrator (voice-type unspecified in the score, but traditionally performed by a soprano) delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style, which complements the mood of the poems aurally. Schoenberg had previously used this combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the Gurre-Lieder, and it was a genre much in vogue at the end of the nineteenth century. The work is atonal, but does not use the twelve-tone technique that Schoenberg would devise eight years later.

Ingram Marshall - Fog Tropes II

2009-12-09T21:45:00.001-06:00

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Ingram Marshall

Ingram Marshall (born May 10, 1942 in Mount Vernon, New York) is an American composer and a former student of Vladimir Ussachevsky and Morton Subotnick. Though the composer uses the term "expressivist" to describe his music, he is often associated with post-minimalism. His music often reflects an interest in world music, particularly Balinese gamalan tradition, as well as influence from the American minimalism trends of the 1960s (the composer often acknowledges the work of Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and John Adams). Marshall also frequently cites Jean Sibelius as a prominent influence. Several of his pieces include samples of Sibelius symphonies and tone poems.

He first gained recognition for his electroacoustic pieces, often performed by the composer himself on synthesizer, tape looping, gambuh (a traditional Balinese flute), and voice ("Fragility Cycles" [1978] is one of his best known works using this method of solo performance). His acoustic music frequently incorporates tape delay, and later, digital delay (such as "Soe Pa", for solo classical guitar, and "Hymnodic Delays" for the Theatre of Voices). Many of tape parts of his pieces include the composer's own keening falsetto and gambuh playing (such as "Fog Tropes" and "Gradual Requiem").

He has written for the Kronos Quartet: Voces Resonae (1984) and Fog Tropes II (1982) and for the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra: Orphic Memories (2006).

Tangerine Dream - The Sorcerer

2009-12-06T13:16:00.003-06:00

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The Sorcerer, a 1977 movie by William Friedkin, provided the opportunity for German electronic music pioneer Edgar Froese to compose his first movie score. His band Tangerine Dream had been in existence for a decade and had begun to attract some critical attention as an electronic live performance group.

Although The Sorcerer as a movie was not a commercial success, it is quite compelling and is worth a watch if you happen to run across it (it's not easy to find).

David Shire - The Taking of Pelham One Two Three

2009-12-02T21:42:00.004-06:00

David Shire composed the soundtrack for the excellent 1974 thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent, dir).

Shire began scoring for television in the 1960s and made the leap to scoring feature films in the early 1970s. He was married to actress Talia Shire, for whose brother Francis Ford Coppola he scored The Conversation, perhaps his best known score, in 1974. Additional screen credits include Two People, All the President's Men, The Hindenburg, Farewell My Lovely, The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three, 2010, Return to Oz, and Zodiac. He composed original music for Saturday Night Fever (for which he received two Grammy Award nominations), and also worked on several disco adaptations including "Night on Disco Mountain." He won the Academy Award for Best Song for his and Norman Gimble's theme song for Norma Rae, "It Goes Like It Goes". He was also nominated the same year in the same category for "The Promise (I'll Never Say Goodbye)" from the motion picture The Promise, with lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman. In 1981 his song "With You I'm Born Again," recorded by Billy Preston and Syreeta, was a top five international hit and stayed on the pop charts for 26 weeks.

The Conversation featured an austere score for piano. On some cues Shire took the taped sounds of the piano and distorted them in different ways to create alternative sonic textures to round out the score. The music is intended to capture the isolation and paranoia of protagonist Harry Caul (Gene Hackman). The score was released on CD by Intrada Records.

For The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Shire used serial techniques and a funky multicultural rhythm section for the main theme. It is intended to evoke the bustle and diversity of New York City, and is an unofficial theme for the 6 subway line (the local Lexington Avenue Line that is depicted in the film). The soundtrack album was the first ever CD release by Film Score Monthly. The end titles contain a more expansive arrangement of the theme. Shire received two Grammy nominations for his work on the film.

David Shire Website

Henry Cowell - The Banshee

2009-11-28T17:00:00.001-06:00

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Henry Cowell

Born: 1897 Died: 1965

A tireless musical explorer and inventor, Henry Cowell was born 11 March 1897 in Menlo Park, California, where he grew up surrounded by a wide variety of Oriental musical traditions, his father's Irish folk heritage, and his mother's Midwestern folktunes. Already composing in his early teens, Cowell began formal training at age 16 with Charles Seeger at the University of California. Further studies focused primarily on world music cultures. His use of varied sound materials, experimental compositional procedures, and a rich palette colored by multiple non-European and folk influences revolutionized American music and popularized, most notably, the tone cluster as an element in compositional design.

In addition to tone clusters evident in such works as Advertisement and Tiger, Cowell experimented with the "string piano" in works like The Aeolian Harp and The Banshee where strings are strummed or plucked inside the piano. Studies of the musical cultures of Africa, Java, and North and South India enabled Cowell to stretch and redefine Western notions of melody and rhythm; mastery of the gamelan and the theory of gamelan composition led to further explorations with exotic instruments and percussion. Later, Cowell developed the concept of indeterminancy or "elastic form" in works like the Mosaic Quartet (where performers determine the order and alternation of movements).

Komintern - Le Bal du Rat Mort

2009-11-22T18:27:00.004-06:00

LastFM:
One of the most legendary of French underground rock bands, Komintern were part of that post-May of ‘68 armada of arch iconoclasts that first established French rock of the era as an unsurpassed force for radicalism, a lineage that would include the likes of Red Noise, Fille Qui Mousse, Martin Circus, Magma, and Moving Gelatine Plates amongst others. Komintern’s particular breed of sonic malarky comes couched in a frothy effervescence and jolliness that can initially mask just how extraordinary their achievement is, at one time or another musically touching on everything from early Gong-like whimsy to chanson and from Moving Gelatine Plates-style post-Canterbury motion to Red Noise-like Dadaist piss-takery. A work of timeless genius.

Thanks, SUBURBANBATHERSON

Milton Babbitt - All Set

2009-11-18T21:09:00.009-06:00

The Exuberant, Controversial, and Thrilling Milton Babbitt
By PETER GOODMAN

"Milton Babbitt, the crabbiest, most ascetic atonalist in America."
— Norman Lebrecht, Critic

"My view of his music is that it is exuberant, full of playfulness, and at same time it is unbelievably rigorous."
— Peter Lieberson, Composer

"Very few conductors venture into Babbitt territory—either they are afraid of the music or don't like it and revile it, and they know that most musicians in the orchestra will either not understand it or hate it, or both. For myself, I have to say every time I have conducted Babbitt has been a great thrill, to get inside that music with those marvelous sounds and textures, and the incredible variety within each piece."
— Gunther Schuller, Conductor/Composer

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen: Milton Babbitt, crabby, exuberant, reviled, playful, rigorous, thrilling. The composer who has been among the most controversial yet influential figures in American concert music of the past 60 years. The theorist whose vision about the direction that music should take dominated the academy for decades. The teacher who has guided generations of young composers both at The Juilliard School and in the Ivy League. The man who, as he celebrates his 90th year, continues to lead a full life as a composer and pedagogue, and who glows at the thought that James Levine, one of his most powerful champions, is now in command at the Boston Symphony.

In person, Milton Babbitt is a small, compact figure whose pursed lips and twinkling eyes behind thick black frames seem always on the edge of a smile. His conversation is quick, his thought fluid, able to dart from one subject to another at the drop of an implication. Just like his music, some might say. Joel Sachs, a Juillliard colleague for many years, makes the comparison directly.

Sachs describes an occasion when he played one of Babbitt's piano compositions at the Dartington Summer Festival in England. "Milton was there," Sachs recalled, "always at the lunch and dinner tables, always gabby, very friendly, very funny." At the recital, Sachs told the audience that one way to "get" Babbitt's music is to think of it as "being like a conversation" with the composer. After the concert, an elderly woman came up to Sachs and said, "Thinking of the conversations with him made all the difference."

"If performers can present his music as conversation that goes by very quickly and very naturally," Sachs said, "that can make a difference."

Gabby playfulness is not the image most concertgoers have of Milton Babbitt, if they have any image at all. Those with some knowledge of music history might recall the February 1958 essay from High Fidelity magazine with the unfortunate—and inaccurate—headline, "Who Cares If You Listen?" That was not Babbitt's choice; he says he would have preferred "The Composer as Specialist."

But the argument of the essay, written in a style that is simultaneously precise and convoluted, was that composers of "serious," "advanced" music should retreat into the cloisters of the academic world. Only there, Babbitt contended, among colleagues in such disciplines as physics, mathematics, and analytic philosophy, could they pursue the creation of work that very few in the outside world would be expected to understand.

Born in Jackson, Miss., in 1916, as a child Babbitt was both musical and mathematical. The interest in numbers came from his father, who was an actuary. The interest in music was eclectic. He studied piano, clarinet, and saxophone, and by the time he graduated from high school he was already playing jazz and popular songs.

When he entered college, Babbitt's first impulse was to study math at the University of Pennsylvania, but he quickly switched to music, studying with Marion Bauer and Philip James at N.Y.U., and later studied privately with Roger Sessions. He did graduate work at Princeton, and continued to divide his time between music and mathematics. Although Babbitt's intellectual bent was toward the mathematical side of music (in 1946 he wrote a paper on "The Function of Set Structure in the Twelve-Tone System"), he didn't give up on pops, with some film scores and an unsuccessful Broadway musical.

Once he settled in, however, the music Babbitt wrote was meant to be as carefully defined as the most complex experiment of physics or the most elegant mathematical solutions. In his musical universe, expanding on the 12-tone system developed by Arnold Schoenberg, every note of every composition needed to be prescribed not just by pitch, but by other sonic variables including register, dynamics, duration, and timbre.

This was music that seemed, in its apparent unpredictability, extreme and unexpected leaps in pitch and dynamics, to be almost incomprehensible to the general listener, a fact which Babbitt not only recognized but advocated. "The time has passed," he wrote, "when the normally well-educated man without special preparation could understand the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics. Advanced music, to the extent that it reflects the knowledge and originality of the informed composer, scarcely can be expected to appear more intelligible than these arts and sciences to the person whose musical education usually has been even less extensive than his background in other fields."

Nearly everything that he has written presents such difficulties to listener and performer. From Philomel, an extraordinary work for soprano, recorded soprano, and tape premiered in 1964 using computer-synthesized sound, to Concerti for Orchestra, commissioned and premiered by the Boston Symphony one year ago, Babbitt's music demands extremely concentrated listening, and more than once.

Not only has Babbitt been the exponent of a radical method of writing and analyzing music, he has also been a pioneer in methods of making its sounds. During the late 1950s and '60s he worked extensively with the RCA Mark II Synthesizer at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center. Not a performance instrument such as the synthesizers used by popular bands today, it was nevertheless the first electronic music synthesizer.

Philomel, written for soprano Bethany Beardslee, is the most famous of his compositions using the synthesizer. Set to a text by the poet John Hollander, it uses the soprano's live voice, her taped voice, and sounds created by the synthesizer to create an alien, disorienting, intense sonic environment.

And, although Babbitt turned away from electronics after the Mark II was vandalized in the 1970s, his music continues to seem disorienting and intense. Yet, despite the complexity of the method by which he writes, and the dense language used to explain it, Babbitt's music is surprisingly transparent, even spare. It is often tender and gentle, and filled with important silences, rather than being harsh, abrupt, and thick.

In his Boston Globe review of Concerti for Orchestra, critic Richard Dyer wrote: "Babbitt's music thrives on the borderline between extreme intellection and extreme emotion. The new piece has all the brainpower of its predecessors within it, but without the bristling density of event. It is music of remarkable transparency of texture, clarity of detail, and spaciousness."

Peter Lieberson compares Babbitt's music to his personality in a way similar to Sachs's assessment: "His mind works very fast. You can hear recalls, subtle references to what happened earlier. It is so subtle that, if you listen to it once it will bypass you. If you listen over and over, while looking at the score, you realize that that kind of association is happening constantly in the music. There are so many of them that it is sometimes difficult to absorb in one listening."

Whatever the theory and impact of his own music, as a teacher Babbitt does not demand stylistic loyalty. On the Juilliard composition faculty since 1971 and at Princeton University's music department from 1938 to 1984 (when he retired and became professor of music, emeritus), he has worked with generations of students who have a remarkable variety of styles. Besides composers such as Lieberson and fellow Juilliard professor Jonathan Dawe, Babbitt's pupils have included Stephen Sondheim, whose music is known for a different sort of complexity. Clearly, he did not impress his own views on their work.

"He never tried to impose himself," Dawe said. "He never tried to spin things in a direction he would think was his esthetic or style. But he had a very strong, intrinsic awareness of your music. In a lesson situation, he does seem to get into a student's music, to get to know it. He was very helpful."

Lieberson had the same experience. "There was no attempt on his part to guide me in a particular direction," he said. "If he was interested in what I was doing, he made himself completely available," even if Babbitt's ideas weren't immediately comprehended.

Babbitt's late wife of 66 years, Sylvia, once told Lieberson, "Milton doesn't want people's music to sound like him, to become like him as a composer."

Viewed from the opposite direction, Babbitt's music is unique. "There are no composers, really, that you can say stylistically sound like Milton Babbitt," Lieberson said. "Nobody sounds like Milton Babbitt."

Peter Goodman recently retired from a career as a music critic, reporter, and editor at Newsday. He is the author of Morton Gould: American Salute (Amadeus, 2000).

All Set:

All Set (1957)

Composed in 1957 for the Brandeis University Arts Festival, which in that year was a jazz festival, All Set is scored for a small jazz ensemble consisting of alto and tenor sax, trumpet and trombone, bass, vibes, piano and drums. While written in the jazz idiom, the work utilizes an all-combinatorial 12-tone row as its material. Characteristic of the "Chicago style", solo and ensemble juxtapositions recall "certain characteristics of group improvisation (Barkin), while the sections correspond to serial technique. While the available literature concerning the work is quite limited, Milton Babbitt has this to say on his work:

"Whether All Set is really jazz I leave to the judgment of those who are concerned to determine what things reallyare, and if such probably superficial aspects of the works as its very instrumentation, its use of the 'rhythm section,' the instrumentally delineated sections which may appear analogous to successive instrumental 'choruses,' and even specific thematic or motivic materials, may justify that aspect of the title which suggests the spirit of a 'jazz instrumental,' then the surface and the deeper structure of the pitch, temporal, and other dimensions of the work surely reflect those senses of the title, the letter of which brings the work closer to other of my compositions, which really are not jazz."
Although remaining faithful to his 12-tone system of composition, Babbitt's effective use of jazz inflection proves that 12-tone music not only can be extremely flexible, but also can indeed be fun! Salzman (1988) remarks that while Babbitt remains "... faithful to a vision of total rationality and control..." the work itself relates "... to [the] character of the live performance, situation and virtuosity of the performers." In this sense, the virtuosity reflects the extremely complex rhythms of the instrumental parts, often polyphonic, which are sounded against a more regular pulse of the drums. Not only are these instrumental parts rhythmically complex, but the melodic lines are extremely angular, requiring a great deal of concentration and control on the part of the performers.

The work is experimental, in that it is the first one in which Babbitt used the idea of ‘time point sets.' Glen Watkins (1988) asserts that Babbitt was "... dissatisfied with the incompatibilities of serial procedures used for pitch and rhythm..." which resulted in Babbitt's creation of a system that could be applied in a more flexible way. Watkins: "Here the obvious need for a clear and audible metric organization is acute if such an organization is to have any meaning for the listener." This statement obviously refers to Babbitt's famous and much misunderstood article "Who Cares if You Listen?" in which Babbitt places the responsibility of understanding and recognizing serial procedures upon performers and listeners.

The problem, as approached encountered by European serialists such as Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen, was a matter of whether the serial technique was perceptible when applied to a rhythmic system. Boulez and Stockhausen, among others, attempted to solve this by applying serial technique to duration. However, when Babbitt understood that the perception of duration was a subjective phenomenon, he successfully solved the issue by applying serial technique to a system of ‘attack points’ corresponding to the series. Simply put, the human brain understands the beginning of an event, but has trouble perceiving ‘how long’ the event has lasted without an external reference of measurement. Therefore, a variety of durational values could be assigned to notes in the series, creating a fluid and flexible system while at the same time adhering to a ‘strict’ rhythmic system that is perceptible to the listener.

Watkins describes the concept of time point sets as one in which "... various note-values are identified by their position at the point of attack within the bar". However, Charles Wuorinen is much more specific in elaborating on Babbitt's concept. Wuornin (1979) defines a time point as "... simply a location in the flow of time." In describing the time point system, he informs us that the concept is based upon two principles: "1) The relationships of the pitch system are transferred in their totality to the sphere of time relations; 2) This transfer is accomplished through the linkage of one simple equivalence - that of time intervalcorresponding to pitch interval." In this usage both time and pitch continuums are applied to modules which correspond to respective intervals, thus arriving at a flexible system in which time and pitch intervals can be varied from work to work. Wuorinen: "... twelve interval divisions of the time modules will therefore make up twelve time-point classes..." In this system, the time points may be identified by locating their points of attack, which have nothing to do with individual event duration. While in All Set Babbitt applies this use to the traditional 12-note series, this system is flexible in that it can be used in series containing other than 12 notes. Additional flexibility can be obtained by varying the lengths of time interval divisions.

While Babbitt obtains contrast by applying operations to different groups of instruments, the overall sonority and way in which he applies the time-point set theory in All Set creates an extremely unified composition.

Aaron Copland - Piano Variations

2009-11-14T21:55:00.003-06:00

The Piano Variations of Aaron Copland may come as a something of a shock to those familiar with Appalachian Spring or Billy the Kid.

Aaron Copland, Piano Variations:

The Piano Variations of American composer Aaron Copland were written for piano solo from January to October 1930. The approximate performance time is 11 minutes.

The Piano Variations were a product of Copland's second-style period, also called the abstract period, which comprised only instrumental (non-vocal) compositions. During this time, the composer moved away from the jazzy idioms he experimented with in the 1920s and started working more in the direction of absolute music. The influence of composition pedagogue Nadia Boulanger, with whom Copland studied in Paris at the Fontainebleau School of Music for Americans, is prevalent in the formal style, logic, patterns, and attention to detail in the Piano Variations and other works in this period.

Copland stated that he worked on the variations individually without an agenda for fitting them together or sequencing them, which seems to contradict the piece's highly ordered construction and seemingly inevitable development. Copland acknowledged this contradiction but maintained that, in fact, "One fine day when the time was right, the order of the variations fell into place." Copland had ambitious plans for this "serious piano piece" — the first of three including the Piano Variations (1930), the Piano Sonata(1939-41), and the Piano Fantasy (1957); he worked painstakingly and thought at epic proportions, saying he "should like to call them like Bach did the Goldberg Variations — but thus far haven't been able to think up a good one."

Unlike a traditional theme and variations, Copland's Piano Variations are not episodic. They are continuously played through, in an undisrupted development of the four-note "row" in the theme from which Copland builds the rest of the piece. All of the content can be traced back to this or transpositions of this four-note motif, suggesting the serialist techniques of Schoenberg. The concision, rigor, and lack of ornamentation have been compared to that of the style of Anton Webern (as in his Variations for piano). The dissonances (ubiquitous minor seconds, major sevenths and ninths) are precisely chosen for their degree of "shock value." While working on the Piano Variations, Copland cultivated a tautness and clarity of form and texture that became a precursor to the style of his other works.

Copland does not actually follow the precepts of the Second Viennese School exactly, although he considers them. Aside from the fact that the four-note "row" is eight tones short of being "12-tone," Copland frequently uses repetition in a declamatory style, as well as modifies and inserts new ideas into his motifs. This is another, smaller-scale form of "variation" that pervades the whole piece. This additional degree of freedom for the composer's imagination permits a gradual metamorphosis of the theme, and in a short period of time he explores many different moods, textures, tonal centers, harmonies, tempi, and rhythms, with a powerful cumulative effect. Copland describes the result as manifesting a "very dry and bare grandiosity."

Copland also experimented with the potential of the physical instrument, as he did with microtones on the stringed instruments in Vitebsk. In the Piano Variations, some notes are held down silently while pitches selected from their overtone series are struck, which produces an effect of ringing resonances without hammering the tones directly.

Another prominent characteristic is the piece's rhythmic irregularity. The meters change constantly within an essentially 4/4 framework.

Captain Beefheart - Ashtray Heart

2009-11-13T17:07:00.002-06:00

Captain Beefheart (Don van Vliet), Ashtray Heart (1980)

You used me like an ashtray heart
Case of the punks
Right from the start
I feel like a glass shrimp in a pink panty
With a saccharine chaperone
Make invalids out of supermen
Call in a "shrink"
And pick you up in a girdle
You used me like an ashtray heart
Right from the start
Case of the punks
Another day, another way
Somebody's had too much to think
Open up another case of the punks
Each pillow is touted like a rock
The mother / father figure
Somebody's had too much to think
Send your mother home your navel
Case of the punks
New hearts to the dining rooms
Violet heart cake
Dissolve in new cards, boards, throats, underwear
Ashtray heart
You picked me out, brushed me off
Crushed me while I was burning out
Then you picked me out
Like an ashtray heart
Hid behind the curtain
Waited for me to go out
A man on a porcupine fence
Used me for an ashtray heart
Hit me where the lover hangs out
Stood behind the curtain
While they crushed me out
You used me for an ashtray heart
You looked in the window when I went out
You used me like an ashtray heart.

Music from Nowhere

Leon Kirchner - Piano Concerto

Virgil Thomson - Soil Erosion and Floods, The River

Michael Harrison - Tone Cloud II, from Revelation for Piano

Penderecki - Passacaglia from Symphony No 3

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