And now here I am. Somewhat recovered after having a real, honest-to-god weekend.

And all the snow is finally melting.

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When I first started grad school everyone was showing off (fairly discreetly, for a bunch of borderline autistics) just how much stuff they knew, and how clever they were, and how they were gonna become professors. Blah blah blah, took this class, solved these problems, mathematical genius, blah blah. Well, after a couple of weeks of getting assaulted by graduate school, almost everyone did a perfect half-spin, and it became cool to talk about how you would NEVER stay in academia, and how things were way more impossible for you. And of course now, at graduation time, everyone is going on to do post-docs.

Well that’s sort of how I feel about the Nutcracker Suite. It’s the kind of piece which is fine to like when you listen to classical only casually, then you have to not like it for a bit, and finally it’s alright to come back to it again. As long as you give some sort of long-winded explanation proving that you know it’s not considered a masterpiece or anything. Classical musical enthusiasts snooty? Never!

• Haydn had his head stolen for 150 years
• Mozart’s full name was Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart
• Mendelssohn’s symphonies were composed in the order: 1, 2, 5, 4 ,3
• Dvorak’s opus numberings are even more confusing
• Mahler only composed about 20 pieces.

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(That’s Valentina Lisitsa, a “pianist electrifying!” and rising classical superstar, playing the last movement of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” piano sonata, Op. 106)

There is so much Beethoven I don’t know, or don’t understand. This was a piece I had heard mentioned dozens of times (it’s one of the most famous sonatas, and I think one of the more famous Beethoven pieces), but I never really liked the first two movements enough to listen all the way through. I must’ve always skipped to a different sonata after a couple minutes (I have the Claudio Arrau boxset, and Beethoven wrote 32 sonatas, so it’s way easy to skip to one I know I like better like No. 32, or the Appassionata).

But now I am totally in love with the Hammerklavier. Especially the last movement, with the crazy fugue, which conveniently lasts exactly as long as it takes me to walk into lab!

I have found some time to work on updating all of the “beginners guide” stuff on this site — which is something I’ve been meaning to do for ages. I’m not doing it incrementally though, it’s all gonna change at once. While doing this I’ve discovered all kinds of little tidbits. For example, do you know the one about Haydn’s head? Apparently he was the victim of head-robbery (a dangerous and serious problem often ignored by mainstream news outlets) and didn’t get it back for about 150 years. And now he has two.

1. The median pay for members of the orchestra is over $140,000.
2. They get several times more paid vacation a year (10 weeks) than I do.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t get pissy over a pay cut. In fact, I’d love to redistribute some less deserving salaries (politicians, hedge fund managers, ambulance chasers, etc.) to the coffers of my own special interest groups (classical musicians, research scientists, underwear models, etc., especially people who are all three). However,  that particular sharing of the wealth will have to wait until I am made dictator of the USA, probably around mid-August. No, I’m delighted they are defending their salaries, but that’s a pretty sweet deal!

Does anyone know what the range of salaries is? I bet that median figure is biased toward the low end of the range.

Featuring all of your favorite vague adjectives:

… the sound was so opulently gorgeous it almost defied belief! It was a total incarnation of the perfectionist’s wildest dreams: rich, velvety, airy, awesome, liquid, yet incredibly detailed. There were none of the analog disc’s problems. No marginal mistracking, no subtle VTA-error distortions, no disc-resonance smearing, no feedback-induced low-end boom or mud, no ticks or pops or pressing grumbles even at the highest listening levels. And there was no analog-tape flutter or modulation noise or transient-rounding or print-through or hiss.

I’d love a history of these reviews for each new audio technology as it came out.

Something else I discovered is that you should under no circumstances send things which aren’t money. This can actually hinder the relief efforts, since it is extra boxes of stuff that aid workers have to sort through and deal with:

“Of course, the donors were only trying to help, but misplaced intentions actually worsened the suffering. Buried under care packages and out of date antibiotics labeled in Thai and Chinese were the world’s most advanced malaria medications. Meanwhile along the coast, people who had just lost homes and families writhed in malarial fever for lack of treatment.”

So just stick with the credit card…

This was prompted by Harry Dean Stanton, who stars as the aurally challenged lead cowboy in this David Lynch shortie (“The Cowboy and the Frenchman”) we watched the other night, while putting the last few brightly colored marmosets and monkeys and minnows into a jigsaw puzzle:

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(parts two, three).

Which at the time reminded me of his appearance as the owner of the Fat Trout trailer park in Fire Walk With Me:

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(Which G did not remember, hence the Youtubing tonight. I don’t see how she forgot it really, it’s one of my favorites in the movie… “I’ve already been places”). Which brought us to one of the major atmospheric forces in Lynch’s movies, the soundtracks of Angelo Badalamenti. Like this piece from Blue Velvet:

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Badalamenti’s soundtracks are always luscious and dissonant, in a wandering, stringy sort of way. That’s exactly why I both love the music, and think it’s perfectly appropriate as a landscape for Lynch’s movies to live in. It is also very similar to some of Shosty’s brooding melancholia, especially that last piece, which was explicitly styled after his 15th symphony:

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Which is of course how we wound down to the comment up there, at the top of this meandering blog post.