Click here to view the embedded video.

(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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

(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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

In the holiday seasons of my youth there were trees and Christmas music and fires and stuff. Now I am old and bitter, and the beautiful virgin snowfall is just another incovenience to take into account for the seven hour drive on Christmas eve. My gosh this sounds Grinchy and tragic when written down!

Well TBH I’m being just a tad melodramatic. We really are doing holidayish stuff, it’s just crammed into the week right before (hence starting RIGHT NOW). In fact, I started considering all this lost scent of pine while munching on a holiday gingerbread pig that G just churned out of the piggery (oven) in our kitchen. I even added a little bit of Christmassy MP3ing to the room. Sort of. Since we don’t have a Douglas fir or tinsel out it’s probably not a huge surprise that I don’t have gigabytes of xmas music, either.

I do have this, though:

The last piece of which is the Hymnis Amoris for male and female choirs and soloists. It’s all about love and stuff, which I suppose is kinda appropriate for the “peace and goodwill to all mankind etc.” crowd.  I remember having that CD on repeat in my car last winter. Even driving around with the windshield icing up became cosy and comforting. It’s a good one. It has to be the choirs which make it so instantly Christmassy.

Although not every piece with choirs has the same effect….

Click here to view the embedded video.

Any other examples of terrifyingly anti-xmas choral music ?

My, how you’ve grown! It’s been such a long time since we last met, every day felt like an eternity, etc, &c, and so on. I have a pile of ideas that wanted to get conveyed, and will be, perhaps: CDs that rejected doubts about composers; meme taggings; long and wistful monologues about the symbolic use of Beethoven’s ninth in Die Hard. It’s all stacked up in the mental out-box, or to-do-box, or some other hyphenated box.

When I don’t write for a while I sort of forget how to do it. Not the actual tap-tapping of keys, but the linking of thoughts to characters. The turning of ideas into words. It feels a bit like building a flight of stairs, one at a time — balancing precariously on the last as you clumsily hammer bent nails into the next plank. I was going to continue that simile, but un-ironically spent several minutes typing and erasing and retyping a series of failed continuations.

That’s why I’m not really writing about much of substance in this post. It’s just exercise typing, a warm up. Getting the joints flexible for next time.

After all, writing-related injuries can be nasty.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(For those who don’t spend hours of their leisure time shifting around ones and zeros, this chick is supposed to be singing along to the music. The game processes the notes being sung and gives you points on how well you match the melody. However, the software doesn’t care about timbre or anything fancy, it’s just looking for pitch, so really you can use anything that can produce a tone. Like a flute.)

I tried this once by whistling. It turns out I’m not so hot at holding whistled pitches either.

They started up straight away. Just push play. It was just one mechanical action between you and the music, nothing to boot up and double-click on. It was much less of a physical divide when there is only a split second action required between you thinking “I want to hear this music”, and that music actually starting. With MP3s it’s a much more elaborate protocol of clicks, responses, re-clicks and confirmations. Before you could just get it on with the music, now you have to take it out to a movie and dinner first.

Of course, you now inevitably have a much larger library of music at your mousetips, but you have to go through the booting up ritual even just to see that selection of songs. If, after browsing by mouse through the acres of uncovered albums you decide that in fact nothing suits your mood right now and you’ll listen to chattering rain on the windows instead, it’s too late. You’ve already committed yourself to booting up the computer. There’s this extra task “starting up the computer” which has incised itself into the middle of the music, it’s now a three part process.

But it’s not like that’s a majorly taxing physical task. In terms of purely calorific value, pressing your Dell’s power-on button is worth about negative one-quarter of one M&M. But that’s not the point. It’s the time taken, the wait for the music library to appear on the screen, the worry that the battery might run out before the peasant’s in Beethoven’s 6th get back to their partying. Every little disconnect adds up.

What I want is a hefty leatherbound catalog of my music. Every beefsteak-thick page has the album art, liner notes and track list on it. If I touch the page with my palm my computer instantly starts to play the selected piece. Of course, the major problem would be how the hell to add extra pages to the thing. It’s totally cheating if this all done on a single electronic screen like an iPod. I want physical, tactile interactions. I want to flip pages. I want to be able to measure the size of the library by the heft of the book in my hands — and until we can electronically create mass, which is never — that’s not gonna happen.

I strongly feel that people want music to retain some physicalness, but in an age of MP3s I’m not sure how we do that.

For now, I’ll click folders, and be thankful for the gigabytes of music. I don’t miss CDs enough to retreat back to them.