Saturday Night Randomry

via here.

Saturday Night Randomry

Pat Metheny at the North Sea Jazz Festival in 2003 together with the Metropool Orchestra.

Saturday Night Randomry

Fantasia No. 3 in D minor, K. 397

Fantasia No. 3 in D minor, K. 397 (Fantasy in English, Fantasie in German) is a piece of music for solo piano composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1782. Despite being unfinished at Mozart's death, the piece is nonetheless one of his more popular compositions for the piano. Because of its somewhat unusual rhythm, its constantly changing tempo (seven different tempi occur throughout the piece, some of which are quite fast), and its complete lack of any recognizable musical form (as indicated by the "Fantasy" title), the Fantasia is considered to be a relatively challenging piece to perform.


Performed by Emil Grigoryevich Gilels

Saturday Night Randomry

Kronos Quartet playing Sigur Ros

Saturday Night Randomry

Saturday Night Randomry

Saturday Night Randomry

Some background:

In the late 1940s John Cage visited the anechoic chamber at Harvard University. An anechoic chamber is a room designed in such a way that the walls, ceiling and floor will absorb all sounds made in the room, rather than bouncing them back as echoes. They are also generally extremely soundproof. Anechoic chambers are widely used for measuring the acoustic properties of instruments and microphones, and for performing psychoacoustic experiments.

Cage entered the chamber expecting to hear silence, but as he wrote later, he "heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation."

I don't know if this explanation is accurate, but this experience is often described as the inspiration behind the famous Cage composition 4' 33".

Saturday Night Randomry

Saturday Night Randomry

From the Youtube user, boototter:

Metros and trams on Amsterdam Zuid station. Friday-evening early spring, people still coming home, switching platform or already going out.

Music from Different Trains / Steve Reich

Different Trains is hands down my favorite musical piece of all time. Ever.

Some background:

During the war years, Reich made train journeys between New York and Los Angeles to visit his parents, who had separated. Years later, he pondered the fact that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe instead of the United States at that time, he might have been travelling in very different trains.

Steve Reich's earlier work had frequently used tape, looped and played back at different speeds. However Different Trains was a novel experiment, using recorded speech as a source for melodies. This followed Scott Johnson's John Somebody of 1978, an early attempt to construct directed melodic motion by harmonising recorded speech.

In Different Trains, after each melody in the piece is introduced, usually by a single instrument (viola for women and cello for men[1]), a recording of the spoken phrase from which the melody derives is played. The melody is then developed for a while, with the instruments playing along with the recording of the phrase or part of the phrase. The music for the strings makes extensive use of paradiddles rhythms, with alternating pitches instead of alternating drum sticking. In addition to speech, the piece includes recordings of train sounds, as well as of sirens and warning bells.

You can listen to my favorite movement here.

Saturday Night Randomry

I ran across my dusty copy of this Kronos Quartet CD a day or so ago, prompting me to use the Youtubes to see if anyone had posted a visual.

Tada.

Some background:

In 1999 Philip Glass composed a new score for the 1931 classic Dracula. The evidence of his considerable genius being the decisions to (a) use only a string quartet (b) engage the services of Kronos Quartet to bring the music to life even as so many lose (not all permanently, however) theirs. The result brings a whole new meaning to “Death and the Maiden” and provides considerable pleasure to movie lover and concertgoer alike.

Glass opts for colours rather than themes in this post-modern melodramatic rendering, chock-a-block full of Alberti basses. Arpeggios signal the entry of the living dead; the horse drawn carriage gallops across the screen with an undercurrent of syncopation that harkens back to Mozart’s first G Minor Symphony (No. 25, K. 183); the sinister viola helps the weary traveler, Renfield (played with a very fine madness by Dwight Frye), up the Transylvanian steps even as his host declaims “The children of the night [wolves howling], what music they make!” All of which contributes to director Ted Browning’s marvellous tone of restrained horror and stylish after life.