For No Reason

(Well, maybe one.)

32 songs in 8 minutes

For No Reason

via Tabloid Prodigy

Grammy Noms

Good to see M.I.A. on for record of the year.

And, no matter what people say, good to see Coldplay get 7 noms.

via NY Times

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

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.