Music - A View from '82

'I hear music in my dreams, in water pipes, on the seashore, in the grass and trees, in the modulations of human voices, in motor engines, in birdsong and in factories.

I cannot escape it. My mind creates meaningful music out of nothing but random sounds.

Only on a black volcanic desert in Iceland was I able to escape this world of sound. The absolute silence was, in its tranquility, the most perfect piece of music I had ever heard; so peaceful to my ears, so clean and untainted by man, though one of my two companions found it eerie and unnerving.

Music emerges from a chaos of noise in every sense. A record has blemishes- it crackles, or you hear a faint background hiss from the tape. And at concerts the music emerges through the coughs and fidgeting of the audience.'

Back to Bomarzo

After my last blog post regarding lost rapidshare links to my flawed recording of Bomarzo I found a picture of the cover to the deluxe edition. There was (or is) a copy available on Amazon.com for less than 50 USD. This recording was also used as the soundtrack to an experimental film called BOMARZO 2007- a taster of which exists on YouTube (see link below)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWM2bShnC-8&list=FLgs93Q6yKIj2I1s-wvJsJ4A&index=4&feature=plpp_video

Apologies to any readers looking to download from Rapidshare links. My account with Rapidshare has expired and thus the links have perished. Apropos of the Ginastera Bomarzo link- what I obtained was a flawed download and I was only able to get disk one to work properly. I know this set is available at a high price occasionally through eBay or vinyl dealers but also have seen that it was reissued on CD in a luxury edition by the Opera company that originally staged it for the recording.

Dr David Wright

Dr Wright has a website posting articles on classical composers as well as classical performers. I have found it quite fascinating reading because he brings to light a lot of unsavoury aspects of various composer's lives. For instance, Sir Edward Elgar gets a very bad press. Now, I happen to like a bit of Elgar- mostly the symphonies and Alassio (In The South) but find the Enigma Variations a bit tedious and have never yet got through the symphonic poem 'Falstaff'. As for 'Gerontius' I have tried many times to like it but have now (after reading David Wright's comments) feel justified in giving up on it.

The composer who gets the worst press of all is Benjamin Britten - the most odious man he had ever met.  Now that one had me hopping from one foot to the other. There's a lot of Britten's music I like but Dr Wright's comments tend to make me see his output in a rather different light than before so there's a massive reassessment going on.

What I don't like about Dr Wright's writings is that he seems to be a little homophobic (though it's odd that he calls Bruckner a spiritual man and makes no mention of his homosexuality) and also rather repetitive. The phrase 'a real man' keeps cropping up in the biographies of heterosexual composers. And several times he reiterates that Walton thought that Shostakovich was the greatest composer of the last century (something I wouldn't try to deny).

Anyway, Dr Wright's writings are very interesting and persuasive if not a little contentious, but beware- they can really distort your perception on the music you love.


http://www.wrightmusic.net/

Memento mori

I was without any home internet access for virtually the whole of December 2010. Therefore I missed hearing about the deaths of three creative people whose work I enjoyed (and still enjoy) until very recently.

Firstly Boris Tishchenko died on the 9th of December. And then Jean Rollin on the 15th December. Finally Don Van Vliet died on the 17th December.

Tischenko was a pupil of Ustvolskaya and Shostakovich. They both influenced his own music but he did have his own voice. His music was uneven in quality but when he was good (as in the two violin concertos and the harp concerto) he was very good.

Jean Rollin has long been a favourite film director of mine. His dreamlike vampire films are so different from either Hollywood or Hammer horror.

And Don Van Vliet - Captain Beefheart - was simply a one-off. There's nothing in rock music quite like 'Trout Mask Replica'

Frank Zappa revisited

Frank Zappa. I’d forgotten what a huge fan I was of the music of FZ; I’d shut the door on him for quite a significant period of time. But now a restrospective is in progress: coming back again to all the old albums brought back to me how much I used to enjoy the music.
I guess nowadays I find the comedy/social comment songs a bit tedious (actually, I could never get through ‘The Torture Never Stops’) but the sheer invention and the range of styles he used still floors me. My first encounter with Zappa’s music was when I saw a copy of ‘Freak Out’ in Woolworths. In the liner notes it quoted Edgard Varese: ‘The present-day composer refuses to die’. Cool, I thought, here’s a rock musician who’s heard of Varese (whom I had already discovered before I got into Rock).
I was hooked instantly. It was rather ironic, I thought, that one of Zappa’s favourites – Anton Webern – was shot in 1945 by an American soldier because he was out after curfew.
Wish Frank had given up the fags (British meaning) and coffee years ago; he might still be with us now.
Oh well, there's the legacy. And the fact that his music is still performed, not only by his son Dweezil but also by 'classical' ensembles. I think he would have been happy about that.

Music and Machines: Stockhausen's HYMNEN

Bernard Pulham, who maintains The Unofficial Karlheinz Stockhausen Site, says in his notes: "1985
I attended the extensive BBC Barbican series of sell-out concerts "Music and Machines" in 1985 (which ended with an incredible performance of Hymnen with soloists and orchestra)."

I wish I'd been there. Nevertheless, I was able to tape it from the radio on an audio cassette which I transferred a few years later onto CDR. The problem with taping this on cassette was that I missed a few seconds recording while I was turning the cassette over, but I don't think this detracts too much from the overall power of this performance. The analogue sound, however, is fairly low level so if you turn it up you can hear a faint hum.

So here, for what I believe is the first time on the internet, is a recording of that incredible performance that Bernard Pulham mentioned. It was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on the 16th of January 1985.

The performers for Regions 1, 2 and 4 were the Stockhausen Group, comprising Markus Stockhausen (trumpet and synthesiser), Simon Stockhausen (saxophone and synthesiser), Andreas Bottger (percussion) and Ingo Metzmacher (piano).
Region 3 was performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Peter Eotvos - conductor.
And Karlheinz Stockhausen was, of course, in charge of sound projection.
The performance includes announcements (in English) by the BBC announcer.

Enjoy this wonderful piece of musical history.

http://rapidshare.com/files/165024644/Hymnen_1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/165161532/Hymnen_2.rar