One of the more impressive classical music-focussed blogs that I follow is On An Overgrown Path. A recent entry about Byzantine mosaics and frescoes in the Chora Church in Istanbul has, in addition to some gorgeous pictures, a link to a video of oud player Rahim AlHaj on YouTube.
At the end he says the song is “how to express your enjoy.” I’ll say! Continue reading ›
Tagged Bach, Beethoven, classical music, Glenn Gould, jazz, Louis Armstrong, Rahim AlHaj, world musicDespite appearances, this blog is not dead. I spent most of March finalizing a score to submit to New England Conservatory for my doctorate. They’ve been expecting it for about 7 years, so push finally came to shove.
One of the last things I managed to do before the dissertation score took over my life was to write about the Greensboro Opera Company’s production of Hansel and Gretel. As an afterthought, I sent an email to the people listed on their contact page to say that I had enjoyed the opera and had written a little on my blog about it. Based on the emails I got back, they were genuinely pleased. I know from my own experience how nice it is to find that someone has heard my music and been engaged by it—a better and rarer thing than simply liking or enjoying it. An excellent thing to keep in mind if you have a blog and you’re inclined to write about the arts.
In that entry I mentioned that the fine young baritone who played the father is a student at North Carolina State University, here in Durham, and that I hoped I’d have a chance to hear him again before long. Lo and behold a comment was left this afternoon to say that his graduation recital well be about a week and a half from now:
Richard Leon Hodges’s Senior Recital
An Afternoon of Classical Music
Sunday, April 15, 2007
4:00pm - 5:15pm
B. N. Duke Auditorium on the Campus of North Carolina Central University
1801 Fayetteville Street
Durham, NC
I’m looking forward to it. His web page is well worth reading, too.
I’m also hoping to get back to Greensboro next week, when they’re doing Henry Mollicone’s Face on the Barroom Floor.
Tagged Greensboro Opera Company, opera
As a jaded, pessimistic, and inertia-bound person, a wonderful thing about having children is that I end up doing fun things I would otherwise avoid. Going to Greensboro, NC to hear Engelbert Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel on Friday was a case in point. Even without my daughter there were good reasons to go, but it’s more than an hours drive from home, and I wasn’t sure about the Greensboro Opera Company. I knew one of the singers would be excellent, but I’ve heard excellent singers in shows that also featured not-very-fun-to-hear singers, or painfully out of tune orchestras, or other things that I’d rather not sit through. My daughter really wanted to go, both for the opera and to visit her Greensboro cousins. So off we went, and no matter how good or bad the opera was, it would have been a fun evening—great to get out of town, to see the cousins, and to have time together without the much loved but often loud and obtrusive little sister. And as a bonus, both of us thoroughly enjoyed the opera. How ‘bout that?
There was, as I said, one singer that I already knew. Cheryse McLeod Lewis sang in a recital of my music a few months ago.
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This morning Alex Ross posted a short summary of the Hattogate scandal with links to some key sites that get to the heart of the matter. The one I found interesting enough to follow up is to Pristine Classical’s Hatto Hoax page. Andrew Rose, the engineer who runs the site, specializes in audio restoration—and it seems that he was instrumental in showing that a hoax had been perpetrated in the first place. The evidence that he produces on his site is quite convincing, I’d say. Another blog that has reasonably succinct, intelligent coverage of Hattogate is Jessica Duchen’s, and this post from On An Overgrown Path shows in stark, graphical terms how much more interested we all seem to be in scandal than anything else.
But that’s now why I’m writing.
A much more heartening item on the Pristine Audio web site is a restored recording of Alfred Cortot and Jacques Thibaud playing Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata. Continue reading ›
Tagged Beethoven, classical music, historically informed performance, recordingsThis morning on NPR I heard Scott Simon and Marin Alsop talking about Mahler’s Fifth (you can listen too). Simon began by noting that Mahler was disappointed with the reception it got, and is supposed to have said that he wished he could have waited 50 years and then conducted the premier, when the piece would be understood. Simon’s first question to Alsop was whether Mahler’s wish was “born of great self-knowledge.” I think Scott Simon is great, so I was a little surprised to hear him lead off with this kind of cliche, and even more surprised when Alsop answered that it’s a “tremendously insightful” question, and finally kind of amazed when she quoted her friend John Corigliano saying that “a composer’s work really can’t be judged while he’s alive.” Huh?
Who knows, it could have been an offhand comment on Mahler’s part, wishful thinking in a moment of frustration that got picked up by the myth-making apparatus. Continue reading ›
Tagged classical music, Mahler, NPR
Today I took my 8 year old daughter (I’ll call her M) to the North Carolina Museum of Art to see the big Monet exhibition. Talk about crowded! I suppose the week between Christmas and New Year isn’t the best time to go if you want to avoid the crowds, though it is a good time if you want to take a school-aged child. We worked our way around maybe half of the paintings and then M asked if we could leave the Monet area. I felt ready to go, too. It’s very hard to be contemplative while jockying politely for a good vantage point and worrying whether you’re going to step on someone or be stepped on.
We had a lot more fun out in the general exhibitions. Continue reading ›
Tagged art, gruesome martyrdom, Monet, parentingYesterday was Rummy’s last day. I heard some retired general interviewed on the BBC about his legacy. I find it completely incredible that there’s any sort of “on the one hand…, and on the other…” to that. The man is a complete and utter disaster.
Everyone is dragging out his famous quotes, especially the one about the known knowns and the known unknowns, etc. To the extent that you can set aside the horror of what he’s done, it’s amusing enough, and you can sure see how he’d have to resort to circumlocution and mystification with regard to planning and predicting. The “unknown unknowns” are, I guess, what the rest of us call surprises, and it’s certainly true that you have to expect surprises in life and in war. Continue reading ›
Tagged Donald Rumsfeld, Iraq, Politics
I’ve just been talking to a colleague in another department about a statistical analysis of Beatles chord progressions that he’s doing. I could go on and on about the pitfalls of that, but I won’t. He’s doing it to illustrate a statistical technique, so he’s not pretending to be coming up with the grand theory of Beatles harmony. He did mention the idea of using some “worst of the Beatles” lists that he’s found on the web as the basis for some comparisons. That got me googling, since it’s totally against my nature to pass up a chance to waste time researching a thing like that.
At the top of the list was a poll that came up with “Ob-La-Di” as “the worst song ever.” Say what? Continue reading ›
Tagged polls, pop music, rating and ranking, rock, The BeatlesWe had an amusing little discussion/debate in my songwriting class today. I brought in 2 recordings of Paul Simon’s song “Something So Right”—the original (from There Goes Rhymin’ Simon) and Annie Lennox’s (from Medusa). Lennox’s rearrangement is fairly radical—she exchanges the roles of the bridge and chorus in the original. I like to spend some time with the song in class because of the relatively sophisticated harmony and the flexible phrasing (and because I like it). I made an iMix with both tracks that you can bring up if you have iTunes.
After hearing both versions we had the inevitable debate about which was better. Continue reading ›
Tagged Annie Lennox, Paul Simon, songwriting, teaching music
Tonight, in the same hall Zorn played last night, it was the Ciompi Quartet with Branford Marsalis. I was looking forward to hearing my friend marc faris’s new composition Mountain Music which, as it turned out, is a beautifully restrained piece, distinctive, personal, and surprising. And yet, through no fault of the music or musicians, I was discontent. I didn’t hear the sounds I wanted to hear. I hope I get another chance when I’m in a better frame of mind to listen (it didn’t help things that the two pieces on that half of the program were listed on the program in the wrong order).
Maybe this reflects my own faulty and biased memory as much as anything, but it struck me at the end of the concert that the grittiest sforzando playing of the evening happened in the Mendelssohn. True or not, the fact that I formed this impression pretty well sums up my frame of mind—I was all set to hear quartet and soloist dig in, as I have heard both do, with great ferocity, on other occasions.
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