The Rambler

Spotted by Kyle, there’s an excellent article by Corey Dargel on the current generation of nonpop singer-songwriters - or ‘artsongwriters’ as Dargel calls them - who are “moving away from the operatic influences that have too heavily affected the development of traditional art song”. Dargel himself is a prime practitioner - samples of his work are here and here.

Which gives me ample premise to tell you that if you do nothing else today download ‘Superhero on the Ground’ and treasure it close; this song has been haunting me for days and is the most heart-aching thing I’ve heard all year. And if you’re already bored of Brokeback Mountain, ‘Gay Cowboys’ is a very good alternative.

‘How many times have we been stunned by the virtuoso violin writing in Alban’s Violin Concerto?’

Priceless.

UPDATE: Felsenmusick has some background info.

Plenty of blog love for Golijov in USA-land at the moment: see Steve Smith and Alex Ross (with a little counterpoint from Jerry Bowles). Somehow, I don’t think it will be the same here when Pasión hits London on Friday. We shall see.

Well, I won’t, since photocopying in the British Library today has eaten all my concert budget for the week.

hills | flickr | 20th February, 2006

Finding the classical mp3 blogs so you don’t have to.

I’ve pulled some of these names from the (surely exhaustive?) list at Hype Machine, and I can’t say I’ve checked every link there - only the ones that look plausible. So if you run a classical mp3 blog called ‘Nu Metal is Rad’ and haven’t linked you, please pardon me not spotting your ironic tone, and drop me a line. I’ll see that you get your link.

First up, you all know cacophonous and Trrill - if you don’t, you should - so they’re a good place to start. Trrill is a great source for all you opera diva needs, Cacophonous for independent new music composers. I can’t be sure there’s not any overlap. (Incidentally, Cacophonous is also a great place to start looking for individual composer mp3 blogs.)

ANABlog is the unofficial blog of the Analog Arts Ensemble, and recent posts include Webern, Tippett, Maderna, and Lutosławski’s Les espaces du sommeil, which is alright by me,

Electric Strings is a relatively new blog by cellist and composer Philip Sheppard which includes a few mp3s of his music.

Dave Seidel is a ‘droney, ambient’ composer who has a sideblog, mysterybear productions where he posts his new works.

Update, 24 May 2006:

Classical Connection. A new blog, which has kicked things off in quite astonishing style. You have to go there and see (now, before the downloads run out…). Some excellent choices here so far, and exactly the kind of contemporary classical MP3 blog I hope we can see more of. Also led me to a couple more:

Le Roi s’amuse: a classical MP3 blog whose recent postings have included Ezra Sims, Morton Subotnick, Bartók, Shostakovich and Rameau.

Masterfade: less contemporary than others listed here, but with a strong line in late 19th and early 20th century repertoire; recents posts feature Bartók, Fauré, Bruckner and Stravinsky.

Update, 1 August 2006:

A Closet of Curiosities. Another of the new wave of complete out-of-print album MP3 blogs, this time with a strong line in mostly American electro-acoustica.
No doubt there are more than this, and more will emerge. So assume that this post is a work in progress…

Update, 8 February 2007:

different waters. For some reason I thought I’d already included this one, but clearly not. DW covers a wide range (from world to minimal electronica) but frequently includes modern classical, and has been quite awesome on spectralism recently.

Update, 27 May 2007:

Because of Sequenza21’s crazy and confusing structure, Jacob Sudol’s blog is easy to overlook, but it’s actually one of the most generous of avant-garde music blogs around. Unfortunately, it doesn’t actually have a homepage (told you it was a crazy and confusing structure), but here’s the most recent page from the archives, and you can navigate around from there. In any case, well worth spending some time and some bandwidth with.

Update, 17 Dec 2007: The contributors to Querbeet post a wide range of stuff, including plenty of avant garde, contemporary classical and experimental.

Update, 30 Jan 2008: Orpheus Music: the Electronic Music Time Machine posts “early electronic music that has been commercially neglected”. Lots of top stuff here.

Also: Classical - New Age - Ambient - OST. Does exactly what it says on the tin, with a heavy lean towards classical rep.

Indie music web portal Brainwashed have published a call for the dismantling of the RIAA.

This poorly-researched, innuendo-ridden piece on pirate radio in Friday's Guardian has rightly annoyed the Dissensus crew; Blackdown's Pitchfork interview with the Rinse management is a valuable counter.

Roots People Music has a two part interview with Kode 9.

Canoe Jam has a one part interview with Philip Glass.

Andante sort of looks like it's back - well, as a static site at least (thanks Felsenmusick for the spot).

Ostalgie fans should head over to WFMU's big bloc of East German mp3s and vids.

WFMU also point up an Sony ad, first noticed in the NY Times looking for unpaid interns to fill MySpace, blogs and other social networking sites with plugs for Sony CDs. In no way is this spam. Oh, and the ad is no longer there, so prospective applicants will have to dirty their hands elsewhere…

And everyone agrees that this sucks.

Some of the Urban Classic aftermath:

Photos at 1Xtra: “It’s the night everyone’s been waiting for”

Bun-U: “Hey tonight we’ve made history, cuz we’ve made posh people say GET ME”

Neil Fisher in The Times: “one left feeling that the orchestra had been asked to travel so far from their world that the product they were offering was largely superfluous.”

Robert Maycock in the Independent: “the biggest noise at the Empire was the squeal of institutions jumping into a fashionable bed.”

Peter Aspden and Alistair Macaulay in the Financial Times: “mostly a case of thumping backbeats receiving an unsophisticated melodic accompaniment, to perfectly pleasant effect.”

The show is now all up on 1xtra’s Listen again, and will be until the weekend. After that it should be somewhere on Radio 3’s pages.

The grime crowd are giving biggest props to Bruza - as by far the biggest name on the night, this is fair enough. He did sound the most comfortable MC too, although Tor wasn’t far behind - here’s hoping we hear a lot more from her.

I can’t say the same for Pase and Purple though, who come over as the sanitised, sanctioned, product that Urban Classic always threatened to become.

Not surprisingly, the broadsheet critics (coming from a more ‘musicianly’ angle) are most impressed by Faith SFX. Concerns over ‘what’s the point of beatboxing’ notwithstanding, it’s good old-fashioned virtuosity that wins them over. Even a cynic like me has to admit that simply on the level of pure entertainment, it’s pretty bloody impressive. And the Faith SFX bits of the show came closest to a truly grimey sound - but this only left me wondering what might have been achieved if a proper drum track had been laid down for both orchestra and MCs to work against.

This revealed the show’s biggest weakness - everything that finally made it onto stage had been worked through an exclusively classical paradigm (and the dread 19th-century classical paradigm at that) that regards musicianship, virtuosity, live performance and a hierachical structure between composer, conductor and performers as the principal standards by which to judge music. An orchestra has to work very hard to break out of such conventions - and top marks to Bruza for trying to break those conventions in calling for the reload! Faith SFX and the four MCs were cast as concerto-esque soloists whose role was to confront the orchestra in only the narrow confines of a concertante format. Naturally, when the one individual with the most apparent virtuosity - Faith SFX - does his thing, the set up works best; he was also the most comfortable player in his role, with the four MCs sounding, on the whole, somewhat overwhelmed.

Faith SFX demonstrated that even if the night wasn’t a complete success, at least there is mileage in beatbox with orchestra. However, this seems doubly perverse; next time this classical vs electronica/urban crossover is attempted, could someone please bring some sequencers with them?

“Why is one of the world’s top opera directors going into musicals?” asks the Guardian of Francesca Zambello, at the same as film director Zhang ‘House of Flying Daggers’ Yimou is booked to direct at the Met. Coincidence? Probably, but if Hal Prince directs any historical kung-fu films in the near future remember that you heard it here first.

river | flickr | 20th February, 2006

Still testing out posting digital photos from flickr…

Seem to have got something that works, anyway. Expect a bit more decoration round here from now on.

Popular music is popular because it's popular: proven by science.

Danceblogga points up the ironies of EMI earning a fat load of dosh out of the Paul MacCartney/Jay-Z Grammy collaboration. "Who is this Danger Mouse of which you speak?"

Kid Kameleon draws attention to Golden Era Jungle - a vast forum, info site, and *licks lips* repository of 100+ classic jungle sets. Yowzer.

And Londonist points to an unusual wedding at the Oxford Street Virgin Megastore. The punchline's worth a snicker - and it's not the one you're thinking of.

I notice in my referrals this morning a Google for ‘critics Phillip Neil Martin’, a composer I mentioned in a review of the Elysian Quartet last year. Well, since someone is looking, it behoves me to mention that I saw another work of Martin’s, Standing Water in concert on Saturday, and thought it probably the best work of the concert. Martin is deeply interested in gagaku, and this work is a splintered take on the Japanese court music (with some effective imitations of sho and hichiriki). Plus, I’m very sympathetic towards the spatial, non-developmental perception of time, and I think Martin got this aspect of his Japanese influences across well.