Category: music

Happy Birthday, Johann

Karen

It’s the birthday of J.S. Bach today, composer of the music I’d take to a desert island (sonatas and partitas for solo violin) and architect of my last remaining Protestant religious experience (the St. Matthew Passion, which will get listened to this weekend).

But let’s go way back to the first Bach I or anyone else probably ever heard, the Toccata and Fugue in D Minor:

Fun music history fact: Toccata comes from the Italian toccare, “to touch,” and was essentially an improvised keyboard warm-up that got written down. And fuga is Latin for “flight.”

Thanks, Schumann

Karen

Here’s a Robert Schumann art song for your Thursday, which I have been listening to on repeat and which I promise will be the most gorgeous thing you will hear all week:

The title is “Mondnacht” (Night of the Moon), from his Liederkreis, (Song Cycle), Op. 39.  This is sung by by great Dietrich Fischer-Diskau, and you can get LOTS of info about the poem that makes up the lyrics (along with different performances and critiques) right here.

Friday Unrelated Information

Karen

1. Today is Good Friday in the Christian calendar. That means I have to listen to at least some of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which is s a religious experience all in itself. You can listen to an intro to the piece and why it matters on NPR, or just jump into a full version on YouTube.

2. If three hours  of Bach is a little much to commit to, there’s always Wagner. The “Good Friday Music” from Parsifal is also themed appropriately and is only ten minutes. The link goes to a Met performance, with good video notes: “…the radiant Good Friday Music is a poignant meditation on the chief themes of the opera: suffering, compassion and redemption.”

3. My inner hippie has no problem with Easter in its broadest form of “suffering, compassion and redemption” (with some pagan spring celebrations mixed in, too), but she also feels compelled to follow all the religious music with this:

Friday Unrelated Information

Karen1 Comment

1. Happy birthday to Johann Sebastian Bach, born in 1685 today. His sonatas and partitas for solo violin are some of my favorites ever–here’s the complete Partita in E Major.

2. Speaking of music, I just learned about  Mumford & Sons, Laura Marling, and The Dharohar Project, which combines folk rock and a group from Rajasthan. It sounds like a terrible idea on paper but in practice it’s like an Irish band crashed an Indian wedding and everybody had a great time. I can’t stop listening to it. See for yourself–give it until about 2:00 in, when the banjo and tabla (!) really kick in.

Late Summer Music

Karen

Every year about this time I go back to listening to classical music, specifically Romantic-era chamber music: Middle and late Beethoven quartets and  string trios, Brahms and Schubert quartets and quintets, etc. So I’ve been saving this poem for this time of year since I saw it on The Writer’s Almanac earlier. “Sad and lavish in their tenderness” gets me every time, because it’s so true of so much Romantic music. (You can listen to the Brahms Intermezzi the poem talks about right here.)


Romantics

by Lisel Mueller

Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann
The modern biographers worry
“how far it went,” their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address, not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shimmer with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving nothing to overhear.

Summers Outside

Karen

In the last week of enjoying my patio I’ve remembered a piece of music I haven’t thought about since high school: Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer, 1915.” It’s a song setting of part of James Agee‘s writing about a summer evening from his childhood.

I love Samuel Barber and this version by Kathleen Battle, but I think I love the words in Agee’s full story even more:

Content, silver, like peeps of light, each cricket makes his comment over and over in the drowned grass….The stars are wide and alive, they seem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very near.

All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of night.

Friday Unrelated Information

Karen

1. I’ve found pretty much the best use of Photoshop outside of True American Dog: LiarTown USA, source of this potential bestseller:

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2. That Radiolab about Beethoven tempi (I have to use the right plural; I was a music major) I posted last week turned me on to Glenn Gould playing Beethoven sonatas. (Here’s all of them in a four-hour chunk; Spotify has them, too.) Glenn’s the man! And this quote is so true:

“Life can’t be all bad when for ten dollars you can buy all the Beethoven sonatas
and listen to them for ten years.”

William F. Buckley

New Music

Karen2 Comments
I found a couple of music-related links yesterday, so let’s make it Music Thursday:
1. There’s a new recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations out, recorded under a Creative Commons license–which means you can download everything for free (including the score), or just listen online at opengoldbergvariations.org.
2. I  read about Nick Waterhouse in my round of blogs, and listened to nothing else for the rest of the workday (sorry, Bach).  He’s a young kid who’s found a horn section and is doing his best to channel 50’s and 60’s R&B, down to recording and editing everything on analog and overdriving the mics. I know it sounds like it could be hipster-ironic, but it’s just really great music–plus, his blog has so many clips of forgotten 45s.
Here’s the “official” video  from his first album, Time’s All Gone, but you can find more of him on YouTube or Spotify.