performed by the Medici String Quartet (Again, we have a piece with no YouTube video. I’ll be perfectly honest: this piece will not be many people’s cup of tea, but if you’re a lover of Webern or Schoenberg or anything … Continue reading Usko Meriläinen: String Quartet no. 1
performed by Gunther Schuller’s ad hoc string orchestra Just let the music wash over you in its totality, and you might be surprised what rich and totally new listening rewards you will reap. -Gunther Schuller, on Transfigured Notes (cover image by … Continue reading Babbitt: Transfigured Notes
performed by the Ensemble InterContemporain, or below by members of the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle, from The Proms 2016 Boulez completed his Éclat for 15 instruments in 1965. Properly (I think?) called Éclat-Multiples, it is (or was to be) … Continue reading Boulez: Éclat
performed by Paavali Jumppanen (from his outstanding release of the three Boulez sonatas), or in an (at least) equally superb reading from the wonderful Maurizio Pollini Boulez and tradition. L’enfant terrible. A polemic. A rebel. A radical. The guy who said … Continue reading Boulez Piano Sonata no. 2
performed by William Purvis (sorry, no YouTube today, but hop on over to the Naxos page featuring this album to hear a few snippets of this vibrant, varied work for solo horn.) Doesn’t anyone here know anything about baseball? … … Continue reading Babbitt: Around the Horn
performed (in the only existing recording I am aware of) by the Fine Arts quartet, the dedicatee of the work As with any relatively intricate composition, further rehearings or — more realistically— further recalling should lead the listener from those local coherences … Continue reading Babbitt String Quartet no. 3
Epilogue: Total Serialism a.k.a Influential People: Milton Babbitt It’s been a while. If you haven’t read or don’t remember a three-part series I wrote a few months back on the beginnings of the twelve-tone system, go check out the first … Continue reading Dodecaphony: Part 4 (a.k.a. Influential People: Milton Babbitt)
How I got here: As stated on my About Me page, my interest in music was rooted in a fascination with the piano. It seems natural, then, that as I started to familiarize myself with classical music, the piano was … Continue reading Dodecaphony: Part 3
To continue our discussion of the twelve tone scheme and the Second Viennese School, we’re going to talk today about the method itself. I’m going to be up front with you, though. I’m not a professional musician, I am not … Continue reading Dodecaphony: Part 2
Do-what? (a.k.a. Influential People: Arnold Schoenberg) part 2 here part 3 here This was going to be a simple introduction to the early works of the Second Viennese School, and to that group of composers itself, but as with many … Continue reading Dodecaphony: Part 1
…. and there isn’t a music critic around to… anyway.I have been in various series of discussions with various series of people in what is essentially a dead-end, highly subjective and rather useless dialogue with a few different people about… “what is art?”The ‘tree in the forest’ thought experiment is just kind of what comes to mind when you (‘you’ as in ‘I’) begin to think about defining something based solely on a person’s or people’s perception of it.I would embed this video in the actual post itself, but it wasn’t what actually started the debate, and it has nothing … Continue reading If a tree falls in the forest…
Fugue for Thought 