In 95 years of life, Carl Ruggles composed only 84 minutes of music - including his masterpiece for orchestra,
"Sun-Treader". Charles Seeger called it "dissonant counterpoint". Charles Ives called it simply "strong, masculine music". In 1980, Michael Tilson Thomas recorded all of it for a long-out-of-print 2 LP set that has never been reissued on CD. Today, with almost none of the music from this significant American composer commercially available in any form, the Internet Archive has performed a valuable cultural service by hosting a 24-bit lossless rip of the Tilson Thomas set. It is
powerful stuff.
posted by Trurl
on Nov 13, 2011 -
32 comments
[Arvo] Pärt’s mature style was inaugurated in 1976 with a small piano piece, “Für Alina”, that remains one of his best-known works. It is governed by the compositional system that he called “tintinnabuli,” derived from the Latin word for “bells.” The tintinnabuli method pairs each note of the melody with a note that comes from a harmonizing chord, so they ring together with bell-like resonance. [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Oct 27, 2011 -
53 comments
One of America's most idiosyncratic musical geniuses was, of course, the great Thelonious Monk (
Wiki), and what better way to celebrate his birthday today than viewing (in its entirety!) an excellent documentary on the man and his music?
Straight, No Chaser
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Oct 10, 2011 -
25 comments
Joseph Brooks was a writer of commercial jingles in the 60's. He went on to write and direct the film
You Light Up My Life in 1977; the film was a critical flop but a commercial success, and the title song went on to win an Oscar and become an adult contemporary standard. He later wrote the book and music for, and direct the stage musical
In My Life (nyt), which flopped famously in 2005 amidst
reactions of bewilderment. In 2009, he was
indicted on charges(nyt) of luring at least 11 actresses across the country to his Manhattan apartment and raping them. He was
found dead yesterday of a suicide while awaiting trial.
posted by mkultra
on May 23, 2011 -
30 comments
Since the late '70s,
Gordon Monahan has been
making a
career of extracting the unheard from pretty much anything he can get his hands on.
Monahan's works for
piano, loudspeakers, video, kinetic sculpture, and computer-controlled sound environments span various genres from avant-garde concert music to multi-media installation and sound art.
Such pieces include
long string installations activated by wind (Long Aeolian Piano, 1984-88), by
water vortices (Aquaeolian Whirlpool, 1990) and by
indoor air draughts (Spontaneously Harmonious in Certain Kinds of Weather, 1996). His work for
electronic tone generators and
human speaker swingers (Speaker Swinging, 1982), is a hybrid of science, music, and
performance art, where
minimalistic trance music based on the Doppler Effect contrasts with issues central to
performance art such as physical struggle and '
implied threat'.
John Cage once said, "
At the piano, Gordon Monahan produces sounds we haven't heard before."
[more inside]
posted by wcfields
on Apr 29, 2011 -
4 comments
Argentine folklore composer, pianist and director
Ariel Ramírez died last night after a long illness. Those who know of him abroad probably do so for his Misa Criolla. This is just the (deservedly famous) tip of a giant iceberg of Argentine music, as he was teacher to many, collaborator to a lot more, cataloguer and promoter of traditional folk music and dances, and defender of local composers rights since his early years of fame.
[more inside]
posted by Iosephus
on Feb 19, 2010 -
6 comments
A favorite of
John Cage and Gyorgy Ligeti, the latter describing his music as "so utterly original, enjoyable, perfectly constructed but at the same time emotional...the best of any composer living today,"
Conlon Nancarrow's
musical ideas were nevertheless too complex and technically demanding for human performers, and his political ideas too radical and leftist for McCarthy-era America. Expatriated to Mexico, the Texarkana-born avant-gardeist
lived most of his life in isolation, in a cluttered, dusty
studio surrounded by records, piles of books, empty Vodka bottles, newspapers, cigarette cartons, and the tools of his trade: 2 old player pianos and a custom-built
piano roll press.
[more inside]
posted by swift
on Feb 15, 2010 -
16 comments
Luigi Russolo was a
futurist painter,
experimental composer, and
instrument builder. In his 1913 manifesto "
The Art of Noises" he declaimed the death of traditional Western music and foresaw the dawning of a new music based on the grinding, screeching, moaning, crackling and buzzing of mechanical instruments. He and his assistant Ugo Piatti built the
Intonarumori to bring these new sounds -
"the palpitation of valves, the coming and going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags" - to life. Listen to them,
then and
now.
posted by fire&wings
on Oct 28, 2009 -
10 comments
British composer and TV presenter
Howard Goodall presents a documentary exploring the influences and theory behind the music of The Beatles, and the transformation of their sound over their recording career.
Part
1,
2,
3,
4,
5,
6 on Youtube.
But that's not all...
[more inside]
posted by Magnakai
on Sep 9, 2009 -
30 comments
Beethoven's Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 9 in A, Op. 47 (
audio) was
originally dedicated to the black violin virtuoso
George Bridgetower after he gave such a brilliant rendering of the piece that prompted Beethoven to jump from his seat and embrace him. Bridgetower was a musical child prodigy and composer who, despite rampant racial prejudice, reached "unusual heights in the music world of his day". Having lived and performed in major European cities such as London, Paris, and Vienna, he would later die forgotten and in poverty.
A personal disagreement with Bridgetower led Beethoven to dedicate the sonata to the famous violinist Rodolphe Kreutzer instead who, incidentally, never played it in public deeming it “outrageously unintelligible”.
[more inside]
posted by lucia__is__dada
on Mar 27, 2009 -
10 comments
In 2006
Nell James was a teenage prog rocker, writing, playing and singing all instruments, and self-producing an album in her bedroom studio that paid homage to 1970s English art rock, a genre that arguably passed its zenith when her parent were in kindergarten. The result,
Tempus, received positive reviews in the re-emging prog rock press. Also impressive was her cover/re-arrangement of Gentle Giant's
On Reflection.
[more inside]
posted by Herodios
on Aug 8, 2008 -
15 comments
You folks out there in MeFi Town been keeping up with the
water themed
MeFi Music Challenge? There's been some mighty fine uploads for you to check out! But if there was
ever a piece of music deserving the
water tag, it's
this drenching wet masterpiece by Brazil's brilliant, eccentric musical genius
Hermeto Pascual, in which Hermeto and his band play bottles full of water, and flutes full of water, and, well, the lake. Música da Lagoa: water music at its very best. And its very wettest.
[more inside]
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Jul 6, 2007 -
8 comments
Frank Zappa - The Gigantic Spoken Word Project. Numerous volumes of a very large collection of Frank Zappa spoken word releases.
They consist of radio interviews and journalist reporter type personal interviews. During the radio interviews sometimes music was played as background or added before the broadcast in between questions and answers. Sometimes FZ acts as D.J., plays records from his collection and talks to the radio audience. But the main focus of this series is FZ interviews which to me is as interesting as his music. (Just a quick warning; the download mechanism is a tad annoying)
posted by KevinSkomsvold
on Jul 5, 2007 -
6 comments
Gian Carlo Menotti was, until his death at 95, the most often-performed contemporary opera composer. Among his
works is the first opera composed for
radio, the most popular
Christmas opera, possibly the first opera in which a
telephone plays a principal role (
Poulenc's came more than a decade later), an opera about
aliens, and a
masterpiece about life under totalitarian rule (which was also the first time that suicide by gas oven made it to the stage). He ignored the fashion of atonality that held academia in thrall, and never veered from his lyrical style. He wrote his own libretti, which showed a mastery and love of language as deep as his musical talents. Some of his
works were Broadway successes. And he created one of the
finest music
festivals [includes embedded music video]. He will be
remembered.
posted by QuietDesperation
on Feb 2, 2007 -
4 comments
Was Richard Rodgers The Greatest American Popular Composer So Far? 2002 is his Centennial. He may be less cool and more bourgeois than the other greats like Harold
Arlen, Irving
Berlin, George
Gershwin, Jerome
Kern, Frank
Loesser, Cole
Porter and Stephen
Sondheim. But even the most cursory look at the long list of the wonderful songs he wrote(try the excellent
song search feature), with
Hart, then
Hammerstein(and some other lyricists, including himself)makes it very difficult to deny there never was - and probably never will be - a more talented and versatile tunesmith. Miles Davis was right. He
was a genius. And yet...[
Flash required for the (interesting) intro]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Apr 18, 2002 -
41 comments
