Hilary Hahn performs Jennifer Higdon's remarkable Violin Concerto, for which Higdon won the Pulitzer Prize:
1726, the first movement, is challenging and prickly;
Chacconi, the second, is calmer, slow and colorful;
Fly Forward, the brief and exciting finale, is worth listening to even if you're not a fan of contemporary classical music.
Here, Hahn talks about having Higdon as a teacher at the age of thirteen, and Higdon talks about writing for Hahn's individual style; after the concerto's world premiere,
they recorded themselves talking to each other on what looks like a computer cam, which is both fun as heck and a fascinating look at the relationship between composer and performer.
posted by Rory Marinich
on Mar 13, 2013 -
7 comments
The Boston Symphony Orchestra is one of the handful of orchestras for which musicians the world over will drop everything to scramble for a job, and the audition ranks among the world’s toughest job interviews. Mike Tetreault has spent an entire year preparing obsessively for this moment. He's put in 20-hour workdays, practiced endlessly and shut down his personal life. Now the percussionist has 10 minutes to impress a selection committee and stand out among a lineup of other world-class musicians. A single mistake and it's over. A flawless performance and he could join one of the world's most renowned and financially well-endowed orchestras at a salary of more than $100,000 a year.
The Audition.
[more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jul 5, 2012 -
90 comments
Between April 16th, 2006 and April 15th, 2007, Paleo, also known as David Strackany,
wrote a song every day for a year and posted them on his website. These include a weekly 'Sunday Prayer,' featuring new lyrics sung to the same tune on the day of relative rest. At the end of the year, he received a
letter of congratulations from Vice President Dick Cheney, who was in the midst of a (failed) campaign to convince the American people that he was not a robot alien overlord. Paleo kept up the site, with all the song-diary entries, and still posts occasional lyrics and a weekly Sunday Prayer. Here's a song I particularly like:
The World's Tiniest Violin.
posted by kaibutsu
on Feb 15, 2012 -
19 comments
So. While hunting for a
live performance of
a song from the
Beatmania IIDX series, a totally sweet primarily-piano piece known for its near-impossibility to play as a video game, much less on real instruments, I stumbled upon
this incredible version, performed by
the phenomenal TeppeikunViolin and his lovely pianist assistant.
Of course, it turns out that beyond just having RIDICULOUS chops on the violin, he's also a nerd in the best sense. Not only has he done a
great violin cover of the
internet sensation "Bad Apple!!", he's also done
a cover of the music from the original Legend of Zelda that must be seen, a
cover of Super Mario Bros. that makes subtle reference in the background, as any good Japanese Nintendo fan should, to
"Kintamario," and a little something he calls
"Tetris being played on a Game Boy with a dying battery" that absolutely must be seen to be believed.
posted by DoctorFedora
on Oct 26, 2011 -
4 comments
A Song of Ice and Fire [SLYT] Game of Thrones Violin Cover. An acoustic and electric violin cover of the main theme song from Game of Thrones. Arranged and performed by Jason Yang. Original song and soundtrack by Ramin Djawadi.
posted by Fizz
on Jul 5, 2011 -
55 comments
Fiddle, accordion, and a singing drummer. Seven minutes and fifty seven seconds of Gypsy music from Ukraine, live in Budapest. The real thing. Totally wailing. Kickass.
Técső Banda at Kertem.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Oct 10, 2009 -
23 comments
Have you ever stopped to listen? I do, when it's not bad, always. I've missed trains, I've been late. I've given all the money I had on me.
I've been reminded of - X -.
I wish I had been there; I fucking love that Chaconne. It's like the perfect prayer.
posted by From Bklyn
on Apr 7, 2007 -
105 comments
So
these guys built a crazy y-shaped guitar that can produce sounds that sound like a regular guitar or
a steal drum[wav]. There are more sound examples on that page. Meanwhile
Mari Kimura has figured out a way to produce
sub harmonics on a regular violin, extending the range down an octave, producing some [
intresting[mp3] results.
via]
posted by delmoi
on Jul 13, 2006 -
15 comments
Her name was Courage & is written Olga "Olga"
(.pdf file in main link) is
Olga Rudge,
violinist, first promoter of the
Vivaldi Renaissance, and longtime companion of the
poet Ezra Pound.
Pound maintained a complicated and
delicate balance between the two most significant women in his life, Olga and his wife
Dorothy Shakespear (who, among other things, was
the daughter of Yeats's mistress).
‘‘Paris is where EP and OR met, and everything in my life happened,’’ Olga (listen to her voice
here) said later of the chance encounter with
Ezra at
20, rue Jacob, in the salon of
Natalie Barney. They were together for
fifty years, through the
dark-night years of
Pound's madness (arrested in 1945 for
treason, deemed unable to stand trial and sent to an American mental institution, he once suggested to the UPI bureau chief in Rome
that the United States trade Guam for some sound films of Japanese Noh plays, asked Truman many times to make him Ambadassor to Japan or Moscow;
Guy Davenport reports dining with him one evening and all Ez said was "gnocchi"), until
the poet's death in 1972.
She lived on for another quarter century, turning up at conferences of
Pound scholars --as far afield as Hailey,
Idaho, Pound's birthplace, where she gave a
lecture in the local movie theater. "Write about Pound", she told publishers who asked her to write her autobiography.
(more inside, with Cantos)
posted by matteo
on Jul 8, 2004 -
15 comments
