Musician
The podcast continues apace. Games! Stories! Music! It’s great.
Episode 4 includes:
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UPDATE: “The Bowmakers†is not playing through Tuesday, September 22 at midnight.
“The Bowmakers†is a documentary about a most surprising subject: five of the world’s greatest creators of violin, viola, and cello bows all happen to live in the same small coastal town in rural Washington state. Check out the trailer:
My group, OSSCS, is sponsoring the digital premiere of this film; it’s never been seen outside of Port Townsend, WA (with the exception of a couple festivals.)
Tickets are $15, which might seem steep, but just consider that half of that is actually a donation to OSSCS, and now is certainly a great time to send your support. But also consider that, like, this is just a fantastic piece of cinema, and I promise that you will both enjoy and learn a ton of stuff watching it!
Like seemingly everyone else on the planet, I’ve started a podcast. Well, not just me — it’s me and my friends Kensho and Tiffany, two of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know.
I stole the format from Slate (I worship Slate podcasts and basically remain on Twitter only to interact with their hosts and producers.) It’s a weekly discussion show where we pick three topics having to do with classical music. It could be something about music and politics or culture, or a new album release, or an internet kerfuffle, or a bit of news related to the discipline or industry.
Crucially, we’re trying to make this show a broad-based look at the world of classical music. When classical music breaks through to the mainstream media, it’s usually just something to do with the world of the biggest orchestral institutions, or star conductors — very often it’s strikes or budget cuts or bad behavior.
But the way I see it, most of what happens in the world of classical music happens at a much more grassroots level. It happens in schools and houses of worship and (now more than ever) in people’s living quarters and online.
Oh, and I should mention: there’s also games (!) and listening recommendations in every episode. And we’re like, fun people. I promise!
The Classical Gabfest is now available wherever fine podcasts are downloaded (Apple, Spotify, YouTube, the world wide web, etc.) Enjoy!
3 [2+p] 2 2 2 – 4 2 3 1 – tmp+3 – hp – solo cello, solo bass – str
The goal of this edition is to provide symphony orchestras with a straightforward, performable version of Camille Saint-Saëns’ The Carnival of the Animals, scored for traditional symphony orchestra.
The pianos of the original scoring have been entirely eliminated.
Brief reflections on my three favorite contemporary* composers.
(*Contemporary in that their lifespans overlapped with my own.)
Find me another composer as adept at suffusing his canvas with darkness, laying on the thick impasto of a late Rothko. You’ll find plenty of angst and agony among the rest, but you’ll never find a musician working in such satisfying gradations of blackness as Alfred Schnittke.
Listen to how notes sustain, suffusing the air like smoke. This is a consistent element of Schnittke’s style, from the early days of the first string quartet right up to the austere works that he wrote after dying and coming back to life (not making that up!) Even his zaniest moments are like Pennywise peering out of a street gutter.
This reaches its apotheosis (as does his entire stylistic vocabulary: his melodicism, the crunch of his orchestration, his Beethoven-like motivic development) in the 8th symphony. I can think of no other music that so thoroughly captures the sound of the universe’s empty blackness.
Stephen Sondheim is the heir not only to the artistic legacy of Gerswhin, Arlen, and Rodgers, but he’s also a direct inheritor of the musical legacy of Maurice Ravel. His music is to Ravel’s as birds are to dinosaurs.Â
Sondheim writes in short score, the purest articulation of the musical art. His music is not written to be played as such, and so it must be translated, either expanded (orchestrated) or condensed (for piano.) His main translator has been the orchestrator Jonathan Tunick, and because I’m an orchestral musician at heart, to me, “Sondheim†really means Sondheim + Tunick.Â
And here’s the thing: Sondheim agrees. I’ll let him explain:
Can I love a Sondheim song when it’s stripped down to just piano and voice? Of course. After all, Sondheim is the kernel and Tunick is the husk. But honestly? I’ll never love it as much as when it’s enrobed in the voluptuous garbs of Jonathan Tunick. After all, Sondheim is the diamond and Tunick is the jeweler.
It’s worth noting that every Sondheim has been awarded the Tony for Best Score, he’s taken the opportunity to single out Jonathan Tunick as a collaborator (and often to bemoan the fact that there was no Tony awarded for Best Orchestrations.) Sondheim is a lover of orchestral music; it’s well known that he mainly listens to Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, and Ravel. Let’s just say, he gets it.
[Coda: When the Tonys finally did institute an award for Best Orchestrations in 1997 (!!!) Jonathan Tunick was the first awardee.]
It’s not just me who calls Alberto Iglesias the master of the quartet — it’s Pedro Almodóvar himself!
How did he come by this mastery? I only recently learned the answer.
Pedro Almodóvar does not use temp scores for his editing, but he wants music. In fact, he wants the music that’s going to be in the film — or the closest possible approximation. So he asks Iglesias to create a sort of temp track of his own.
The thing is, neither of them likes midi. So, starting early in their collaboration, whenever Iglesias would write a piece of music intended for string orchestra, he would hire a string quartet to record a reduced version of the cue. Pedro would end up falling in love with the quartet version. Eventually, Iglesias got wise and started writing the pieces as quartets.
Thus the greatest exponent of the string quartet since Debussy came into being.
But man, just listen to what he can do when he has a full string orchestra at his disposal:
To quote Penélope Cruz:
