In 2006 I...

• Went to Korea (Not technically accurate, I was in Korea for New Year's 05/06)
• Resurrected a radio station
• Gave my senior recital
• Graduated with a Bachelor of Music from Lawrence University
• Started a blog
• Had a guitar student accepted to an undergraduate music program
• Moved to Boston
• Began work towards a Master of Music at the Boston Conservatory

On initially compiling the list I was upset that what I thought to be a rather eventful year could be summed up by eight points. I suppose these aren't exactly non-trivial points, however. The events I've set in motion will have their biggest ramifications in 2008 (Hopefully another graduation, perhaps another admission/move) so I'll really have to work to make sure 2007 doesn't look like a lull.

Happy New Year's everyone, and do much enjoyment in the 2007 season.

Most Annoying Song - Quarterfinals Round 1

Now the actual tournament feature of these shenanigans really comes into its own. Dashboard def. Stefani, unsuprisingly. Mark Dinning performs a stunning upset over Pachelbel!

Lightning Bolt - Magic Mountain v. James Tenney - For Ann (rising)

I wanted this matchup, I wanted it to happen a lot. Ascension by rock band, or ascension by Shepherd tone. This whole thing was an excuse for an answer to this question.

Muzak of your favorite song v. Any song on Rachael Ray's mixtapes

H.P. Lovecraft forged a new brand of horror writing by depending entirely on the imagination of the reader. Both of these combatants work in basically the same way having defeated more concrete songs.

Celebrity Deathwatch - Holiday 2006 Edition

It is often said that deaths come in threes, so I was waiting for the tres before commenting on either of the two previous. However, it's getting unfashionably late for me to discuss the late Mr. Brown.

Dial M has a really great tribute that ropes in the idea of hip-hop (and funk and so on) being a music of vertical complexity rather than horizontal. Probably just best to follow the link rather than have me try to explain it, it makes sense. I also suggest another reason that the Hardest Working Man in Show Business was so damn fonky. Much like Reich and the minimalists would the next decade, James Brown didn't just master the beat. He was the beat. YouTube fails me in illustrating this, but either the PBS Rock and Roll series or the oft-syndicated History of Rock and Roll has priceless footage of James Brown in action. One of his saxophones cracks the note, and James Brown whips his head around looking straight at the offender and hits on the beat "You know I got you!" That guy was fucked.

Also something I hear about preventing Boston, and often by extension the rest of the nation, from descending into race riots singlehandedly.

I can't say much about Ford, being his prominence was outside my lifetime and the scope of this blog. You were a President, thumbs up for that even if you weren't elected.

(Current news is predicting that this trifecta will be concluded rather shortly, even if there's another recently deceased pair that probably have more in common.)

Most Annoying Song - Round 4

I told you I'd do it. Lambchop def. Macarena, Ludacris def. Vengaboys (barely). Here's the last round of preliminaries, after here it's winners only. I am sad that the extra traffic I got this week didn't result in a great upswing in voting. Come on, we're doing serious work here!

Mark Dinning - Teen Angel v. Johann Pachelbel - Canon in D

If you have chosen to attend a wedding, you've probably heard both of these songs. Compounded if it happens to be a shotgun wedding. (Those usually aren't well attended, poorly decorated) These also happen to be the oldest combatants in the tournament (1960 and 1680, respectively) Poor Pachelbel has had this relatively obscure work in his oeuvre, the only canon he wrote and not particularly representative of the rest of his work, turned into a spectacle for jackasses of all sorts, especially ones with guitars. Not to mention an entire album dedicated to it. Mark Dinning, on the other hand, deserves everything he gets for having invented the "my love interest has died in a tragic accident" genre of 60s pop.

Gwen Stefani - Hollaback Girl v. Dashboard Confessional - Screaming Infidelities

I unabashedly hate both of these songs. Two main themes seem to have arisen in this tournament, whining and repetition. Two modern practitioners present their wares to do battle here.

The Sounds of Science

 I occasionally disappear for weeks at a time, because the physical limitations of the universe and time-space continuum. Whenever anyone talking about how blogging is hard work it sounds like whining, because it is whining. Sort of like all those crappy songs about how the road is fuckin' tough, man. You could make blogging hard work, and but you can't not make it long work. Even posts that I think are going to be easy (this one should be a good example) take a not insignificant amount of time.

My good friend Dan Willis came to visit the past couple days, it my first opportunity to talk shop about this form of writing we've both chose to attempt. As a cursory glance will show, his posts are less common but significantly longer, each of which he said takes him the better part of a day. (It deserves mention that the blog isn't the sum of his writing, he also plays music critic for Lawrence's campus newspaper) Granted, since he posts at least every six months, most indices would consider him active.

Some entries require a little bit more research than stream of consciousness rambling. One of my favorite webcomics xkcd took to his interblag to explain his research behind one of his more ingenious comics. Get Rich Slowly, a personal finance blog I've recently taken to, also posts about his typical writing process. He says that most of his posts take weeks to put together, and he posts three times a day! Since blogging is all about getting on bandwagons, I'm recording the process that a post I'm working on that might be a bit over my head. You'll probably know it when you see it. When it's finished in a couple weeks.

By the way, it took me 38 minutes to write this. (well, 26 minutes to write. 12 to find the links.) But I was watching Food Network while I did it. Multitasking!

Keys are Funny Things

The Bad Plus links to me and I get more pageviews than I did in the first two months of this interblag. When I submitted my answers to the original gentlemen of the Bad Plus, I included an anecdote of my brief conversation I had with Ethan Iversen. I tell it in its entirety:

At the 2005 CMJ Music Marathon I attended a panel will the presumptious title of "The Future of Jazz!" (exclamation point added) Intriguing indeed, but it wasn't just a panel but more like the meeting of the goddamn New Jazz Justice League. Bill Frisell, Chris Potter, and a drummer whose name I can't remember, being led in battle by Ethan Iversen. There were only eight of us in the audience so the panel really just consisted of everyone playing their most recent releases.

It was right before Suspicious Activity? came out, so Ethan introduced his jam by saying that there were no rock covers on the new album, (!) but that they still laid a cover down. "You'll probably recognize it when you hear it." Problems with the jambox. "It's track 9." "Chariots?" A look of dejection. Don't worry, knowing the punchline didn't ruin it.

With the small audience, I felt only a little awkward going up and talking to Ethan afterward. My burning question? Who's idea was it to go major at the end of Iron Man? (If you haven't heard the Bad Plus's "Iron Man", you haven't lived.) Ethan actually seemed hesitant, almost embarassed, to admit that it was his idea and then explained exactly how the modulation worked. Music nerdity straight from the source. I had forgotten it, but was kind enough to repeat the magic incantation.

Thanks, you're not just a good bloginnist and one of the bestest pianists around, but a solid gentleman.

A Thoughful Gift

Whoever gave me this wondrous gift:
should identify themselves, since the packaging failed to do so.

I also have realized that I may have unleashed good sir Ethan's quizonnaire onto Facebook. I can't imagine it'll get far, it requires too much thinking and those that have taken the gauntlet thusfar aren't really the OMGWTFLOLBBQ types.

Music for Airports

By the time this is posted I should be back in Wisconsin for the holidaytime season. Thusly most of the posts for the next month would be more rumination than action, but maybe I'll get more research done when I can just drive to the library rather than taking the T. Not sure if they'll have the same selection.

I seem to gravitate to listening to Reich (God, I've been talking about him a lot lately) whenever I'm flying. And no, I don't own Music for Airports. And as I type this I'm actually listening to The Bad Plus's Blunt Object – Live in Tokyo. Nonetheless, I usually listen to Reich in airports, most often Music for 18 Musicians but this time it was Drumming. Perhaps by listening to minimalist music I become hyperaware of my surrounding and everything is interesting! Or captivating at least.

This led me down a train of thought: I thought of when I was first introduced to Steve Reich's music, by a friend of mine who is somewhere between session musician and local hero in Minneapolis's jazz scene. Or maybe he's dead, for all I know. It was late in high school, just as I was starting to approach the guitar as a classical instrument. He was attending Lawrence University, as I would the next year, and played for me the first four minutes of Piano Phase. Needless to say it was a bit of a shift from the steady diet of nü-metal I was ingesting at the time. (Don't misread this as a disownment, I will defend some of those albums to the death) The MP3 he had was incomplete, and for a couple years afterwards I thought the piece was only four minutes long.

Now my parents had taken me to the requisite children's symphony concerts, although I only have a vague recollection of them. However, that sliver of Piano Phase ended up being the touchstone that my knowledge of concert music would be built around. I'm not saying this is wrong, in fact it might be kind of cool, but the one point I kept coming back to as I ate my overpriced airport lunch was that this approach would be totally impossible and absurd if I had chosen any other instrument, Granted, this isn't the normal flight path for the guitar either but I think it's the only instrument where it's even possible. Maybe not, as with a lot of things, I'm starting to look into it.

Do the Math questionnaire fest

Do The Math invited the sum of the blogosphere to answer the questionnaire that they had offered to a variety of important or famous jazz musicians. As a non-important, non-famous, non-jazz (mostly) musician, I accept said invitation.

GIVE US AN EXAMPLE OR TWO OF AN ESPECIALLY GOOD OR INTERESTING:
1. Movie score. Yojimbo (Masuto Sato set the standard for East-meets-West), Kill Bill
2. TV theme. Who brought up the insanity of the Transformers theme?
3. Melody. Elegy for Marianne (an obscure electric guitar piece played by my former sensei), Cherokee.
4. Harmonic language. McCoy Tyner, Vaughan-Williams's "Fantasia on a Theme by Tallis", Kenny Garrett "Sing a Song of Song" (I think I have a thing for Phrygian)
5. Rhythmic feel. Medeski Martin and Wood, all the time but especially "Bubblehouse" and "Reflector". I also invoke Louis Andriessen's "Workers Union" because I am a jackass.
6. Hip-hop track. Wu-Tang Clan "Triumph"
7. Classical piece. Michael Gordon's "Trance" renewed my faith in classical music, it will rip your face off/make you eat your own face.
8. Smash hit. "Africa", Toto. Unstoppable.
9. Jazz album. "Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus Mingus", Kenny Garrett's "Songbook"
10. Non-American folkloric group. Kodo: Heartbeat Drummers of Japan FTW!!!!!111
11. Book on music. Steve Reich's "Writings on Music", Hindemith's "Elementary Training for Musicians"

BONUS QUESTIONS:

A) Name an surprising album (or albums) you loved when you were developing as a musician: something that really informs your sound but that we would never guess in a million years: I don't think I have a sound yet, but my youthful study of all of Brian May's work (especially "News of the World" and "Queen II") probably counts.

B) Name a practitioner (or a few) who play your instrument that you think is underrated: All the guys I can think of (Mark Stewart, Nick Didovsky, Jason Vieaux, Ben Wienman) are certainly considered heroes in the circle I run in, they probably don't get enough props with the world at large.

C) Name a rock or pop album that you wish had been a smash commercial hit (but wasn’t, not really): Spacehog's "The Chinese Album", neo-glam at its zenith. If there were justice in the world "Mungo City" would be some nation's anthem.

D) Name a favorite drummer, and an album to hear why you love that drummer: I try not to say Dave King but I must. ("Part of the solutionproblem" and "Give" battle in a battle where there can be no winners, who will win?) Chris Pennie (Dillinger Escape Plan) is also way crazy insane.

Most Annoying Song - Round 3

I'm so bad at this.

Tenney def. Cage, Muzak def. Stairway. (Both shutouts!)
But we press onward.

Los Del Rio - Macarena v. Lambchop - The Song That Doesn't End

We've left the land of academia to those infinite loops sounding in your eardrums as you stare in the gaping maw of hell. This decision basically comes down to whether you prefer your repetition to come from older Spanish gentlemen or puppets. Both feature invigorating dances.

Vengaboys - We Like to Party v. Ludacris - Number One Spot

Repetition appears to be the height of annoyance. The Vengaboys jam works in a similiar manner as our previous two combatants, even involving an older gentleman. Ludacris is far more insidious. (The following requires some music geekdom) The sample is well-known, Quincy Jones's "Soul Bossa Nova", the big dominant hit before resolving. Too bad the video starts with Soul Bossa Nova, fully establishing the key before driving in the leading tone until Doomsday. To add insult to injury, the video breaks down to "The Potion" which is in the dominant or whatever, crushing any dreams of resolution. How could you do something like this to us, Quincy?

I swear to God that this will run until next Saturday.

Tonight I'll See The Light

When successful blogs don't post for two weeks they have all their bloginista friends do guest posts. I am neither successful nor do I have bloginista friends. (Post to your blog, Dan.) I now plan my march back into triumph.

1) Get Technorati shit done, embarassed at having not done this yet.
2) Post next round of annoying song contest, also embarassing
3) Post answers to Do The Math's questionnaire, hope for a link
4) Post, just do more posting

My research on Four Organs has reached the end of its current formation, term paper submitted. It's not very poetic, but maybe someday it will be. Right now I'm turning my attention back to a theoretical Reich concert, and perhaps a reconstruction of Pulse Music. Daring! Mega-genius Bryan Teoh is reconstructing the Phase Shifting Pulse Gate using magick, we'll see how it works.

And now, some links:

Judaism ∞ Billion - Richard Wagner 0

One of the last great men of the record industry leaves the building

God damn do I love Will It Blend

Consistency is Difficulting

I have a real grinder of a weekend/week/following weekend coming up, hence the not posting so much. Sorry about that.

Jeremy Denk finally admits it.

Will It Blend finally achieves its destiny.

I got nothing.

Most Annoying Tournament: Round 2

Finally, an idea whose time has come. The bracket as it stands now.


Both battels surprised me, I expected the hamsters to dispatch Ms. Ray. Furthermore, "Magic Mountain" was one of the songs that inspired this whole mess and it just eeked victory over Steve Reich. One vote, seriously. Let's see if you keep surprising me.

James Tenney - For Ann (rising) v. John Cage - As Slow as Possible (hour one) (hour six) (hour nine)

There is nothing that I can tell you about For Ann (rising) that you won't know after hearing it. Perhaps you'll be interested in the Shepard tone. Cage's ASLSP is notorious for the performance current being undertaken in Germany with an estimated duration of 639 years, but these recordings are from the considerably more succinct nine-hour performance at ArtsAHA! this year. Them Omaha kids are hip.

That kid in the guitar store playing Stairway v. A Muzak rendition of your favorite song

This is perhaps the most esoteric matchup of the tournament. True, some songs are calculated for the intangibility of the hook. Some are engineered to invoke an investigation of some emotion. But do you, or even I, know how really bad that guy who hangs out in the amp room for hours on end will be just by seeing the glint in his eyes upon seeing the 12-string guitar. Or what destruction a smooth man dreaming of elevator can do upon your favorite song? I'll eventually update this with my own rendition of Zeppelin's masterpiece, but in the meantime you can just go to your nearest music store.

BoCo New Music Festival 2006: Finale

I suppose it wasn't such a bad idea to let the all the concerts congeal a little bit before wrapping everything up. My initial underlying bitterness of a new music festival celebrating a composer who died 60 years ago as mellowed some. A festival celebrating a currently active composer, say Michael Gordon or even the birthday boy, wouldn't have as much interpretative freedom with the theme. With the space of time that Webern provided, his influence can be examined as much as his own work.

However, I still wish the the concentration had been on more contemporary music. I was also chagrined to find that the most enjoyable concert of the series was the faculty/student presented panorama of the Second Viennese School. This makes its own sense too. One of the necessary evils with a bleeding edge ensemble like the Argento Ensemble is that the chances are exceedingly slim of packing a whole program of home runs. By definition new music is new, it hasn't had the time necessary to see if it'll stick to the wall. The age old argument of enjoyable and important, perhaps another time.

I'm looking forward to the next one anyway, and I was able to bother a lot of composers about trying their hand at writing some guitar music. (Tossing off some Andrew York at an afterparty didn't hurt either.) Some complicated situations of faculty speaking to other grad students and myself as peers. Except clearly we aren't, they've got a good 30 years head start on this stuff. I don't want to leave parties feeling like I should go study. It's good in its own fantastical way.

BoCo New Music Festival 2006: Day 4

Sorry about the delay, you all knew it was going too well and that I was going to fall off the wagon eventually. Anyway the final night of the new music festival featured conductor Eric Hewitt and his White Rabbit ensemble. Just like the festival openers the Argento Ensemble, these are guys who are actually out there doing it. Nonetheless, after three days of serialesque I had come into this final concert with some preconceptions especially upon receipt of the program notes. I basically spent the whole pre-concert about how I don't like Babbitt very much and how there's no decent electronic music before '95. It sounds pretty stupid now.

This program was presents as the intersection of Webern's technique and American optimism. (In a different way than Ludovico's Cage-n-Feldman fest.) Perhaps fittingly for the end of the festival, the two Webern works acted as relaxations when placed next to the more extended lines of the American works. The first hit was Babbitt's All Set, a serialist piece for the jazz ensemble. I had been trash talking the man, but this drove like nothing else. It didn't sound like the kit was doing any beats, per se, but a pulse was sort of carried by various instruments as a sum. I wonder what sort of jazz Eric Hewitt listens to, his program notes cite Chet Baker and Lee Konitz? I'd say Coleman instead, Zappa more likely.

Like the Berg on Friday, Stravinsky's Three Songs from Shakespeare were a romantic take on tone rows that wasn't that far removed from his own Rake's Progress. The performance was good, except the soprano on the third song clearly had absolutely no idea what she was speaking of. Come on guys, don't sluff off just because it's in English.

The festival as a whole closed with Charles Wuorinen's New York Notes. The piece dates from 1981/2 but at least the festival ended with an active composer. (His Theologoumenon will premiere this season at the BSO.) It's a blistering virtuosic work that features a tape part. This is where things get a little sticky. A lot of electronically generated music gets cheesy way fast, or way boring. Reich famously struck out of his attempts all total electronic music, not mention it obscured the last five years of Zappa's composing. Tone is an issue. The tone on the tape for New York Notes is often buried by the other six parts, and tones Wuorinen used cut through enough. The trouble came with a lengthy "tape cadenza" at the end of the first movement, it played well with others but was extensively irritating by itself. I was concerned that another one would finish the piece and festival. It did end with a tape generated note, but not the Synclavier voice used throughout the rest of the piece. A square wave generated by God himself. Awexome.

After the concert I realized a dig like the piece Philomel, which kind of shot my tape piece and Babbitt prejudices to shit. Festival wrapup tomorrow (yes, a week late I know), which will put me on schedule to start round 2 of the tournament a week late as well. Nice.

BoCo New Music Festival 2006: Day 3

Last night was the Ludovico Ensemble, TBC's student-run new music group, chance to expound on the lasting tendrils of Webern's influence. The theme of "Brevity, Quietness, The Aphoristic" seemed even a little more tenuous than the Argento Ensemble's proposal. (Also, aphoristic? Aphoristic music? Apparently this is also the New Words Festival.) This program was built around the tag team of John Cage and Morton Feldman, presumably linked by their fateful meeting after Webern's Symphony. Both of these guys are certainly known for their daring use of silence, even if Cage's boldest maneuver as such as been commandeered by stuffy establishmentarians into comedy.

The Feldman concentrated mainly on his middle period of surrendering to the performer the duration of the notes while strictly dictating the other three traits of the note. However, ever for the new music nutcase such as myself this makes for a very trying concert. Almost more so because the various ensembles knew what they were doing. Unlike minimalism that slowly but constantly unfolds before us, with these pieces all of our time was spent in anticipation. It's a stressful and unfamiliar place to be.

The Cage pieces selected were a little unusual, given the theme. His song The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs is certainly brief and a high point of the concert. Did he write other songs using a closed piano? It's a fantastic sound world. The first half closed with selections from his crowd-pleaser Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano. I'm not sure where Webern showed up here, but it's a pretty sweet sound world too.

The night closed with a more recent work, See, Even Night by Marti Epstein. This followed Feldman's school of gentle quite and looked forward towards the more prodigious lengths of his later works. It was only half an hour, not a million billion years. The programming seems a little confused but as with the festival thus far everyone brought their A-game. With a concert as such it's a fine line between obnoxious intrigue and being boring as shit. Big ups to blogginist Matthew Guerrieri for connecting the wisps of Feldman's Three Pieces for Piano into a beautiful, if taxing, performance. Sorry about my phone going off, this is seriously the only concert where vibrate mode isn't good enough.

The festival finishes with Harvard's White Rabbit ensemble, their ringmaster Eric Hewitt also happens to run the Wind Ensemble around these parts. Then I will finally post the next round of the tournament and get some sleep.

BoCo New Music Festival 2006: Day 2

Yesterday was a grab bag of TBC students and faculty performing a similarly mixed selection of works from the Second Viennese School (also Henze). My knowledge of this school is pretty weak, but way better now after these concert. I'm not sure how often all three of these d00ds (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg) are put on the same program, but it's fascinating to see how they treated the same academic model completely differently.

I hadn't received much in the way of twelve-tone analysis until my ear training teacher made an almost off-hand comment quickly running through the various angles that the composers set up their tone rows. The second half consisted entirely of Webern and Berg, and Berg's Four Songs, Op. 2 definitely felt like a Romantic treat in the middle of the Webern sandwich. There clearly wasn't a tonal center, but the sweet consonances produced by the tone permutations were more remiscent of Debussy than the angular shapes produced by Webern's rows.

Even more daring on the program was an early tonal piece by Berg and Webern each. Schoenberg's tonal period is well known, (Verklarte Night) but Webern's string quartet Langsamer Satz was entirely unexpected. I need to hear it again, but Webern's search for a pure musical language is evident even if he didn't know how to do it yet. Nonetheless it's a very lush and melodic work and the quartet chose to emphasize this. I found myself wondering what it would sound like if a group were to approach as they would the rest of the Webern canon. (Soho the Dog appears to be having a similar dilemma concerning a Feldman piece he'll be playing tonight.)

One uniting factor was a total commitment by all the musicians. Of particular note was the quartet that performed Webern's Six Bagatelles for String Quartet, Op. 9. A thoughtfulness and emotion exuded from the work that one rarely associates with serialist music. They were goddamn serious, and we were richly rewarded. I don't want to fall into hipsterati bullshit. I'm still not very good at this.

I must say big ups to Jim Dalton (who is also the aforementioned ear training teacher) with Hans Werner Henze's Drei tentos for solo guitar. Them's are hard music, and he came up with some frightfully clever uses of harp harmonics to get some of the famously impossible parts playable (and playable well!). His performance as well as my constant nagging may lead to some student compositions for solo guitar rolling out. Sweet.

Tonight is the Ludovico Ensemble, a student-run new ensemble. If nagging works with composers, perhaps it will work for ensemble directors too. (Not as likely.) Also, I'm too busy/tired to change the tournament polls, so it'll happen on Sunday again.

BoCo New Music Festival 2006: Day 1

I'm going to try and blog every day of the new music festival here. It's probably not going to work out, but that's okay. That's going to mean two posts tomorrow, one for the festival and one for the tournament. (One day left until the bodies are swept away! Vote early, vote often.)

The festival kicked off with a blistering set of recent music from New York's Argento Ensemble. The subtitle of the program caused a bit of pre-concert commotion, (is there such a thing as neo-compressionism?) but nonetheless the ten (!) works that followed illustrated that Webern's crystalline musical world is still visited by more recent composers. The concert opened with two solos and a duet. Of these composer/conductor/pianist's Michel Galante's Flicker was the highlight, perhaps of the entire evening. The demands of virtuosity on the modern player were very evident, a barely audible but insistent sextuplet was demanded of clarinetist Carol McGonnell for the entirety of the piece. Piano chords punctured this layer of sound, with a sum effect that reminded me of Fantômas's Delirium Cordia. I just got an image of someone on a stretcher, the piano acting as their separated thoughts. As the clarinet ostinato becomes more present, the dire situation is harder to ignore. Take that however you'd like.

The first two movements of Fabien Levy's Risâla fî-i-hob wa fî-ilm al-handasa were performed with apparently the premiere of the total work coming this Saturday. (But you're staying around for the rest of the festival, right?) This work dispensed with the brevity that marked the program thus far, also involving most of the ensemble. Much like my experience with Flicker, the pointillism used seemed to affect time itself. A fun thing to note is that the second movement of Risâla fî-i-hob is it use of the bass flute. Not so much that its capabilities for overtones and loud key clicks over its rich notes, but the delight that the audience took in its appearance. As the ensemble came out for the piece, more than one cry of "BASS FLUTE!" could be heard over the applause.

After intermission came Fred Lerdahl's Imbrications, a quick neo-minaturist (I think that one better than neo-compressionist) celebratory piece. A good time. However it in no way prepared us for what came next. Mega-virtuoso Stephanie Griffin stepped out solo for Arthur Kampela's Bridges. The composer refers to it as an exploration of "the continuum between noise and pitch", and I can't think of any other way of describing it. In addition to a metric fuckton of extended technique and wacky glissandi, there was a hissing part. Or maybe it was supposed to sound like static. It was like a tape piece gone wrong, or right. It actually was more reminiscent of early Michael Gordon or other Bang on a Can-ites than Webern. Maybe Webern is in them too.

The final two pieces, Morton Feldman's Viola in My Life I and Philippe Hurel's ...à mesure were intriguing in that more traditional formal statements made an attempt at a comeback. Unlike most of Feldman's pieces of the same time, Viola in My Life is notated traditionally. Nonetheless it's stil very evocative, just barely skirting the idea of a concerto. Supposedly all four Viola in My Life pieces have nearly identical material for the solo viola part. It would be interesting to see them places against each other. Or not, if there's a reason people don't do that.

...à mesure is sonata form, no hiding that. The fast opening is very interesting and again recalls Bang on A Can. (This will be a tangent.) I am admittedly one of an elite group of people who celebrates Toto's "Africa", and when one of this legion held power temporarily she demanded that people listen to it backwards. Try it, it sounds almost the same! Except you get to the good part first. ...à mesure is described as the "negative image" of an earlier piece, so I was worried that the fervent opening merely would lead to sitting through a length denouement. The slow "development" that followed, instead demanded attention to every note as the theme was slowly deconstructed to an almost rediculous level of pontillism. Yes, to the point where each instrument had a single note.

It was a great concert full of working composers, (other than Feldman, who is getting trotted out a little more recently) and I got to get a couple beer with the violist and the composition studio afterwards. Sweet. My apologizes to the Argento Ensemble and everyone reading this since I know I missed some pieces, but it was huge program of shrapnel and I'm not very good at this yet. Three more days of avant-garde pretention are coming, very Webern heavy. Hopefully I'll see some of yous guys at Seully Hall at 8.

じゃ明日ねえ

Bad at Concentration

A thought I had, what if everyone dedicated themselves to their craft the way that musicians have to? Do accountants go home and study financial law, learn new software, that sort of shit? On the flipside, I support there aren't really rockstar accountants.

Sound Effects (the Globe's music blog) mentioned a couple days ago that everyone's favorite metal bodybuilder Glenn Danzig is on the Classical Crossover top 10 with Black Aria II. I need to check this album out I guess. Someday the Guard will own this chart, and feel really bad about it.

Boston Conservatory is having a super-sweet new music festival starting Thursday through Sunday. The festivities are everynight at 8 in Seully Hall. I, alas, won't be in the proceedings but Harvard's White Rabbit ensemble is in residence and Soho the Dog will be guesting with our own Ludovico Ensemble. (I need to figure out more about those guys.) Most of the music is stuff like Webern, Feldman, Cage n' stuff. So, you know, not real new.

As far as the annoying song tournament goes, remember that there are two each week. The second poll is probably below the fold for most everybody.

Battel Go Now!

Ladies and gentelpeople, here's your first round.

Steve Reich's "Four Organs" v. Lightning Bolt's "Magic Mountain"

"Four Organs" represents a pivotal moment in Reich's evolution as a composer. Taking the lessons he learned from his failed Phase Shifting Pulse Gate he moves always from phasing and explores the possibilities of a single chord (tonic over dominant). This chord is insistent for up to fifteen minutes! "Magic Mountain" off of Lightning Bolt's new album Hypermagic Mountain, is just as insistent but with an ever upward theme. In a way.

Any song off of Rachael Ray album v. The Hamster Dance

Rachael Ray continues to prove that she has yet to make it past middle school by insisting we listen to this really cool mixtape she's made, man. OMG, it's totally about Halloween too! Her adversary is a more aged threat, dating back to the very beginnings of the World Wide Web. Clearly this is what Tim Berners-Lee dreamt of. If you've ever been in a computer lab with children who know of this terror, you have stared directly into the gaping maw of hell.

Your votes should be tallied to the immediate right. (Before the ads! Generous are I!) Sorry about getting this out a day late, it'll still only run until next Saturday. I suppose I could write the next three as drafts and publish them when their time hath come. How's that for a thought. Predictions for the eventually winner would be fun too.