Music you're listening to lately?

[mrbillet]

Flipper.

Sacrifice is one of the best anti-war songs I've ever heard. It has a crude, brutal simplicity to it. Focused, clearly worded anger over a distorted, dissonant background of musical racket. It captures a young man's outrage at senseless war perfectly.

You can find them performing this song circa 1982-3 on YouTube but it's out of sync and I get too agitated to watch that. The sound is as good as it gets for Flipper though, so if you want to hear them then go ahead and look it up. Their studio recordings don't sound that much clearer than the live stuff I've heard.

-Ian

[jgest]

If I were a carpenter.....Bobby Darin

[twistedtom]

" Do you want to undo my bottons" Pussy Cat Dolls. NOT

[jeff sanders]

If I were a carpenter.....Bobby Darin

id have forced my sister to eat more...

just laughs no disrespect to the departed.

[jgest]

If I were a carpenter.....Bobby Darin

id have forced my sister to eat more...

just laughs no disrespect to the departed.

It's all good. I was just trolling down memory lane and gave the track a few listens......So many people covered the song, Joan Baez's version is my favorite....Now back to Psychedelic trance where I usually hang my hat....

[sdfalk]

Tony Levin
Tom Ze
Richard Thompson
John Zorn
The B-52's
Ayub Ogada
Eric Bibb

[Frodo]

1. "Mathis der Maler" (Mathais the Painter)-- by Paul Hindemith, Leonard Bernstein, cond., Israel Philharmonic.

2. Beatles-- "Rubber Soul"

3. Lifehouse-- "No Name Face"

4. Bruce Springsteen-- "Working On A Dream"

5. Stevie Wonder-- "Number 1's"

6. Chick Corea-- "Light As A Feather"

7. Oscar Peterson-- "The Lost Tapes"

[Shooshie]

1. "Mathis der Maler" (Mathais the Painter)-- by Paul Hindemith, Leonard Bernstein, cond., Israel Philharmonic.

Now there is an under-rated composer. Lots of people have never heard of him, or if they have, they've never listened to his music. His orchestral works may be dense for them, but I learned something about modern composers -- all composers, really, but especially modern ones -- that changed the way I heard them. If you have trouble with their larger works, seek out their smaller works first. Their smaller works will teach you their "voice," so that you are accustomed to who they are and what they tend to say in music. Then when you go to the larger works, you're ready for them. Then you hear their voice and understand what it's saying, so you feel acclimatized, comfortable in their realm. Hindemith, for example, wrote a series of pieces that last about a minute or two, each. Seems like he called it "Volksmusik," or something like that. Music for the people. A friend of mine and I used to have a duo which played a lot of society gigs where they wanted classical music, but were tired of Mozart string quartets. We played Hindemith pretty regularly at those, and it was surprisingly a hit.

One thing you can tell about a composer from their smaller works is their level of musical sophistication. Bach, for example, wrote what may be the most amazing examples of human thought -- ever -- in the form of his Partitas and Sonatas for Violin Solo: 6 works for 1 instrument playing alone. Add a 2nd voice, and you can play all of his "Two Part Inventions." A 3rd voice adds the three part inventions, and 4 voices opens up the majority of his musical ideas. When any composer writes for 2 voices, they are forced to economize and to write clearly. Ideas either work immediately or they do not, and you needn't sit through an hour or symphonic padding to find out whether this composer can make a musical statement. When Hindemith wrote for 2 instruments, the result was on the genius level, like Bach's but with an entirely different and thoroughly modern voice. Sensitive players can make those works speak with a clarity and immediacy that audiences easily follow, and when the listeners realize they're "getting it," they get excited to hear all that Hindemith has to say. They want more. Imagine! Modern music that doesn't adhere to familiar tonal rules, and yet it makes as much sense as Bach!

We found a little corollary that defined itself over time: the finest composers can express themselves equally well in 2 voices as with an entire symphony orchestra. Not surprisingly, we also found that a lot of great music can be successfully reduced to 2 voices without losing its basic meaning or even its subtle harmonic tension. Arranging for duo taught me a lot about economy of the musical line, and it was Hindemith who first really opened my eyes to it, and made me realize that great duos didn't end with Bach and Telemann.

Shoosh

[jeff sanders]

im orchestrally uneducated, well wait i got an A in music appreciation class in community college. fooled them lol. probably the most 'in the know' on the subject i felt was watching the mozart movie when a lesser accomplished court composer agreed with a kings remark about one of mozarts symphonies having too many notes. truly a timeless statement that gets applied to every generations virtuosos.

[Frodo]

...when a lesser accomplished court composer agreed with a kings remark about one of mozarts symphonies having too many notes. truly a timeless statement that gets applied to every generations virtuosos.

And this statement still tends to get tossed about by those who are less qualified to make such statements! Rockers, jazzers, and classicists have been known to say the same thing about one another. That the "complaint" tends to focus on that which is "too much" says much about the listener. Rarely do you hear anyone complaining that it's "not enough".

Also, such quantitative assessments tend to be the only kinds which can be made by those who are not equipped to make any meaningful qualitative judgements.

It's so odd.

[BobK]

When Hindemith wrote for 2 instruments, the result was on the genius level, like Bach's but with an entirely different and thoroughly modern voice. Sensitive players can make those works speak with a clarity and immediacy that audiences easily follow, and when the listeners realize they're "getting it," they get excited to hear all that Hindemith has to say. They want more. Imagine! Modern music that doesn't adhere to familiar tonal rules, and yet it makes as much sense as Bach!

For a performance class in college, I played piano accompaniment to a flautist playing Hindemith's Sonata for Flute and Piano; last summer a friend picked up the music and we started working on it. It's an amazing piece, and Hindemith had a fascinating, warped (in a good way) sense of harmony, which I appreciate much more now with years of playing and studying under my belt. It doesn't make as much sense as Bach to my ears, but I do think it's brilliant in its own way. I found the piano part difficult, mainly because of the unique harmonic language.

[Shooshie]

I think you'll find the key to Hindemith is to make the lines sing contrapuntally with each other. Don't think vertically; let Hindemith worry about that. Think horizontally, with careful attention to the phrasing and how the lines all respond to each other. It's as though they are speaking. Find the tonal inflections of this "language," and if anything OVER-do them until you hear it gelling between the instruments/lines, then you can back off just enough and you'll have it where you want it.

I think that performing Hindemith duos was some of the most fun I ever had on stage. We were playing several gigs a week, and if they were unstructured gigs -- like background music for a party or dinner -- we spent as much time playing Hindemith as we could. It just "worked." But there was one particularly funny incident. We were playing an opening at the Kimbell Art Museum, where we had practically become the house band, thanks to Van Cliburn, who had particularly enjoyed our playing there one evening. The Kimbell is one of the finest museums in the world, with a wonderful building designed by Louis Kahn, and an amazing collection, but it's small. Cozy small. They often partner with major museums 10 times their size, such as the Metropolitan in NY, to put together exhibits and bring them to town for a while. One of those happened to consist of rare Japanese sculpture that had never been out of its home country before -- ancient sculptures of fierce mythological beasts bearing swords and teeth, striking samurai poses. We had no music to correlate with THAT, so we just played whatever we wanted. We were parked between two particularly fierce warrior-like beasts, and as we were playing Hindemith, a woman was staring intently at the sculptures, sipping her champagne and listening to our music, lightly lilting with the beat. We were feeling great for connecting with this woman so deeply, so I wasn't at all surprised when she took advantage of the silence to speak to us as we rested after a taxing set of Hindemith. Without taking her eyes off the Japanese sculpture, she said "their music is just different from ours, isn't it?" She had thought we were playing some kind of Japanese music. Not to spoil the moment, I simply replied, "yes it is. VERY different."

Shooshie

[Frodo]

One of the things I love about "Mathis der Maler" in particular is how that opening G major triad sounds so fresh and new. I tend to listen to music as though I'm swimming through soup-- neither vertical nor horizontal-- especially when it comes to orchestral music-- at least when I have that rare opportunity to listen for pure pleasure. If I'm learning a score, I tend to pick it apart and put it back together in my head over and over again. But I love it when the music just washes over me and takes me far away.

I love orchestral textures and have a particular admiration for those composers who really know how to blend orchestral instruments on the page.

This passage from "The Lord of the Rings" sums it up much better than I ever could:

"Frodo began to listen.

At first the beauty of the melodies and the interwoven words in elven-tongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and sliver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for its pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him. Swiflty he sank under its shining weight into a deep realm of sleep. There he wandered long in a dream of music that turned into running water, and then suddenly into a voice." -The Fellowhip of the Ring - Book Two, Chapter One

[BobK]

Without taking her eyes off the Japanese sculpture, she said "their music is just different from ours, isn't it?" She had thought we were playing some kind of Japanese music. Not to spoil the moment, I simply replied, "yes it is. VERY different."

LOL! Thanks for sharing that, Shooshie.

[Mr. Quimper]

Just stumbled on these guys...real killer funk/R&B/fusion. Not a weak track in sight.

http://www.mainsqueezemusic.com/music/