Playlist

Recorded

July 21, 2014

Pete Comley - July 2014

The Sentient Insect Variations: Zoar Valley - Pete Comley and Dave Fuglewicz

 

Our progress is a descent, spelunking through a viscous gelatin, thick with signal, gas-giant deep, to the mighty thrum of the world swarm.

 

My notes from a previous listening on October 26, 2002: Wild and beautiful. Like some crazy urban jungle heard through several timewarps through several scales of magnitude at once. The sci-fi film score to kill them all. Dangerously intense - gird your loins! At last we descend into the crater: wasp-lava.

 

Ambarabusaraba - Quintetto alla Busara

 

Music for social dancing, as opposed to couples dancing. Competitive in the sense that lifts the whole rather than in the sense that comes out on top.

July 22, 2014

The New Mother: 2 Excerpts - John Rahn [from Open Space 21]

 

Piles of eels or worms coalescing into the sensibility of voice - wheels of bird flights.

 

Call It What You Will - Matthew Barber [from Milton Babbitt: a Composers' Memorial]

 

A set of artifacts for violin, piano, and electronics, remarkable for the disparate senses in which the spaces enclose the sounds. The distinctions between togetherness and alienation are completely unfinessed, or baldly composed to sound as little like parts of the same piece as possible. Fascinating.

 

Hat Island, Washington

Poiche l'avida sete (Prima parte) - Gesualdo - Consort of Musicke, Anthony Rooley

 

Layers of stagnant suspensions pull back to reveal us: mechanical.

July 23, 2014

Konzert in F, BWV 1047 - J.S. Bach - Philharmonia Orchestra, Otto Klemperer

 

Ben Boretz once opined that Klemperer's recordings of the Brandenburg Concertos made them sound like something Stravinsky might have cooked up. This one is surely the prime example. You could almost count the legato phrasings on one hand.

July 24, 2014

Sonata in B, Wq. 48 #2 - C.P.E. Bach - Bob van Asperen

 

Slightly irregular. Sudden dark turns.

 

Quartet in D, Hob. III:3 - Haydn - Tatrai Quartet

 

There are some fabulous legato hocket passages here that could have been in the back of Tchaikovsky's mind for the last movement of the Pathetique.

 

Symphony in G, K75b(110) - Mozart - Academy of Ancient Music, Chriostopher Hogwood, Jaap Schroder

 

Grabs a sonority and hangs on tight.

 

Sonata in C-sharp minor op. 27 #2, - Beethoven - Wilhelm Kempff

 

Kempff believes in the power of clarity as a core value. If the performance lacks something in visceral thrill it nevertheless brings forward a solid image of tonal function, immovable but transformable.

July 25, 2014

Symphony in C minor (#4) - Schubert - Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Karl Böhm

 

Long lines, multi-stage slow builds, major landmarks - this music imagines around itself an extensive world, rather than the infinitely reflexive social chamber of the court or church.

 

Symphony in E minor (String Symphony #3) - Mendelssohn - English Bach Festival Orchestra, William Boughton

 

Interesting as clockwork, but as a thing it is more like an old-fashioned concerto grosso than like a Beethoven (or even a Haydn) string quartet.

 

Valse in E-flat Op. 18 - Chopin - Alfred Cortot

 

At once a one-man-band imitation of a waltz orchestra and the evocation of being in a waltzworld: fluttery hearts and flights of romance and passion. Not a waltz, but what a waltz is.

 

Remeniscences de Don Juan  - Liszt - Charles Rosen

 

Always a good idea to start with the hell-fire since it makes a great show. What fun! Brimstone ale, cool! Party on!

 

Overture, Scherzo and Finale, Op. 52  - Schumann - Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Herbert von Karajan

 

Light and dark but mostly light, though it starts in a dark corner of a dark world where what counts as a door to brightness comes across as a passing shadow in the light of day.

 

In Session at the Tintinabulary

 

July 21, 2014

Gradus 247 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

 

[weight - duration] [order] (in that order). Simultaneity of order operates as a reset and an articulation point. Weight and Duration operate on local relations - The distance of their orderings matters to how much they matter.

 

Upcoming

Sunday, August 10, 2014

Skylark (Seattle) 

Your Mother Should Know

Canals of Venice

Bucktoad