by | October 31, 2015 · 6:00 am

L’amorosa caccia

L'amorosa caccia

In 2014 Ut Orpheus issued L’amorosa caccia: 24 five-voice madrigals by Mantuan masters (Venezia 1588/1592), edited by Stefania Lanzo.

All of the Mantuan composers represented in this new edition were distinguished professional people, working within the church, at court, or in the Basilica Palatina di Santa Barbara, and music lovers of noble birth from the area who were connected to the Accademia degli Invaghiti.

The realization in score of the madrigals has made it possible to bring to light this collection, establishing its musical value and proving the remarkable mastery of madrigal writing of these 24 musicians and offering the opportunity to highlight each one’s different skill as a composer.

Below, a sequence of Italian madrigals.

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by | October 29, 2015 · 6:00 am

Či Bulag and the morin huur

Či Bulag

Či Bulag (b.1944) has had a significant influence on the development of the Mongolian morin huur in the post-Mao era.

Bulag adapted the morin huur and its repertoire to the concert stage in the 1970s and 1980s to widespread acclaim. An analysis of his well-known and frequently played composition Wan ma benteng (Ten thousand galloping horses) and his efforts to adapt the morin huur to the concert stage shows how he reworked stereotypes of Mongols as simplistic nomads to represent them as both powerful descendants of Genghis Khan and participants in the modern world.

While many Mongols appreciate Wan ma benteng for its evocation of a Mongol spirit, Bulag’s morin huur model has received harsh criticism from the musical community in independent Mongolia as being too Chinese.

Mongol musicians in China have increasingly used the morin huur to balance their longing for a Western-style modernity, a project undertaken by Bulag, with recent desires to seek out a pan-Mongol (and non-Chinese) past through exchanges with the nation of Mongolia. Still, Mongol musicians continue to orient themselves around the work of Či Bulag as they debate the appropriate direction for the morin huur and Mongol music in the 21st century.

This according to “Driving change, sparking debate: Chi Bulag and the morin huur in Inner Mongolia, China” by Charlotte D’Evelyn (Yearbook for traditional music XLVI [2014] pp. 89–113).

Below, Wan ma benteng in a performance by Bulag and his galloping students.

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by | October 26, 2015 · 6:00 am

Scarlatti’s creative process

scarlatti

Four analyses of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonata K.296 demonstrate the possibilities and problems with analyzing this unusual and fascinating technique of composition—devising sequences of keyboard events while at the instrument, a forerunner of present-day procedures.

This approach diminishes the value of all conventional approaches to Scarlatti’s keyboard works, both of his time and ours, putting them in a new light.

This according to “F.244: 4 Annäherungen an eine Sonate” by Peter Böttinger, an essay included in Musik-Konzepte 48-49: Morton Feldman (Musik-Konzepte 47 [1986] pp. 57–121).

Today is Scarlatti’s 330th birthday! Below, the sonata in question.

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by | October 24, 2015 · 6:00 am

Berio’s creative process

 

Luciano Berio’s sketches and drafts show how he worked with a clear and well-defined core of poetic values and constructive procedures while exploring a wide range of musical characteristics.

His concepts and techniques included redundancy, rereading, alliteration, saturation of the chromatic aggregate, rhythmic cells and their transformation, permutation of tone rows, and harmonic construction from pools of intervals. Many of his compositional devices originated in his serial practice of the 1950s or were designed in direct response to serial problems.

This according to “Berio at work: Compositional procedures in Circles, O King, Concerto for two pianos, Glossa, and Notturno” by Christoph Neidhöfer, an essay included in  Luciano Berio: Nuove prospettive/New perspectives (Firenze: Accademia Musicale Chigiana, 2012, pp. 195–233).

Today would have been Berio’s 90th birthday! Below, the Concerto per due pianoforti e orchestra, one of the works discussed in the article.

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by | October 22, 2015 · 6:00 am

SMUG: Scientific Music Generator

SMUG

 

SMUG is a system for generating lyrics and melodies from real-world data, in particular from academic papers.

The developers of SMUG wanted to create a playful experience and establish a novel way of generating textual and musical content that could be applied to other domains, in particular to games.

This according to “SMUG: Scientific Music Generator” by Marco Scirea, Gabriella A. B. Barros, Noor Shaker, and Julian Togelius, a paper included in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Computational Creativity (Provo: Brigham Young University, 2015, pp. 204–211).

Many thanks to Improbable Research for bringing this to our attention! Above, an excerpt from the score generated from Charles Darwin’s On the origin of species by means of natural selection. Below, an app that generates music from barcodes.

 

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by | October 19, 2015 · 6:00 am

The Elvis sandwich

Some pop stars are remembered for their music, some for their style; but Elvis Presley may be the only one who’s also remembered for a peanut butter sandwich—not just any peanut butter sandwich, but one that adds bananas and sometimes bacon to the mix and is typically pan-fried or finished on a griddle.

The Elvis actually predates Elvis Presley. Indeed, the sandwich has its roots in what the food blogger Tina the Mom describes as “Southern po’ folks cuisine”. It seems as if every celebrity chef now offers a recipe for it, and in a food world that can never leave well enough alone there’s been a push to reinvent the sandwich in myriad ways.

What’s behind the fascination with this dense mess of comfort food? It begins with the fact that Presley, despite his royal status, always retained a fondness for the simple things in life. Then again, the Elvis isn’t quite so simple, and its over-the-top aspect is perhaps key to the appreciation of both man and sandwich.

This according to “Celebrate Elvis Presley’s birthday with a sandwich fit for a king” by Charles Passy (Speakeasy 8 January 2014).

Below, the King recommends milk with that.

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by | October 17, 2015 · 6:00 am

The Henry VIII book

Henry VIII Book

In 2014 DIAMM facsimiles published The Henry VIII book, a full-color facsimile of GB-Lbl MS Add.31922, which contains many works by Henry VIII of England.

This new edition presents over 260 full-color page images plus an 85-page introduction by David Fallows, who examines the book with fresh eyes and shares considerable new information about the content and context of this manuscript.

Below, two of King Henry’s works for recorders.

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by | October 14, 2015 · 6:00 am

La Monte Young’s cosmology

La Monte Young

For centuries composers have used numinous language to describe the transcendent potential of their art. In La Monte Young’s case, however, one cannot dismiss such lofty claims as hyperbole: A presupposition of ontological contiguity underscores his work, such that what appear to be indistinct musical metaphors play out in surprisingly literal ways within the mechanics of his music.

The highly conceptual works from the early 1960s, with their sometimes baffling transgressions of musical norms, resist traditional musical analysis to such a degree as to expand the composer’s activities well beyond the traditional scope of composition.

In his maturity, Young sees himself as a prophet whose highly specialized tuning systems and sustained sound environments recast music onto a spatial, rather than temporal plane, interface directly with the periodic structures of the universe, and traverse the boundary separating the physical from the metaphysical.

This according to Music of a more exalted sphere: Compositional practice, biography, and cosmology in the music of La Monte Young by Jeremy Neal Grimshaw, a dissertation accepted by the Eastman School of Music in 2005.

Today is La Monte Young’s 80th birthday! A complete performance of The well-tuned piano.

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by | October 12, 2015 · 6:00 am

Pavarotti sings for soccer

 

The group New Order’s World in motion, commissioned by the British Football Association to mark the 1990 World Cup soccer finals, “is probably the least likely official football theme song ever recorded: Denying its own status as a football song, introducing elements of subcultural love lyrics, and becoming a gay club hit, but also assuming the burden of combating football’s major peripheral problem, hooliganism, the song is ultimately unheimlich, even despite its closing chorus that speaks of ‘playing for England; playing this song.’”

This according to “Playing for England” by Paul Smith (South Atlantic quarterly 90/4 [fall 1991] pp. 737–752). Smith goes on to note that “both the BBC and the independent television companies forewent the pleasure of having ‘Love’s got the world in motion’ going across the airwaves every night, and the BBC used as their World Cup theme another piece of music that quickly became a number one hit: Luciano Pavarotti singing his version of the Nessun dorma aria from Turandot.”

Today would have been Pavarotti’s 80th birthday! Below, singing Nessun dorma in 1994.

BONUS: By way of contrast, New Order’s song:

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by | October 9, 2015 · 6:00 am

Camille Saint-Saëns, astronomer

saint-saens and flammarion

Many know Saint-Saëns as the composer of Le carnaval des animaux and other landmark Romantic works; fewer know that he was an avid amateur astronomer.

Saint-Saëns was friends with the eminent French astronomer Camille Flammarion and participated in the Société Astronomique de France. His stature as a great French composer brought attention to the Société and astronomical research, and he contributed several articles to the group’s journal, Revue d’astronomie populaire.

This according to “Inspired by the skies? Saint-Saëns, amateur astronomer” by Léo Houziaux, an essay included in Camille Saint-Saëns  and his world (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012, pp. 12–17).

Today is Saint-Saëns’s 180th birthday! Above, the composer (right) with Flammarion; below, Saint-Saëns adresses the heavens (Laudate, coeli!).

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