Hey, whatever Lola wants.
Hey, whatever Lola wants.
This thing’s touted as a microtonal piano and it has the potential to be an absolutely awesome instrument. In this performance though, it sounds more like a hammered dulcimer with an unused pitch wheel. I’m a big fan of modern harpsichord music – which this strongly reminds me of – and I sure like to see Western composers tackle this little invention – instead of just playing a minus one Indian raga.
If you want your mind blown check out this recording.
Performed by John Williams and Maria Farandouri
The spanky new high-tech turntable I bought for Nora last Christmas has finally landed in our living room, attached to the amp that can crank the sound out of her mammoth speakers. So far, only classical music has made its way under the needle, and it may stay that way till one of us has a gust of nostalgia sweep over them.
Anyway, yesterday I went down to the basement and brought up a handful of old vinyl favorites, things I haven’t listened to in at least a decade. This album was among them.
You know, I could probably give you a top ten list of every damn era, form and instrument used in ‘classical’ music. From Gothic to Post-Modern, winds to keyboards, bagatelles to symphonies. But if I had to put together a single top ten list based on composed music (as opposed to pop, rock, jazz, etc) this one would probably be on it. It has been a guilty pleasure since the ’70s.
First of all, the lyrics for one of the song cycles are adapted from Lorca. Second, Theodorakis, the composer behind Zorba the Greek and Z, was moved to create a musical response to the demos-stomping dictatorship in his native Greece. Third, we have contralto Maria Farandouri, who technically, brings a perfectly balanced blend of folk and operatic tone to the songs, and emotionally, brings a lie-down-and-cry richness. Fourth, we have the John Williams on guitar.
Together, my freaking god… you’ll be hard pressed to find a recording this cohesive, this moving, this exquisite, anywhere. Dude, you can play this at my funeral. When I dragged it out, I thought, hmm… is this going to stand the test of time? That question was answered before the first ten bars of the first song were over. Whatever else these guys did in their musical careers, they could have retired after this recording and been satisfied they pushed the envelope of world music a little higher.
The album was out of print for decades, then reissued in the ’90s and dropped again within a month. It is now only available from Sony in Greece. Here’s the link.
By the way, if you ever read somewhere that Maria Farandouri is the Joan Baez of the Mediteranean, don’t believe it until you hear Baez sing Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5. Then it will make sense.
Many years ago, I met a Polish real estate agent who did his Masters degree playing accordion. Super nice guy. He said he could have bought a car if he’d sold his instrument. Jigga high, jigga low, la-la-la, etc.
By the way, I don’t think they called it ‘shredding’ in the 18th Century.
Two of my all-time favorite pieces of piano music are Beethoven’s Opus 110 and 111.
What slays me is the left hand in the Opus 110 third movement fugue, pounding away in some kind of elephantine may-pole dance while the right twitters away above. And what a friggin tease it is! A smidge of the theme here, a smidge there. Ludwig, you could just play that for a full five minute track and I’d be grooving from the first note to the last.
I took piano lessons at one time entirely to play this piece. I had the score, I practically had every note memorized already. But my idiot teacher said I had to learn to play baby pieces first. (Oh… was I pissed.) She was this cranky old blind teacher who, I’m sure, wailed on the knuckles of her infant students with her white cane when they made mistakes. I would have been quiet happy to learn this thing one note at a time until I got it down. (I subsequently left that teacher and started learning on my own.)
Opus 111 is a whole other animal. Like 110, all the magic happens in the second half. But 111 only has two movements. Scads has been written about this sonata. A friend of mine even attained some international fame based on his scholarship of the piece. What appealed to me, as a teenager, hearing it for the first time, was the jazzy interlude in the middle of the second movement, arriving like a molehill of funky in an otherwise sleepy plain. That little chunk of happy “get-down” literally launched Beethoven into the 20th Century for me, alongside boogie and stride and every other kind of modern dotted note piano boppin’.
The version I ripped from vinyl was by Stephen Bishop (now known as Stephen Kovacevich). Who knows if it’s still in circulation, but unlike many, many other staid performances of 111, he fearlessly embraces the groove. If you see it, nab it.
A great many well-known "classical" pieces have caught my imagination over the years. Pieces that are universally recognized as being head and shoulders above the hills of symphonic mediocrity out there. Years ago, I bought everything I could find by Alan Hovhaness, hoping to discover more pieces like the St. Vartan Symphony, only to bring home tons of "final sale" vinyl that I would only play once.
Hovhaness is an American composer, born of a Scottish mother and an Armenian father. Both influences are blatant in his work. But the mixing of Armenian modes and lilting Scottish rhythms in the dark brain of this guy makes this Symphony No.9 sound more like a soundtrack for an Eastern European version of Lord of the Rings than anything else. The piece is hugely cinematic. The guy loves to switch tonal gears mid-sentence, so to speak. But the lushness and darkness of his strings just kill me. The only thing I can compare it to is maybe Scriabin’s Poem of Fire or Carl Nielsen’s 4th Symphony. This is definitely a journey piece, the kind of thing that demands you listen to it exclusively, and let it carry you into it’s own cryptic world.
There’s a guy gave a review on Amazon.com that pretty much sums up the attraction of this piece:
"I listen to this spectacular symphony EVERY night… I mean EVERY night…"
Here’s a vid of part of his 2nd Symphony, to give you a taste.
If you’ve never heard of this guy, run out and buy his music. This album came out in 1969 and I bought it around 1973. I won’t go into Moondog’s bizarre history (check Wikipedia for that). I’m much more interested in him as a composer and musician. The guy brought something intensely unique to the late 20th music scene.
You could characterize it as psychedelic orchestral folk. I prefer to think of it as Viking campfire music meets Charlie Parker meets Carl Orff. The overarching tone of every Moondog piece is a sense of whimsy. In particular, rhythmic whimsy. Quote, "I’m not gonna die in 4/4 time." He even had a name for it. He called it "snake time". It as the sound of the subway, of traffic, of erratic bird chirps. If he was a scientist he would have called it fractal time, and if he was Miles Davis, who knows what he would have called it.
Considering he was a blind street musician, I’ve always found his whimsy incredibly inspiring. I’ve always loved complex music. And fearless music, where the barriers between genres are ignored. Moondog epitomizes both for me. Unlike most artists who love a continuous, complex percussion beat, he knows how to rock an orchestra. At the same time, he is not afraid of simplicity – even to the point of naivete – which, I’m sure, hurt his credibility as a serious artist.
Personally, I couldn’t give a shit. I’ve had as much pleasure from listening to Moondog as from any half dozen Baroque pieces and certainly more than any David Munrow Gothic boxed set (which I’ve played to death).
The second album I bought by Moondog was his rounds, recorded with, I believe, his wife and daughters singing. There’s like, twenty-odd one and two minute tracks on this thing, and though it gets a bit much after number 15, there’s a lot to love there. Joyful? My god… it doesn’t get any more joyful than this.
Anyway, when I grow up, I want to be Moondog. White beard, Viking helmet, non-4/4 percussion and all.
p.s. These two bits of music are barely indicative of Moondog’s range. Just go buy the music, you’ll thank me later.
I just wikipedia-ed these albums and realized they came out in 1977. This three ‘year’ set was one of those wear-out-my-copy-and-have-to-buy-another-one favorites. I even read friggin Byron’s Childe Harold, just to get a sense of what Liszt was experiencing. (That’ll be a once-in-this-life-time experience.) One track on the first ‘year’ made such an impression on me I was inspired, still as a teen, to write a sci fi novel based on the spirit of it.
If you’re a fan of thoughtful solo piano, this series is for you. The first ‘year’ is still the pyrotechnic Liszt, the guy who could caress you with one hand and tear you a new one with the other, but he calms down a bit for the second year. The third year was written so long after (by the black-robed, white-haired, depressive Liszt), they’re almost unrecognizable as being part of the same series.
Here is a little taste from the first year: