Saturday 31 August 2013

July 2013 - Popular Music

Tori Amos - From the Choirgirl Hotel
Tori Amos - Abnormally Attracted to Sin
Fiona Apple - The Idler Wheel...
Bryan Duncan - Mercy
Nik Kershaw - To Be Frank
Mark Lizotte - Soul Lost Companion 
Something for Kate - Leave Your Soul To Science

I've written once before about From the Choirgirl Hotel, here.  Basically I want to expand on what I said then, because the power of this album still amazes me in a way very few other albums do.

I said last time that I was often drawn to listen to Choirgirl when I'm in a dark, angsty mood. This is still true. But it's not merely that. It's that when I'm in a dark, angsty mood, quite frequently this is the only thing in my entire collection I can find that provides the kind of catharsis I'm looking for.

I don't know if other people ever go trawling through their music trying to find something to match their mood, and spend a while thinking "nope, that's not it... nope... nope...think, think, what are you hearing in your head? What does it feel like?".  It's certainly something that I do from time to time, having a moment when I feel the desire for something really specific.  To me this is one of the reasons for having a large music collection, to cover as many different nuances of mood as possible.

Time and again, Choirgirl can be relied upon to be the best possible album for a particular kind of angst-ridden mood.  Nothing else I own possesses the same kind of power and drama.  No-one else sings to me - no scrap that, sings for me - about trying to hold back glaciers, about balloons not staying up in a perfectly windy sky, about boys who can't be men, about screaming at cathedrals, about just feeling that there's something wrong and not knowing how to fix it.  Song after song hits these kinds of marks with pounding beats and soaring melodies. It's intoxicating.

I know it's not healthy to be in that kind of place for long periods. But it's certainly easier to bear that kind of place when you can give it a fantastic soundtrack, and for me at least, being able to find an articulation of the mood is the kind of therapy that can help me move on.

And 54 minutes of music is a lot cheaper and more readily accessible than a counselling appointment of the same length.

Friday 16 August 2013

June 2013 - Classical Music

Bach, J.S. - Keyboard Partitas 1 to 3
Dvorak - String Quartets 7 and 8

There's not really much to say here, other than there were 2 sets of classical works I decided to take with me on my travels, and at first I didn't get terribly far with listening to them.

Travel can be very exciting and adventurous, but fundamentally it's a disruption of your normal routines.  And I kept finding that I wasn't in the mood for listening to much music.  Anytime I took my headphones thinking that I might listen to some music while I was walking around, it didn't happen.  My normal habit of listening to music at night was almost entirely abandoned, and if I did listen it would only be when I was really tired and I would fall asleep before the end.

Eventually I worked out that the best time to listen was when I was travelling between cities, on a plane or train or bus, and had little else to do except perhaps stare out a window.

Even then I was quite liable to fall asleep, particular on a bus or train. A bit of gentle rocking motion and I would soon be nodding off.

So really, the story of the month was not listening to music. I got very stuck on the second Partita, and I lost count of how many times I started listening to Dvorak's 7th quartet but didn't reach the end.  This isn't really a reflection on the music, it's a reflection on the circumstances.

Wednesday 14 August 2013

June 2013 - Popular Music

Tori Amos - Scarlet's Walk
Tori Amos - Past the Mission single, Parts 1 and 2
Bat for Lashes - The Haunted Man
Marc Cohn - The Rainy Season
Gomez - How We Operate
Radiohead - In Rainbows

I was travelling throughout the month of June.  I wasn't necessarily going to mention that on this blog, but it's an important piece of context for what I decided to write about.

One of the things I occasionally do while travelling is wander into music shops. Not generally with that much intention of buying anything (especially not when the luggage is already excessively full...), but I find the exploration to be a nice little diversion or time-filler on days when I don't have a set plan.

I don't know if anyone else does this, but I tend to 'test' the quality of a music shop by looking for certain things. Favourite things, ever so slightly obscure things. Does this shop have a good range, or is it a generic store full of the same CDs as every other big brand store? Is there some depth here?

It probably comes as no surprise that one of the most frequent tests is looking for Tori Amos material.  This clearly isn't because I have much need to buy more Tori Amos. I have most of what I really want, and indeed a fairly large proportion of everything she's released.

Imagine my astonishment, then, when I walked into a music store in Toronto called Sunrise Records and not only found a couple of albums on LP, but one of the few CD singles I hadn't acquired yet.  In the second-hand section they had Past the Mission.

It originally came as two separate parts. Record companies are always trying to make more money out of you, of course.  The gimmick was that one part had space for both CDs, but the second slot had a cardboard placeholder instead of the actual CD - which you had to buy the second part to get.  Sure enough, the copy in the shop had both CDs.

Apart from the studio version of the song, there are a total of 7 live performances taken from Tori's 1994 tour.  At the time of release, the performances were about 2 months old at most and the tour was still going. So it's a nice little time capsule.

There was no way I was passing it up. I think it was only about 10 dollars as well.  So congratulations, Sunrise Records.  You are officially the most impressive music store I've encountered in a while.

You shouldn't have such sticky labels on your products, though. I hate that, and I'm sure the corner of the CD's original cardboard packaging suffered damage as I tried to get one of the stickers off. Ironically the sticker said 'quality guaranteed'.

Monday 12 August 2013

May 2013 - Classical Music

Bach, J.S. - French Suite No.6
Beethoven - Piano Sonata No.27 (2 versions)
Bridge
  • Lament
  • Two Poems for Orchestra after Richard Jeffries
  • Two Old English Songs
  • Thy Hand In Mine
  • Mantle of Blue
  • Blow Out, You Bugles
  • A Prayer
Dvorak - String Quartets 7 and 10
Faure
  • Nocturnes 6 and 7
  • Barcarolles 5 and 6
  • Valse-Caprice No.4
  • Theme and Variations for piano
  • Sérénade du Bourgeois gentilhomme
  • Pleurs d'or (Tears of Gold)
  • 2 Songs, Op.76
Holmboe - String Quartets 2, 4, 9, 12 and 17
Janacek - Concertino
Liszt - Hunnenschlacht (Battle of the Huns)
Poulenc
  • 5 Impromptus
  • Napoli
  • Badinage
Most of these Bridge pieces were short, the exception being A Prayer which is his only work for choir and orchestra.  I don't, from this distance, recall any of these works grabbing my attention the way that his Dance Poem did, but neither did I dislike any of them. There's a consistent level of enjoyment from these pieces.

My Faure chronology took me into some of the music that made me fall in love with this composer in the first place, the piano pieces he wrote in the 1890s.  The fifth Barcarolle is an astonishing piece - even more astonishing once you try to learn to play it, as I have, and realise just how fiendishly complex it is.  In some sections the harmony changes constantly, in others the melody keeps changing octave/register (at times between every note) and creates an intricate ballet between the pianist's two hands that a listener should hear as one seamless flow. It's strange and it's beautiful.

(This isn't the recording I have, but it's not dissimilar in approach.)



And then there's the sixth and seventh Nocturnes, perhaps the greatest works in his piano output. The 7th is a piece I know how to play, and indeed it's one of my very favourite things to play. In the past I've often listened to them together, but in reverse order, with the darker, struggling 7th finding a peaceful resolution before the 6th takes its beautiful, dream-like flight.

They make a lovely pair, but they also represent what is, at least in the piano music, something of a turning point. In early Faure, the melodies soar easily. In late Faure, the melodies often don't soar at all, but instead crawl doggedly upwards.  Here in the middle it feels like the music is just beginning to forget how to take flight. And the results are some wonderfully complex music.


Sunday 11 August 2013

May 2013 - Popular Music

...And there are no entries.

Which doesn't mean I didn't listen to any popular music whatsoever. I did. It was just very fragmentary, and didn't consist of whole albums. The works that generate entries on this list.

I can report, for example, that my occasional total obsession with the Tori Amos B-side 'Honey' resurfaced.  That opening (and recurring) bass line is one of the most persistent ear-worms that I know. It can lodge in my head for days at a time.


And then there's this song from Glee...

Yes, I have, gradually, become a Gleek. The show is awfully hit-and-miss, but sometimes the 'hits' send shivers up my spine.

And it's also true that usually when I go and compare a Glee version to the original, I can see in hindsight how the Glee version has become too smooth and sugary and is lacking a little life underneath the surface.  But THIS time, when I went to listen to the original again, I concluded that Glee had unearthed an incredibly beautiful and clever melody and rescued it from the excessive production that had originally drowned it.

The song, by the way, is called "Let Me Love You (Until You Learn To Love Yourself)". The original version is by Ne-Yo.



The reason I keep returning to this song over and over is that melody, specifically in the verses. It's ingenious. It's a syncopated rhythm that is so simple, and yet so effective in the way that it steps up and down, avoiding the beat most of the time. It's exactly the kind of construction of music from the smallest building blocks that delights me.

Saturday 10 August 2013

April 2013 - Classical Music

[Note: I wrote much of this post several months ago, but then haven't been in a position to finish it until now. The normal levels of patchy service will now be resumed.] 
 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bach, J.S. - French Suite No.4
Beethoven - Mass in C major
Dvorak - String Quartet No.7
Faure - La bonne chanson
Haydn - Symphony No.99
Holmboe
  • String Quartets 1 to 20
  • Symphony No.5
  • Chamber Symphonies 1 and 3
  • Violin Sonata No.2 
Janacek - Capriccio, 'Defiance'
Liszt - Festklänge (Festival Sounds)
Poulenc
  • Three Pastorales
  • Valse-Improvisation on the name of Bach
  • Melancolie
Well, it happened again.  I went completely and utterly Holmboe-crazy.

It might only take a few lines in the above list, but the focus of that craziness was the complete series of numbered string quartets.  No sooner had I listened to the last 4 works (which form a sort of a group) that I impulsively decided I wanted to listen to all of them, in chronological order, to get a better grasp of the music.

So I did. Over most of the month of April.

No sooner had I finished this that I decided I wanted to listen to all 20 of them again, this time not in chronological order, to further develop my sense of the individual works.  I polished off a dozen of them in about 36 hours, before slowing down and listening to the rest a few days later.

At the start of this Holmboe frenzy I was also listening to a few other works, and along the way the 3rd chamber symphony marked the point where I had finally listened to all of the Holmboe discs I bought last year (having expanded my total collection from 6 discs - the symphonies - to 17).  I already have my eye on about half a dozen more.

Those quartets are quite a body of work. They span 36 years of creative output, and that's starting from when Holmboe was already 40 years old! I won't pretend to love them all equally, but I didn't get tired of listening.

Favourites? Well no.11, subtitled ''Rustico", is probably top of the list and it's about the only quartet that could really be called happy.  I've also got an instinctive soft spot for no.2 and no.7.

I listened to a Haydn symphony after I heard that the conductor Sir Colin Davis had died, because it's his set of the 'London' symphonies that introduced me to that music and also it's the only set of Davis recordings I own. I now know that he's considered to have left a greater legacy with some other recordings, but I'm pretty happy just from having that one slice of lovely, warm-hearted music-making from him.