Friday Miscellanea

Lindsey Stirling has a new video out linked to the Dragon Age video games:

You know, try as I might, I just can't think of a good video game link for my music. Civilization V?

* * *

This looks like it might be a cool book. The Wall Street Journal review has a photo gallery of great rock album covers. My favourite:

* * *

Speaking of pop music, Ann Althouse has a post up in which she refers to "a great musical artist". Go read the whole post and the link to the tribute post. The great artist in question is "Dimebag" Darrell, lead guitarist and songwriter for the heavy metal band Pantera. I put this up just because the idea of referring to Darrell as a great musical artist troubles me. Of course, this mere admission tags me as a mossback or classical snob. "Thou shalt not question the great artistry of pop musicians" is a commandment written down somewhere. But I have to be honest: aren't there hundreds of heavy metal bands? All with fervent followers? How many of them are great musical artists? All of them? None of them? A very few? I have heard Metallica called great musicians, but I'm not sure I understand why. I have a pretty clear idea that the Beatles really were great musicians and I have written dozens of posts here about why I think so. But I just have difficulty with elevating many other pop musicians to that level. Let me see if I can put my difficulty into perspective: I would have a similar difficulty labeling a great number of classical composers as great musicians. Frankly, most of them wrote rather predictable music for particular occasions and got paid for it. Someone like Georg Christoph Wagenseil wrote singularly uninspired keyboard concertos notable mainly for how dull they are compared with those of Mozart. Alongside every great classical composer like Haydn were a host of second-rate composers whose works sleep inside dusty covers in university libraries. And this is as it should be. So why is it so different for pop musicians? Is it just that every pop musician of some success has a devout following? In our adolescent years we get captured by a lot of passions. I admit to being really fond of Eric Burden and the Animals for a time in the mid-60s. But I'm over it now.

* * *

Behind the paywall the Wall Street Journal has an article about Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. You can read it at this link. It's a pretty good essay on the piece, though lacking both musical examples and musical clips. But it does tell you the nicknames various pianists have given to the various movements, so there's that. Here is a superb performance by Grigory Sokolov with the score:

* * *

Also in the Wall Street Journal is this persuasive essay arguing for contemporary piano music. One of the pieces mentioned is Ligeti's Automne à Varsovie:

* * *

From the Guardian, here is a detailed account of a recent complete performance of all 20 Etudes for piano by Philip Glass.

* * *

And yet another instance of rude airline employees bullying a musician traveling with his instrument. I ran into this a lot when I was touring. But, I also had good experiences. You never know...

* * *

Here's an interesting article on the wood used for musical instruments. This story is about the high-altitude spruce trees growing in the Italian alps that Stradivarius used for his violins and that are still used for violins today. My guitar has a high-altitude spruce top as well, but from the mountains in British Columbia. The builder of my guitar, Robert Holroyd of Vancouver, selected the particular log he wanted and supervised the sawing into sections. Why you want a particularly straight-grain piece of wood grown at high altitude is not discussed in any detail in the article, but the reason is that at high altitudes trees grow much slower and therefore the annual growth rings, which are the grain of the wood, are very narrow instead of wide. This gives a better resonating plate for musical purposes. Or so I understand it! I have seen laser-generated photos of the way the top of a guitar vibrates at different frequencies--quite fascinating! I suspect that the tighter the grain, the more minutely flexible the wood is and therefore the more responsive to vibrating at different frequencies.

* * *

Speaking of high altitudes, here is a piece by Villa-Lobos that I have always associated with mountains. His Prelude No. 4 for guitar, in my performance on the guitar by Robert Holroyd that I was just mentioning: