Friday Miscellanea

This is where all the short and/or silly items go that don't quality for full post treatment. Stuff like, you know, a Ping Pong Concerto. Thanks to frequent commentator Marc for this item:

The Ping Pong Concerto, which debuted at the closing ceremony of Shanghai Music Festival, combined the rhythms of a bouncing ball with violins and percussions.

Akiho said the ball was a unique musical instrument and its bouncing was in perfect harmony with string instruments.

The New York-based composer said he had always wished to combine the rhythms of sport into music

Akiho is an innovative composer of classical music. He gained his knowledge of rhythm and percussion through exploration of the steel pan.

He is also working on a Ph.D. in composition at Princeton University.

Do you think that there might be some translation errors there? Or did he really learn about rhythm from the steel pan?

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I confess I am an evil, evil person, but after reading a lot about birdsong and listening to a lot of it in the music of Messiaen, this just made me chuckle. Several times.

https://www.facebook.com/NPR/videos/10153796153456756/

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The blinkered myopia of music critics is often amusing. Yo-Yo Ma just performed all the  Bach Cello Suites from memory in a single Proms concert. This not exactly the most amazing thing I have heard of as he has been known for his performances of these pieces for a few decades now. So I am greatly entertained to read this fulsome prose:

Among the many things we don’t know about Bach’s six cello suites is whether they were performed during the composer’s lifetime, or whether they were intended to ever be performed at all.

One might readily guess that the notion of a musician sitting down before a live audience of more than 5,000 people and playing from memory all six suites in succession would have left the composer astonished and incredulous.

I suspect that very little we do would make J. S. Bach terribly astonished and incredulous--apart, maybe, from the iPhone. But a performance of his Cello Suites would certainly not. He was in charge of the chamber music for a minor German nobleman at the time he wrote them, so it would be very surprising if his cello suites were not performed. Later on, in Leipzig, he was personally in charge of the music for all the churches in the city and also contributed to secular concert series as well. He wrote the scores, rehearsed the ensembles and conducted the performances of the three-hour-long passions and oratorios on a regular basis. He wrote and rehearsed cantatas for vocal soloists, chorus and orchestra every week. A few cello suites? Small potatoes...

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You know that I stay up late watching Danish television just so I can share things like this with you:

If you learn about the world from the mass media, you will have a profoundly distorted view. Plus, I am going to start using this quote with my more truculent commentators: “The facts are not up for discussion. I am right and you are wrong.” Heh!

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Thanks to commentator Marc for this link to a piece on Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir. It is a paean to her music that occasionally wanders into the unintentionally comic:

Though the metal percussion and deep, resonant drones remain, the feeling is less like attending a midnight ritual that might end in the sacrifice of one’s own life, and more like a gathering to welcome the morning sun on the summer solstice. Thorvaldsdottir’s music is likely not what the average person thinks of when they hear the phrase “classical music.” However, its atmosphere and tonalities are likely to appeal quite strongly to fans of forbidding music of any genre (dark ambient, industrial, noise, post-metal). With a quality sound system and proper lighting design, the music on Aerial could turn a concert hall into a deeply unsettling place, one filled with listeners under 60. On the other hand, In the Light of Air, while it retains the emotional intensity of the shorter pieces, adds enough brightness and positivity to demonstrate the vastness of Thorvaldsdottir’s compositional imagination and sonic universe.

 I guess that is how you are forced to write about music when your mental categories have all been shaped by listening to popular music.

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There has been some interest in the music of Heinrich Biber here lately so let me alert you to a new recording of his Missa Salisburgensis (yes, he was resident in Salzburg before Mozart). The review is in the Guardian. But Amazon doesn't seem to have that recording in stock at the moment, though there are other ones. The piece is famous for being in 54 parts! Don't believe me? Here:

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Norman Lebrecht reminds us that today is Arvo Pärt's 80th birthday. Though he has written a number of much-loved pieces, I think that the most interesting is probably Tabula Rasa. Here is a live performance by the Lviv Philharmonic Orchestra with conductor Siergiej Burko and soloists Violin- Jan Pietkiewicz and Violin- Katarzyna Seremak:

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Here is an excellent and informative article by the Washington Post's Anne Midgette about the different makes of concert grand pianos that are available. It's not just Steinway! The last paragraph reminds me of a adult beginner student I used to have. He came to a lesson one day very enthusiastic about a demonstration of a new Yamaha "acoustic" digital piano he had just seen in a department store music section. He waxed on so fulsomely about how the salesman kept saying that "you couldn't tell this piano from a concert grand!" that I finally stopped him by saying: "I'll bet you fifty bucks I can." This was way back in the 80s so fifty dollars was a serious bet. He gave me a very quizzical look to which I replied, "look, I have pianist friends who can tell a New York Steinway from a Hamburg Steinway--you don't think I can tell an electric piano from a grand piano? Even if it is in a wooden case?" At this he looked rather chagrined and refused to take the bet.

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And speaking of birdsong, tomorrow I am going to get back to our series on Messiaen and as a little appetizer, here is his fairly late piece for piano "Petites esquisses d'oiseaux" from 1985. The pianist is Håkon Austbø:

You might wonder why a piece fifteen minutes long is considered "petite" (small). But bear in mind that Messiaen's idea of a full-scale piece for piano is his "Vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus" which is in twenty movements and two hours long!