I don't think I have ever done a review of a sound system here, and I won't make a practice of it, but I think this might be of interest to quite a few people:
Here is the link and Amazon delivered it to me in Mexico without fuss. Bose is a company well-known for quality sound systems and this one is no exception. Despite its "mini" size, it has very good reviews on Amazon. I've been using it for several days now and can recommend it. It is not cheap, but at $199 US, I think it is priced according to the quality it delivers.
The problem for many of us these days is that we do most or a lot of our listening on our laptops just because of the convenience. So many use laptops as their main computer these days and it is so easy to just call up whatever you want to listen to on YouTube. But the problem is that laptops have low-quality sound reproduction. Especially in the bass range they are simply inadequate to listen to these pieces, for example:
If you were listening to a laptop like mine the beginnings of all three of these pieces were virtually inaudible, even with the volume up. Why? Because they all start with very low bass lines.
The Bose Soundlink Mini is a great solution for music lovers. It is small enough to tuck on your desk and you will finally be able to really hear the music! It makes a wireless Bluetooth connection and runs off batteries so no wires to worry about. It easily connected with both my iMac and Chromebook and delivered hours and hours of very satisfactory sound reproduction especially in the bass range. Your whole desk will vibrate!
A resident of Mexico is often presented with delightful surprises of a musical nature. True, the sonic environment in Mexico, studded as it is with the cheerful baying of dogs tied up on the roofs and the frequent release of resounding fireworks at unpredictable intervals, does not want for variety. But it is only occasionally--once a year in my immediate neighborhood--where they truly go all out to entertain everyone within earshot. Earshot, in this case being, anyone within several blocks.
I have the particular advantage of being front-row center for this celebration as it takes place in the forecourt of the church immediately across the street, so the fidelity for me is particularly high. All this weekend, starting with some rehearsals and sound checks on Friday afternoon, I have enjoyed a panoply of soundscapes.
There are, of course, the Indian drummers and dancers with their charming recourse to a tightly limited set of patterns. But there are also more conventional bands playing what I imagine must be popular music. Popular where, I am not quite sure, but if popularity can be guaranteed by sheer volume, especially of the bass which has been rattling my dishes this past hour, then this group must be wildly popular. Have I mentioned the brass ensemble? No? Ah yes, they alternate between the other groups and bring a certain je ne sais quoi to the proceedings. The higher trumpets feature a wide and unstable vibrato that is nicely contrasted with the solidity of the oom pah pah of the tubas. And, of course, they have their own snare drum corps accompanying them.
Sometimes, out of sheer enthusiasm, I am sure, the different groups overlap in a kind of gentle competition. But the prevailing mood is one of sheer frenetic intensity alternating with more frenetic intensity at a slightly different tempo.
I rejoice in the subtle developmental techniques such as the accelerando that the drummers are currently displaying. Come to think of it, they used that very same technique earlier today. And yesterday.
I don't believe I mentioned the lowing of the plastic tube horns? Well, they don't occupy a lot of the entertainment, so perhaps it is just as well.
Ah, I can hear from the glissandi of the heavily-amplified electric bass that the pop group is about to replace the drummers who, frankly, were beginning to run out of idea.
I had planned to listen to at least two more of the Bruckner symphonies this weekend, but really, how could I ignore the musical treasure trove that is unfolding right in front of me? That would be rude. So Bruckner will just have to wait.
As I understand it the musical performances will begin to taper off around eleven pm tonight making for a very full weekend of ... well, I hardly know what to call it.
Here is a little sample for you, but of course it is far more formal and restrained than the performances I have had the pleasure of experiencing over the last couple of days. With scarcely a break...
Oh joy, I think that now the Indian drummers are colloborating with the brass band AND the pop group. I'm sure that any minute now they will settle on a tempo and perhaps even a key.
I just ran across a little article about how often people skip a song after listening to just the beginning. Because of the digital world we live in, we can find this stuff out: the data come from Spotify. Here are some points:
Nearly a quarter of all songs on Spotify get skipped within five seconds of starting.
More than a third are skipped within 30 seconds.
Nearly half of all songs are skipped at some point.
On average, listeners skip over a song roughly every four minutes. Oh, these sad, distracted times!
At the other end of the spectrum, I've decided to give myself a little course in Bruckner because I have never really gotten to know his music and it has been intriguing me. So I have been listening to all the symphonies in order. Just got up to the Symphony No. 4 in E flat major. Here is Sergiu Celibidache in a famously leisurely performance some 80 minutes long:
Other conductors briskly trot through in a mere 60 minutes.
It gets me thinking: with pop music, what is it that either grabs or turns off the listener in the first five or thirty seconds? Let me pull up a few clips at random:
That had such a nice piano intro that I would have kept listening.
That one caused severe boredom after twelve seconds! It's the particularly annoying drum track back beat.
Yeah, fifteen seconds of that was enough!
I see that pop musicians have a real problem: if you don't have a compelling opening, people are just going to skip over. But if your opening is too interesting, people are also going to skip over because they will think it is "weird". What do the big names do?
Spacey synth sounds, no pulse, diamonds, water, smoke, naked woman and when the song finally arrives it has an interesting harmonic progression, so it does make you listen a bit longer just to see what is going on. The Beatles paid a lot of attention to how songs began:
That's a famously weird chord that begins that one: a diminished dominant: D, F natural, A, C and G sharp. But they don't give you any time to mull over its weirdness as they jump right into the chorus.
But symphonic composers are not under the same pressure to totally hook the audience in the first ten seconds. Bruckner essentially spent his whole career as a symphony composer working out the implications of how Beethoven wrote his Symphony No. 9, with its famously spacey opening:
Sometimes a composer tries very hard to be as minimal as possible in the opening, because that can be very compelling:
Shostakovich actually said to the quartet preparing to give the first performance:"Play the first movement so that flies drop dead in mid-air and the audience leaves the hall out of sheer boredom". The opening adagio movement is followed by five more--all of them also adagio!! Don't quite know how to end this meandery post, but here is Bernard Haitink conducting the Symphony No. 1 by Bruckner with its march-like first movement:
First up is what I call a "zombie album" that is, an album made with lead vocal tracks from a dead celebrity. In this case it's a new Michael Jackson album--who died in 2009. Also, in 1994, the surviving Beatles did a couple of zombie tracks with long-deceased John Lennon vocals for one of the Anthology albums:
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Here is a crossover for you: The Quatuor Ebène accompany Stacey Kent (and with the help of a little percussion) in a tune by Sting. I can't get Blogger to embed, so here is a link to the post on Norman Lebrecht's site with the video. Of course, Sting has crossed over in the other direction doing songs by John Dowland:
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Just one more benefit: practicing music results in increased blood flow to parts of the brain, according to the University of Liverpool. Of course, looking at Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue covers has a similar effect...
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I know you have been asking yourself, which violinist sells fifty times as many albums as the big classical violinists? And the answer is crossover violinist Lindsey Stirling who sold over 56,000 copies of her album last week. Just for comparison, a while back Hilary Hahn's Encore album was at the top of the weekly classical chart with 341 sales. And no, I didn't miss any zeros.
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The Eurovision song contest, a long-running promotional effort of the European Broadcasting Union, has long been renowned for its less-than-stellar songs and performances. But The Wire has helpfully gone to the work of collecting the worst of the worst--performances that did not win a single vote! Here is the link and here is a sample:
That really has it all, doesn't it? Singers who can't sing in tune, dancers who don't dance very well, a guitarist who is a bit fumble-fingered and a dreary song in a generic arrangement. Yahoo!
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Here is a rather interesting article on pieces of music that were left unfinished and pieces of music that were written as to seem fragmentary or unfinished. One example from the article is the first song from Dichterliebe by Robert Schumann that really can't decide what key it is in and ends on the dominant anyway:
You are going to laugh--some of you more than others. After resisting the piano my whole life, I have finally given in and for the last few weeks, have been teaching myself to play. The piano. Not a real one, of course, but a digital electronic keyboard that I can plug into my computer and link up with my music software. But it does, among a bunch of other sounds, have several piano sounds.
I had a lot of not-very-plausible reasons for avoiding the piano: it just didn't appeal to me, aesthetically. Rather than an expressive musical instrument, it felt more like a piece of furniture. Later on, after I had become a classical guitarist, the nails on my right hand interfered with good hand position on the piano. Also, for quite a number of years, trying to use my right hand on the piano felt awkward to the point of being painful. As someone who was a professional classical guitarist, it just didn't make sense to work on an instrument that seemed incompatible. I suspect that other incompatible instruments would be, for example, the oboe and brass instruments as the embouchure is completely different.
But as nowadays I am largely retired from playing concerts on the guitar and devote my time more to composition, the situation is different and it makes sense to do some work on the piano as an aid to composition. I'm not sure how much difference it will make as I have never really composed on an instrument, only checking things out afterwards to see if they will work. But working to learn a bit of piano technique is interesting in itself and gives one a different perspective on music. I think that guitarists have a somewhat idiosyncratic approach to harmony because of the instrument. On the other hand, I wonder if pianists are not somewhat restricted in their understanding of certain kinds of expression because of their instrument. As a guitarist I have always been able to bend the pitch of any note (except for open strings) and to change the timbre as well. I can also apply vibrato to most notes. If you see a guitarist, or someone who has played some guitar, playing piano, you might catch them occasionally trying to make a note vibrato by wiggling the key--ineffectually, of course. Mechanizing the production of notes on the piano has meant giving up the ability to control certain expressive aspects of the note.
I'm an odd sort of piano student. For one thing, I can mostly teach myself, though at some point I may get my hand position and technique checked out by a real pianist. It is challenging sight reading on piano for me for several reasons. One is that I don't get the same kinesthetic clues as to where my fingers are that I do when playing guitar. Because I am holding the instrument I pretty much know exactly where the frets are. On the piano I don't have that same feeling of unity with the instrument. Also, little clues from the curvature of the neck and the angle of my arm enable me to localize which fret I am on, but to my finger, all the white keys on the piano feel the same and I have to glance down to be sure where I am. I guess this will improve? Other things that are different are having to read two clefs simultaneously and the different relationship between the hands. On the guitar the hands always have to be coordinated in the same way, with the right hand initiating the note while the left hand stops the string. On the piano, you coordinate the hands rhythmically, but the feel is totally different.
What excites me about playing piano is the enormous harmonic freedom. Things that are awkward or impossible on guitar are easy on piano. Any inversion of any chord is as accessible as any other. The sheer facility of the piano is compelling. I'm starting to sense how the fine control of the mixing of the notes of the melody and harmony is where the expression lies on the piano. The equivalent on guitar is those subtle alterations to the angle and stiffness of the finger as it plucks the string that give a spectrum of different "colors".
But probably the biggest thrill is that all that music for keyboard that was only somewhat available to me as a guitarist is playable on the piano. Well, after I do a lot of very dull work on scales and arpeggios, that is! This is the only downside I see: in order to have even minimal technique on piano, I will have to do a huge amount of work. And my right hand will, as a result of being a guitarist for over forty years, always be weak compared to my left hand. Still, I've already had the fun of playing through the first twenty or so pieces in Bartók's Mikrocosmos...
Most of that is modal music in octaves, which seems to be a great way of getting the hands organized to play together.
I'm also coming to understand that part of my aversion to the piano was simply that I found it an intimidating musical instrument.
Tom Service hits one out of the park this week with his choice of Mozart's Symphony No. 29 in his weekly symphony guide. Go read his essay, which is an excellent introduction. All of us who discovered classical music at some mature age recall the exact piece that turned us on. In Tom's case it was this symphony; in mine it was the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto. Tom writes an excellent introduction to the piece and describes the opening as follows:
The first movement opens with the opposite of the grand rhetorical flourish that the vast majority of contemporary symphonies (including Mozart’s own) start with. The first thing you hear is a soft, descending octave in the first violins, the simplest of musical ideas, and a stepwise progression up the first four steps of the A major scale – along with a little chromatic agitation - over some serenely, almost ecclesiastically sonorous polyphony in the lower strings. This theme is then repeated, loudly, and with the addition of a canon: two beats later, the violas and cellos have the same theme as the violins, but at the third and fifth of the chord rather than the tonic - which means there’s a greater harmonic and contrapuntal richness than when we first heard the melody. In the space of 30 seconds or so, Mozart has used an enormous arsenal of sophisticated compositional techniques to create a miniature symphonic drama.
Pretty good description, but wouldn't it be even better if we could look at the score? Here is the first page:
This is a great theme, one of Mozart's best ideas. It is constructed from a couple of little ideas: first of all that octave leap:
Which keeps coming back, a tone higher each time. Leaping down an octave like this has the feel of a syncopation because the note you land on is on the off-beat. Next element is the appoggiatura from below, also repeated each time a tone higher:
This two-measure idea of the octave leap, followed by the appoggiatura figure, is heard four times on A, B, C# and D, whereupon it cadences on A. Then there is a four-measure transitional passage using turns that takes us back to the beginning of the theme. What is so very interesting about this, apart from its immediate appeal, is that it is structured quite unusually. It most closely resembles a sentence-type phrase, but instead of the basic idea repeated once followed by a couple of measures of continuation and a couple of cadential, the basic idea is repeated four times, then we have the cadence, then there is four measures of continuation. The result is that the theme is very dynamic and a bit unstable. Then, in the next section, Mozart ups the ante with a wonderful idea: let's hear this theme in close canon:
The first and second violins restate the theme in unison, an octave higher than the first phrase. Then, a half-note later, the violas and cellos have the same theme, in octaves, but on the third, C#. It is as if after a single 12-measure phrase, Mozart moves immediately into a development. But soon we do hear a second theme, in the dominant of E major:
The repeated notes in this theme tie it closely to the first theme. We get a little group of themes in E major and that ends the exposition, which repeats. The development moves to D major and we get some sequences and scale passages that don't seem too closely related to any of the themes we have heard so far. I think this is to distract us a bit because quite soon that terrific opening theme comes back again, like a long-lost cousin. Then we get our second theme, now in A major, so we know that we are in the recapitulation, which proceeds as it should. But what about that terrific theme? Surely we are not done with it? No, because now Mozart gives us a coda with an even more energetic version of the theme and brings the movement to an end. That's it: seven minutes of brilliant symphonic writing by the 18-year-old Mozart. Let's have a listen to the whole symphony:
I used to have a composition/theory professor who loved to give us little what he called "ear-training" tests. These were nothing like the usual ear-training tests where you had to take a chorale down in dictation or sing a melody at sight. No, his idea was to play us a really unusual piece of music and watch our reactions to it. The pianists were particularly troubled by a piece like this:
Of course, he didn't tell us what he was going to play. It is simply not possible to actually play that on piano. The composer, Conlon Nancarrow, manually cut holes in piano rolls to create a kind of non-electronic, electronic music. Here is another sample:
Half the students were asking themselves "why is the music never changing" while the other half were thinking "listen to those interesting changes". Here is another sample:
Scroll ahead to anywhere in the middle and ask yourself these two questions:
