Friday Miscellanea

As a kind of footnote to my post on heavy metal this week, here is the third, not the frequently played/transcribed/arranged first movement, but the much more difficult third movement of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 14 in C-sharp minor "Quasi una fantasia", Op. 27, No. 2, commonly known as the "Moonlight" Sonata, played on electric guitar as if it were heavy metal:

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Every now and then, and I suspect, largely by accident, the Globe and Mail has something interesting on music. This week it is this piece by Sean Michaels: "Three Songs You Need to Hear." Go have a look/listen. This is a recurring series in the Globe and Mail, but previous iterations I have mostly enjoyed making fun of. You really don't, ever, need to hear surfer music out of Toronto, trust me on this. But the first song in this piece is pretty interesting:

One of the past year’s most successful, left field collaborations is an album called Everything Sacred, uniting (1) the Scottish singer-songwriter James Yorkston; (2) Jon Thorne, long-time bassist for the English trip-hop outfit Lamb; and (3) New Delhi’s Suhail Yusuf Khan, who plays the stringed, short-necked sarangi and sings in a classical Indian style. The result is a beguiling mash-up of British folk and Eastern mysticism, with droney Sufi jams and frilled, intertwining voices.

Here is "Little Black Buzzer":

Sure, there isn't a lot there, but what is, is pretty nice. The next tune does not seem to be available where I am, but you might be able to listen to it. The last one is an odd tune by Kanye West.

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Courtesy of Norman Lebrecht, here is the list of the world's worst airlines for musicians (go to the article for links):

1 Ryanair

The Irish budget line make it their business to be horrid to everyone, but they reserve a special extra nastiness for musicians.

2 KLM

The Dutch are rude to divas and even ruder to dogs.

3 WestJet

Our reader’s advice: ‘Cellists: Never. Fly. WestJet’.

4 American Airlines/USAir

Unkind to instruments. And worse to concertmasters.

5 Easyjet

Locked an orch in an airless corridor for half an hour. No apology.

6 Alaska Airlines

Alaska have the same tender concern for baggage as Sarah Palin does for truth.

7 Southwest Airlines

See Alaska, same problem.

8 Vueling

Probably the worst of the lot. Repeat offenders who never apologise, let alone compensate.

But be sure to read the comments because they offer a lot of illuminating detail. KLM, for example, seems an excellent choice for musicians.

Why does this matter? A significant number of the concerts that you attend probably feature soloists, chamber ensembles, conductors or even entire orchestras that travelled by air. If the airlines make it nearly impossible to do so, they just won't come. As my instrument is an irreplaceable guitar I have been playing for thirty-three years, I simply will not take it anywhere near an airplane. Their track record is simply too dangerous to musical instruments.

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Due to their own videos we have this image of the popular crossover string players of today like Zoe Keating or 2Cellos spending their childhoods locked up in the dry discipline of that boring classical music with a nasty old white guy rapping their knuckles. But maybe they were always crossover...

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And now, for some classical music news: "Physicists Prove Classical Music Inhabits Separate Realm, Inaccessible To Humans." Doesn't this make it cooler than ever?

“Classical music transcends both the linear, forward flow of time and the Euclidean space we are used to,” said Rolf-Dieter Heuer, the director general of CERN. “A musical work is a mysterious entity whose essence totally eludes our senses.”

Physicists claim that any given performance or recording of a classical music piece is a kind of audible hologram projected into our everyday reality by the true musical work, which vibrates eternally in an ethereal medium floating in and around us at all times.

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Definitely in the "if you have to ask you can't afford it" category is this high-fidelity sound system from Wheel Fi:

I want one...

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And that brings us to our envoi for today. I'm afraid I can't resist putting up a recording of one of my favorite pianists, Friedrich Gulda, playing the aforementioned last movement of Beethoven's Sonata op. 27, no. 2, often referred to as the "Moonlight" Sonata. Now this is how it is done: