Friday Miscellanea

This month is the 50th anniversary of the release of the Beatles' double album universally known as "The White Album."

Sadly, I lost my vinyl copy, purchased new in 1968, years ago, but that's pretty much what it looked like. A lot of photos show "The Beatles" in high relief or brought out in some way, but on the original cover, it was not printed, just embossed so you barely saw it. The Beatles were so famous that they hardly needed to identify themselves on an album cover. The Wall Street Journal has an item on a new deluxe edition of the album. Since the band broke up in 1970 and besides, two of the original members are dead, the only way to keep up the revenue stream is to keep issuing new versions of the original recordings every few years.

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Whoever did this compilation is as obsessive as I am! Here are ten different pianists all playing Le Rappel des oiseaux by Rameau. The pianists are Emil Gilels, Youra Guller, Robert Casadesus, Wilhelm Kempff, Alexander Alexandrov, Cyorgy Cziffra, Jill Crossland, Marcelle Meyer, Pierre Barbizet, and Denys Proshayev. Whew!

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Prince's long-lost East Coast studio? A hip-hop haunting? No explanation for mysterious sickening pulsing beat driving inhabitants of Delaware and New Jersey to distraction: 'A sickening, pulsing heartbeat.' Mystery music is floating from Delaware to N.J.

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If that wasn't creepy enough for you, there is the newish phenomenon of dead musicians on tour thanks to hologram technology. A sample:

More at the Toronto Star: The dead musician holograms are coming — better get used to it.

This Sunday, a resurrected Roy Orbison will take the stage at the Sony Centre in Toronto as a high-tech spectre fronting a live orchestra in a touring production created by Las Vegas company BASE Hologram dubbed In Dreams: Roy Orbison in Concert. 

Winehouse is apparently next, by the way. The British singer died far too young in 2011, but now BASE Hologram is working with her father to put her back on the road with a live band of her own in 2019.

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The Daily Beast has a piece on composer Nico Muhly:

Muhly is resistant to defining his style of music-making, which combines electronic, choral and classical styles. “If you ever have 10 minutes to think about defining your musical style, I would suggest doing something else like learning German or doing ‘a Marie Kondo’ sorting through your drawers,” Muhly said with a hearty giggle.

“I find it supremely uninteresting and not productive, because you find yourself writing the press release before the piece. If you get caught up in self-definition, you don’t do yourself any favors announcing to the world what the project is stylistically.”

He prefers to talk about influences. “Influence is considered such a bad word, as if you’re stealing a recipe from someone. I confess quite openly when I steal something from John Adams. I email and tell him, too. He’s quite gracious about it. My emotional home base of music is from the 1500s to the late 1600s. Maybe then it picks back up to the choral world with Stanford, Finzi, and Howells. Then (Steve) Reich, Glass and Adams, and Messiaen and Stravinsky: the usual suspects. I don’t worry about how to mix them together.”

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And in the category of musical "fake news" here is a hoax video of Maurizo Pollini playing Beatles arrangements with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Karl Böhm. Yeah, right!

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Norman Lebrecht alerts us to this photo of Walt Disney with Dmitri Shostakovich. What could they possibly talk about?

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Environmentalist composer John Luther Adams pens an essay for The Guardian: 'I want my art to matter. I want it to be of use': John Luther Adams

Conventional wisdom holds that as people age they become more conservative. But now, in my mid-60s, I feel as passionate as ever about the imperative for cultural and political change. Neither divine intervention nor artificial intelligence will save us from the catastrophes that seem to lie ahead. To find that salvation, we must find our rightful place in the larger-than-human world – the world that encompasses great human cities and vast mountain ranges, the Mass in B minor and the song of the hermit thrush, the Sistine Chapel and the aurora borealis – this miraculously beautiful world that is our one true home. If my music can inspire people to listen more deeply to this miraculous world we inhabit, then I will have done what I can as a composer to help us navigate this perilous era of our own creation.

Speaking of "conventional wisdom" that collection of platitudes is about as conventional as can be.

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Just reading about Adams' piece Become Ocean reminds me of its soporific blandness. So let's have something rather different. This is the daunting and challenging Sonata No. 6 for piano by Galina Ustvolskaya:

And for the other side of the coin, let's have a rather whimsical piece by Shostakovich. This is the polka from the ballet The Golden Age played by the Apollon Musagete Quartet:

To all my readers a traditional Canadian farewell: have as good a weekend as possible, under the circumstances!

UPDATE: So sorry, I published this a day early by mistake. So have a good weekend anyway. Tomorrow I will put up another post on a new history of new music, so you at least have that to look forward to!