Friday Miscellanea

Here is a YouTube clip on the top ten musical moments from movies. Most of these top ten lists are the merest clickbait, but this one is actually quite interesting. For one thing, whoever was responsible for this project does actually know some stuff. They reference a number of movies that I don't know but am now curious about. They also know the difference between diagetic vs non-diagetic use of music in film. So, have a look.

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The Guardian has an article on a really interesting project: commission eight young composers to write movements for string quartet based on the same planets that Gustav Holst used for inspiration in his wonderful suite for orchestra The Planets, written between 1914 and 1916. Six scientists were asked to aid the composers in their work.

The idea to reimagine The Planets using modern science came from the young British composer Samuel Bordoli who, along with producers Sound UK, paired up each musician with a planet and a mentor and asked them each to write a five-minute piece for string quartet. Titled The Planets 2018, the results are to be performed by the Ligeti Quartet in planetariums across the country from Saturday.

Sounds fascinating and I hope they issue a recording.

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This item is just weird: VIOLINIST, 81, IS NORWAY’S HIGHEST TAX PAYER.

The Norwegians have a habit of publishing every citizen’s annual income and tax bill.

In the latest list it turns out that the distinguished violinist Arve Tellefsen had the highest tax bill in the whole of the entertainment sector.

Arve, 81, has been obliged to pay 21,211,550 Norwegian krone ($2.55 million) on taxable net worth of 90,774,551 NOK, which is $10.9 million.

Where did Arve make all his money?

He sold his violin, bought in 1970 for a million krone, to a very shy German investor.

In many countries homeowners get a exemption on capital gains taxes on their principal residence. Shouldn't musicians get one on their principal instrument?

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Also at The Guardian is an article about composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor:

Young Samuel was brought up by his mother and her extended family in Croydon. He never met his doctor father, Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, who was originally from Sierra Leone and had come here to study medicine in London. You may be wondering about his name. Samuel’s mother, Alice Hare Martin, named her son after Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the poet. Oh, those Victorians!

The family clubbed together to pay Samuel’s fees at the Royal College of Music, which he entered at 15 as a violin scholar. But the violin was set to one side and composition took centre stage and he was taken under the wing of the composer and conductor Charles Villiers Stanford, who also mentored a generation of big-name composers, including Gustav Holst, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Frank Bridge. For two years running, Coleridge-Taylor won the RCM’s Lesley Alexander composition prize and was championed by Edward Elgar, who recommended the talented young composer for a major commission – an orchestral work for the Three Choirs festival, his Ballade in A Minor, opus 33.

One interesting thing about Coleridge-Taylor is the considerable renown he enjoyed in the early 20th century:

In the US, he was a household name in his lifetime, and travelled there by invitation of the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society of Washington DC in 1904, and again in 1906 and 1910. The US marines band were engaged for his first performance and 2,700 people were in the audience, two-thirds of whom were black.

This would seem to argue against claims that he was neglected and discriminated against. Here is his Hiawatha Overture:

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Alex Ross' latest for The New Yorker is a piece on Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan’s Masterpiece Is Still Hard to Find. The masterpiece in question, coming out of 1974 sessions and later released in modified form as Blood on the Tracks, is a Dylan album I have never heard. My excuse is that from the early 1970s until into the 1980s I was so focussed on my own career as a classical guitarist that I had no time to spare. So, while I have heard of this album, I have never listened to it. Ross says:

In September, 1974, Bob Dylan spent four days in the old Studio A, his favorite recording haunt in Manhattan, and emerged with the greatest, darkest album of his career. It is a ten-song study in romantic devastation, as beautiful as it is bleak, worthy of comparison with Schubert’s “Winterreise.” Yet the record in question—“Blood on the Tracks”—has never officially seen the light of day. The Columbia label released an album with that title in January, 1975, but Dylan had reworked five of the songs in last-minute sessions in Minnesota, resulting in a substantial change of tone. Mournfulness and wistfulness gave way to a feisty, festive air.

Here is his discussion of the music to "Idiot Wind":

The music that Dylan wrote for these lyrics has a chilly, clammy air. His guitar is in open-E tuning, meaning that all six strings of the guitar are tuned to notes of the E-major triad: E, B, E, G#, B, E. As a result, the tonic chord rings rich and bright. But each verse begins with a jarring A-minor chord, which tends to land awkwardly. The middle note easily strays off center, souring the sound. Occasionally, a stray F-sharp bleeds through, adding a Romantic tinge. The unwieldiness of the progression is at one with the fraught atmosphere of the text.

He links to a clip of the Tristan chord to explain the phrase "Romantic tinge" though I'm not sure what he is claiming exactly. Here is the song:

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Just ran across another track on YouTube from Hilary Hahn's latest album of the Bach solo suites. The Partita No. 1 in B minor is an extraordinary work. Instead of a typical suite of dance movements, usually allemande, courante, sarabande and gigue, Bach gives us the first three, but replacing the gigue with a bourrée. Then he pairs each movement with its "double" --a variation in running quick notes using the same harmonic scheme. The result is an extraordinary tour de force, a kind of homage to pieces like the Gavotte et six doubles by Rameau, the seventh movement from his Quatrième suite de pièces de clavecin.

Here is Hilary Hahn with the Double to the Courante from the Partita No. 1:

And just for fun, here is Trevor Pinnock playing the Rameau. Be sure to stick with it as it just gets better and better:

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I guess we still need an envoi and what better choice than Holst's The Planets. Here is Edward Gardner conducting the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and the CBSO Youth Chorus at the 2016 Proms. The performance concludes with Colin Matthews' supplementary piece "Pluto, The Renewer."