Weekend Ruminations

Wow, you guys have been keeping the comments section hopping lately! That adds so much to the blog.

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Salzburg is looming closer and closer--I'm off in a little over a week. I will try to blog every day while I am there. In the meantime I had to get two movements of my quartet off to the players in time for their annual reading session. There was a surprising amount of tidying up to do. My last movement, titled "Ocean" is in 10/8 time (well, mostly) divided up 3+3+2+2. That looks like this:

I had to go through and make sure that the computer was doing the rests properly. When you have one of these composite time signatures (a famous example is the Precipitato that is the last movement of the Piano Sonata No. 7 by Prokofiev), you need to make sure that the rests are subdivided correctly so as not to throw off the performers. So I had to check every measure and correct quite a few of them. Sometimes I go against the underlying subdivisions:

Here, for example, the second violin and viola are following the 3+3+2+2 subdivision while the first violin and cello are actually in 5/4.

I use the Finale music software. I know that most people use Sibelius these days and maybe it is better, but I have been using Finale for over twenty years and almost have the hang of it 8^)

One great thing about these notation programs is that they can save a lot of time. For example, Finale has an "extract parts" feature. In the old days you would pay a copyist to do the laborious task of taking the part for each individual instrument from the score and notating it separately (only the conductor works with the full score). Not too much work if it is a string quartet, but imagine what that involves for a full orchestra! But with notation software, the parts can be extracted in a matter of seconds. But then you have to go through and check every measure. Finale tends to scrunch up some measures rhythmically so you have to adjust them. And then sometimes the slurs go astray so you have to adjust them. That was what I spent the morning on.

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I've been really enjoying the big box of Salonen from Sony that arrived the other day. Sixty-one discs! A surprising delight is to be listening to things I wouldn't normally listen to based on the thought that if he thought it was worth recording, then I should give it a listen. Some examples?

• the soundtrack to The Red Violin composed by John Corigliano
• Il Prigioniero by Luigi Dallapiccola (I don't think I have ever listened to Dallapiccola before)
• the whole of the incidental music to Peer Gynt by Edvard Grieg

That's as far as I am so far. There were also a couple of CDs of Bartók and a couple of Debussy as well. Upcoming are Bernard Hermann (soundtracks), Paul Hindemith and some fairly obscure Scandinavians plus all the Lutosławski symphonies.

What I am noticing is that Esa-Pekka Salonen is a very, very fine musician. I keep hearing interesting secondary voices that I don't recall hearing before. There is a tremendous amount of musical clarity, which brings out musical meaning. In any case, really looking forward to the rest of the discs.

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For an envoi, here is the Piano Concerto No. 1 by Bartók from the Salonen box. The pianist is Yefim Bronfman with the LA Philharmonic.

All three of the Bartók piano concertos are in the box as well as the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta and the Concerto for Orchestra in very fine performances.