Friday Miscellanea

For those who are interested in this sort of thing: How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports.

Brian Eno’s experiments with tape loops go as far back as 1973’s (No Pussyfooting), a collaborative album with King Crimson guitarist Robert Fripp. For the recording of (No Pussyfooting), Eno employed an early experiment in sound-on-sound tape looping, where he would run Robert Fripps’ guitar into two tape machines, that were then fed back into each other. 

Fripp’s guitar melodies were recorded and then bounced back and forth between the two tape machines, creating longs, fading delays that would build up to create a dense soundscape. The length of the delay was controlled by the physical distance between the two machines.

We did similar experiments in a 1976 20th century performance practice seminar at McGill.

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Igor Levit Takes on a Shostakovich Kaleidoscope in a Carnegie Hall concert:

He played just one work: Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87. That music, though — inspired by Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier” and written in the early 1950s, during one of Shostakovich’s frequent bouts of official Soviet censure — is a marathon, a two-and-a-half-hour kaleidoscope of melodic and harmonic invention. Until Tuesday, it had never been performed in its entirety at Carnegie.

I have long been a big fan of this work which rarely receives concert performances.

Levit released a recording of the Preludes and Fugues with Sony Classical in 2021, so the evening also provided an opportunity to hear him continue a conversation with Shostakovich. On Tuesday, that dialogue was rich in risk taking, and rewarding. From the first prelude, in C, Levit’s daring tempo — much slower than on his album — made clear that he was not on autopilot, but taking advantage of the Stern Auditorium’s resonance to consider the music anew.

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Some news: Jazz Cellist Tomeka Reid Receives MacArthur "Genius Grant"

Reid, 45, was trained in the Western classical tradition and is fluent in musical modes rooted in the African diaspora and avant-garde minimalism, plus uses many extended techniques in her performance. 

She is the leader of the Tomeka Reid Quartet, alongside Tomas Fujiwara, Jason Roebke, and Mary Halvorson, whose latest album, “Old New,” was released in 2019 and includes original works and standards with a post-bop, free jazz, and minimalist hue.

Reid has also performed and recorded with the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Nicole Mitchell, Anthony Braxton, the AACM Great Black Music Ensemble, Mike Reed’s Loose Assembly, and Roscoe Mitchell. Reid also co-leads the string trio HEAR in NOW with violinist Mazz Swift and bassist Silvia Bolognesi.

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A minimalist project: Removing notes from Mendelssohn overture shows plight of humpback whales.

Felix Mendelssohn's The Hebrides was inspired by the composer's 1829 trip to the British Isles. His overture has now inspired collaboration between a Cambridge economist and a composer, using sound to call attention to the loss of biodiversity on Earth. Hebrides Redacted successively removes notes from the 10- to 11-minute overture in proportion to the decline in humpback whale populations over many decades. 

...there are about 30,000 notes in Mendelssohn's original score, which roughly corresponds to the number of humpback whales that populated the oceans in 1829. But a thriving whaling industry reduced their numbers to the brink of extinction. By the 1960s, there were only around 5,000 humpback whales left, and the International Whaling Commission (IWC) banned commercial humpback whaling as a protective measure. 

The species has since rebounded, with a 2018 worldwide population of around 135,000 whales, 13,000 of which call the North Atlantic home.

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When so many confusing things are going on--the resignation of the new UK Prime Minister in just a few weeks, wobbly stock markets, increasing inflation--one starts to realize that perhaps we don't understand the world as much as we thought. We become conscious of our own ignorance. So this is rather apropos: What We Don’t Know.

We need external reminders of our own ignorance (such as piles of unread books, or good teachers, or friends willing to give it to us straight, or supernatural spirits visiting on Christmas Eve) to prod us out of complacency, because recognizing our deficiencies on our own is famously difficult. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a handy concept that explains why some people know so little that they think they know everything, and why you have to know a lot about something before you can truly understand just how little you know.

Amen to that.

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And now for some suitable music. First some Brian Eno. This is his early Music for Airports:

And here is my favorite Shostakovich fugue with a birdsong-like subject, from Igor Levit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlvBkhjjLKk

Here is Prospective Dwellers by Tomeka Reid:

Finally, an early piano work by Bartók that is a fascinating blend of folk music and modernism, the Bagatelles, op. 6: