A little ballet music and a pretty sweet bass instrument:
Here he plays the end of his own piece:
And here are some typical deadpan shots and a taste of what he was working on around about the time of the war:
Remind anyone else of Pearl Bomb by the Melvins? A little, a little.
Here's my favorite recent discovery, the unusually chill second movement of Piano Concerto #2:
I love those comforting/menacing strings. Shostakovich does Chopin. I do really like it. You sort of have to enjoy feeling nervous and giddy to enjoy Shostakovich's impulsive context switches, but this piece shows he could even get something on your Soothed By the Greats mixtape if he felt like.
And for no reason besides Bach is super, a little touch of J.S. in the night:
I don't know why this piece, which is the opening of his St. John Passion, reminds me of Blonde Redhead. Well I suppose there's that descending chord progression, that takes a handful of measures longer than you expect to get to its lowest point... and the pipes linger a little too long, too, and overlap, and there's that steady pulse of the bass and string arpeggio. I have a recording of this that I'd have worn out if you could do that with mp3s. Whether this has something in common with Blonde Redhead, or I'm crazy, judge for yourself here, here, and here.
Currently Listening Bach: St. John Passion / Gardiner, The English Baroque Soloists By Johann Sebastian Bach, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, Nancy Argenta, John Eliot Gardiner, Neill Archer, Cornelius Hauptmann, The Monteverdi Choir, Michael Chance, The English Baroque Soloists, Richard Earle, Lisa Beznosiuk, Pavlo Beznosiuk see related
I took a rattling bus (line 60 from Newport to Monmouth) to my Shostakovich class last Wednesday morning a little before dawn. This week the class was temporarily held in the hamlet of Llandenny and Terence Gilmore-James (Terry!) sent me a carefully hand-drawn map to the town centre. (About the word Llandenny: in Welsh "ll" is pronounced by blowing air
out of both sides of your mouth, like a lisping cartoon snake, say. I find
myself making excuses to practice the Ll sound, e.g. ordering whatever beer's got it. But words with two Ll sounds, like the common name Llewellyn,
are currently out of my league.)
I got off the bus at Cold Harbour with my cup of coffee and baguette and walked the rest of the way, about two miles on a country road. The sun was coming up and the scene became handsome:
The rest of the class is from nearby and they were impressed that I'd come up from Cardiff. A gentleman named Max who plays the double bass thinks I am "quite enterprising". Terence and his wife Grace drove me all the way back to the train station in Newport, and promised to do so for the remaining eight class sessions. Both are one of a kind, and everyone in the class has been warm and charming toward me. We were filling out a form and someone complained of having no box to check for "indeterminate gender", and everyone tittered and then the same person murmured "quite ludicrous!" under her breath. I forgot to mention that the class is mostly made up of upper middle aged sorts and pensioners. I am, it seems, the only whipper-snapper.
The professor, Terence, is just that sort of intuitive, charismatic personality that you dream of having for a classical music prof. No one in the class seems to *really* like Shostakovich, in an unqualified way, and Terence's opinion is that his music would have been better if he had sneaked away to the west like Rachmaninov and Stravinsky did. But everyone respects the symphonies and listens hard and places him somewhere between Chaikovksy (in string orchestration), Prokofiev (in the shape of his melodic lines) and Hindemith (not positive what the connection here is, but I think it's also melodic). His symphonies 1 & 5 seem to be the favorites so far.
I think being under the giant eyeball of Stalin might have actually been good for Shostakovich's music (if not his health). I'm building my case. It's like the way 80's hard core thrived under Reagan and Thatcher. When W was re-elected, we consoled ourselves the at least we should expect four years of really good punk rock (by the way, where is this 2004-2008 really good punk rock?) Shostakovich's music always dealt in the absurd and contradictory, it seems appropriate that he composed in an environment where there was irony aplenty (e.g. the irony of Shostakovich composing From Jewish Folk Poetry to please Stalin's request to use more folk music, only to be unable to premiere them because Stalin had begun campaigning against Jewish culture in the press) Actually I don't know if this is the right approach. I'm working on it.
Terence Gilmore-James, who introduced Thom Yorke & co to 20th century music back in uni, is teaching an adult learning course on Shostakovich in a town an hour north of here starting next week. I have no clue how I'm going to commute up there each Wednesday for a 2 hour class.
Radiohead began at Abingdon School, a boys' school outside Oxford.
Abingdon has a history dating back to the twelfth century, but it is
not an 幨ite bastion on the order of Eton or Winchester. Its students
tend to come from the Thames Valley region, rather than from all over
England, and many rely on scholarships. The members of Radiohead were
born into ordinary middle-class families: Yorke's father was a
chemical-equipment supplier; Jonny and Colin's father served in the
Army. They were, basically, townieshe kids on the other side of the
ancient walls. Even at Abingdon, they felt out of place. The headmaster
of the school, Michael St. John Parker, cultivated a pompous manner
that many alumniot just Radioheademember less than fondly. Parker
is still in charge, and has described the school spirit in these terms:
"Competition is promoted, achievement is applauded, and individual
dynamism is encouraged."
In schools of this kind, many students gravitate to the art, music,
and drama departments, where the sense of discipline is looser. For
Radiohead, the saving grace of Abingdon was an exceptional teacher
named Terence Gilmore-James, who headed the music program. "I was a
sort of leper at the time," Yorke recalled, "and he was the only one
who was nice to me." Yorke was born with his left eye paralyzed; in his
childhood, he endured a series of not entirely successful operations to
correct it, and the oddity of his half-open eye made him a target for
bullies. Tougher than he looked, he often fought back, but he preferred
to disappear. "School was bearable for me because the music department
was separate from the rest of the school," he said. "It had pianos in
tiny booths, and I used to spend a lot of time hanging around there
after school, waiting for my dad to come home from work." Other members
of the band also studied with Gilmore-James and were encouraged by him.
"When we started, it was very important that we got support from him,"
Colin said, "because we weren't getting any from the headmaster. You
know, the man once sent us a bill, charging us for the use of school
property, because we practiced in one of the music rooms on a Sunday."
The yen for freedom in Radiohead's sound owes a lot to
Gilmore-James, who immersed his students in twentieth century classical
music, avant-garde music of the postwar era, classic jazz, and film
scores. Once, he had the school orchestra perform Richard Rodney
Bennett's score for "Murder on the Orient Express" while the film was
playing. He left Abingdon in 1987 to devote himself to the legacy of
his father-in-law, the Welsh composer Mansel Thomas, whose music he is
editing for publication. "I watch over Radiohead much as I watch over
my children," he said in a phone call. He spoke with the fastidiousness
of a lifelong teacher, and yet his tone was enthusiastic rather than
dogmatic. "They were all of them talented boys, in the sense that they
had more than average abilities to think for themselves. I was of a
different generation, and I did not always grasp what they were after,
but I knew that they were serious. And they were delightful to be
around, always getting carried away by their latest discoveries.
Whenever I see them"is voice became firm?I tell them that they must
continue to pursue their own original line."
Last night, despite having written 3000 words a day for two weeks straight (plenty to finish on time) I decided to grant myself an extension on the novel. Here are the reasons I presented myself for consideration:
The novel is just too good to rush.
I didn't really start till the 12th, due to factors like remembering that I can't write.
I have a project deadline on the 27th and, besides HVAC control systems being important to the world, I'm paid by the hour. We're traveling to France in December, and maybe Egypt in January, so we need the money.
So the good news is that I'm 25,000 splendid words into the novel, code-named Teratoma, which is set in a Cardiff size town in Wales where two heavy metal bands, Teratoma and Diebola, are engaged in a rivalry over which band is more Satanic (and more Celtic--Satanic/Celtic are conflated in the fantasy world of the novel--the important thing is that they are old gods). Our heroes are a 14 year old orphan metal head and his Liszt-obsessed narrator friend who hate each other but are forced to write a zine in order to pass their creative writing class. Of course, they find themselves caught in the struggle between the bands.
I feel good about it, that's the other good news. I made the mature choice and cut out an entire subplot involving a remote island of cannibals, proving that I can "kill my darlings". I also planned to give it an epic sweep of time, but currently it's entirely set in about a 2 week period in 1991. The final word count of the novel will be about 25,000, but I
have to write more than that so I can cut about half the words. Lord
knows about half of them already need to go!
The bad news is that it won't be finished on the 30th, and thus won't receive the NaNoWriMo cup for 2007.
