I know, I missed yesterday, so we’ll do a make-up post today. ‘X’ is a tough letter anyway, obviously, and it pretty much led me inexporably to Iannis Xenakis, a Greek composer of highly mathematical, avant-garde music. When I say “highly mathematical”, I mean just that: Xanakis applied a lot of advanced mathematical concepts to the creation of his music. From Wikipedia:
Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic and computer music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances.
The work below, Metastaseis, is…you know, I honestly don’t know how to grasp this kind of music on any kind of intellectual way. This sort of thing takes music so far into pure abstraction that I find words utterly inadequate. Even after reading on its composition, I find it terribly difficult to understand the work, and I find myself confronting the philosophical problem of how the genesis of a given effect is somehow identical with that effect. I don’t know.
I don’t understand music like this. That’s not to say that I don’t like it — although this type of listening is really only possible for me in small doses — but that liking or disliking it just seems almost irrelevant. It’s like walking along a dirt road and saying, “I don’t like that pebble.” What the hell does the pebble care?
Oddities and Awesome abound…but I wasn’t online much this week, so I only have one thing: this article about the fellow who invented Sriracha Sauce, which is the newest food craze. Yes, I have a bottle on hand. I like it, although I tend to forget that it is significantly hotter than my usual Frank’s Red Hot.
Early on, one of Tran’s packaging suppliers told him, “Your product is too spicy. How can you sell it?” Add a tomato base, some friends counseled. Sweeten the flavor to pair it better with chicken, others said. But Tran stood firm.
“Hot sauce must be hot. If you don’t like it hot, use less,” he said. “We don’t make mayonnaise here.”
I especially like the part toward the end, when the article discusses what Tran did when underforecasting led to the company literally running out of product for three months. Their choices were to change the formula so they could keep bottles on the shelves, or…well, check it out.
I watched the first episode of Mad Men the other night, after a number of years of reading many, many folks whose judgment I trust insisting that it’s one of the best things ever. But after just one episode, I was really baffled. The show looks and sounds amazing, and yet, after a single episode, I wasn’t sure I liked any of the characters enough to keep watching.
Then I read this post by Ken Levine:
When I’m creating a show my first rule is that I’ve got to love my characters. They may be flawed – they should be flawed – but ultimately I love them and care about them. And hopefully, I can convey that to the audience and they’ll love them too.
Again, the characters don’t have to be particularly loveable. Sweet and earnest and always-doing-the-right-thing is also boring. The best characters are complex. They may have internal battles between good and evil. They may be scoundrels but deliciously so. Or they can’t get out of their own way. Or life’s dealt them a bad hand. Or Hitler was their nanny growing up. I dunno – there are endless possibilities.
And often times the more layers the better.
But lately I’ve observed a disturbing trend. (Now the rant begins) Series creators are making their characters so hateful that I stop caring.
So apparently over time, the characters in Mad Men with whom I was not particular impressed in the first episode get even worse? Well, that settles that, then. Real life offers crappy people a-plenty to deal with. Why watch more of them on teevee?
Richard Wagner can be a real slog, I will admit. He can be heavy and ponderous, and even when he’s not being those things — because he can also be light and ethereal — he’s always totally serious. He’s never kidding. I hear a lot of wonderful things in Wagner’s music, but humor is, for the most part, not one of them.
Wagner appeals to that part of me that still loves a big, epic story to chew on. Wagner is big stories, featuring heartbreaking sacrifices made by lovers. Wagner is epic magic, the magic that existed before the world began. Wagner is stately lines of guests entering torch-lit castle halls, and he is creatures of myth winging through the air. Wagner is a Knight of the Grail who is forbidden to reveal his name, and he is the final fall of the gods themselves.
No, Wagner is not much for the lighter things in life.
Wagner is also a stern test for the idea that an artist’s art should not be judged by the artist’s personality. This is because Wagner was pretty much of a shit — an arrogant and pompous philandering ass who went through life demanding money of others that he might maintain his lavish lifestyle. He was an anti-Semite and pretty much of a boor. But his music — oh, his music transcends.
Here is an orchestral excerpt from his masterwork, Der Ring des Nibelungen — specifically, the fourth opera, Gotterdammerung. It is “Siegfried’s Funeral Music”, but it also closes with the “Redemption Through Love” music that closes out the entire saga. Wagner’s not for everyone…but I sure dig him.
Barkevious Mingo, who went to the Browns, may have the greatest name in the history of football. I just love that name. He sounds like something out of a pulp SF novel…like one of the natives of Barsoom met by John Carter in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Mars books.
Barkevious Mingo. I just like saying that name. Barkevious Mingo! Barkevious Mingo! And it’s easy to type, too!
In the interests of honesty, here’s some music by a guy whose music I just don’t like very much at all. Antonio Vivaldi is one of the leading Baroque composers, and he’s uncommonly beloved, but whenever I listen to Vivaldi, I hear all of the things I dislike in Baroque music and none of the profundities a J.S. Bach brings to the table that blunt the impact of the stuff I don’t like. This is all purely a matter of taste, but so far as I’m concerned, the old saw that Vivaldi wrote the same concerto five hundred times really does carry some weight.
Yes, I had to perform this piece in college. Aside from enjoying the challenge of the trumpet part…nah, I didn’t even enjoy the challenge of the trumpet part. I just found this whole thing irritating. I have no rational explanation for this, any more than I have a rational explanation for my recoiling in horror from a plate of steamed broccoli. I’ve tried to be more fair to poor Vivaldi a number of times over the years, and in all honesty I find this piece more palatable than the ever-maddening The Four Seasons (I could live my whole life and happily never hear a bar of that work again), but there’s times when we just don’t like stuff, you know? But Vivaldi is an important part of musical history, so here’s Vivaldi’s Gloria in D.
Tomorrow: ‘W’ can go a lot of directions. Which will I take? Tune in!
African classical music, what little I’ve heard, tends to be as interesting as any nationalistic classical music, especially when the language of Western music is combined with the folk tunes and indigenous rhythms of the homeland. This is yet another area of classical music about which I know very little and wish I knew more; there’s a blog called AfriClassical that explores this area. African influence on music is, I suppose, often thought to be strongest through the importation of native rhythms and song to the Americas through the slave trade and then eventually into jazz, but it’s only natural that a classical tradition should spring up as the cultural pollination started going the other way, as well.
For a ‘U’ composer, I found Joshua Uzoigwe. Biographical information on Uzoigwe seems a bit scant, but he lived from 1946 to 2005 and was a native of Nigeria. This work of his, called “Ukom (from ‘Talking Drums’)”, is a very pleasurable study in rhythm.
As I near the end of this alphabetic exercise, I look back and note a complete lack of women cited here. Now, this blogging meme-thing was clearly not meant to serve as any kind of exhaustive, or even representative, survey of the long and rich history of classical music. But the question cannot be avoided: why is the long and rich history of classical music so dominated by men? Literature and art had prominent women in their history, but women seem oddly absent.
One answer is that they weren’t absent at all, we just don’t really bother with what they were doing. And that’s a fair point; googling “female classical composers” turns up an enormous number of names. But why have so few works by women endured to eventually enter the standard classical repertoire?
I wish I had a good answer other than “Music has a pretty sexist history”, which is a tautological answer, when you get right down to it. But it is true, nevertheless; witness the fact that the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the notion that women were even worthy of being allowed to appear within its ranks. It just seems to me that music has been an undeniable area of enduring sexism; just why that is the case is beyond my knowledge as a layperson. One argument I read recently is that music, unlike literature or visual art, is dependent upon others to work. You can write a symphony, but a fat lot of good it does you if you can’t get an orchestra to play it. As orchestras were, for most of history, dominated by men — well, that’s kind of the ballgame. I suspect that’s at least a chunk of the answer. Even the great male composers often had to struggle to get their works performed, with many of the most cherished masterpieces of all time having never been heard at all by their own composers. Here’s a good article as a starting point on this topic:
Classical music — at least in the United States — is one of those areas that tend to be something of a hole in a lot of people’s education. I’ve been continually surprised by the number of extremely intelligent people I know who can discuss politics, visual art, film, philosophy and popular music in detail who, nevertheless, don’t know very much about classical music – at least, beyond the three B’s (Bach, Beethoven and Brahms) and Mozart. Maybe Haydn or Handel. Maybe Wagner (but usually only Ride of the Valkyries). Maybe a 20th-century composer or two like Stravinsky or Copland. But certainly, never about any of the women over the years who have written classical music. After all, just about every field of art tends to diminish the accomplishments of women, but especially classical music, since most of it that outsiders pay attention to was made in a time when women’s roles in the arts were limited. Even today — in an era where there are countless amazing female composers — when I tell people I studied music composition in college, I still get “Wow, a woman writing classical music! I’ve never heard of that!” about as often as I get, “Wait, people still write classical music?”
But women have always been writing classical music; it’s just that, now, we’re more able to make a career of it, and compete with the guys. In the past, women were often limited in what they could write, thanks to gender roles. The rules for a female composer of the 18th or 19th century (when most of the best-known male composers flourished) were: only solo and small-ensemble works that you could play in your living room (which is why we now know this as “chamber music”). Never large-scale works, like operas or symphonies, where you would need to rent out a concert hall to have them properly performed. It’s easy to see how this was able to limit women; while there are a number of male composers known primarily for their chamber music (such as Chopin), most of them, while they wrote in a variety of genres, made their names through the big stuff. In fact, some of the biggest, most influential composers of that era were known mainly for writing operas, like Verdi and Wagner, or symphonies, like Gustav Mahler. Even the men who became famous for their chamber music were usually able to get them performed in large halls, unlike women, who were limited precisely so they wouldn’t be taking attention — and careers — away from men.
There is a great deal of classical music by women that deserves very much to be heard. Here are a few works by one such composer, Joan Tower, who is still with us and active. I find these works fascinating, particularly the Percussion Quintet.
Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (the inspiration here is pretty obvious):
Petroushskates:
DNA for Percussion Quintet (percussion ensembles can make for some really riveting listening):
Tomorrow: I have no idea. ‘U’ is not the easiest letter….
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