No. 1 for May 10, 2020

Band Geek plays Close to the Edge

At the end of an engaging profile by Alex Ross, centered around his recent live-streamed performances from his home, the pianist Igor Levitt says this

“When I started doing these house concerts, I realized that every single problem I had ever had with the performing world suddenly disappeared. I never really cared about acoustics. I never cared that much about the quality of the piano. All I wanted to do was play. The important point about these concerts is not how they sound but the fact that they happened. Everything is getting reduced to the essential thing of being there and playing.”

Ross' essay shows that this attitude applies not just to Levitt's recent lockdown performances to the pianists entire career, his choice of repertoire, and his outlook on life.
 
The truest musical experiences involve performers and audiences engaging with the music as it is presented to them. It's not about the acoustics, or the quality of the piano. The setting and the medium don't really matter. Even compromised or distorted media can create a meaningful musical expression.

Yesterday toward the end of a long day of internet surfing, I came across a group called Band Geek playing a note-for-note recreation of Close to the Edge, the eighteen-or-so minute piece that takes up side one of Yes' 1972 album of the same name. It's kind of a ridiculous piece of music. It's majestic and pretentious and grandiose. The idea that a rock band would supersede its proscribed function and produce a quasi-symphonic monstrosity generated the band and its music both praise and derision since its creation. I, for one, love it. If one wants to play it, one cannot make a trip to the music store to pick up the score as you would to pick up a volume of Beethoven's sonatas. One must transcribe it from the recording and find a bunch of similarly-minded colleagues to pull it off. It's by necessity a labor of love, with the reward of not an arena of adoring fans, like Yes had, but making a video in you basement which gets a surprising (to me, at least) amount of views on YouTube.

What's the point, you may ask. The point is that it happens. They played it and recorded it, and at some later point in time I watched it. At the end, the bass player says "I'm so happy." I was happy, too, and I was happy for him.

Gimme That Ol' Atonal Music

This is apparently making the rounds among music nerds. Don't be left out.

via Alex Ross

Merle Hazzard, described by Anne Midgette as a "[pioneer of] a form of comic bluegrass economics" takes a break to promote some unpopular music. However, being somewhat familiar with the work of Paul Elwood, I don't believe this is my first atonal banjo solo. (OK, that selection may not actually be atonal, but I did hear him once play in a Cornelius Cardew piece at New England Conservatory back in early 2000's.)

Alex Ross on Boulez

 

I pledged to write something on Pierre Boulez, but alas the muse and the energy have eluded me.

As would be expected, Alex Ross has posted an excellent memorial piece on the New Yorker's website.

However, I do have one quibble. Boulez was a notoriously slow composer, especially in his later years. Promised new works never appeared, or often ended up being reworkings of older works (not that they weren't often brilliant in themselves), so I always took the talk that Boulez was composing an opera based on Waiting for Godot to be a joke. Finding out that the keen-witted Daniel Barenboim, who waited for decades by a tree on a country road for his commission of an orchestrated version of Notations to be completed, was the source of the this rumor only made it more so.