This is a classic. It’s available elsewhere, but now it’s available here as well. For anyone interested in the origins, Alex Ross as already done the leg work on his popular music blog. Check it out.
http://www.therestisnoise.com/2006/02/you_vill_enjoy_.html
Triadic Memories is my absolute favorite Feldman piano work and probably ranks up there with my top five Feldman works of all time (the others include his Piano and String Quartet, Rothko Chapel, King of Denmark, and Crippled Symmetry). Solo piano works so well for Feldman’s music for a number of reasons. Works such as “Why Patterns?” can sometimes sound a bit shrill if the musicians have not made good sonic choices. Anytime you have flute and orchestra bells as two thirds of an ensemble, you’re bound to risk a lot of high-frequency irritation. By contrast, the piano has a wonderful range that is never grating on the ears. (I should point out though that I do like “Why Patterns?” when it’s performed well)
I’ll comment first on the work itself and then on the interpretation.
There are some reviewers here that claim the work is “boring”. This could be for a variety of reasons. The most obvious is that they’re inexperienced with 20th century modernist art music. But, I’ll give these listeners the benefit of the doubt and address these criticisms anyway. There is no perceptible form at work here. You can’t follow it as you would a sonata. There is either very little repetition or quite a lot - it’s difficult to say which. Sometimes I feel like I’ve heard a certain section before, but other times it feels through-composed. That is all to say, there are valid reasons for not enjoying Triadic Memories.
Additionally, as with all extended-length Feldman, if you don’t happen to enjoy the mood and texture of a particular work, you’re probably not going to like it. “For Philip Guston” does not appeal to me because I happen to not like the small idea that Feldman expands into a nearly four-hour work. On the other hand, I like the sounds of his second String Quartet, which is even longer.
Ultimately, I would suggest listening to Amazon’s 30 second previews. They give a very representative sampling of the work. It’s as simple as this: if you like the preview, you’re in for a treat because it’s more of the same for about 93 minutes. If you don’t think it sounds good, then you’re not going to like the work.
These are all subjective perspectives anyway. Personal taste aside, this is one of Feldman’s strongest works. It perfectly realizes his delicate, haunting aesthetic and induces the type of meditative listening experience that he typically requests of his listeners. Beyond that, he finds variety with simple ideas. The broken chords of Triadic Memories, if stacked vertically, would form more-or-less normal triads, but Feldman arranges them into major and minor seconds that destroy any chance of triadic consonance. It’s beautiful stuff, really.
Marilyn Nonken provides a terrific interpretation of this difficult work. After listening to it around ten times, I cannot find any faults or errors. Her tempo is slow, but not too slow. Most importantly, she maintains excellent rhythmic integrity. For those who have had the chance to examine the score, you know that Triadic Memories is rhythmically complex - deceptively so, I might add. Nonken is able to convey this accurately and avoids the pitfall of making the notes seem like a random cloud of pitches.
Overall, I can’t recommend this recording highly enough. The only question for Feldman fans is whether to buy the double CD or the DVD-Audio version.
This is another review for Amazon.com under my usual nom de plume “Steward Willons”.
This is a frustrating DVD. I love Steven Schick, Roger Reynolds, contemporary music, and the work itself. The DVD itself is severely disappointing.
First the good news. Watereshed IV is a wonderful addition to the ever expanding body of multi percussion literature. As usual, Steven Schick turns in a masterful performance, clearly demonstrating why he is *the* final word in contemporary (non-keyboard) solo percussion. His performance of Watershed is amazing to watch. One interesting note: he appears to be following the score during the performance. This is highly unusual for him - I’m not sure what’s up with that. If he can memorize a 60+ minute work like John Luther Adams’s Mathematics of Resonant Bodies, I’m not sure why he’s using the score for this performance. Regardless, I can find no fault with the performance whatsoever.
I’m not as familiar with Roger Reynolds’s work having only heard a handful for his pieces. Watershed is interesting to watch, but you definitely get more out of it having the score to follow along. The scope of the 25 minute work is so large that it’s difficult to keep the ideas in mind. From looking at the score, I can see thematic material, developments, and variations, but from simply listening, it’s not nearly as clear. If you don’t have access to the score, this is will require a number of listenings before things come into focus. The good news is that it’s worth your time.
There are some interesting interviews with Reynolds, Schick and the sound engineer offering some very interesting insights not just to Watershed, but to sound spatialization and music in general. The spatialization definitely adds a lot to the work. If you don’t have a 5.1 system, headphones are the next best thing. The DVD includes a 5.1 and stereo mix, both of which sound good.
Now the bad news. The image quality is abysmal. You might think I’m exaggerating when I compare the picture to what you’d expect from Real player or Windows Media. I promise you - it looks that bad. The image is blocky, pixilated, dark, and flat. This is totally inexcusable when there are some many great looking DVDs out there. Additionally, there is an annoying “W” in the lower right hand corner for the duration of the work. W for Watershed??? I have no idea why it’s there. Just a pointless distraction.
While I can recommend the music, I can’t recommend this DVD at all. I’d be very suspicious of any Mode Records DVDs. I do know that this was their first and (if what their website claims is true) the first “art music” DVD ever produced. Maybe they have figured out how to make a decent product in the six years since this came out.
Of course, watching Steven Schick is always a treat and, as I always say, a crappy Watershed DVD is better than no Watershed DVD at all. Just make sure you know what you’re getting before you buy this.
I’m doing a bit of video work for J.C. Combs’ final percussion ensemble concert. He’s created a tribute to Harry Partch, one of the most prominent microtonal composers. Partch was a renegade free-thinker who broke the bonds of Western tonality and equal temperament (the common tuning practice of the West) by creating a unique 43-note scale and an array of original instruments. My task is to play some video clips from a Harry Partch documentary along with editing and a few other tasks. All the clips were preprocessed so by the time Pd is involved, it doesn’t have to do any stressful video work.
I’m used to using PDP and PiDiP, two Pd externals that are fairly decent at image-based processing of live video. They’re not so great with pre-recorded video. I may have just mentioned this in a previous blog post, but allow me to repeat how annoying it is that the software designers decided to only support some obscure Quicktime codec that is now long gone. PDP supports .avi, if I remember correctly. Huh. That’s funny. .avi is a Windows format, but PDP isn’t even ported to Windows. Who came up with that great idea?
Fortunately, GEM (Graphics Environment for Multimedia) is a much better Pd external complete with a little documentation and some tutorials. Building a video player was mostly a matter of looking through the help files, reading a couple tutorials, and putting it all together.
The first step is to download Pd-Extended. It’s got all the major Pd externals included. I’ve included my patch below, although you might as well just go through some of the help files to make your own.
As you can see from the Pd code below, everything is straightforward. The [gemwin] object creates the window and accepts a number of messages including dimensions, border on/off, cursor on/off, and rendering on/off. Make sure you send dimension and border messages before creating the window. It’s easiest to stop rendering while you’re not actively watching a video. I didn’t run into CPU problems, but you never know.
The [pix_film] object played my QT files without and problems. Just send it a message with the file name and path. You can go frame-by-frame, auto-play, and see the total number of frames in the movie. I added a gain control [pix_gain] so that I can do nice smooth fades. Finally, you supply the dimensions of the video output. It’s a little confusing because you create the GEM window, but then you also have to specify the size of the video output within the GEM window. It would be nice if GEM automatically scaled the window so that you could use an object like [rectangle 4 3] and it would keep the same aspect ratio without you having to figure out a size that’s close.
There are a few objects left over, so just ignore those. I should have just deleted them. I found GEM video playback to be very high quality, but easy on the processor. I recommend it for anyone wanting to play video in Pd.
This is another review I wrote for Amazon.com
– — – –
Perhaps the only things more polemical than Adorno’s critique of Schoenberg and Stravinsky are the reactions that followed. Unfortunately, many people still assume that they understand Adorno’s views and arguments concerning these two composers. The reductionist tendency to simplify Adorno’s view to “Schoenberg good, Stravinsky bad” shows just who has and who hasn’t actually read this book. It is never so simple. Adorno is frequently critical of Schoenberg in very perceptive ways. Of course there’s no mistaking who Adorno favors, but to consider this book as a good-vs-evil study is far too limiting. Not only is this a great study of the then current state of musical thought, it is also an interesting overview of twelve tone music, how it works, what it seeks to do, and why it’s important.
The format of the book is especially nice. Adorno’s favored paratactical prose style can be incredibly difficult when multi-page paragraphs begin to accumulate. For the most part in Philosophy of New Music, each new paragraph is marked by a heading. This keeps the ideas organized and focused. Adorno’s paragraphs seem to function as a spinning out of an idea in a very fluid manner and the length of his sections are just the right length to allow the reader to comfortably follow him without getting bogged down. His theses is developed piece by piece, but clearly dividing up the ideas helps the reader see the logical progression. Having read other Adorno writings, I found this to be unusually clear and concise. I wonder how much more useful Aesthetic Theory would be if he had used this structure.
The remarkable clarity is probably due, to a large extent, to Robert Hullot-Kentor’s translation. I’ve read many other translators with varying degrees of success (Ashton’s attempt at Negative Dialectics being one of the worst), but Hullot-Kentor is by far the best. Adorno’s writing is riddled with allusions and references that are frequently vague or obscure. Hullot-Kentor does a great service to readers by including additional references and background information. His detailed understanding of Adorno’s complicated thought is evident in every sentence. Reading Adorno has, to me at least, never been so straightforward.
In addition to the translation, Hullot-Kentor provides an excellent foreword providing both a context and an overview of what is inside. His description of the translation process is, as always, interesting. Hullot-Kentor has found a way to provide very readable English translations while maintaining Adorno’s linguistic artistry.
Recent Comments