Category: Culture and anti-culture

American music

Charles Ives is often celebrated for having anticipated many of the innovations of twentieth-century music. Less often noted is that he also anticipated, if that’s the right word, P.D.Q. Bach. Some years back, an acquaintance for whom I played a recording of Three Places in New England was scandalized by the second movement — real music isn’t supposed to be funny, he said. (Tell that to Mozart.) Here it is, the ideal music for the Fourth of July:

It’s become trendy in recent years to complain that the music of P.D.Q. Bach overshadows that of the composer Peter Schickele. I’ll grant that the humor is hit-and-miss, with misses predominating on the later recordings. Sometimes, though, the jokes work. Here’s the fourth movement of the “Unbegun Symphony.” ((Strictly speaking, this isn’t P.D.Q. Bach, since Schickele claimed it as his own, so to speak.))

If you’ve got a couple of hours to kill while waiting for it to get dark enough for fireworks tonight, why don’t you invite 35 of your closest friends over with their instruments and run through some American music of a different sort. Here’s the score to Terry Riley’s In C.

Music appreciation

One of the books I tested my new glasses with is Alex Ross’ The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, recommended by Steven. Here’s a trivia quiz based on it.

Identify the speaker:

1. “I have actually outlived myself.”

2. “Defend me, Spaniards, from the Germans, who do not understand and have never understood music.”

3. “All the doctors who wanted to forbid me to smoke and to drink are dead.”

4. “Beauty of sound is beside the point.”

5. “Thank God! Finally a Reich Chancellor who is interested in art!”

6. “There is, thank God, a large segment of our population that never heard of J.S. Bach.”

7. “Beethoven was wrong!”

8. True or false: Debussy served as the thirty-third grand master of the Prieuré de Sion.

9. Who told a tenor saxophone player to play a descending major seventh with “sex appeal”?

10. Who was known to wear “a peach-colored shirt, a green tie with white polka-dots, a knit belt of the most vivid purple with a large and ostentatious gold buckle, and an unbelievably loud gray suit with lots of black and brown stripes”?

11. Who, according to Pierre Boulez, “… had displayed ‘the most ostentatious and obsolete romanticism'”?

12. Who, according to Pierre Boulez, was “… a ‘performing monkey” whose methods betrayed ‘fascist tendencies'”?

13. Who was apparently born near Cologne in 1928, but actually was of extraterrestrial origin and had lived many past lives?

14. What is 8’37” better-known as?

15. Who was “the best drug connection in New York”?

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Bookless in Wichita

I had an unnerving experience last week. I made one of my rare forays to the shopping mall and stopped at the bookstore there. I couldn’t find any book I wanted to buy, not a single one. What looked interesting I already have in my library, and everything else looked irrelevant, tedious or dumb. This has never happened to me before. At every bookstore I’ve ever visited, no matter how small or specialized, there was always something that caught my eye. In recent years I’ve minimized the number of trips to bookstores because I’ve run out of space for more bookshelves and I can only pile books on the floor so high before the stacks become unstable. If my experience at the bookstore last week is a harbinger of things to come, bookstores may not be the dangers to my budget that they have been in the past.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, I can still find plenty at Amazon.com.

Something isn’t quite right in this picture. Although the spine of the book on the left end states that it is also “Fugitives of Chaos,” actually it’s “Titans of Chaos,” the conclusion to John C. Wright‘s trilogy.

Fakes and fake fakes

Via Aziz, here’s a 1978 essay by that strangest of Episcopalians, Philip K. Dick: “How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later.”

This was announced back in April, but I didn’t discover it until just now: Dick is going to be Disney-fied:

KING OF THE ELVES (Domestic Release Date: Christmas 2012, Disney Digital 3-D™)
Walt Disney Animation Studios
Directors: Aaron Blaise, Robert Walker
Producer: Chuck Williams

Legendary storyteller Phillip K. Dick’s short story (his only experiment in the fantasy genre) becomes the basis for this fantastic and imaginative tale about an average man living in the Mississippi Delta, whose reluctant actions to help a desperate band of elves leads them to name him their new king. Joining the innocent and endangered elves as they attempt to escape from an evil and menacing troll, their unlikely new leader finds himself caught on a journey filled with unimaginable dangers and a chance to bring real meaning back to his own life.

Miscellany

loindhana01

My sister sent me a link to an “identify the album” quiz. The page is no longer maintained — the link to the answers returns a 404 — and at least one of the identifications is wrong, but you might find it amusing anyway.

The above is one of my favorite covers, though the album, a collection of medieval dances, is too obscure to be fair game for such a quiz. Here it is in higher resolution.

loindhana02

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Is there a superhero in your neighborhood? Check the registry. (Via Ken the Brickmuppet.)

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Introducing Edward, the Veggie-Vampire.

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I’m an embarrassment to Barack!

I only scored 14 on the Obama Test

(Via John Salmon.)

The Listening Room

John Salmon notes that René Magritte‘s 110th Birthday was last Friday. Coincidentally, one of the LPs I recently recently transferred to CD was the first Dreams album, the cover of which is based on a Magritte painting. I posted one of the tunes here. ((Beck Ola, another album with a Magritte cover, will probably be in the next batch that I digitize.))

Those are the Brecker brothers, Billy Cobham and their bandmates floating in the air.

Below the fold are a few more of the albums that I pulled out to digitize recently. CDs have a lot of advantages over vinyl — they’re far more convenient; they don’t skip or get stuck (usually); there are no pops, clicks, hisses or rumbles — but for cover art, they can’t compare to LPs.

Continue reading “The Listening Room”