Category: Music

Bach times 377

Amazon.com is currently offering the complete harpsichord works of Bach, performed by Martin Galling, for 99 cents. This includes both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the partitas and French and English suites, and much else. Even if the recordings are not to your taste, you’re only risking a dollar for fifteen hours of music.

The performances, to my non-expert ears, are acceptable but not outstanding. Here’s Galling’s rendition of the Prelude and Fugue in C minor from the first book:


Compare it to Malcolm Hamilton’s


and Takahiro Sonoda’s


Galling is a plodder. I’m being unfair — he usually picks better tempos than he does in that prelude — but there is a reason why he is seldom mentioned in the same breath as Glenn Gould and Wanda Landowska. Still, Galling generally does play Bach well enough to give pleasure, and the set is a good deal. You can indeed find better recordings of Bach, but they’ll cost you much more than one dollar.

For the heck of it, I found MIDI files of the prelude and fugue and ran them through a synthesized harpsichord on my computer:

Musical interlude

Just a few music videos that caught my ear recently.

Tim and Myles Thompson will be at Winfield this year.

Probably as painless an introduction to twelve-tone music as you’ll ever find. I’m less enthused by the philosophy, though — Josh calls it “rank nominalism.”

I experimented with some highly-simplified twelve tone techniques some years back. The results were not pretty. For the morbidly curious, “Twelve Toes” was probably the least unsuccessful.

Free noisemakers

My old computer died last month. The hard drives are intact, so I didn’t lose any files. However, several frequently-used applications will not run on my middle-aged laptop, some because of technical incompatibilities, some because of tyrannical DRM. I spent a little time recently searching for freeware to substitute for missing soft synths, and I found a few.

Spicy Guitar

• Spicy Guitar is a pretty good physically-modeled acoustic guitar. In a mix with with a pinch of reverb, it can pass for the real thing, and it’s a lot cheaper than the AAS Strum Acoustic.

Continue reading “Free noisemakers”

Notes, musical and otherwise

There is an anime music tournament in the works, and the organizers seek your nominations. The following are what I came up with during breakfast this morning. There’s a lot of Susumu Hirasawa, Masumi Itou, Yuki Kajiura and Yoko Kanno. It’s not by accident.

Haibane Renmei — “Free Bird”
Paprika — “Mediational Field”
Azumanga Daioh — “Soramimi Cake”
Noir — “Salva Nos”
Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica — “Sis Puella Magica”
Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita — “Yume no Naka no Watashi no Yume”
Macross Plus — “Voices”
Paranoia Agent — “Yume no Shima Shinen Kouen”
Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto — “Kouya Ruten”
Ghost in the Shell SAC — “Lithium Flower”
Shin Sekai Yori — “Wareta Ringo”
Ghost in the Shell SAC — “Inner Universe”
Paranoia Agent — “Shiroi Oka – Maromi no Theme”
Pumpkin Scissors — “Mercury Go”
Level E — “Cold Finger Girl”

Inevitably, I forgot a favorite: “Poltergeist,” from Ghost Hound.

***

No one ever visits my photo gallery. I decided to open a Flickr account, so even more people can ignore my pictures. It seems I timed it just right — the Flickr page sure looks pretty, but I have to wait for it to load completely twice before I can do anything there. I joined a few Flickr groups and, again, I timed it just right. It seems that Wichita photographers hang out at Facebook nowadays. Although I do have a Facebook account to keep tabs on family and friends, as a policy I post virtually nothing there. That’s not going to change.

***

Satsuma-jima

Satsuma-jima, not far from Kyushu, has been a bit feisty lately. I grabbed the picture above from the JMA webcam (third from the bottom of the list) this morning.

From the chariot boudoir

If you can’t find the video you want on YouTube, look elsewhere. (This is the complete recording of the song, not just the excerpt included in the eighth episode of Girls und Panzer (and censored on Crunchyroll). The missing section of the anime begins around 1:50.) ((Though the censored section is back on Youtube for now.))

So we’ve had girls with guns, girls as guns (or is that guns as girls?), girls with mecha, girls as combat aircraft, and now with girls with tanks. ((It’s actually not that new. See Those Who Hunt Elves — on second thought, don’t. It’s lousy; not even Kotono Mitsuishi could redeem it.)) It’s probably all just pandering to otaku, but perhaps there is something more sinister going on. If anime reflects reality, Japanese young men generally are either hapless dweebs or sparkly bishies and crossdressers. If you want to form an army, they’d be useless. You’d be better off drafting young women, who in Japan have talent for using the tools of war, and often magic, too. Girls und Panzer may be just the latest in a series of entertainments designed to accustom the Japanese to the idea of women as warriors.

At least one Chinese writer sees “evil intent militarism” in Girls und Panzer, though it’s difficult to follow the argument as interpreted by Giggle Translate. ((Giggle Translate insisted that the original language of the linked page was Irish.))

Cultural notes

For those who remember Leonard Pinth-Garnell.

*****

Norman Lebrecht says that The Rite of Spring was “a glorification of primitivism that challenged the values of modern society. Its response was reciprocal violence.” My own theory is that the riot at its premiere was caused by time-traveling aesthetes happy for an opportunity to get rowdy.

*****

The Locus Science Fiction Foundation bought the rights to R.A. Lafferty‘s writing a couple years ago and is planning to reprint his complete short stories. The first volume is due out early next year, in time for the centenary of his birth. Twenty or so years ago I tried to collect every book by Lafferty in print. Although I found numerous chapbooks and small-press editions, most of his writing was out of reach. The new edition is very welcome, even though the first volume costs $66.

If you’ve never read Lafferty, there are a handful of his stories online:

Slow Tuesday Night

Narrow Valley

The Transcendent Tigers

Sodom and Gomorrah, Texas

The Six Fingers of Time

Nine Hundred Grandmothers

I’m pleased to observe that I am not the only R.A. Lafferty obsessive around. Andrew Ferguson is reading his way though Lafferty’s stories in order and commenting on them at Continued on Next Rock. See also The Ants of God Are Queer Fish.

Readers of Lafferty are often readers of Gene Wolfe as well. I recently found a couple of weblogs devoted to Wolfe, Silk for Caldé and The Silk and Horn Heresy.

Notes from Nineveh

The bishop administered Confirmation this Pentecost Sunday at the Cathedral this morning. While he was annointing the confirmandi, a string quartet in the choir loft played the “nocturne” from Borodin’s quartet. I would have enjoyed it under other circumstances, but this was the wrong place and time for the music. I suppose I should grateful that it wasn’t Marty Haugen or the St. Louis Jesuits.

Continue reading “Notes from Nineveh”

Ending well

Jonathan says that Shin Sekai Yori is “… the best science fiction TV show that I have ever seen, animated or otherwise.” I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but it definitely is in a class with Serial Experiments Lain and Dennou Coil. It’s the best show of any kind I’ve seen since at least Madoka Magica. The ending did not disappoint — not that I was worried; it was obvious early on that the creators knew exactly what they were doing.

It’s absolutely not for children, and even for adults I can’t give it an unreserved recommendation. It’s partly a horror story, with monsters and worse than monsters, all the more chilling for what isn’t shown. But if you have the stomach for it and are willing to think about aggression, social control and human nature, Shin Sekai Yori is worth your time.

*****

I can give Girls und Panzer an unreserved recommendation for all ages. The premise is silly — teams of high-school girls compete in tank battles — but the staff played it straight and made it work, and did so without panty shots. The last episode was exhilarating and satisfying. If you watch it with friends, you’ll likely cheer aloud as Miho and her comrades fight their desperate battle.

Musical archaeology

The worst time-sink on the internet is TV Tropes, followed by Wikipedia. And then there’s YouTube, where I got trapped this weekend. I wondered if I could find some of the barely-remembered songs I heard back in ancient times. Many hours later, I had located quite a few. Here are some I unearthed. You can judge for yourselves whether these were buried treasures or something else.

Continue reading “Musical archaeology”

The truth about Lincoln …

… and Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding and Richard M. Nixon. Fred Himebaugh, a.k.a. The Fredösphere, who has neglected his weblog for too long, shares the results of his historical research. Content advisory: robots, alien gods, banjos.

Fred earlier wrote a chamber opera “They’re Made Out of Meat,” using the Terry Bisson short story as the libretto, as well as a touching ballad of interplanetary romance, “Earth Girl.”

No silver eagle of the steppe

US copyright law is stupid. Case in point: Girls und Panzer‘s eighth episode is missing about a minute in its Crunchyroll version. Unless you download a fansub, you are going to miss this 1938 song, the highlight of the episode.

Update: here’s the video, via Ivlin, who notes that “Copyright is demonstrably making art worse“.