2010 Source music

Get ready for a bunch of YouTube videos! Obviously a drum corps is not exactly a sit-down orchestra, but these recordings should give you an idea of what the music we're playing will sound like. First up is Mahler's Second Symphony:

A long overdue update

Hi! I'm not dead! Sorry for not updating my blog. It's finals season, I was sick recently, etc etc, excuses excuses. Basically life has been incredibly busy and I've slacked off on the blog. I'm going to try and get a little more in the swing of updating before the summer comes around, when I do plan on updating (hopefully!) daily, with details of what Crown life is like on the inside.

For now though, check out this beautiful video (thanks to Chris Brophy for showing it to me!). For more info on the instrument involved, check out the wikipedia page.

A 60 ton angel falls to the earth

A pile of old metal, a radiant blur
Scars in the country, the summer and her

A mind-boggling Rube Goldberg Machine

Courtesy of OK Go.

Track 1: Time Difference

Clocking in at 6 minutes and 19 seconds, Time Difference starts the album off with a bang. I've actually been putting some time into figuring out this one on the piano, and boy is it complicated. It starts out in a truly bizarre meter: 13/4. Yeah, 13. And people thought Dave Brubeck was crazy when he played in 5/4.

Here's another Beethoven Sonata you've never heard before

3 AM still counts as "today", right?

So here's my post for today: a harp cover of Owl City's Fireflies:

Why you've never really heard the Moonlight Sonata

Check out Slate's fantastic article here. The article describes how Beethoven's famous third movement of the Moonlight Sonata, along with countless other works, was designed for the instruments of the day in an essential way. This viewpoint is pretty common in looking at Baroque music, as you can see in the huge market today for "period" version of Baroque music - played on authentic instruments, with authentic stylistic nuances and often in authentic frilly costumes. However, when you get to Classical period composers and the invention of the pianoforte, we all sort of assume that wham bam, the modern Steinway grand descended from heaven pre-made. However, one of the most obvious differences in the older pianos is that when you hold down the sustain pedal on an older piano (1805 in the article), the notes don't last as long. Beethoven directs the performer to hold down the pedal the entire time, and if you tried this on a modern piano, you'd get what the author delightfully calls a "tonal traffic jam". But that's enough of me talking - go read (and listen to) the article!

All Along The Watchtower

Just when I thought I wasn't going to have anything to write about today, I came across this absolutely fantastic cover of All Along The Watchtower. This version was composed by Bear McCreary for Battlestar Galactica - check it out!

Mashups

Mashups are a funny kind of music. A mashup basically consists of bits and pieces of existing songs spliced together, i.e. mashed up together. There are quite a few different varieties of mashups - the simplest is to just take the vocals from one song and add them to the music of another. Others take that concept to its extreme, adding tiny pieces of different songs together to make an incredibly complex new work, often changing what songs are used quite rapidly. I'll give some great examples after the break

A February 4th resolution?

So, as you can see, I've discovered that it's hard to have enough substantive, interesting content to fill a blog with regularly. I think that's partly because I have a tendency to not want to write anything here unless I have something that I think is really super awesome. So, I'm going to go to the other end of the spectrum. I certainly use the internet at least once a day, and I definitely think or say or see or experience something interesting or noteworthy every day, so why not combine the two and update this blog every day? That's what I'm going to try and do.

So, for today (it's past midnight, but it counts as today), I'm going to share a picture. I'm in a class called Worlds of Music, which is basically about learning to see and listen to music in a broader context than just the usual "classical" music. It's a really cool class so far, and our first quiz is tomorrow, so I made a playlist in iTunes of the musical samples we've listened to so far to study. It's a pretty varied list, to say the least. You have to click on the picture to see it full-size.

Nostalgia!

So I was flying home this weekend via Airtran, and they had XM radio with headphone jacks in the armband, which was great because you could listen to it during takeoff and landing, which are always the parts of flight when I'm tragically separated from my otherwise-constant iPod intake. Plus, you could use your own headphones, you didn't need to buy their shoddy ones for $5. Thumbs up Airtran!

Anyway, as I was browsing through the stations trying to find something interesting to listen to, I came across something I hadn't heard in forever: Headstrong by Trapt. It was a classic angry white boy rock song that came out in 2002, an anthem for pent-up middle-school angst across the country. Hearing it brought back memories of a few kids from middle school jumping around yelling BACK OFF, I'LL TAKE YOU ON, HEADSTRONG, I'LL TAKE ON ANYONE. I wonder if this is what "oldies" radio will end up like for my generation?

Hiromi Uehara

Another group that my friend Butchko made me aware of: this is Hiromi Uehara and her quartet called Hiromi's Sonicbloom playing songs from their album Time Control. In the tradition of all the great jazz pianists, she gets very, well, into her music and ends up looking pretty silly.

Seriously though, she is an absolutely fantastic pianist with a great band behind her. Her Wiki page that she met Chick Corea at a young age and was tutored by Ahmad Jamal at Berklee, and boy does it show. Well worth a listen.

Musical obsessions of today

A few songs have been keeping me addicted lately, by which I mean I've had them on repeat and have each racked up almost 20 plays on iTunes already. In order of my getting them:



This song is courtesy of Arthi (and I believe Kevin sent it to her). It sounds very 80s, but was in fact released in 2007, and it's catchy as anything



Butchko gave me this one. Again very addicting, which would explain why I'm addicted to it!



I heard this one last night in someone else's room, and even though it was indeed a good song, I knew I'd heard it somewhere before. Eventually, I figured out that an instrumental version of it had been used in UPS commercials!