The Horror!

DC residents please notice on the left that I have added a special section for my recommendations of upcoming concerts in the DC area. Use it!

Alright, before we get started with Spooky Tuesday I want to address a couple of very good questions which Sarah brought up.

First of all she is wondering why Wikipedia makes a distinction between popular and folk music but in my first post I seem to make no such distinction.  What I meant when I said "Popular music is folk music or  music for consumption." is that popular music is derived from folk music.  For example blues and rock and Jazz all come from aural folk traditions.  Technically, they are not always one and the same, it's more of a ven diagram situation (my mother would be proud). The important thing is that neither of them is classical.  Linus and Lucy is Jazz which, too keep a very long story very short, comes from African American Folk music (though it wouldn't exist if Creole musicians in New Orleans hadn't been kicked out of white orchestras and forced to take their brass and woodwind skills to the streets).

Second, the fact that this blog primarily deals with just the past 200 years is entirely a ME thing and not a historical thing... I simply don't enjoy as much of the music from before then so I wouldn't make a good teacher of it.

Finally, "How did Beethoven manage to write crazy amazing music after he became deaf?"  Haha he is a real hero.  It's a combination of things.  His ear was trained from as early as he could walk to recognize what different notes on the page sound like in relation to each other without having to play them.  What that means is that he, like many musicians trained from a young age could look at a piece of music and hear it in his head.  That's the intellectual component.  What amazes me most is that he managed to keep such a keen mastery of orchestration, harmony, and dynamics (in other words what instruments sound good with each other, what different combination of notes sound like when played simultaneously, and the use of volume in composition).  In his own words, spoken directly to a prince: "What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself.  There are and always will be thousands of princes, but there is only one Beethoven."

Alright!! Now on with the listening...

5) In the first half of the twentieth century something horrible called 12 tone music happened.

6) Penderecki - Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima 1959 - (I chose this youtube because it's hilarious)
     In the aftermath of 12 tone music, composers of the twentieth century were able to take much greater liberties with dissonance than they had previously been able to.  Threnody is an example of how composers pushed the sonic envelope to reach new emotional territory.  Fun fact, Threnody was not composed with Hiroshima in mind.  It was not written as "programmed" music (music with  explicit meaning or representation) but the commissioner of the piece gave it that name after it had been composed.  Seems apt though.  This shit is horrifying.  It has been used in many films.  Check out these pictures of the conductor's score:

  Not exactly what you think of when someone says "sheet music" eh?  Believe it or not it is easier for a conductor to follow those scores than it would be to follow the regular music.

Suggested listening for the brave who REALLY like to get scared out of their pants:

A)Sofia Gubaidulina is one of my favorite composers.  She lived in the 20th century and was an understudy of Shostakovich.  I can't find any of my favorites of hers online but here's an example, and if you like it I can always get you more (play this LOUD):

B)Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain. Mussorgsky is my favorite composer.

 

C)Delirium Cordia - a single track concept album by super group Fantomas representing the theme of surgery without anesthesia.  It may seem a bit metal at first but I would erg the brave to stick with it because it has a really interesting integration of many traditions from around the world.

Stay tuned tomorrow for heart-wrenching music that will make you cry...