17 July 2004
Penderecki
My parents recently Wish Listed me four Penderecki CDs from Naxos containing his Symphonies 1 through 5, Violin Concertos 1 & 2, and his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. The last being his, sort of, "Stairway to Heaven" in terms of popularity. I'm digging into the Violin Concertos now--great music, and his style became much more romantic than I expected. The liner notes aren't that fun though. They give a very short historical and stylistic description and then a long blow-by-blow of the pieces (each a single movement concerto). Those descriptions, especially in some modern music, are hard to follow when being followed in a continuous 40-minute piece. Some time-stamped signposts would be nice.
Anyway, I then found a Brit blogger who (despite an embarrassingly irritating use of the word "milady") has some good background on Penderecki and modern composition. He'll certainly be a source to find other opinions on modern music. Aaaand, he's a Messiaen ('rents also got me his Turangalila Symphony) and Sonic Youth fan.
But, geez, "milady"?!?
He also linked to the recent and recently interesting Shape of Song MIDI applet. It displays MIDI files graphically by linking their repeated sections. The result is layers of interconnected loops of different sizes depending on the length of the section that's repeated. Another possibly cool-but-what-do-I-do-with-it tool.
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