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Nikolai Roslavets

Dries — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:40:37 +0000

My undergrad piano professor, David Renner, introduced me to Nikolai Roslavets a few years ago. I finally followed his suggestion and bought Marc-Andre Hamelin’s excellent CD of a few of his piano pieces. Roslavets was dubbed “the Russian Schoenberg” — he dabbled in his own type of serialism. He himself This was (predictably) not to the liking of Soviet authorities. Roslavets’ name became a derogatory term of sorts, used to describe “formalist” music not accessible to the masses. The whole story is lamentably familiar, having been repeated over and over again with many other composers and artists (most famously Shostakovich and Prokofiev.)

Here is my favorite (thusfar) of his works: the first Etude, played by Hamelin.

Microtonal Business

Dries — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 05:56:52 +0000

Kyle Gann has been on a microtonal kick lately. Today he posted a MIDI rendering of a microtonal quartet of his teacher, Ben Johnston. It makes for some very interesting listening.

What strikes me about this piece is that even though there are three or four times as many possible pitches per octave than we’re accustomed to, the harmonies are still very quartal and quintal. It still has a very American harmonic language, despite being out in sonic free space.

Which begs the question: what’s the point? Am I just not getting something? Gann says it took a really long time to put together this rendering (i.e., hundreds and hundreds of hours), but to me it sounds like someone sliding around the pitch bend on their keyboard. Not to say it doesn’t sound cool — cool doesn’t cut it, actually; gorgeous and serene is more like it — but it does sound like an awful lot of time and effort to create a 150 second rendering of someone else’s work. To me, MIDI was always just a tool — how do my harmonies sound? what might that rhythm feel like? Human performance was always the goal. But in this world of microtonality, MIDI is often the next best thing.

Maybe we’re back at that familiar pendulum: no one can really tell the difference between Boulez or chance music.

Babblecast #1: Succesful Themes & Passages

Dries — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 18:56:01 +0000

So here we go: my first podcast. As I’m a huge classical music nerd, my podcasts will cover music I like; each podcast will be centered around a vague theme or idea. In the first podcast we have:

Charles Koechlin: Sonatine No. 2, Op. 87: III, Menuet
Einojuhani Rautavaara: A Tale of Fate, “Book of Visions”
Maurice Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin: III, Forlane
Igor Stravinsky: Suite #1 for Small Orchestra: Andante
Dmitri Shostakovich: Fugue in F# Major, Op. 87 No. 13

Click here to download.

Let me know what you think! I’m quite new at this, so I’d love to hear some feedback.

I’ll be adding this podcast to the iTunes Podcast directory soon.

[Edit] I had to disable the podcasting plugin I was using (Podpress 8.8) because it was messing with the photo galleries I posted in the previous weeks.

Jenny’s Birthday!

Dries — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:00:16 +0000

So it’s Jenny‘s birthday today, and I decided to surprise her a little. I made her a song with Fruity Loops. It has a pretty decent drum machine, and combined with its ability to record velocity while recording loops with a MIDI keyboard and the DVI Les Paul plugin from Sonivox, it actually sounds like a real band. The song itself is my take on the 1950′s “Doo-wop” genre, even though it eventually breaks down into The Police whent they’ve had too much to drink. Also, please forgive the cheesiness. It is her birthday, after all.

Take a listen: It’s Your Birthday