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kip_w.
What's on my iPod? Don't have one. I bought something that does a lot of the same stuff for less in a slightly less keen package. It's an RCA Lyra, with which I have had humorous mishaps (traumas seen in retrospect), but which is pretty good when it works. So let's ask the question again, only say "What's on my mp3 player?" instead.
Glad I asked. This is what makes talking to myself such a pleasure.
It's a pretty big player, storage-wise, so I'll just talk about a little of it. Lately I've been shoring up some of my LP material. This wave started with my procuring a copy of Anthony Newman's "Organ Orgy" LP, which doesn't seem to have been reissued. This record is an all-Wagner outing on the pipe organ at St. John the Divine in NYC, and includes the best version of "Ride of the Valkyries" I've found so far. I bought two other CDs that had different versions of this arrangement on it, and this one still beats the rest, maybe because Newman had assistants playing extra notes and changing registrations and holding down pedals (he credits them on the liner). This led to my also transferring other great organ recordings, the Calvin Hampton arrangement of Franck's d-minor Symphony, a concert by Virgil Fox on the Mighty Wanamaker organ (there's some Wagner in it), and some arrangments for violin and organ that includes a lush treatment of Wieniawski's "Romance" from the violin concerto and several good Kreisler tidbits.
About this time, I started hankering for more music box pieces as well. Early on, I converted a tape of music box opera selections, and I decided to bite the bullet and go back to the disks for better and possibly more complete recordings, since I wasn't trying to fit them all on a tape now, so I could include multiple versions of the same pieces. There were a lot of different music boxes, so this isn't as redundant as it sounds. Some played from disks almost two feet wide. Some had organ pipes, drums, or tweeting birds. This naturally led into exploration of other automatic instruments, like the Violinola, the Orchestrion, or other mechanical combos.
So I'm big into this stuff at the moment. (At the moment. I've had the LPs for decades.) It's so vigorous, and oblivious. The pieces were programmed, not played. Some of the cruder instruments, I almost think they made the rolls by hammering nails into a rolling pin or something -- well, it sounds like it. Over the decades, too, the instruments have gotten a wee bit askew, perhaps, and don't sound quite like they did when they first thrilled the crowned heads of Europe. The violinola playing "Indian Love Call" is a bit unearthly. The drums that punctuate some of the instruments sound more like coffee cans (just think how hard it would be to get all that just right in something that has to keep playing on and on and on), and I suspect a few notes have vanished somewhere along the way.
Maybe the format is backwards. Maybe I should always write long-winded screeds about the music I'm listening to, and then afterwards check off a box that tells what's on my mind. "Politics." "Entertainment." "What I ate." "Something Sarah said." "Quiet hissing sound."
.
What's on my iPod? Don't have one. I bought something that does a lot of the same stuff for less in a slightly less keen package. It's an RCA Lyra, with which I have had humorous mishaps (traumas seen in retrospect), but which is pretty good when it works. So let's ask the question again, only say "What's on my mp3 player?" instead.
Glad I asked. This is what makes talking to myself such a pleasure.
It's a pretty big player, storage-wise, so I'll just talk about a little of it. Lately I've been shoring up some of my LP material. This wave started with my procuring a copy of Anthony Newman's "Organ Orgy" LP, which doesn't seem to have been reissued. This record is an all-Wagner outing on the pipe organ at St. John the Divine in NYC, and includes the best version of "Ride of the Valkyries" I've found so far. I bought two other CDs that had different versions of this arrangement on it, and this one still beats the rest, maybe because Newman had assistants playing extra notes and changing registrations and holding down pedals (he credits them on the liner). This led to my also transferring other great organ recordings, the Calvin Hampton arrangement of Franck's d-minor Symphony, a concert by Virgil Fox on the Mighty Wanamaker organ (there's some Wagner in it), and some arrangments for violin and organ that includes a lush treatment of Wieniawski's "Romance" from the violin concerto and several good Kreisler tidbits.
About this time, I started hankering for more music box pieces as well. Early on, I converted a tape of music box opera selections, and I decided to bite the bullet and go back to the disks for better and possibly more complete recordings, since I wasn't trying to fit them all on a tape now, so I could include multiple versions of the same pieces. There were a lot of different music boxes, so this isn't as redundant as it sounds. Some played from disks almost two feet wide. Some had organ pipes, drums, or tweeting birds. This naturally led into exploration of other automatic instruments, like the Violinola, the Orchestrion, or other mechanical combos.
So I'm big into this stuff at the moment. (At the moment. I've had the LPs for decades.) It's so vigorous, and oblivious. The pieces were programmed, not played. Some of the cruder instruments, I almost think they made the rolls by hammering nails into a rolling pin or something -- well, it sounds like it. Over the decades, too, the instruments have gotten a wee bit askew, perhaps, and don't sound quite like they did when they first thrilled the crowned heads of Europe. The violinola playing "Indian Love Call" is a bit unearthly. The drums that punctuate some of the instruments sound more like coffee cans (just think how hard it would be to get all that just right in something that has to keep playing on and on and on), and I suspect a few notes have vanished somewhere along the way.
Maybe the format is backwards. Maybe I should always write long-winded screeds about the music I'm listening to, and then afterwards check off a box that tells what's on my mind. "Politics." "Entertainment." "What I ate." "Something Sarah said." "Quiet hissing sound."
.
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no subject
Date: 2004-10-29 11:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-10-29 07:39 pm (UTC)Now, there was one time when I turned the radio on and they were playing a rag, and I listened and said "Bolcom" and then theorized that it might be the graceful ghost. It turned out I was right, though whether I was right from vaguely recollecting or just right out of my usual general ineffable superiority, I couldn't say.
What do I play now that you'd like? (Apart from Solace.) I've been working on Nola (by Arndt) forever. It sounds like a regular syncopated novelty, but I keep finding swell things in it, and I have sanded down many of the bumps, making a fairly decent job of it most times. Or maybe the Andante from Beethoven's "Pastoral" sonata, which was also a big favorite of the composer, who is said to have improvised on it by the hour. I don't improvise on it, so the world is safe for now.
Note to self: must put more people's names in the postings. It finally got me a comment.
no subject
Date: 2004-11-01 12:15 pm (UTC)As far as I could tell in my search for the sheet music for "Graceful ghost," Bolcom has only one large book of rags published, and it's in there - and is probably one of the easier. Not that I would know from trying.
I would say I'm a Bach and Schubert kind of gal, but I thought of you again today when I heard on the radio Dvorák’s Slavonic Dances. I'm also partial to Brahms' Hungarian Dances, though every recording I've heard seems to me to take undue emotional liberty with tempi....
no subject
Date: 2004-11-01 03:58 pm (UTC)Perhaps I should bite the bullet and buy the big book. Buh. Scuse me. I might be more motivated by one of his more famous pieces; either the ghost or "Sweet Sixteenths." I first became aware of him, by the way, with his recording of Gershwin piano music.
My main Schubert piece is actually part of a piece. I play the scherzo from his Sonata in D (forget which one at the moment; the one I listen to), but I skip the trio and the repeat most times, and the music I carry around doesn't include them by the simple expedient of not having copied them in. I also have the first page of the delightful Rondo from that sonata, which was given as a self-standing excerpt in a cheapo Schubert collection I bought in the 70s (so it's the sonata with that Rondo in it -- simple). It's a sweet, songlike Schubert theme that would pretty much fit the words and meter of "Sweetly sings the donkey / at the break of day / if you do not feed him / this is what he'll say" and even has some similarity to the tune.
I play Dvorak's famous Humoresque, an underestimated musical joke, and when I'm at home by myself, I take another stab at a piano arrangement of the slow movement from his "American" string quartet, which is my all-time favorite piece of Dvorak.
With the Brahms, I think the wild mood swings in the music are a nod to the performance practices of the Hungarian musician(s) who actually wrote the tunes Brahms used, mistakenly believing they were folk tunes.
If you feel like some tasty Hungarian, give Kodaly's opera "Hary Janos" a try. For starters, there's the familiar suite that was partly swiped for The Wizard of Oz. I was lucky enough to find an LP with about an hour's worth of the opera in it and fell in love with it, and after much looking I found a piano-vocal score (at Ricordi, in Rome) and later ordered a complete recording online. It's fantastic stuff, at times earthy, humorous, refined, boisterous. The 'recruiting song' is stirring as all get-out, and I've been plugging away at playing it on the piano for some time now.