music?

[kip_w]

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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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Comments

[ssprince.livejournal.com]

This is probably where I should have asked if you know William Bolcom's "Graceful Ghost Rag."