happy new year to all!

The first post I wrote on this blog 2 years ago was after a trip to see a Monday Evening Concert. I’ll be playing with them this coming January 11th!

The question is: Can music really speak?
Music is merely notes, all self-referring;
The articulative faculty is weak;
Music means rather less than a cat’s purring.
The fact that E flat clarinets can squeak
Will hardly make them murine. So, in stirring
The listener’s blood with crash and upper partial,
Is not a march a march, abstractly martial?

         from Byrne by Anthony Burgess

N.B. E flat [sic]


x = "with".ascii; Pbind(\midinote, Pseq(x/4, inf), \dur, 0.2, \legato, 0.8, \db, -20).play(quant: 1);

z = "the fun never stops ".ascii; Pbind(\midinote, Pseq(z, inf), \dur, 0.2, \legato, Pif(Pkey(\midinote)>40, 0.1, 1.5), \db, -20).play(quant: 1);


Happy 101st to Elliot Carter.

This is a performance from my senior recital on December 13, 2008 of his Figment III for solo contrabass.

Figment III.mp3

I got to see this piece performed on Monday in LA and it was wonderful. I’m quite definitely a Sciarrino fan, and I was very excited to finally hear some of his music live since my only experience of it has been via recording.

The LA Times has a (sort of strange) review of the concert.

listening

• Wuorinen — all I can find on you tube
• Beethoven — late string quartets recorded by Tackacs

reading

• finished Wallace’s Infinite Jest a few months ago
• currently Nabokov’s Pale Fire

watching

• Jodorowsky’s El Topo
• Brakhage selections from the Criterion set
• My Dinner with Andre
• Fantastic Mr. Fox

I did this a while ago and just remembered this morning. I was doing a little presentation on using Patterns in SuperCollider and thought I might be able to make a little mock Studie II with one pattern. It’s definitely nothing as wonderful as Stockhausen’s piece, but I think it’s humorously close.

Here’s the real deal: Stockhausen’s Studie II

Here’s my code:


(
SynthDef(\notQuiteStudieII,
{
arg freq = 440, amp = 0.5, mults = #[1, 1, 1, 1, 1], sustain = 1;
var sound, filt, mix, env, attack, decay;
sound = Formlet.ar(WhiteNoise.ar(0.1), freq*mults, 0.01, 0.05);
mix = Mix(sound);
attack = Rand(0.01, 0.99) * sustain; //attack.poll;
decay = sustain - attack;
env = EnvGen.ar(Env([0, amp, 0], [attack, decay], \lin), levelScale: 0.5, doneAction: 2);
Out.ar(0, FreeVerb.ar(mix, 0.9, 0.9, 0.1) * env ! 2 )
}
).memStore;
)


(
Pbind(
\instrument, \notQuiteStudieII,
\freq, Pwrand([Pwhite(100.0, 1000.0, 1), \rest], [4, 1].normalizeSum, inf),
\mults, Pif( Pkey(\freq) < 500.0,
Pfunc( { [ {rrand(0.5, 0.6) } ! 5 ] } ),
Pfunc( { [ {rrand(0.5, 7.6) } ! 4 ++ 1 ] } ),
Pfunc( { [ {rrand(0.5, 8.0) } ! 4 ++ 1 ] } )
),
\dur, Pif( Pkey(\freq) < 650.0, Pwhite(0.1, 0.8), Pwhite(0.5, 1.9), 1),
\legato, Pif( Pkey(\freq) < 375.0, Pwhite(0.5, 1.2), Pwhite(0.9, 1.9), 1),
\amp, Pwhite(0.1, 0.5)
).play;
)


I drive from Hillcrest in San Diego to Mission Viejo on Fridays to teach some bass lessons. Today’s drive was approximately 12 seconds shy of John Eliot Gardiner’s recordings of Beethoven’s 3rd and 4th Symphonies combined.

There’s something very satisfying about that.

I’m about 400 videos behind the times, but this is an amazing youtube channel.

The Lucerne Festival Academy put up some really nice photos of performances from the festival here.