Pomp and Circumstance

Today son Nik received his honors diploma in high school graduation ceremonies. And, of course, the tradition of playing Sir Edward Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance (technically, what gets played is a just one of several marches, in part inspired by Shakespeare's Othello, that comprise the whole work) was upheld -- incidentally including clarinet work by Nik's younger sister in her role with her bandmates. It is said that Elgar was invited to a 1905 Yale commencement, where the work was played and went on to become a virtual institution at stateside graduations and commencements. Here is Elgar conducting a 1931 performance (a much more brisk rendition than the slow, stately treatment we usually hear these days):



SIDEBAR: While hearing this music can readily and rightly make parental hearts flutter and tears flow, it is still Elgar's Cello Concerto -- especially the classic first movement -- that really reaches me, especially Jackie Du Pre's interpretation (here seen a few years before her death):

Drumming and More

Hallelujah! Steve Reich gets a Pulitzer for his composition, "Double Sextet". About time, please pardon the pun.

As a long-time fan of the kind of music often characterized as "minimalism" and as created by people like Terry Riley, Philip Glass, John Adams, Brian Eno and others, it is the work of Steve Reich that has especially drawn me in, perhaps from my own, but very limited, background in percussion.

The other day I unearthed my beloved 1974 Deutsche Grammophon three-vinyl-disc set of Reich's 1970-1971 Drumming, found it to be in fairly decent condition and set to digitizing it for my FLAC project.

"Drumming" is a monumental piece performed over about ninety minutes with four pairs of tuned bongo drums, three marimbas, three glockenspiels, two female voices, whistling and piccolo. It employs Reich's now-famous technique of players (typically percussionists on the same instrumentation) repeating a pattern in unison, then gradually moving out of sync so that one is a sixteenth note, then a quarter note, etc. away. This kind of thing fades from one group of instruments and players to another, and can include layers and combinations of the differently-phased patterns. Or at least that is my layman's explanation of how it seems to build. Here is a condensed sampling from a relatively recent performance that might give you the idea:



Other Reich pieces in my library include Music for 18 Musicans (tagged as a favorite on my iPod), The Desert Music, Tehillim, Four Organs, Six Pianos, and Different Trains, and maybe more I have overlooked. All of it is fascinating, hypnotic and highly recommended for further exploration. Except for the (Bach-inspired?) Music for 18 Musicians, which I hear fairly often, it has been some time since I have listened to this other stuff, and I need to try to find time to do that -- and maybe acquire some more of Reich's output.

I have not yet heard Reich's Double Sextet, and after reading Newsweek's interview with Reich on the occasion of his Pulitzer, I learn that it has not yet been commercially recorded. And I see that FlypMedia has another multimedia-interview-piece with Reich, along with information on his upcoming rock composition "2x5".

Update: Here is an interesting YouTube finding -- a rather unique one-man performance of Reich's Piano Phase (I heard that this piece was dedicated to Philip Glass, but I haven't confirmed that) on two pianos:

Song Of The Day: California

Joni Mitchell is one of those icons of the Sixties who keeps coming up in shuffle mode on my iPod during my walks to work. Joni, along with, say, Neil Young and k.d. lang, have to be among Canada's great gifts to the world. While this is not my single favorite (there are so many) Joni tune, it has popped up twice now in the last day and always brings back lots of memories; from 1970:



If you ever get a chance to see her American Masters PBS TV documentary (there's a DVD), go for it. And check out some of Joni's later jazz collaborations. Her voice deepened over time, and later on she famously has said that her young voice sounded "like she was on helium".

This one hit home. Literally. As a native rural Iowan and decades-long fan of Robert Frank (who wrote an introduction for this project, and whose The Americans book of mid-fifties photographs seems to be a definite spiritual predecessor), I was immediately taken away with this work by fellow Iowan Danny Wilcox Frazier. You can also see pieces from this project -- and much more great photojournalism -- at the New York Times' wonderful Lens site, fast becoming one of my very favorite Web destinations.

Death Of Music

Weekends sometime find me sitting around with my teenage kids watching Saturday Night Live. ( I only share my memories up to a point of what that conjures up in my mind.) When the SNL musical guests come up, and even my kids often shake their heads or even snicker out loud, I wonder where the good music went (not always, but too often). Things have changed when listening to great music for hours at a time, every day, with a killer stereo -- if it wasn't possible to hear live concerts -- as a young man represented just about the highest form of leisure-time activity. We demanded high quality, both performance and reproduction. Now we watch TV or stream a Netflix video or catch a few minutes of MP3 while strolling about with iPods attached. Once in a while, I stumble across something that reminds of what we seem to be missing these days. Here is the late/great Janis Joplin, live in Stockholm, circa 1969 (thanks to Tom Hannaher of ZVox for spotting this) :

Synecdoche

Veering off-topic a bit here.

I had to look this one up:

Synecdoche (pronounced "si-NEK-də-kee", IPA: /sɪˈnɛkdəˌki/; from Greek synekdoche (συνεκδοχή), meaning "simultaneous understanding") is a figure of speech in which:

* a term denoting a part of something is used to refer to the whole thing (Pars pro toto), or
* a term denoting a thing (a "whole") is used to refer to part of it (Totum pro parte), or
* a term denoting a specific class of thing is used to refer to a larger, more general class, or
* a term denoting a general class of thing is used to refer to a smaller, more specific class, or
* a term denoting a material is used to refer to an object composed of that material.

Synecdoche is closely related to metonymy (the figure of speech in which a term denoting one thing is used to refer to a related thing); indeed, synecdoche is considered a subclass of metonymy. It is more distantly related to other figures of speech, such as metaphor.

Now when the subject of great contemporary actors come up, Philip Seymour Hoffman immediately comes to (my) mind. And then I find that he is in a film directed by the terrific (IMHO) writer, Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, etc.). Last night I saw Synecdoche, New York. Go see it for yourself!