Welcome to Nowhere

I am nowhere man. If you are here you are indeed nowhere. The music in this collection has nothing in common,
other than the fact it comes right out of nowhere.

Thursday, December 24, 2009

Charles Mingus - Epitaph (excerpt)















Mingus: Epitaph



Epitaph is a composition by jazz musician Charles Mingus. It is over 4000 measures long, takes more than two hours to perform, and was only completely discovered during the cataloguing process after his death. With the help of a grant from the Ford Foundation, the score and instrumental parts were copied, and the piece itself was premiered by a 30-piece orchestra, conducted by Gunther Schuller. This concert was produced by Mingus' widow, Sue, at Alice Tully Hall on June 3, 1989, ten years after his death, and again at several concerts in 2007.


The New Yorker wrote that Epitaph represents the first advance in jazz composition since Duke Ellington's Black, Brown, and Beige which was written in 1943. The New York Times said it ranked with the "most memorable jazz events of the decade". Convinced that it would never be performed in his lifetime, Mingus called his work Epitaph declaring that he wrote it "for my tombstone." Conductor Gunther Schuller said that Epitaph is "among the most important, prophetic, creative statement in the history of jazz.”


There was one ill-fated attempt to record some of this during Mingus's lifetime; a Town Hall concert on October 12, 1962. The title of the original album is Town Hall Concert and has two tracks marked "Epitaph Pt. I" and "Epitaph Pt. II", and other tracks including "Clark in the Dark", for trumpeter Clark Terry who played in the band. However, the endeavor never yielded a coherent whole like that achieved posthumously.


Official Site
Buy Mingus Epitaph



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Friday, December 18, 2009

Arnold Schoenberg - Pierrot Lunaire, No. 8 (Nacht)


Photo of Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles, bel...Image via Wikipedia

























Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds 'Pierrot lunaire', ("three times seven poems from Albert Giraud's 'Pierrot lunaire'"), commonly known as Pierrot Lunaire ("Moonstruck Pierrot" or "Pierrot in the moonlight"), Op. 21, is a melodrama by Arnold Schoenberg. It is a setting of twenty-one selected poems from Otto Erich Hartleben's German translation of Albert Giraud's cycle of French poems of the same name. The première of the work, which is between 35 and 40 minutes in length, was at the Berlin Choralion-Saal on October 16, 1912, with Albertine Zehme as the vocalist.


The narrator (voice-type unspecified in the score, but traditionally performed by a soprano) delivers the poems in the Sprechstimme style, which complements the mood of the poems aurally. Schoenberg had previously used this combination of spoken text with instrumental accompaniment, called "melodrama", in the summer-wind narrative of the Gurre-Lieder, and it was a genre much in vogue at the end of the nineteenth century. The work is atonal, but does not use the twelve-tone technique that Schoenberg would devise eight years later.





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Sunday, December 6, 2009

Tangerine Dream - The Sorcerer

{{es|Tangerine Dream, Concierto 2007-07-01 en ...Image via Wikipedia






The Sorcerer, a 1977 movie by William Friedkin, provided the opportunity for German electronic music pioneer Edgar Froese to compose his first movie score. His band Tangerine Dream had been in existence for a decade and had begun to attract some critical attention as an electronic live performance group.


Although The Sorcerer as a movie was not a commercial success, it is quite compelling and is worth a watch if you happen to run across it (it's not easy to find).

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Wednesday, December 2, 2009

David Shire - The Taking of Pelham One Two Three




David Shire composed the soundtrack for the excellent 1974 thriller The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (Joseph Sargent, dir).


Shire began scoring for television in the 1960s and made the leap to scoring feature films in the early 1970s. He was married to actress Talia Shire, for whose brother Francis Ford Coppola he scored The Conversation, perhaps his best known score, in 1974. Additional screen credits include Two People, All the President's Men, The Hindenburg, Farewell My Lovely, The Taking of Pelham One-Two-Three, 2010, Return to Oz, and Zodiac. He composed original music for Saturday Night Fever (for which he received two Grammy Award nominations), and also worked on several disco adaptations including "Night on Disco Mountain." He won the Academy Award for Best Song for his and Norman Gimble's theme song for Norma Rae, "It Goes Like It Goes". He was also nominated the same year in the same category for "The Promise (I'll Never Say Goodbye)" from the motion picture The Promise, with lyrics by Marilyn and Alan Bergman. In 1981 his song "With You I'm Born Again," recorded by Billy Preston and Syreeta, was a top five international hit and stayed on the pop charts for 26 weeks.


The Conversation featured an austere score for piano. On some cues Shire took the taped sounds of the piano and distorted them in different ways to create alternative sonic textures to round out the score. The music is intended to capture the isolation and paranoia of protagonist Harry Caul (Gene Hackman). The score was released on CD by Intrada Records.


For The Taking of Pelham One Two Three, Shire used serial techniques and a funky multicultural rhythm section for the main theme. It is intended to evoke the bustle and diversity of New York City, and is an unofficial theme for the 6 subway line (the local Lexington Avenue Line that is depicted in the film). The soundtrack album was the first ever CD release by Film Score Monthly. The end titles contain a more expansive arrangement of the theme. Shire received two Grammy nominations for his work on the film.


David Shire Website





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