George Antheil - Ballet Mecanique

George Antheil via last.fm

Ballet Mécanique was originally written to accompany a Dadaist film of the same name, directed by Dudley Murphy and Fernand Léger, with cinematography by Man Ray. Originally scored for 16 player pianos and a large percussion battery, Anthiel found it impossible to properly synchronize the player pianos in a live performance - so he substituted four human pianists at the premiere. Thanks to modern technology  this all-robotic version of George Antheil's infamous Dada provocation can now be heard in its original conception. Features new robotic instruments from LEMUR: League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (http://lemurbots.org)


The setting is the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., March 12 - May 7 2006.

Harry Partch - Barstow

At various times in his checkered life, Partch was a hobo, and "The Wayward" is a chronicle of those experiences. Partch's titles and subtitles tell his tale, from "Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California" to "San Francisco: A Setting of the Cries of Newsboys on a Foggy Night in the Twenties" to "The Letter: A Depression Message From a Hobo Friend" to "U.S. Highball: A Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip."



Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California:

Here the music transcends the almost pointillistic daubs of the "Intrusions" and becomes a dense, flowing symphony of twanging, plunking, tapping, purling microtonal moans and sighs. The sheer junkiness of the sounds, their homemade, crazy-true authority, seems a proper analogue of hobo life. Partch's musical constructions are like Simon Rodia's Watts Towers in Los Angeles, funky, obsessive and grand..."

The words of Barstow are funny, profane, touching, and cynical - like Partch's music itself (in this performance the spoken words are performed by the composer)


Number One

[spoken] It's January twenty-six. I'm freezing. Ed Fitzgerald, Age nineteen. five feet ten inches, black hair, brown eyes. Going home to Boston Massachusetts, It's four p.m., and I'm hungry and broke. I wish I was dead. But today I am a man.

[sung] Going home to Boston, yuh-huh, Massachusetts. It's four p.m., and I'm hungry and broke. I wish I was dead. But today I am a man -- Oh-- O, I'm going home-- to Boston, yuh-huh, Massachusetts.

Number Two

[spoken] Gentlemen: Go to five-thirty East Lemon Avenue, Monrovia, California, for an easy handout.

[sung] Go to five-thirty East Lemon Avenue, in Monrovia for an easy handout, gentlemen. Yo-ho-ho -- Yoo-hoo-hooo -- Ya-ha-ha-- Yee-hee-hee-- Go to five-thirty East Lemon Avenue, in Monrovia for an easy handout, gentlemen. Yo-ho-ho -- Yoo-hoo-hooo -- Ya-ha-ha -- Yee-hee-hee

Number Three

[spoken] Marie Blackwell. Age nineteen. Brown eyes, brown hair, considered pretty. One-eighteen East Ventura Street, Las Vegas, Nevada. Object: matrimony.

[sung] Age nineteen, Brown eyes, brown hair, Oh, but I'm considered pretty. Here's where I live-Dah dah dah dah -- One-eighteen East Ventura Street, Las Vegas, Nevada. Taa -- Ta-ta-ta ta-ta-ta-ta-ta -- ta-ta-ta -- ta-ta-taa- My object is - Yoo-hoo-hoo - Matrimony!

Number Four

[intoned] Dear Marie, a very good idea you have there. I too am on the lookout for a suitable mate. My description -- No description follows, so he evidently got his ride.

Number Five

[intoned] Possible rides: January sixteenth, fifty-eight. January seventeenth, seventy-six. January eighteenth, nineteen. January nineteenth, six. January twentieth, eleven. To hell with it -- I'm going to walk!

Number Six

[ad lib] Jesus was God in the flesh.

[sung] Hey hey hey -- Jesus-- Jesus was God in the fle-esh Hey hey hey -- Hey hey hey -- Hey hey -- Jesus was God in the flesh. Hey hey hey - Jesus -- Jesus was God in the fle-esh Hey hey hey -- Hey hey hey -- Hey hey -- Jesus was God in the flesh.

Number Seven

[intoned] Looking for millionaire wife. Good looking, Very handsome, Intelligent, Good bull thrower, Etcetera. You lucky women! All you have to do is find me, you lucky women. Name's George.

[sung] All you have to do is find me -- You lucky women -- Name's George.

Number Eight

[spoken] Here's wishing all who read this, if they can get a lift, and the best of luck to you. Why in hell did you come, anyway?

[sung] Damn it anyhow -- Here I am stuck in the cold -- I've come, twenty-seven hundred miles from Chi, Illinois -- Slept along the highway, slept in open boxcar without top. Went hungry for two days (raining too) -- Dah dah dah dah -

But they say there's a hell -- What the hell do they think this is? Do they think about this? Dah dah dah dah dah

(and etc: more Dah-dahs here...)

I'm on my way, one half of desert to the east. Then back to El-lay, to try once more -- Car just passed by, make that two more, three more. Do not think they'll let me finish my story.

Here she comes, a truck, not a fuck, but a truck. Just a truck. Hoping to get the hell out, here's my name-- Johnnie Reinwald, nine-fifteen South Westlake Avenue, Los Angeles. Doh dee-dee

(and etc: more Doh-dees here...)

Here's wishing all who read this, if they can get a lift, and the best of luck to you - Doh doh doh doh doh doh -- dah dah dah -
Why in hell did you come, anyway?

Partch is the prototypical American outsider. Born in Oakland in 1901, Partch was the son of a missionary couple who had fled the Boxer Rebellion. As a child he became fascinated with the subtle intonations of the human voice and adapted a viola to reproduce them. As a young man he obtained a grant to study tuning systems, travelling to Dublin to obtain Yeats permission for a proposed opera based on Yeats translation of Oedipus. Although Yeats was impressed, Partch's money ran out and he was forced to return to the US in the middle of the Depression.

Partch lived as a hobo, riding trains and taking odd jobs to support his continuing obsession with microtonal pitches and the human voice. He gradually developed a set of instruments tuned in accordance with Ptolemy's 11-limit (43-tone) just intonation, and acquired a group of acolytes he trained to play these instruments. For more information about Harry Partch, click here. 

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Leon Kirchner - Piano Concerto

Leon Kirchner - Piano Concerto (1953)
New York Philharmonic, Dimitri Mitropoulos cond.
Piano: Leon Kirchner

Remembering Leon Kirchner1919-2009:



"His music can be harrowing to listen to," Robert Lwevin said in a recent phone interview. "It shatters and transforms us. Leon gave us self-portraits without any mercy to himself. He showed the anguish within and did not flinch from it. The number of composers who are able or willing to do that is not large."

Michael Harrison - Tone Cloud II, from Revelation for Piano

(Yes, the gentleman in the first row with the cane is La Monte Young.)

From Michael Harrison's website, the composer describes the concept of "just intonation" (a system of tuning which is subtly different from the standard equal temperament of modern Western instruments):


“ 'Just intonation,' or 'pure' tuning, is the universal foundation for harmony which is constructed from musical intervals of perfect mathematical proportions.  Pythagoras and other ancient Greek philosophers and mathematicians discovered that musical harmonies arise from mathematical relationships based on whole numbers.  The most consonant harmonies are created when two strings or other musical bodies vibrate in simple musical proportions. For example, the two notes comprising an octave have a 2:1 relationship, where the higher note is vibrating exactly twice as fast as the lower note.  A perfect 5th is a 3:2 relationship, a perfect 4th is 4:3, a major 3rd is 5:4, a minor 3rd is 6:5, a “septimal” minor 3rd is 7:6, a whole step is 9:8, and so on.  Every different set of whole numbers corresponds to a different set of musical intervals.  My music uses many of these simple combinations, as well as more complex relationships such as the “celestial comma,” or extremely minute interval of 64:63, which forms the nucleus of my work Revelation..."




Mr. Harrison makes use of an extensively modified grand piano to realize his compositions.

Penderecki - Passacaglia from Symphony No 3

Krzysztof Penderecki (born November 23, 1933 in Debica) is a Polish composer and conductor. His 1960 avant-garde Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima for string orchestra brought him to international attention, and this success was followed by acclaim for his choral St. Luke Passion. Both these works exhibit novel compositional techniques. Since the 1970s Penderecki's style has changed to encompass a post-Romantic idiom.

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Vincent Russo - Postlude

Long Island composer Vincent Russo is representative of a new generation of musicians completely at home in a wide range of musical styles. Russo, like many other composers of new music, doesn't rely on commissions from orchestras or performance ensembles. Instead he works with a variety of like-minded musicians to perform and record his music

vincentrusso

Djam Karet - Severed Moon

Djam Karet is an instrumental progressive rock band based in Topanga, California. The band was founded in 1984 by guitarists Gayle Ellett and Mike Henderson, bassist Henry J. Osborne, and drummer Chuck Oken, Jr.. The band's name is an Indonesian word (pronounced by English speakers as 'jam care-RAY) that translates loosely as "elastic time".

Website

Djam Karet is usually referred to, for lack of any better descriptive adjective, as "progressive." Don't let this throw you off. This Topanga-based group of musicians follow their own particular muse, and it takes them in some really odd places.

A case in point is the 1991 album Suspension and Displacement. It has everything from an anatomy lecture surrounded by ominous phasing rhythms ("Consider Figure #3") to dawn-of-man shuffling rites with exotic percussion ("A City With Two Tales"). The only adjective you can eliminate with certainty is "predictable."

King Crimson - The Sheltering Sky

King Crimson have gone through too many line-up changes to enumerate here, but the early eighties version that debuted with the album Discipline remains one of its most potent. The long instrumental The Sheltering Sky eschews the Gamelan rock of the rest of the album, and pours forth a flowing and inspired lyricism.

One of Fripp's best instrumental creations.