Top Artists for the week ending Sunday 25 February 2007
(Artist, # of tracks played)
Aaron Copland 4
This artist - I mean, American composer of chiefly ballets - exemplifies the issues I'm having with classical music. I bought most of it from eMusic, where you get a 30-minute unbroken cut of a symphony or whatever for 1/10 the cost of the same thing split up into Allegro Vivaces and so on. Naturally, I go for the prior option. The problem is that half-hour tracks take a huge amount of dedication to sit down and listen to, and they don't exactly fit well into playlists. So one of these days I'm hopefully going to split these files and re-compress them at 128K, because the Appalachian Spring Suite is seriously taking up 100Mb and I've only listened to it twice. Or I could just keep it on my external drive.
I’ve taken to scrobbling fake 31-second tracks with the titles of movements along with such long tracks to even out the submission count somewhat.
Antonín Dvořák 6
On Facebook, I had him under "favorite music" with Anathallo for months, even though I had one track by Anathallo and none by him... that's what can happen when you find something awesome on eMusic and then don't download it for months.
Also when you’re trying to impress people. I’m better now. I just dealt with Anathallo - I bought nearly every track I could find - so now it's Dvorak's turn. (I've found some Copeland, the band, on there as well, interestingly.) What I like about Dvorak, aside from the same ("Anyone think Andro and Dorvaq are actually the same person?" "Can some wrap Andro up in a carpet?!?") is how close to modern film music some of his material is. I know they say it's all Wagner, and Wagner's music "may have been satanically influenced,"
which would lead some people on an interesting path of reasoning. Moya Brennan is a Christian new age artist. One woman said that Moya’s style of music alone makes her feel uneasy, regardless of lyrics.
Franz Schubert 16
This guy's piano-rumbling on the Music & Art Appreciation CDs was fascinatingly similar to some Halo concept work (fast sketch by
Martin O'Donnell) which I'd downloaded from the Bungie official site, so I had to check out his other stuff. I haven't found anything else like it, but it turned out to be a pretty good indicator of his ability not to be boring.
Frédéric Chopin 6
I downloaded one of his waltzes after someone played it at an Open Recital last year. Then I accidentally downloaded a few more, but the first (only sure which when I hear it) is by far the best. One of my bored/nervous habits is to move things in increasingly complex patterns so that the total usage of every possible position remains fixed to fit some grander scheme. I get that feeling of controlled completeness from Chopin. My pet frog is named after Chopin's girlfriend, "George Sand."
Someone said Michael Nyman's theme for The Piano rips off Chopin's Piano Sonata No. 3: Largo. I call BS. It's great how higher-than-thy-art classical freaks always have an "original version" of whatever movie theme you like which turns out to be BORING! With the exception of "If I Had Words" from Babe, which is pretty much straight from Camille Saint-Saëns. And other exceptions which I haven't bothered to look into because the ones I have have been, by and large, so disappointing.
George Gershwin 7
The unfavorably named
Rhapsody In Blue was adapted as a track in SimCity 3000. The SC3K version makes a bit more sense to be, but I have a sixteen-minute cut of the original, and it rules. New York City rules. James and the Giant Peach rules!
Oscar Hammerstein 7
I got a few instrumental suites from eMusic. This is probably the best music for which I inherited a liking from my parents. And everybody recognizes it, which is nice in a
Homestar Runner sort of way.
Edvard Grieg 8
I couldn't figure out what "
Morning Mood" was for several months. Finally I was saved by an eMusic list of classical music used in Bugs Bunny / Looney Tunes shorts, which also put
Franz Liszt on my radar. The whole series of which Morning Mood is a part is seriously good music, grand swelling and beautiful.
Igor Stravinsky 9
A bit edgier than thrash metal, but compelling nevertheless.
Stravinsky is like black metal. I have full-length cuts of the Rite of Spring, The Firebird, and Petrushka, all adapted well for solo piano. I've checked out samples of Schoenberg and Bartok, and a lot of their stuff is easily good as well.
Really? I've forgotten. The curriculum we used had to choose the most representative pieces of each artist's work, not what would most likely appeal to our ear.
London Philharmonic Orchestra & Peter Scholes 10 and
The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra 10
Okay, I was listening to "classical not film music," so here are the orchestral versions of classic rock hits (and Disney songs). This is mainly Pink Floyd, though Queen is also on my shopping list and I've heard there's a Beatles album out somewhere. But if you really want to find the definition of amazing, check out the Bluegrass tribute to Relient K.
http://www.emusic.com/album/10997/10997006.html
I now have Symphonic Pink Floyd tagged under Pink Floyd, with (Symphonic) after each song title. I feel better about that. No orchestra should ever be credited as an artist, unless everyone in it helped to compose something.
Y’know, when composers team up (Harry Gregson-Williams and John Powell, Hans Zimmer & James Newton Howard, Iva Davies, Christopher Gordon & Richard Tognetti), they should give themselves a group name, like “The Crayon Melters.” That’d be more fun. Also musicals, the cast and composer should make themselves a band name for each and every recording (and I don’t mean “Electro Poop! 2023 National Touring Cast,” that is NEVER a good artist name). ESPECIALLY when the composer is already dead at the time of recording.
Michael Nyman 16
Someone recommended Nyman to me when I asked for an ID on a piece of orchestral music from Bill Nye the Science Guy's Lakes & Ponds episode. My initial impression was that "minimalism sounds really
fresh." Now I can only describe some of what he's done as "rapturous." Turns out he also composed the Gattaca score. Awesome composer man.
His scores for Greenaway films are incredibly strange, but often really good in their own absurd way.
Philip Glass 14
I think Nyman is better, but Glass reminds me of
Martin Kiszko's Ocellus Suite - music from the BBC series/PBS Nature special, Alien Empire, AKA the most awe-inspiring nature documentary I've ever seen, which (along with an episode about a pioneer of insect motion photography) motivated me to pursue filmmaking as a career. I may have been an unknowing fan of minimalism since 1999.
Kiszko confirms this, describing the work (aside from the title theme) as “pure minimalism” in the liner notes. Kewl rly. A simple theme of perpetually repeated work in an ant colony renewed itself in my mind years after I heard it, until I finally won the CD last year and, um, heard it for the first time in stereo. (True story: my parents could have exchanged our mono TV for a stereo one days after they bought it, but in my solitude I had developed an emotional commitment to the mono set and plead for its retention. We use it to this day. Need a converter for next year.)
I have exactly this much to say about Philip Glass. His 2nd symphony (I think it was the 2nd…) sounds like his score to The Illusionist to me. They say Hans Zimmer’s scores sound the same, well, maybe Philip Glass’s really do. Maybe I'm a Mohenjo-Daroan.
Hildegard von Bingen 10
I made some preliminary investigations and ended up purchasing several of these simple melodies. It's not the most brilliant music, but it's pleasant to listen to, and sometimes the singer(s) hit an insanely high note so flawlessly that a single note becomes a thing of piercing beauty which cannot be ignored.
More often, it hurts my ears.
Ludwig van Beethoven 13
The BBC should have put the out-of-print out-of-stock out-of-mind Ocellus Suite up online for free download, but they decided to offer Beethoven's nine symphonies instead. This has made a lot of classical record execs very angry and they widely regard it as a bad move.
HOW DARE THE BBC INTRODUCE NEW LISTENERS TO BEETHOVEN
I only showed up for the 1st, 2nd, 4th, and 5th symphonies, but I can get the others on eMusic for under $5 so no worries. I need to support some orchestras any way, right? Phwoar!
I actually just got the rest of the symphonies two weeks ago, over a year after writing this. So my favorites, descending, are 9, 5, 7, and 2. My preference is soooo mainstream. Hey, now I have the Die Hard music.
Earthsuit 16
Yeah... they put their last album up free online, so I downloaded it. Uh, here.
http://monopedilos.com/staticpages/index.php/earthsuit_troms
Thanks for leading me to
Anathallo's "Hymns,"
MichaelGeorge. :)
The Afters 12
I saw this group in my
at the time, top last.fm neighbor's lists, went on iTunes for some previews, and immediately bought the disc from Amazon.com. I'm a music-buying MACHINE!
I like this line. A lot.
It's like the sun swallowed up by the earth
Like atomics bombs in reverse
As if a glass could contain the sea
That's the way You are in me
tobyMac 62
I bought the new album
(Portable Sounds). I had a subversive reason to, but I won't say what it was. The highs are about as good as
Momentum gets, and the rest is much better than much of the stuff on Momentum, which was about the fifth CD I ever "intentfully acquisitioned" - one of several mainstream CCM releases I asked my parents to buy, having never heard nearly any of the music, based solely on articles in Focus on the Family's Breakaway magazine.
I've come a rather long way.
Portable Sounds isn't that great, but I really don't like more than 6 songs on Momentum either. Those 5 or 6 songs are rockin' awesome, though.
And yes, Kevin Max was the best musician of the three.
ApologetiX 6
To me, ApologetiX was at first a connection to the "real world" of popular music. There are quite a few songs I like but don't want to listen to, and parodies offer relief, even though 'GetiX doesn't want to be about providing an alternative for the isolationist Christian subculture; they see themselves as outreach-oriented. (I was actually introduced to them as a serious alternative, also by Focus on the Family - go figure.)
Current happenings:
Midnattsol's new album ("Nordlys") is really good, in that I think its songs songs are a lot catchier than last time. POV A: This is important to me, because if a song isn't memorable, I'm not going to go back and listen to it often. The band may get more attention than their talent deserves because of their connection to Liv Kristine, but everyone improves with practice. POV B: They're selling out and going for a more mainstream-accessible sound. Well, if that were true, they wouldn't have two songs entirely in Norwegian, would they?
I've intended to get Emilie Autumn's stuff from eMusic for a while now, and finally bought Enchant tonight. The personal/originality aspect reminds me of Joanna Newsom, except I can actually get into this. It's strange, but very cool; it's weird & wonderful. I expect I'll like her victoriandustrial stuff also.
Aaron Copland
