Just the notion of an album of George Crumb orchestral works drew me to this recording. Crumb’s pieces seem so exclusively suited for small ensembles, it’s difficult to imagine the heavy mass of an orchestra occupying the sparse nooks and crannies of his scores. I can just picture the concert hall swallowing up his pieces’ signature textures.
It’s not surprising to discover Crumb has so far only written five pieces for orchestra, two of which were recorded by the Louisville Orchestra. Although Crumb employs the entire orchestra for the Varizioni, his economic orchestration still makes the piece feel largely like chamber music.
He makes few odd demands on the orchestra, and the piece, with its 12-tone theme, feels relatively conventional. That’s not to say the discordant bursts of strings and brass are at all tonal — this score is thoroughly modern. Compared to Black Angels or Ancient Voices for Children, Varizioni sounds like, well, music. (For readers unfamiliar with Crumb’s work, the background music for the TV show Lost is essentially Crumb made palatable for prime time.)
Still, Crumb manages to give the orchestra a workout, and the piece can be as thrilling as it is intense.
John Corigliano has an Oscar and a number of composition prizes under his belt. His father was a renowned concertmaster for the New York Philharmonic. So he’s got some serious cred in classical music circles.
And yet the First Edition reissue of orchestral works performed by the Louisville Orchestra didn’t seem all that impressive. Perhaps the fact I was listening to this disc as well as First Edition’s reissues of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and George Crumb colored my perception. Corigliano’s set of works doesn’t possess the timbral adventurousness of Crumb or the lean expressiveness of Zwilich.
But perhaps history plays a role as well. The very first Corigliano piece I listened to was his Symphony No. 1, a work inspired by the NAMES Project AIDS quilt. The piece won a Grammy Award for best contemporary composition, and it’s tough not to feel the anguish, anger and darkness of the piece.
The works on the First Edition release feel quaint by comparison.
Composers in the classical tradition — even living ones — aren’t immune to fashion. Maybe they don’t cycle as quickly as their pop music counterparts, but any study of music history follows the "trends" that came into — and out of — favor with composers and audiences of the time.
Just as Nirvana spawned its share of imitators, so too did Ludwig van Beethoven. And just as the White Stripes was called neo-garage and Eryka Badu neo-soul, Igor Stravinsky wasn’t above dabbling in neo-classical, and serialism? Oh, so stylish in the post-war years.
The labels are still getting thrown today — minimalism, post-minimalism, post-classicism, neo-Romanticism, totalism. Ellen Taaffe Zwilich doesn’t follow any "-isms", so states the liner notes from the First Edition reissue of orchestral works performed by the Louisville Symphony. Rather, her works concentrate on the rigorous development of motifs. If I were so lazy, I’d call that neo-Hadynism.
I’ve compared Levi Kreis to Onitsuka Chihiro numerous times, but like any such comparison, it’s not exact.
Kreis makes his R&B influences plainly known, while Onitsuka draws more from the Carole King school of balladry. When either artist cuts loose from the confines of the piano ballad, the results are strikingly different.
But within the context of the piano, their similarities are more perceptual than musical. In plainspeak, I don’t usually like this kind of stuff, but I like it far more when they play it.
Kreis’ first album, One of the Ones, is pretty much him and the piano. For such limited instrumentation, the album is incredibly expressive.
I owned Uncle Tupleo’s No Depression before, and at the time, I recognized that it was good — just not what I was in the mood to listen to. It became a victim of a cash crunch and was sold to a used music shop.
I’m not sure what prompted me to give the album a second shot, especially since it was remastered a number of years ago. But in the basket it went, and I’m glad it did.
No Depression became the namesake for a style of music called any number of things — alt-country, perhaps the most enduring. There’s even a magazine named after the album.
It’s almost difficult to go back to an album that directly beget Wilco and Son Volt, while opening the door for the Old ’97s, Whiskeytown, Tift Merritt and Mindy Smith. So many bands sound like No Depression, it’s almost easy to hold a grudge against it.
I don’t take Enigma half as seriously as Michael Cretu does. If anything, his attempts at high mindedness usually end up being unintentionally humorous. I mean, what could be more obvious than sampling Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana on his previous album, The Screen Behind the Mask?
But at least he tries, and even if sampling Gregorian chant seems gimmicky, it still takes guts to do it.
At first, I listened to A Posteriori just to see if Cretu was still reaching beyond his means. In true music fan OCD fashion, I alphabetized my playlist and put Enigma right next to Eluvium’s copia. As a result, A Posteriori would start as copia would end. All that to say, I listened to A Posteriori more times than I planned.
And I have to say, it may actually be the first really decent Enigma album, if not ever then at least since MCMXC a.D.
How can you call an album "perfect background music" without having it come across as an insult? Because honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever consciously listened to Horn of Plenty by Grizzly Bear.
The album’s transparently sparse songs hover so close to a perceptual horizon that focus would dispel the music’s hypnotic charm. Yeah, I don’t know what that last sentence says either. I can only liken it to that time between dreaming and wakefulness, when the conscious mind can’t tell it’s slipping into a deep sleep.
Extend that feeling for the entire length of Horn of Plenty, and that’s what it feels like listening to this album.
James William Hindle is a British queer folkie. Does the world really need another, British or otherwise? If his third album Town Feeling is any indication, the answer is yes.
Two things set Hindle apart — good songwriting and a grizzled voice. Hindle’s music is actually more country than folk, with pedal steel guitars and brushed snares setting the sonic backdrop.
You can picture the clichéd tumbleweeds tossing in the wind on "Birthday Candle", while the finger-picking on "Love You More" and "Sleeping Still" is far more rural than what Garrin Benfield or Dudley Saunders offer. The waltz meter of "Dog and Boy" is pure country, as are the twangy guitars on "Dark is Coming".
Much ado was made of Harry Connick, Jr. back in the late ’80s and early ’90s. He was simultaneously hailed and derided for being the next Frank Sinatra, having scored commercial success with albums of jazz standards.
In the mid-’90s, Connick ditched that bread and butter by releasing a pair of rock albums — She in 1994, Star Turtle in 1996. I’m not much an adherent to the great American songbook, but Connick looked like he was committing career suicide at the time, and I wanted to hear what it sounded like.
A "Harry Connick, Jr. rock album" didn’t turn out to be Pat Boone crooning metal hits or Garth Brooks indulging a rock alter ego. Rather, Connick turned to the music of his youth.
She is a showcase for New Orleans music, that mix of rock and funk emblematic of the town’s party atmosphere. "Between Us" pretty much sold me on the album. A smooth song with a nice beat, "Between Us" gave the sense Connick’s cool voice was absolutely at home.
The list of bands I should be listening to will always be longer than the list of bands I am listening to, and the older I get, the further back in time I’m reaching on the former list.
The Replacements is a band I should have been listening to when I was growing up. At one point, I owned the final two Mats albums on cassette — Don’t Tell a Soul and All Shook Down (although All Shook Down was pretty much a Paul Westerberg solo album credited to the Replacements.) I liked Don’t Tell a Soul but not enough to turn me into a Replacements fan.
I noticed in the last six months, the opening riff of "Talent Show" became an earworm — I’d hum it or hear it in my mind out of the blue. On a buying spree that netted both R.E.M.’s And I Feel Fine and Siouxsie and the Banshees’ The Very Best, I threw in Don’t You Know Who I Think I Was? with them. It’s both shocking and exciting to discover something on which I missed out.