More than a year ago, I posted a question on Ask Metafilter for suggestions of Romantic-era classical works.
My archetype for the Romantic era is Hector Berlioz, and there hasn’t been a work of his I’ve encountered that I ever liked. One night I tuned to the local classical station during a workout, and the piece playing over the speakers alternately bored and annoyed me. The announcer came on and identified the offending work as Berlioz’s Romeo and Juliet suite. Figures.
I’m a big fan of the Classical era — Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven — and of course, I listen to a lot of music written after 1900. But the 19th Century? Big gap in my listening, and for many years, intentionally so.
But at some point in 2008, I reached a point where a steady diet of serialism, minimalism, expressionism and other latter-day -ism got … tiring. So I reached out to the Internets to explore a century for which I still have a chip on my shoulder.
A friend of mine pointed me to Project52, something like a year-long Holidailies, but instead of updating your site everyday, you update every week.
Since I’m employing GTD, I made a list of all the titles I’ve got on various playlists. As of this writing, that list has 93 items.
I don’t want to spend the next 93 weeks writing about those items.
Of course, I could group a lot of them into round-ups, and some will get deleted outright. (I’m looking at you, Van Tomiko cover albums.) But I think for the backlog I’ve accumulated, an extended Holidailies approach would be more suitable.
Adding to that backlog, though, does me no favors.
Even though I reviewed Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso I, it’s not the only recording I had in rotation.
I was listening to two recordings of his chamber music, in addition to the Kronos’ set of string quartets. His Symphony No. 4 and Requiem are in the wings, but these days I’m not fond of orchestral works. (The way they’re recorded doesn’t allow the kind of immediacy as chamber music.)
I would have liked to review them all, but I would be repeating myself. So instead, I’m relegating the other recordings in a round-up.
For nearly 21 years, only one work defined my perception of Alfred Schnittke — his third string quartet, which Kronos Quartet recorded for its third studio album Winter Was Hard.
It took a long while before I got around to listening to the rest of his string quartets, but once I did, I became curious about his other works.
So off to eMusic I went to download a number of recordings on the Bis label, and the richness of his string quartets were amplified by the heterogeneity of his orchestrations.
Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso I is often cited as a major work, and it’s easy to hear why. His "polystylistic" writing can get dense, melody peeking out of clouds of harmony, dissonance giving way to consonance, only to dissolve back into a hazy texture.
At the ripe age of 13, I declared to my family that ABC’s How to be a Zillionaire! was one of the best albums ever recorded.
Ah. Youth.
Of course, I would go on to expand my listening palette, and for a spell, I’d dismiss How to be a Zillionaire! as an exploratory detour of an immature music fan. Or was it?
How to be a Zillionaire! may not be the best album ever recorded — even less so compared to ABC’s bigger hit, The Lexicon of Love — but it’s not entirely bad either. Trashy, yes. Bad? Not really.
At the very least, the album cover art is pretty spectacular. (Best viewed in all glorious 12 inches.)
When eMusic announced it would carry titles from Sony labels, I wasn’t very impressed. Yes, I’ve downloaded quite a number of Sony titles since they became available, but most of the time, I would wish I could go crazy with the Nonesuch catalog.
eMusic has struck an agreement with Warner Music Group to carry about 10,000 titles from the label’s catalog. I would have posted this news sooner, but I was too busy filling up my "Save for Later" list.
My introduction to ABC was not the dapper Chic-meets-punk sophistication of The Lexicon of Love. No, it was the cartoon-y Chic-meets-DX7 trash of How to be a Zillionaire!
I bet if the order were reversed, I would find How to be a Zillionaire! thin, vapid and grudgingly appealing. As it stands, I still like Zillionaire!, but I question how I could have gone so long without knowing the wonder that is The Lexicon of Love.
It’s tough not to compare ABC with another band influenced by disco and punk — Duran Duran. Where the latter skewed its formula closer to the rock side, the former went for something more glamorous.
Between the lush strings, disco beats and funk guitars, The Lexicon of Love screams "fashion." Producer Trevor Horn’s imprint can be heard all over the album — a few more guitars and some gayer content, and The Lexicon of Love could have morphed into Welcome to the Pleasuredome.
The unfortunate death of Fuji Fabric’s Shimura Masahiko pretty much overshadowed another bit of news released on Christmas Day: Furukawa Miki is releasing a new album on Feb. 17. The 14-track album is titled Very and includes the single "Saihate", which was released on Dec. 9. Not much information is available beyond the brief post on Furukawa’s official site, but I noticed the catalog number looks like she’s back in the Sony field. Her first two solo albums were released by BMG Japan.
I can’t help it. Anything that I buy or download is potential content for this site.
Sometimes, I’ll listen to something with no intention to review it, only to like it so much I want to talk about it. Other times, I’ll listen to something with every intention to review it, only to end up feeling ambivalent about it. It’s easy to hate an album or to love an album. Merely liking? Merely not hating? Much, much, much harder.
So that’s where this GTD thing comes in — I combed through a few past entries to come up with one big list of music I’ve consumed over the past few months, about which I haven’t written much. I hope having everything on one screen gives me a better sense of how to prioritize.
Do I have anything to say about those Felix Mendelssohn chamber works I downloaded? Is there anything else to say about the Replacements’ Let It Be? Do I want to subject myself to another spin of Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimist, knowing full well Department of Eagles’ In Ear Park is way better?
Maybe GTD will help. And for the first order of business, let’s take out the trash.
Wow. So I made it to the last day of Holidailies. Of course, it helps to cheat.
Allow me to confess that I’m currently writing this entry on New Year’s Eve, during a time when the office is pretty much empty. Most of the entries I’ve written for this month were done ahead of time.
Yes, it helps to have a backlog of music to review, news to discuss and a year to review. But did I really need to spend five entries counting down my favorite albums of the decade? (Padding.) I did enjoy writing about my trip to Japan, which was very tangentially musical. But that kind of personal writing would have gone on my Vox site instead.
I did like the fact I created a new channel for music-themed book reviews, and I like how I’ve gotten back into the habit of recreational reading. I hope this fascination with non-fiction lasts me for the rest of the year.
I also hope this GTD thing keeps. Maybe the shift in priorities about which I fretted at the start of the month is a good thing.
None of my entries earned special recognition for Best of Holidailies. Eh, I figured music punditry wouldn’t go over well on a project based more on personal storytelling.
And as I predicted, I don’t think I’ve captured any new readers as a result. (If I did, holler out in the comments section. Did you enjoy the Holidailies Audio Guide to Musicwhore.org?)
I have to say I’m exhausted. That’s a lot of writing. And this weekend I’m taking a trip to San Francisco as research in my effort to relocate from Austin. In other words, the radio silence that befell this site before the trip to Japan is re-emerging once again.
Don’t worry. I still have that big-ass backlog to get through.