music

I heard a piece of music last night, "Variations for the Healing of Arinushka" by one of my favorite composers, Arvo Pärt, on the local (but not really local anymore) classical radio station WILL FM 90.9. I noted down the title before falling asleep.

Today, I headed to Amazon to see if I could find an album with this particular recording of the piece by Kalle Randalu, an Estonian pianist. It turns out this track is from the soundtrack of Ken Burns' film "The War", and not surprisingly, there's a lot of other great music on the soundtrack. So I was a click away from buying the MP3 version, when I thought I might as well check the CD version and see if there were any additional tracks on it.

There weren't, but guess what? The MP3 album ($9.99) costs $2 more than the CD ($7.98)! What the hell? I hope this is an accident and not the start of a trend. I might as well pirate the MP3s while the CD is in the mail. Read more »

I heard "The King's Hunting Jig" on WILL a week or two ago and got the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble album from Amazon MP3. Having sung barbershop for several years now, I've developed a taste and respect for ensembles that have this sort of tight harmony and perfect intonation. Other musicians that have struck a chord with me recently: The King's Singers (listen to Greensleeves!), the Kassiopeia Quintet (Gesualdo's madrigals), and Moira Smiley & Voco (their performance at BLEMF was on Harmonia recently).

If you use last.fm, I made a pipe for recently weekly artists (for a given user), since they don't seem to deliver that information in RSS format for some reason. The whole point of this post was to share a link to the Philip Jones Brass Ensemble from my feed and show how nicely information can flow from one place to another, but Google Reader stripped all the links out of my note. Fix it, Google!

Also nice: moc and lastfmsubmitd.

This is what happens when I put my iPod on random during the walk into work in the morning:

• "Everything's Under Control" — Meat Beat Manifesto — Actual Sounds and Voices
• "Reveille" — The Black Watch — Proud Heritage
• "Éirigh Is Cuir Ort Do Chuid Éadaigh Cóiríu" — Clannad — Dúlamán
• "Honey Medley" — Max Q — Discovery
• "L'inverno: III. Allegro" — Nigel Kennedy — Vivaldi: The Four Seasons
• "Suite No. 10 "KA": II" — Aki Takahashi — Giacinto Scelsi: The Piano Works 3
• "Return of the Jedi: 'Jabba the Hut'" — The Boston Pops — Out of This World
• "Wie Glauben" — Carter Burwell — The Big Lebowski
• "Neon Lights" — Kraftwerk — The Man-Machine
• "Goriri" — Tortoise — A Lazarus Taxon

This has got to be about the coolest performance I've seen, and not just because it was bloody cold and windy. The Continuum keyboard by itself is fascinating; it's essentially a piano keyboard with a continuum of pitches and an extra dimension of modulation. But it's clever: It can tune itself so that you don't have to be precise in order to play in tune, but it doesn't get in your way when you want to bend pitches or slide up and down. The output is MIDI, which controls a synthesizer, which in turn modulates a pair of Tesla coils!

Zounds! The crackling of the electricity through the air is music, and not just something you could generously construe as music, but totally rocking tunes, polyphonic, melodic and harmonic, expressive, and dangerous.

Here's one more short video. Hopefully EOH will post some high-quality videos with better sound; it looked like they had some decent recording equipment set up.

Congratulations to the people at the 2008 UIUC Engineering Open House who put this together!