Pursuing praxis

January 14, 2008

Sopranos

Filed under: Music, Creators

I’ve recently re-discovered Sarah Brightman. Or should I say, recently re-aquired both a tolerance and enjoyment of the female voice. I usually prefer male singers, when there’s singing involved, usually in the baritone range, despite the popularity of the Three (Four?) Tenors.

The catalyst was stopping for ice cream at Ben and Jerry’s the other day. It was an empty shop, as is usual for some reason, so I sat and listened to the music as it hopped from genre to genre. My listening went from passive to active when this beautiful, slow and haunting duet between two sopranos came on. I was so intrigued by it I asked one of the attendants if he could find out what it was for me. Turns out the store speakers were just plugged into his laptop. The artist was Sarah Brightman, the song Pie Jesu, from Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Requiem. The second soprano was actually a treble - a young boy.

Now, it turns out I’m not a huge fan of Sarah Brightman, especially her newer work. She has an amazing voice, but there’s something about her eyes, that seems to translate to her voice, that doesn’t sit quite right with me. But, this song was recorded in 1985, I think, and doesn’t seem have that trait, whatever it is. It seems more serious, in a good way. And, of course, the song’s sparse Latin lyrics are religious, but that doesn’t seem critical to the piece. It has a churchy sound anyway because of the tone, and the choir-boy-in-a-cathedral sound, but I have always liked that hollow sound, and churches don’t have a monopoly on it. (It would be funny if churches tried to have a monopoly, or if someone claimed they did and tried to ‘regulate’ them).

Anyway, you can listen to the full song on YouTube. I don’t know what the video is about - seems like it was supposed to be for a movie, like a war movie or something. Not sure. 

September 29, 2007

Movie theme music

Filed under: Music, Lists

I’ve been hankering for good movie theme music again. And these sorts of hankerings usually lead to a list that quickly recedes into obscurity as my ADHD brain flits to something new.

So, the context of this list: Music without lyrics that’s a recurrent theme, or the opening or closing track for a movie which I have seen. Further: I’m looking for the kind of music that makes me want to go for a hard five mile run - the sort of music that functions as pre-endorphins to the real endorphins you get after you do something hard or achieve something important to you. For me that usually involves some combination of kettle drums, french horns, cellos, baritone voice, a trumpet volley, a 75 piece orchestra and/or full choir. I’m open to electric guitar, steel guitar, amped violin, giant Japanese drums, mass tap dancing, and the odd ethnic/world/non-standard instrument or vocalization. But whatever the instruments, the music - composition, melody, harmony, all the rest - has to grab your brain and heart and stomach and take them all for a ride. A.k.a. Knock Your Socks Off Music. KYSOM.

To begin, then:

Theme to Pirates of the Caribbean (I): The Black Pearl, Skull and Crossbones (oh yeah), He’s a Pirate
Robin Hood Prince of Theives: Overture and Prisoner of the Crusades
The Hunt for Red October: Hymn to Red October  (did you know that there’s a track called ‘Putin’s Demise’?)
Jurassic Park (of course): Theme from Jurassic Park, End Credits
Indiana Jones: The Raider’s March
Run, Lola, Run: Running Two
Gladiator: Now We Are Free
ET: Adventures on Earth
Back to the Future: Theme
Star Trek: The Voyage Home: Hospital chase
Superman: Main Theme (man I miss this music!)
Star Wars: A New Hope: Main Theme
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: Prologue Hedwig’s Theme,
Goldeneye: Goldeneye by Tina Turner (I’ll make an exception for lyrics)
Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Desert Capriccio, Night Flight,
The Thomas Crown Affair (1999): Black and White X5, Glider Pt 1, Glider Pt2
XXX (exception for lyrics): Rammstein’s Feuer Frei

Movies I haven’t seen but know the music to:

Excalibur and Glory: Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana: O Fortuna (this will rock your world, especially if you hear it live)
Apocolypse Now: Wagner’s Die Walkure (Ride of the Valkyries)
Brief Encounter: Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 (heaven on a stick)
2001: A Space Odyssey: Strauss’s Introduction from "Also Sprach Zarathustra"
Somewhere in Time: Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini
My Life: The William Tell Overture

June 27, 2007

Jurassic Park

In unrelated and present news: This rockin’ coffee shop I’m in at an ungodly-early hour of the morning usually plays straight up classical music, unless it’s closing time, and then they blast Brazilian mariachi music or something equally intrusive. It took me a minute to recognize the music just now - and it was the theme music to Jurassic Park by John Williams. (If you like his music, he took a lot of cues from Dvorak. Check out Dvorak’s 9th Symphony, "From the New World." Really.) (PS: as a favor to those who don’t know the missing accents on Dvorak’s name and what they mean: it’s pronounced like Duh-VORE-zhock, where that "zh" is like a cross between "sh" "z" and "j" sounds. It’s Czech.)

Wow. It’s been a long time; I’d forgotten how awesome that music is, and it still evokes the giddy awe (and visuals) of the scientists arriving at the island of dinosaurs, "pristine" jungle amid state-of-the-art technology. That was a great movie. Great music, great graphics, decent book, cool dinos, scary dinos, scientist-heroes, a man in black, the lawyer gets eaten while sitting on a toilet, and you’ll never look at rings in a glass of water quite the same again. Plus the follow-up book was kinda heavy on theoretical math (for a high schooler, that is). I’m kind of a wuss when it comes to suspence and scariness, but if I had to pick, getting hunted by Deinonychus in a stainless steel kitchen, or having a piece of plexi-glass between you and the business end of a T. rex is the way to go. 

Who’s Deinonychus, you say? Deinonychus is "Velociraptor" in Jurassic Park. They combined the real  Deinonychus’s scary body and wicked-cool claws with the spiffy name of Velociraptor for the movie. I mean, it’s Hollywood’s schtick to rewrite the facts of nature and science for box-office sales. Real Velociraptors were, if I remember correctly, about knee- or hip-height, and had fingers about as long as their forearms, with smaller claws, and were more snatchers than eviscerators. The morphology of their wrists, as well as the proportions of their forelimbs, are "adaptations" previously thought to only be part of the package-deal for flight in birds. Turns out the proportions of the forelimbs and shape of some of these wrist bones (and probably other stuff) is needed for both flight and snatch-n-run predation. The rest of their bodies was very obviously unrelated to flight; they were made for dog-eat-dog (Deinonychus-eat-Deinonychus?) life on the ground. So you get this piece-mealing of very purposeful traits "leading up to" or even concurrent with the emergence of powered flight capability in birds, and in close-but-separate branches of the family tree, rather than a clean, exclusivist monopoly of useful-for-flight morphologies marching towards the acquisition of avian flight. Being bird-like in some very key morphologies was not the sole province of birds. [Note to self: double-check this with labmates for any slight errors]. [Self: See Sarah’s comment below.]

 

Of course, as I recall it, the over-riding message of Jurassic Park was "Don’t mess with nature," which I disagree with. You gotta mess with nature in light of nature, and not dictate your terms to it; but messing with nature is critically important in general. As Sir Francis Bacon emphasized, "Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed." It’s the purpose of that bubble-shaped boney structure sitting atop your vertebral column, the latter which also broadly supports a body that is the bipedal, terrestrial version of sushi. I like "Man tames Nature" themes, not "Nature tames Man" themes.

Still, fabulous music. Makes my cd-buying sense start to itch. Really badly. Argh!

And where the devil is the soundtrack to any of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies? That too is half the appeal of the movie (the other three-quarters being an amalgamation of ships, bad hats, heavy eyeliner, and subtle, witty retorts). 

[June 30: Methinks I spelled Caribbean wrong? Surely not Pirates. In any case, my labmate helped me fix this hole in my music library. And I’ll be watching Pirates 3 tonight. I’m looking forward to Pirates 5 and 9 and 24 and however many they make.] 


From Sarah:

Sorry to go all dino weenie on you(and even worse, I\’m about to correct your theropod comment, and even even worse, I\’m talking about dromaeosaurs), but velociraptors were very similar to the JP evil beasties in most aspects but size. And Deinonychus was, alas, also too small to be the nasty raptors in Jurassic Park. Deinonychus was about 4 feet tall at the most.

However, there was a dromaeosaur about that size, Utahraptor. It was named in 1993 and was about 6 feet tall. It\’s also one of the three dinosaurs that appear in every day\’s installment of Dinosaur Comics at http://www.qwantz.com

Some good reconstructions:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Velociraptor_skeletal_by_Scott_Hartman.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Deinonychus-scale.png

http://www.marshalls-art.com/images/ipaleo/paleopg25/utahraptor_final300web.jpg

http://www.qwantz.com/archive/001019.html

October 30, 2006

Offspring: Defy You

Filed under: Music, Quotes

Artist: Offspring Lyrics
Album: Orange County soundtrack
Song: Defy You Lyrics

You may push me around
But you cannot win
You may throw me down
But I’ll rise again
The more you say
The more I defy you
So get out of my face

You cannot stop us
You cannot bring us down
Never give up
We go on and on
You’ll never break us
Never bring us down
We are alive!

All my will
All my strength
Rip it out
Start again

The wind blows
I’ll lean into the wind
My angle grows
I’ll use it to win
The more you say
The more I defy you
So get out of my way

Can you leave it all behind?
Can you leave it all behind?
Cause you can’t go back
You can’t go back

September 7, 2006

The Steel I

Filed under: Music, Quotes

Shadow stabbing
by Cake

Adjectives on the typewriter
He moves his words like a prizefighter
The frenzied pace of the mind inside the cell

The man on the street might just as well be
The man on the street might just as well
The man on the street might just as well be

Outside, outside the walls
Out there you don’t hear the echoes and calls
But the steel eye, tight jaw,
Say it all, say it all
But the white paint, plastic saints
Say it all, say it all, say it all

Say it all (say it all)
Say it all (say it all)
Say it all (say it all)
Say somebody’s got to say it all
Somebody’s got to say it all

I’m so nervous, I’m so tense
My heart can’t forget about its self defense
The air is so hot and my breath comes fast
I thumb the cool blade but I know this can’t last
I thumb the cool blade but I know this can’t last

Outside, outside the walls
Out there you don’t hear the echoes and calls
But the steel eye, tight jaw
Say it all, say it all
But the white paint, plastic saints
Say it all, say it all, say it all

Say it all (say it all)
Say it all (say it all)
Say it all (say it all)

Say somebody’s got to say it all
Somebody’s got to say it all

Adjectives on the typewriter
He moves his words like a prize fighter
The frenzied pace of the mind inside the cell

The man on the street might just as well be
The man on the street might just as well
The man on the street might just as well be

September 3, 2006

Hero

Filed under: Music, Quotes

"Hero" lyrics
by Chad Kroeger, featuring Josie Scott

I am so high, I can hear heaven.
I am so high, I can hear heaven.
Oh but heaven, no heaven don’t hear me.

And they say that a hero can save us.
I’m not gonna stand here and wait.
I’ll hold on to the wings of the eagles.
Watch as we all fly away.

Someone told me that love would all save us.
But how can that be?
Look what love gave us.
A world full of killing, and blood-spilling, that
world never came.

And they say that a hero can save us.
I’m not gonna stand here and wait.
I’ll hold on to the wings of the eagles.
Watch as we all fly away.

Now that the world isn’t ending, it’s love that I’m sending to you.
It isn’t the love of a hero, that’s why I fear it won’t do.

And they say that a hero can save us.
I’m not gonna stand here and wait.
I’ll hold on to the wings of the eagles.
Watch as we all fly away.

And they’re watching us (Watching us)
They’re watching us (watching us) as we all fly away.
And they’re watching us (Watching us)
They’re watching us (watching us) as we all fly away.
And they’re watching us (Watching us)
They’re watching us (watching us) as we all fly away.

August 27, 2006

Purging the playlist

Filed under: Music, Quotes

I’m becoming a lyrics snob. Snob in the best sense: discriminating, with standards and a critical eye, ready to dish both criticism and sing high praise. Mostly the latter. Mostly I’m just putting words to things I already know, but have never verbalized before.

This change in musical taste is, of course, a by-product of many hours and trains of thought on other topics - a conclusion I didn’t seek for its own sake. It’s just kind of happened, and I noticed it, and now I act and reflect and that’s that.

The good news is that my playlist isn’t populated by just one or two artists. Some old, some new, but all newly chosen and appreciated. Today, the praise goes to this Bon Jovi song. I won’t speak for the corpus of Bon Jovi’s work, though.

 

"It’s My Life"

This ain’t a song for the broken-hearted
No silent prayer for the faith-departed
I ain’t gonna be just a face in the crowd
You’re gonna hear my voice
When I shout it out loud

[Chorus:]
It’s my life
It’s now or never
I ain’t gonna live forever
I just want to live while I’m alive
(It’s my life)
My heart is like an open highway
Like Frankie said
I did it my way
I just wanna live while I’m alive
It’s my life

This is for the ones who stood their ground
For Tommy and Gina who never backed down
Tomorrow’s getting harder make no mistake
Luck ain’t even lucky
Got to make your own breaks

[Chorus:]
It’s my life
And it’s now or never
I ain’t gonna live forever
I just want to live while I’m alive
(It’s my life)
My heart is like an open highway
Like Frankie said
I did it my way
I just want to live while I’m alive
‘Cause it’s my life

Better stand tall when they’re calling you out
Don’t bend, don’t break, baby, don’t back down

[Chorus:]
It’s my life
And it’s now or never
‘Cause I ain’t gonna live forever
I just want to live while I’m alive
(It’s my life)
My heart is like an open highway
Like Frankie said
I did it my way
I just want to live while I’m alive

[Chorus:]
It’s my life
And it’s now or never
‘Cause I ain’t gonna live forever
I just want to live while I’m alive
(It’s my life)
My heart is like an open highway
Like Frankie said
I did it my way
I just want to live while I’m alive
‘Cause it’s my life!

June 30, 2006

Metallica on independence, science and second-handers

Filed under: Music, Quotes

This is why I like Metallica.

Metallica (Black Album, 1991)

Wherever I May Roam

…and the road becomes my bride
I have stripped of all but pride
So in her I do confide
And she keeps me satisfied
Gives me all I need

…and with dust in throat I crave
Only knowledge will I save
To the game you stay a slave
Rover wanderer
Nomad vagabond
Call me what you will

But I’ll take my time anywhere
Free to speak my mind anywhere
And I’ll redefine anywhere
Anywhere I may roam
Where I lay my head is home

…and the earth becomes my throne
I adapt to the unknown
Under wandering stars I’ve grown
By myself but not alone
I ask no one

…and my ties are severed clean
The less I have the more I gain
Off the beaten path I reign
Rover wanderer
Nomad vagabond
Call me what you will

But I’ll take my time anywhere
I’m free to speak my mind anywhere
And I’ll never mind anywhere
Anywhere I may roam
Where I lay my head is home

But I’ll take my time anywhere
Free to speak my mind
And I’ll take my find anywhere
Anywhere I may roam
Where I lay my head is home

Carved upon my stone
My body lie, but still I roam
Wherever I may roam

Don’t Tread on Me

Liberty or death, what we so proudly hail
Once you provoke her, rattling of her tail
Never begins it, never, but once engaged…
Never surrenders, showing the fangs of rage

Don’t tread on me

So be it
Threaten no more
To secure peace is to prepare for war
So be it
Settle the score
Touch me again for the words that you’ll hear evermore…

Don’t tread on me

Love it or live it, she with the deadly bite
Quick is the blue tongue, forked as lighting strike
Shining with brightness, always on surveillance
The eyes, they never close, emblem of vigilance

Don’t tread on me

So be it
Threaten no more
To secure peace is to prepare for war
So be it
Settle the score
Touch me again for the words that you’ll hear evermore…

Don’t tread on me

So be it
Threaten no more
To secure peace is to prepare for war

Liberty or death, what we so proudly hail
Once you provoke her, rattling on her tail

So be it
Threaten no more
To secure peace is to prepare for war
So be it
Settle the score
Touch me again for the words that you’ll hear evermore…

Don’t tread on me

Through the Never

All that is, was and will be
Universe much too big to see

Time and space never ending
Disturbing thoughts, questions pending
Limitations of human understanding
Too quick to criticize
Obligation to survive
We hunger to be alive

All that is, ever
Ever was
Will be ever
Twisting
Turning
Through the never

In the dark, see past our eyes
Pursuit of truth no matter where it lies

Gazing up to the breeze of the heavens
On a quest, meaning, reason
Came to be, how it begun
All alone in the family of the sun
Curiosity teasing everyone
On our home, third stone from the sun

All that is, ever
Ever was
Will be ever
Twisting
Turning
Through the never

On through the never
We must go
On through the never
Out of the
Edge of forever
We must go
On through the never
Then ever comes

All that is, ever
Ever was
Will be ever
Who we are
Ask forever
Twisting
Turning
Through the never

Never

Nothing Else Matters

Nothing else matters

So close no matter how far
Couldn’t be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
And nothing else matters

Never opened myself this way
Life is ours, we live it our way
All these words I don’t just say
And nothing else matters

Trust I seek and I find in you
Every day for us something new
Open mind for a different view
And nothing else matters

Never cared for what they do
Never cared for what they know
But I know

So close no matter how far
Couldn’t be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
And nothing else matters

Never cared for what they do
Never cared for what they know
But I know

Never opened myself this way
Life is ours, we live it our way
All these words I don’t just say
And nothing else matters

Trust I seek and I find in you
Every day for us something new
Open mind for a different view
And nothing else matters

Never cared for what they say
Never cared for games they play
Never cared for what they do
Never cared for what they know
And I know

So close no matter how far
Couldn’t be much more from the heart
Forever trusting who we are
No nothing else matters

My Friend of Misery

You just stood there screaming
Fearing no one was listening to you
They say the empty can rattles the most
The sound of your voice must soothe you
Hearing only what you want to hear
And knowing only what you’ve heard
You you’re smothered in tragedy
You’re out to save the world

Misery
You insist that the weight of the world
Should be on your shoulders
Misery
There’s much more to life than what you see
My friend of misery

You still stood there screaming
No one caring about these words you tell
My friend before your voice is gone
One man’s fun is another’s hell
These times are sent to try men’s souls
But something’s wrong with all you see
You you’ll take it on all yourself
Remember, misery loves company

Misery
You insist that the weight of the world
Should be on your shoulders
Misery
There’s much more to life than what you see
My friend of misery

You just stood there screaming
My friend of misery

May 14, 2006

Sydney Harbor Bridge

Filed under: Music, Pics

It gets a whole page unto itself. (Also so it doesn’t screw up the formatting of this page.) Looking at this picture goes with listening to the finale to Stenhammar’s 2nd piano concerto. Who, you say? That’s what I said yesterday. Trust me, it’s a gold nugget well worth your hunt.

February 19, 2006

Protected: Music list

Filed under: Music, Personal

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February 12, 2006

Music as tiers of concepts

A tangent to my reading in Rand’s ITOE, applied to music:

I played piano for my best friend when she was here just before Christmas. Her comment was, "I have no idea how you remember all those notes." Truth is, I don’t remember them. If you plunked the music down in front of me and told me to sight read it cold, I’d be screwed. Sure, I read the notes and memorized them initially, but now it’s to where I remember the shape of the chords, the position on the keyboard, the required movement from one to the next, and the associated sounds (before, during, and after), which together ensure I play the correct notes. They are totally subsumed under this umbrella of integration by experience.

Now I think, pairing these observations with a re-reading of her theory of concepts, that there’s a parallel between run-of-the-mill concepts, and music. If concept formation requires a collection of percepts from which you abstract the commonalities, yet discard the variations in those commonalities (what she calls measurement omission, generally speaking), that’s a lot like learning a chord by figuring out all the separate notes, and then integrating them into a whole, where all you have to do is remember the whole in order to remember the many. (This way you don’t "blow your crow"). And you do this iteratively - you take these integrated, conceptualized chords, and link them together into phrases, establishing the transition from one chord to the next, till you remember the phrase as a whole, and picking out a single chord requires mentally disassembling the phrase. And on and on, abstractions on abstractions, conceptions of conceptions, till the whole piece becomes folded within a few key concepts that act as starting points, all within your crow.

Because there’s no way I could ever remember all those notes, even though I can play them no problem. Problem solved :o)

Favorite Rachmaninoff

Filed under: Music, Personal

My fascination with Rachmaninoff is probably closer to a long-distance love affair than hero worship. And I’m fascinated not just because Rand mentioned his 2nd piano concerto in The Fountainhead. I loved, loved Rachmaninoff long before I’d even heard of Ayn Rand. We go way back.

In any case, this is a 3 CD set containing his four piano concertos, the impossibly brilliant (and uncharacteristically lighthearted) Rhapsody, and the well-loved Tchaikovsky piano concerto no.1. The composer, conductor, soloist and orchestra are all Russian. I don’t know if that makes this a "better" recording than others (Horowitz, Rubenstein, and Rachmaninoff himself come to mind), but these recordings are my worn-to-death favorites, if only because they are the ones I own.

Admittedly, the 1st and 4th concertos are not well known and are hugely overshadowed by the 2nd, 3rd and Rhapsody. They’re conveniently placed on the same CD and are probably best listened to as historical or biographical bookends.

The 2nd piano concerto is paired with the Tchaikovsky concerto on one disc, which has much heuristic value, as magnificent as both are. Tchaikovsky sounds, well, wonderfully Tchaikovskyish, with strong clarinet overtones and synchronized instrumentation for melodic emphasis, which remind one of his ballet scores. His opening lines were also mentioned by Rand in The Fountainhead. Overall, it is a spectacular piece, as I’m sure others have said here already, so I will not elaborate more. I will lightly criticize the last three notes - so unoriginal! The 3rd movement is exhilarating, and he ends the upward sweep with three predictable notes. But it’s just a little tarnish.

Immediately compare that with Rach’s 2nd. Through and through, in all his works, he is original, his own. You can hear influences from Beethoven, Chopin and Tchaikovsky in his 2nd concerto, but his complexity combined with superb musicality, lyricism and controlled but pure emotion make him a master of the instrument, the format, the genre. I have read elsewhere that Rachmaninoff knew the piano better than nearly any other composer - certainly better than Chopin and Tchaikovsky - and I think the piano soars more under his pen than that of anyone else. Rach’s 2nd is a very romantic piece, combining the heroic elements Rand surely noticed, with wistful longing and introspection, determination and heady, exuberant drives towards a highly satisfying climax.

My favorite however, by far, is the Rach 3, and certainly not because of the movie Shine, although that movie aptly pointed out the Mt. Everest-like scale - technically and emotionally - of the piece. To give you an idea of the technical difficulty involved: some say the Rach 3 is the most technically demanding piano music there is. Ever. A student asked Artur Rubenstein when he started learning the Rach 3. At eighteen, he said, though he was still learning it some 30 years later. And, on a personal note, a former piano teacher of mine played Rach’s 2nd as an undergraduate to rave reviews; he told me a few years later that he hoped to *attempt* the Rach 3 sometime in his lifetime. That is the magnitude of technical difference between the two.

As for the music itself, what can I say? It touches an essential cord within me. Here, Rachmaninoff *knows* me, and makes my soul’s essence audible - the somber, brooding struggle with personal doubts and demons (Rand would be appalled by Rachmaninoff’s lack of self-esteem! His letters are a stark contrast to his music), the spark and burn of motivation, inspiration, the joy of epiphany, and the ebb of energy and recollection of brooding. And that’s just the first movement :o). The 2nd movement is characteristically slower, reflective, lyrical, featuring the flute, but Rachmaninoff’s genius and passion shine through as he (somehow) smoothly interrupts this to bring back a spur of energy, which is slowly, then quickly, flung into joyous, striding - no, galloping - confidence, conquering the doubts of the first movement. There are a couple recursions that I feel ambivalent about; on the one hand, they seem to interrupt the straight-line course of conquest that I love; on the other hand, they serve to underscore how vitally important and beautiful that clarity of purpose is, and make me all the more appreciative when it returns. The concerto ends like a fist slammed on a table and someone saying, "Yes! We will do it!" How to top that? I can’t conceive of it.

The Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini was written a couple decades later, around 1936. There are a few influences from more contemporary music, but Rachmaninoff was a romantic through and through. The structure of the piece is entirely different - perhaps I’m not used to the rhapsody format - with 26 fully connected variations. Again, there is the technical originality, musicality, lyricism, and a wide emotional spectrum, all of which are well-integrated, to be expected from Rachmaninoff’s unsparing critical judgment and insistence on perfection. The tone is completely different from his other works, however, especially towards the end. One wonders if he was thinking of the antics of his grandchildren, or had found some internal fountain of youth, because I find the tone not a triumph *over* something, just triumph, joy, and a wink of humor for their own sake, like a child shouting and dancing that he loves being alive.

For those wondering if this is a living Concerto of Deliverance, and why Rand didn’t name this or the 3rd as such, I’m on the fence. In my listening of the pieces, struggle is not entirely thrown off in Rach’s 3rd the way I imagine in my version of Halley’s 5th, and the absence of struggle in the Rhapsody precludes it from being delivered from something. Nevertheless, I find in Rachmaninoff’s music the affirmation, refueling, motivation and exhilaration that I imagine in Halley’s music. And in classical, instrumental music existing today, Rachmaninoff’s as close as it gets, and it’s pretty darn good!

The feeling of Rachmaninoff

Filed under: Music, Personal

On the factual observations that 1) most people do not play the piano, 2) many who do play do not play the specific Rachmaninoff pieces that I know*, and 3) few, if any, instruments are physically played the way a piano is, I thought I’d take this perceived opportunity to describe how it feels to play a Rachmaninoff prelude.

The easiest way to describe Rachmaninoff is by contrast, and for that role I pick Bach. Bach likes to twist my mind in knots, the musical equivalent of patting your head and rubbing your belly. Playing a simple sounding counterpoint "Invention" of his can be so mentally trying that it becomes physically exhausting. And that’s for a single string of methodically placed notes for either hand. And for what? A mathematically intriguing, pedantic bit of background music. Perhaps it’s because he only had a harpsichord to work with, and not the modern piano-forte (which deserves a whole blogpost unto itself). But he sounds, to my impetuous ears, so mild-mannered he could be mistaken for being whole-heartedly boring. I wonder, what was the man like when, having received a fat commission for his latest clever creation, he was embarking on an evening of riotous celebration with his compatriots and a pretty lady on his knee? If only he had had a pen by him then.

Thankfully, there is Rachmaninoff. My first characterization of his music is: easier. Melodies with song and purpose in them, that impress on my memory and make me want to get on with playing the piece, like jumping into the driver’s seat of a roller coaster. To look at the page, his music can be formidable - blobs of black ink crowding out the white spaces, soliciting my attention, demanding courage, taunting the size of my hands. I think of Rachmaninoff and I think of chords that are, literally, a handful, galloping up and down the keyboard in great big clomping strides, or, broken into single notes, carrying the piece smoothly along, like the spokes of a wheel.

Considering the intellectual aspects of playing Rachmaninoff, my first inclination is to describe Rachmaninoff as emotional compared to Bach’s detached intellectuality. One simply cannot succeed in playing Rachmaninoff with anything less than a heart brimming over with emotion. But then, what does it take to translate my feeling into the corresponding sound? The only road is through my mind, and upon realizing that I discovered that Rachmaninoff is as fully intellectual and demanding as Bach. Over-eagerness must be tamed, disciplined, funneled; pathos must be meted out in strict time, never lagging, but never indulging; triumph must be articulated crisply and clearly, no detail overlooked as one crosses the finish line. Hours spent repeating the same three measures pay off when a single thought of "More!" effortlessly translates into a brighter melody, or higher contrast, or surging tempo, with no regard for the intricate dance of my fingers. Only after all the particulars have been consciously integrated at each level, from the notes to the fingering, rhythm, dynamics, phrasing, and overarching message, can an emotional edict produce a work of art.

And, even after all this mental effort, there’s a final bit of justice in reaping the reward that is playing Rachmaninoff well. Not only must I be mentally prepared, I must physically work for it every time I play. He’s a taskmaster at the piano, demanding strength, flexibility, speed, precision, and coordination. I’ve felt the same fatigue from playing piano as from a speed workout at the track - painful, aching exhaustion pushed on by sheer desire; a thumping heart, measured breath and beads of perspiration; the noodley weakness in my fingers and arms; and a numb, happy mind knowing - hearing - that I’ve earned my prize.

That’s Rachmaninoff.

* Prelude in c-sharp minor, Op. 3, no. 2, and Prelude in g-minor, Op. 23, no. 5






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