I'm not sure why I've developed this recent interest in mushrooms. Before this strange obsession I didn't even like eating the regular cultivated mushrooms, but two days ago I felt compelled to try a slice of mushroom pizza, and quite enjoyed it. I think the source of it all is musical. Part of that definitely related to the saprophytic nature of some (most?) mushrooms. May also have something to do with a fairly recent listening interest in field recordings/related use of amplified natural sounds. Although I do feel that that interest may have been as a result of mushrooms, and not a cause.
On Friday (17th) Jessie and I took a trip into NYC to see a performance of Verdi's Rigoletto. I've had an unfortunate history with opera. A couple of years ago I was given tickets to three operas for my birthday. I made it to see one of them, Verdi's Aida, missed the second (another Verdi I think) due to a pit orchestra rehearsal, and missed the third (Wagner's Die Walküre) by screwing the dates up (awoke one Sunday morning feeling very excited, only to look at the tickets and realise they were for the day before). Nothing of the sort happened this time, fortunately. It took me a while to acclimatise to listening to the music, and the first act left me thoroughly unthrilled. Perhaps partially due to the fact that I didn't turn on the subtitles and was fairly confused as to what was going on for most of it. Second and third acts were a vast improvement though, inducing some slight leg-tingling that I experience to a much greater degree when attending live music in much smaller venues.
The experience, while enjoyable, did confirm some of my already existing stigmas against opera as a form though. I still cannot shake the relationship in my mind between a male tenor at the top of his range and a bleating goat. I really detest such unsubtle use of vibrato.
Listening this week has been a little more varied than the past couple. The James Dillon CD has still been playing daily and proves to be a much deeper and more interesting selection of works with each listen. Found a couple of his other works on youtube as well, such as Helle Nacht. As I write currently I have some of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder playing against a background of mid morning birdsong and what sounds like two droning aeroplanes overhead. They are producing surprisingly round, full tones... sounds not unlike a pair of bass trombones playing interacting, microtonal glissandi.
About a week ago I burned myself a CD of three pieces of music to listen to in the car going to and from work, all from net labels. The first is Kevin Parks and Joe Foster's recent release, Prince Rupert Drops, the second a track called revenant : põdra, released on the Compost and Height netlabel, by Yannick Dauby, John Grzinich, and Maksims Shentelevs, and the third another compost and height download, Simon Whetham's Night of the Owl.
Prince Rupert Drops is, I have decided after 5 or 6 listens split between when I first downloaded it (shortly after it was released) and this week, an incredible piece of music. I remember there being a lot of excitement about Kevin Parks and Joe Foster's duet recording Ipsi sibi somnia fingunt a year or two ago, but at that point my musical focus was on other areas and I have not yet heard it. I will definitely be grabbing a copy if I can soon though. What I found most impressive about this music was the structural complexity of the recording. A real sense of multiple polyphonic structures following their own paths through the music, yet at the same time so closely linked and on a number of occasions crossing paths with each other.
This has been a recurring idea in my own compositional thought throughout the past few months. The idea of multiple structures undulating not unlike various transformations of trigonometric functions layered on top of each other on a graph. This concept has come to the forefront of my pre-compositional work on "Ungeschehengemacht" for two voices. Below is an image of a small segment of one of my reference sheets for the work, featuring a visual sketch of the structure of the piece, constructed over time as my ideas evolve and start to all come together.
I've also spent a lot of time listening to Webern's lieder. Anton Webern was and continues to be a primary influence on life and work. Since discovering his work a little under two years ago, and acquiring a copy of his complete works box set on the Deutsche Grammophon label shortly thereafter there has rarely been a week gone by when I have not spent at least a short while listening and marveling at his genius. Much of the feeling I get from Webern can be summed up with the anecdote of Webern writing the notes of the chromatic scale on a piece of paper during his first aphoristic forays into freely atonal music and crossing off each one as he used it.
As incredible as every aspect of his work and every medium he worked in is, Webern's songs do hold special significance as it was a form he had composed in throughout his career, and his song cycles provide a highly detailed outline of his progression as a composer, from his earliest years through to his latest. At each turn in his compositional thinking there is a song cycle to mark that shift in thinking. I also find that of all his early pre-atonal pieces, it is the early lieder that point most poignantly towards what was to come.
Berg (left), Webern (right)
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