Master manipulator
Guess the composer:
Now that’s what you want a musician to do: see into the future by listening to the past to remake the present.
Beethoven? Brahms? Try Madlib, aka the Beat Konducta.
The quote comes from a recent profile of the prolific beatmaker and avant-jazz explorer by Paul Morley of The Guardian. If you’re not familiar with Madlib – ‘master manipulator of history’ and one of the most essential young musicians in the world today – Stones Throw will take care of that for you.
Update: ST just offered up a few tracks from Madlib’s forthcoming Beat Konducta in Africa release.
Now featuring …
… featured posts! Consider these representative of my approach to blogging about orchestral music.
To make room in the navigation bar I’ve removed the random post option, but you can always try your luck by typing the word ‘random’ after my domain, like so: blog.jasonweinberger.com/random.
Concert → Music of the Americas → Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony
Vernacular-inspired music from North and South America – get ready for some serious rhythm.
New media music
It’s easy to assume that new media is a strictly 21st-century preoccupation for musicians. Experience Aaron Copland’s Prairie Journal this Saturday at the WCFSO and you may reconsider that assumption.
In 1936 Columbia Broadcasting System commissioned an unprecedented six orchestral works for broadcast on its fledgeling national radio network, including a new piece by Copland. The composer, already writing in a variety of media and soon to embrace film, approached his first radio commission with an uncanny sensitivity to the amplifying power that so often accompanies the development of new media forms.
Enthusiastic about the ‘exciting new medium,’ Copland recognized that ‘the very idea of reaching so many people with a single performance’ would reward a specific type of music – ’profound in content, simple in expression and understandable to all.’
It is also worth noting that the original presentation of Prairie Journal featured a quintessential new media marketing ruse – the crowdsourced contest. The piece’s first subtitle, Saga of the Prairie, was chosen from hundreds submitted by listeners.
Manuscript via the Library of Congress Aaron Copland Collection. Top image shows Andre Kostelanetz with the CBS Radio Orchestra in 1930; Howard Barlow conducted the premiere of Copland’s piece in 1937. Quotes from Howard Pollack’s biography of the composer.
Reblog → An opinion on creativity
Kanye West, ever ready to express opinions, frees himself from their orthodoxy:
There’s no such thing as fact anymore, only opinion. The closest thing we have to fact is ‘common opinion’. Everything is an opinion. The way you dress is an expression of your opinion. Your religious beliefs are your opinion. The music you turn up loud is your opinion. For most people it’s easier to just agree. For me the hardest thing is to ‘just’ agree and that is what sparks creativity, the feeling that something can be better, the feeling that something’s missing. The feeling that something’s needed.
[Seen first at Put This On, and again at Frank Chimero has a blog.]
‘Sistema’-tic excellence
We are rehearsing Alberto Ginastera’s Estancia at the WCFSO this week, and as we work on imbuing it with as much rhythmic vitality and exuberance as possible I’ve suggested that everyone spend some time with these dynamic performances of the piece by Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra. I intended to post one of them here as well, until I stumbled across this from another of Venezuela’s El Sistema youth orchestras:
Bravo to TED for highlighting the Teresa Carreños, and to The Rambler for the link – whoa is right!
Looking forward to this
Click through the image for the table of contents to Alex Ross’ forthcoming Listen to This. I’m hoping that the second chapter, ‘Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues: Bass Lines of Music History,’ includes a consideration of hip hop. Anyone been to one of Alex’s readings of that essay?
