Howard Who?

So it seems the film version of Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius will not see the light of day. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get your Dave Eggers fix satisfied through film.

Away We Go is a film co-written by Eggers, directed by Sam Mendes, and starring John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph. These people all carry some weight with me, so I’m definitely on board to see it. Seems all they need is some appropriately well-crafted indie pop music that could potentially cross over aka The Shins in Garden State.

And here we have Alexi Murdoch, whose song “All of My Days” appears in the trailer (click on the photo above).

All of My Days - Alexi Murdoch

I have not seen this movie. I have not necessarily thought about seeing this movie. In fact, I’ve been much more jazzed about Star Trek than anything else. If someone were to ask me what to watch, I wouldn’t mention it.

But I’m mentioning it now. Why?

Through some whim of a random link, I went to the official website of the film THE SOLOIST, and found it to be a moving experience. For one thing, the music that pops up is Beethoven.

Now, playing Beethoven as your placeholder for high musical culture isn’t original. But they play two pieces of Beethoven that aren’t really addressed much in the popular culture. One is the slow movement of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony. I swear the website plays at least a third of the movement, which is far more than I would have imagined it going. The movement runs about 15-20 minutes depending on the performance. Normally, I get somewhat testy about using the Ninth, but this was refreshing at 2 am.

The other piece is Beethoven’s Third symphony, the Eroica or Heroic, which is another not so mainstream work although it’s probably a better overall piece than the Fifth symphony in my opinion. There is a strange sounding cello melody that slowly becomes enveloped within an orchestral sound, and you realize that the music you heard was a symphony from the point of view of one of its cellos practicing alone. A brilliant demonstration of how one person adds to the symphonic sound.

Well, I’m not a sucker for the usual web enticements, but this was enough to make me stop and smell the roses as it were. Usually, you’d expect a big movie to feature something with pizazz, something that sparkles, something virtuoso and showy, something like…well, the prelude from Bach’s first cello suite.

And predictably this is what we find in the trailer for the movie…along with Stevie Wonder’s Higher Ground. The cello prelude is perfect for films. It’s been featured in, among other things, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Master and Commander, and You Can Count on Me. None of those projects really have anything in common with each other or really with the piece of the music at hand. Yet it works.

I suspect it has something to do with the simplicity of the musical idea that really translates into an openness for whatever is on screen. If music is too complex or demanding, it ultimately detracts. And to top this off, the music has a very convenient musical climax at the end with a chromatic passage that leads into the final cadence that always works perfectly for an editor looking for a place to cut.

So enjoy it already!

Prelude, Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major - Bach   BUY IT!

Since I referenced Paul Reale in my previous post, I thought it was worthwhile to write about his music. He conveniently has some on his website ready for downloading.

A quick scan of his Catalog of works reveals a man of humor and intelligence. Lately he seems to be in a parody mood with his Furball Elise and Minute in G Whiz pieces. But he’s also done piano sonatas, concertos, chamber music, choral works, and songs. This is all accompanied by an accomplished, intellectual, and articulate presence, which is able to connect music to other disciplines (I think in college he had a double major in English and physics!). When you read his program notes, you can’t help but be drawn into the mind behind the maker.

For his Piano Sonata No. 8, Reale describes his general realization of how the forces of musical imperialism threatened to crush his creativity. It’s a common theme I think for people in the classical music world, where for years anything tonal was shunned. Fortunately, Reale and tonality prevailed. Below is the mp3 of the sonata and the text. Enjoy!

Piano Sonata No. 8 “Il Trionfo della Folia” - Paul Reale

“The hardest thing in the world to accept is a death sentence. Creatively, I can think of two occasions when I felt that I was receiving one: the first occurred when I was a graduate student in a composition seminar, and Charles Dodge had just presented a new piece of his (coincidentally called Folia) which was written using all the latest twelve-tone serial techniques. After the presentation, the teacher announced: “this is the way all music will be written from now on.” Considering that I was next to present and had a piano passacaglia in D minor in my bag, suddenly I was a dead duck. The second creative death knell sounded in 1985 when a visiting pianist asked me to play my new sonata (Piano Sonata no. 1): just as I was about to begin he proclaimed that “all the good piano music had already been written and that there was no need for any more.”

Seven piano sonatas and two piano concertos later, I often think of those two events, especially in the light of “Il Trionfo della Folia,” because this piece owes everything but its structure to the past. I was working on Piano Sonata No. 8 when I first met Walter Ponce, and he expressed considerable interest in the work. At that time I was not completely happy with the piece, but with Ponce’s encouragement I got it hammered out as the kind of virtuoso vehicle that I had imagined it could be. Since the piece uses fragments at first, then complete phrases of the famous “Folia” theme and since the other materials trade on the gestures, if not real quotations from standard repertoire, I was justifiably concerned that the whole thing would come off merely as a bombastic rehash.

The real key to the piece is the integration of at least six kinds of musical complexes, all of which use intervals in varying orders from the “Folia” theme. Not until those ideas are fully fleshed out does “La Folia” emerge with its concomitant harmony and familiar bass. The real “trionfo” is that this familiar stuff becomes reborn in the integration of its variants. The piece is cast in a single movement to emphasize the continually developing and plastic nature of the musical materials.

CD’s of the first three piano sonatas are available from Music&Arts Programs of America.

Paul Reale, November, 1997.”

Finally! Steve Reich wins a Pulitzer Prize for his Double Sextet.

Of course, at age 72, Reich seems the obvious choice. An added benefit is his long-time New York affliations, which have helped composers in the past get Pulitzer notice.

The Pulitzers for music are a mixed bag, with many of picks leaning towards either conservative works/composers or late career lifetime achievement deals. No one said it better than my former music teacher, who maintains a running commentary on Pulitzer Prize winners in music.  It’s too bad he doesn’t appreciate Steve Reich, but being the classicist that he is, I’m not too surprised. Still, his comments are smart and irreverent.

Anyone who knows minimalism knows In C, the Terry Riley masterpiece which started the musical style. And if you’ve read my comments before here and here you will also remember that it’s one of my favorite pieces of minimalism to listen to.

What’s great about this piece is that it allows an infinite varieties of performances from the number of performers involved, the types of instruments they play, to how long the performance is and how the piece is conducted.

In honor of the 45th Anniversary of the piece, Kronos Quartet has curated a performance of it at Carnegie Hall, which will feature some of the original performers of the piece, notable composers Philip Glass, Morton Subotnick and Osvaldo Golijov, Terry Riley’s son Gyan, and celebrated Chinese Pipa player Wu Man (below).

And as a bonus, they have interviewed various musicians that will be performing about the piece In C and how it has affected them. It’s on Facebook, and they gone through about eight performers thus far, including Wu Man. I already knew the Kronos Quartet were cool guys before, but this is a great series.