I lately found this on Youtube. Branka Parlić playing Metamorphosis One:

You can find parts two through five on le ‘tube as well (or on Parlić’s own website under “videos”).

Here’s some appropriate exit music for “the decider”: the Two Gallants playing their tribute, “Waves of Grain”.

…such an infamous freedom / such a militant peace…

I recorded it using the iSight on my Mac and didn’t bother to figured out how to turn off the default mirror-image mode. So no, I’m not a south-paw fond of wearing shirts with backwards lettering. Though that would be cool.

If you poke around there are other videos on Second-Person-Pronoun-Tube of the same concert.

I saw him live in Halifax a few years back. He played a great show, singing powerfully and dancing onstage with abandon. Healey was a versitile performer. The material that night was Jazz, played in the style of the 1920s and 30s. I have the album he was promoting, “Among Friends”, and it’s one of my favorites from the tentative steps I’ve taken into Jazz.

And man oh man could he play the guitar.

My introduction seems a bit familiar, but I’ve only read his wikipedia entry and heard some of the music of his band, “Beirut”. I believe dependable Mr. Frank arranged my first introduction, and at that time I bought one track, “Elephant Gun”, from iTunes. I’m not normally in the habit of buying single tracks, but I wasn’t sure about Beirut at that point and didn’t want to splurge $3.96 for the other four tracks on the short album. I did like his airy voice, even if I have no idea what he’s saying, and the more I listened to Elephant Gun the more it grew on me. I really like the layers of sound created by the various instruments as they come in against Condon’s voice.

I went back and bought the rest of his short album and realized by not doing so before I had violated my own maxim: songs need context. The whole album works as one extended performance, starting with Elephant Gun and meandering through other themes. Track four is just a minute-long reprise of the accordion line from E.G., tying the whole piece together.
There is something moving about this music’s gypsy excesses. Some heavily layered music invites you to live inside it, but Beirut instead directs you outward, makes you aware of the world turning around you.

Play us out, Zach.

“Wondrous Strange: The Life and Art of Glenn Gould” by Kevin Bazzana is a fairly recent biography of the Canadian classical musical icon, and I wish I’d had my previous Gould encounters after reading it. I have a much better sense of the man and his significance now. I’ve seen the movie, been to the museum exhibit, and now, read the book. Next I need to hear more of his music. I have a couple of his Back and Beethoven albums, but I’ve got my eye (predictably) on his Goldberg Variations and hope to soon snag a recording of one (or both) of the Goldberg albums that book-ended his career.

Gould’s first record, at the age of 22 in 1955, was the Goldberg Variations and it hit the classical music world like an atom bomb. The Variations was not a well-known piece (Gould single-handly changed that), and Gould was a largely unknown artist making his debut, yet the album had huge success.

At one point in its first year, [Gould's record] was outselling a new recording by Louis Armstrong and the soundtrack of The Pajama Game; in 1960, in the New Yorker, Joseph Roddy reported that it had sold more than forty thousand copies, “which is just about as astonishing in the record business as a big run on a new edition of the Enneads of Plotinus would be in the book trade.”

In 1981, dissatisfied with his earlier recording, he recorded the Goldberg Variations again, offering a different interpretation of the music. The video I posted previously is of this recording session, and is the last videotape of Gould in existence. Bazzana again:

But within a week of the album’s release Gould was dead, and it was easy then to hear it as “autumnal,” as his “testament”; in the decades since, sentimentality about his untimely death has given the 1981 recording, and the Goldberg Variations generally, an exaggerated prominence within the Gould oeuvre. A better candidate for the summit of his Bach discography might be his two-record set of the English Suites, released in 1977: his Bach was never more thoughtfully creative, more intimate or more strongly characterized, and never attained a superior balance between high-modernist orderliness and Romantic flexibility. In any event, Gould had no plans to die at fifty, and his second recording of the Goldberg Variations became his testament only through a sad fluke of fate.

That passage should give you a sense of the book in general. Inevitably it contains a lot of musical terminology and history, with which the reader is not necessarily familiar. While I was put off by this at first, I came to appreciate it a lot. Any book about Gould with any insight must delve into music, which was Gould’s whole life, and Bazzana does a good job of giving the reader a sense of what these musical concepts are and mean. I feel like I know more about classical music now, even if I don’t know exactly what “high modernist orderliness” in Bach sounds like.

I also feel as though I have a good sense of Gould the person: quirky, gifted, suffering terribly from hypochondria, sure, but also likable and real. I’m a little sad to have finished the book: I was getting used to living partly in Gould’s world and now that connection has been severed. I do know that I’ll appreciate his music all the more for understanding the aims and story behind it.

For Christmas, my mom gave me a big coffee-table book called The Top 100 Canadian Albums, as chosen by a panel of 500 musicians and music lovers. The chosen albums are ranked by vote and not sales, and span all genres and periods from the 1950s to present day, so the book is reflects a nice slice of the Canadian music scene.

The #1 album is “Harvest” by Neil Young. This, I am somewhat ashamed to report, didn’t really ring any bells for me. “Neil Young is Canadian?” I asked aloud on Christmas morning. And then, “Neil Young is who, exactly?”.

As I flipped through the book it began to dawn on me that this Neil guy was a bit of a big deal. He had the #1 album in Canadian history, and appeared a few other times on the list.

Specifically, Neil is #1, #3, #16, #22, #30, #31, #40, and #47.

Clearly I’ve not been paying attention.

In my defense, in order to answer my next question, “What does Neil Young sound like?”, my parents dug into their collection of vinyl records. So his peak was slightly before my time.

I listened to “Harvest” on the turntable, and while it wasn’t an epiphany moment, I did start to understand why he might be thought of so highly.

Since then I’ve been keeping an eye out for Mr. Young. k.d. lang covered some of his songs on her “Hymns of the 49th Parallel” album (#59 in the Canadian pantheon) and I’ve been listening to that. On the airplane today I listened to a Neil Young live album via the in-flight entertainment system. I’m getting to rather like him.

Unsurprisingly, there’s lots of Neil Young on YouTube. Here he is with The Band. (”The Band is who, exactly?” led to more records being dusted off…)

I’ve been running into Glenn Gould more than usual lately (well, not the man himself, obviously). The Museum of Civilization, which I visited on Thanksgiving weekend, has a Gould exhibit running currently, in honor of the “Year of Glenn Gould“. Likewise, CBC has been playing more Gould-related programming than usual, including, I kid you not, Saturday’s episode of Fuse featuring five artists covering Petula Clark, “Gould’s favorite popular singer”. It was… odd.

Gould, was of course, famous for playing the Goldberg Variations (care of google video), but he also did a lot of work for the CBC is a broadcaster. His wonderfully odd tribute to/analysis of Petual Clark falls into the latter category, and you can hear it here (along with two of his other CBC programs).

I’m dying to hear “The Idea of North”, his “contrapuntal” radio documentary about the Canadian arctic, but no googling has turned it up.

It all started (as many things in my life seem to) with Battlestar Galactica. In an episode of Season 2 they used a Philip Glass minimalist piano piece called “Metamorphosis”. I thought it sounded pretty neat at the time, but forgot about it. I heard it again later, used as theme music on an episode of CBC’s Ideas, and tracked it down. I bought a Phillip Glass piano music album from iTunes and enjoy it a lot. If you’ve not heard “Metamorphosis” (and really, why would you have?), it is mainly deliberate arpeggios, gradual chord changes and bell-like treble notes. The whole thing is 30 minutes long. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Beethoven’s famous Moonlight Sonata. It also reminded me that I really like piano music.

A while later I went home to visit my parents, and for the first time in a long time, sat down at the piano. I dug out the music for a (simplified) version of Moonlight Sonata and was surprised how well I remembered it. Afterwards, the melody continued to rattle around in my head for days, and I eventually bought an album of Artur Rubinstein playing Beethoven from iTunes, which, of course, included Sonata No.14 in C-sharp Minor: “Moonlight”.

I like to listen to music while I work, though when I am writing something, I find I can’t listen to music with lyrics, because they are too distracting. The Rubenstein album turned out to be ideal “working music”; the opening track, Sonata No. 8, has exactly the right mix of complexity and energy to put my mind into “productivity mode”. The album quickly became the soundtrack of my thesis writing, and I got to know the music fairly well.

On the bus yesterday I listened for the first time to a newly-acquired album of Canadian piano genius Glenn Gould playing Beethoven. I don’t really know a lot about the man, except for what I dimly remember from Don McKeller’s film tribute, “Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould”. Is he known as a speed demon?

I first listened to Moonlight Sonata, and was immediately surprised by the speed. If anyone else on the bus noticed me press play on my iPod and then sit there with a stunned look on my face, they must have thought I was going mad. Gould plays it a lot faster than Rubinstein, and it completely changes the feeling of the piece. It’s as if someone has made your favorite recipe, but substituted a few spices, perhaps replacing garam masala with cinamon (which is something I actually did in a curry recipe recently, mainly from necessity, and it turned out really well). It’s familiar, and you like it, but at the same time it’s completely changed.

I then listened to Gould’s version of my favorite track from the Rubenstein album: Sonata No. 8. Again, Gould’s version was faster and carried a different feeling, but this time I was less convinced. It is quick enough in the Rubenstein version, and Gould plays some passages at an impossible pace (his version is 6 minutes to Rubenstein’s 8). The added speed seems to rob the piece of some of its weight, and thus reduce the amount of force it produces as it moves.

I’m not sure how adding Glenn Gould to the mix will affect my productivity. I’ll keep you posted.