October 2011 - Popular Music

Tori Amos

• American Doll Posse
• Abnormally Attracted to Sin
• Night of Hunters
• Silent All These Years - regular UK single, limited edition UK single
• Winter - regular UK single, limited edition UK single (recreated from other sources)
• China single
• Crucify UK single
• Cornflake Girl US single
• Audience bootlegs - Mannheim 2 December 2001, Oberhausen 3 December 2001, St Petersburg 30 September 2011, Moscow 2 October 2011

Fiona Apple - When the Pawn...
Bjork - Biophilia
Frou Frou - Details
Bruce Hornsby - The Way It Is
Nik Kershaw - Human Racing
Roisin Murphy - Ruby Blue
Roisin Murphy - Overpowered
Radiohead - The King of Limbs
Something for Kate - Beautiful Sharks
Something for Kate - Echolalia
Talk Talk - Spirit of Eden
Toys - Soundtrack

Hmm...

Nope. I still don't especially want to talk about Night of Hunters. Other than to say I'm thoroughly enjoying it.

I want to talk about Biophilia instead because I decided to opt in to the whole album-as-app experience.  I didn't buy Bjork's album on CD. I've only heard it on my iPhone.

Bjork is one of those artists that I'm frequently curious about but never completely connect with. I already own one album that I bought second-hand (Homogenic). I've considered buying others and sampled them repeatedly. One of the attractions is arguably that she conceives albums as based around particular ideas or sounds.

The biggest problem, I think, with Biophilia at times is that the concept is taken sufficiently literally that it hasn't necessarily translated from a concept into music with an independent existence.  Some of the songs are very, very sparse.  Mind you, sparse can be beautiful. I actually love it when a composer is able to build a musical structure out of only a few small elements.  Beethoven's 5th symphony (or at least its first movement) is arguably one of the most famous examples, with so much material drawn from the opening da-da-da-dum.  But there are pop songs, too, that manage to be incredibly clean and economical - I just wish one of them would leap to mind right now as I'm writing this.

With a number of the Bjork songs, though, it feels as if I'm just seeing the bare bones.  It's possibly not helped by the ability, in app form, to literally see those bones - in visual form.  The animations of the music are simultaneously one of the most impressive features of the app (the animations involving circles, bars and lines are quite brilliant as a means of intuitively showing musical form to people who haven't learnt musical notation) but also something of an Achilles heel. You can see exactly what's there in the music - to the point of saying in some cases, 'oh, is that all it is then'.

The quality of the apps varies considerably. Some of them are interesting in interactive mode, some of them are interesting when you just play the song, arguably only one is interesting in both cases ('Virus') and some are dull in both.

As a musical experience, though, the most frustrating thing about the app album is that you can't just play the album.  It's forever in the form of 10 separate songs, which you have to click and swipe between, and if you want to hear the songs fully you have to remember which mode will give the most straightforward rendition in each app, as it varies.  Instruments are often missing if you select the 'wrong' version.

I suppose one response is that if I wanted to listen to an album, I should have bought a CD (or a music download).  Well yes, maybe.  But if you're trying to create a new musical experience, wouldn't it be better to ensure that you don't cause people to lose their existing musical experiences? Shouldn't the new part be an addition?  Or is it just an exercise in getting more money by requiring customers to effectively buy the album twice?

I don't regret partaking in Bjork's app experiment, but I'm not sure it's going to have a great deal of staying power for me. At some point I may end up resenting the space taken up by an app that's of no 'practical' use that also doesn't do the one thing I would most like it to - provide me with music to listen to.

September 2011 - Classical Music

Bach, J.S. - Cello Suites (complete, 2 recordings)
Bach, J.S. - Brandenburg Concertos (complete - 2 recordings for Nos. 4 and 5)
Haydn - Symphonies 102 and 103 ('Drumroll')
Scarlatti, D. - Keyboard sonatas - K.1, 3, 9, 17, 24, 27, 213, 214, 247, 283, 284, 380, 404, 443, 519
Schubert - Piano Sonatas in A minor and in D, D. 784 and D.850
Schumann

• Papillons (Butterflies)
• Davidsbundlertanze (Dances of the League of David)
• Carnaval
• Symphonic Etudes
• Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood)

Simpson - Symphony No.10
Telemann - Tafelmusik Volume 1: Overture, Quartet, Concerto, Trio, Solo
Vivaldi

• The Four Seasons (2 recordings)
• Violin Concerto in C, RV 171
• Kyrie in G minor
• Gloria, RV 588 with introduction Jubilate, o amoeni chori RV 639
• Credo in E minor
• Dixit Dominus, RV 594
• Lauda, Jerusalem
• Magnificat in G minor (1720s version), RV 610a
• In furore iustissimae irae (In wrath and most just anger)
• Longe mala, umbrae, terrores (Away with woes, shadows, terrors), RV 629

One of the things I did this month was compare different recordings of the same music.  I don't generally aim to get multiple performances of classical music into my collection, but my fondness for box sets does sometimes mean there's a bit of overlap.  And it's interesting to hear the different approaches that various musicians will take.

Some of the comparison was deliberate (the Bach Cello Suites for example - I think Rostropovich beat Tortelier in most of them, but honours were the other way in the 3rd suite), and some of it was quite accidental as a result of my massive new purchase.  Having been alerted to a sale of box sets, I ended up with 5 of them, and a whopping 32 CDs of new classical performances to explore.

That's a pretty overwhelming delivery of new music!

By chance rather than design, most of it comes from just one generation of composers.  I've got a lot of new Bach (1685-1750) as well as second, often considerably better versions of the Brandenburg Concertos. I've got some Telemann (1681-1767) for the first time, which has proved itself highly enjoyable.  It's about time the world's most prolific composer, allegedly, got some space in the collection - 18 pieces down, only around 3,000 more to go.

And I'm suddenly drowning in Vivaldi (1678-1741), after increasing my collection by about 1500 per cent!  The new performances of The Four Seasons are exciting and dramatic.  The sacred music is a bit of a mixed bag so far, some of it I like a lot and other bits aren't really grabbing me yet.

It's actually quite educational to get such a heavy dose of the one era, which I guess I'm not as familiar with as later music.  It's definitely helping me understand a bit more about the forms and styles of the late Baroque period.  Some things that I only knew as 'Bach' I now recognise as more general.  I'm getting a better sense of what's common to the composers of the time and what's individual to each of them.

Just before buying all of that, not only was I listening to my existing versions of the Brandenburg Concertos and The Four Seasons, I happened to be spending time listening to the first half of a 2-CD collection of the amazingly inventive keyboard music of Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757). So it really was a month full of music from around the 1710s to 1740s or so.

As well as the avalanche of Baroque, the other purchase was Schumann piano music.  And that's been a real surprise.  I had no idea just how radical, even strange, some of his work was.  In several of the early pieces I listened to this month (written when he was in his 20s), fragments of a minute or less zip by before being replaced by something else entirely.  It's pretty startling stuff when you consider that the previous generation was often creating sonatas that developed musical ideas on a large scale - not always, but often.  So to get, say, 21 Carnival 'scenes' stuffed into 27 minutes is really quite something.

Just because someone else can't code correctly

And I wanted to the opportunity to listen to the new Florence + The Machine album, Ceremonials. The page on the Hypetrak website that was SUPPOSED to make that possible - entirely legally, as far as I understand - is missing a couple of vital pieces of punctuation in the HTML.

I've no idea how long this will continue to work.

September 2011 - Popular Music

Tori Amos

• From the Choirgirl Hotel
• To Venus and Back (studio disc)
• Scarlet's Walk
• The Beekeeper
• Night of Hunters
• Audience bootleg - Helsinki, 28 September 2011

Kate Bush - The Dreaming
Kate Bush - Aerial
Eskimo Joe - A Song Is A City
Peter Gabriel - So
Patty Griffin - 1000 Kisses
Janet Jackson - Janet Jackson's Rhythm Nation 1814
Sting - The Soul Cages
Talk Talk - It's My Life
Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Hey! This thing wasn't supposed to get this far out of date again! I drafted the list and never came back to writing something about what was on the list.

The list is short.  This is not simply because a new Tori Amos album dominated my listening... yes, yes, okay, I did listen to it quite a bit at times, but the list is also short because the pop/classical pendulum swung very much in the classical direction, for reasons that will be explained further once the classical post for September is up.  The fact that Tori's new album is itself very much in the classical direction only helped push the pendulum in that direction.

I did find time during the month to listen my 'official' favourite album of all time.  And no, it's not the Janet Jackson - which is something I hadn't listened to for ages and decided to load onto the iPhone for precisely the kind of reasons this blog exists, exploring the music collection.  The official number one is Sting's The Soul Cages.

This doesn't mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that I listen to it frequently.  It doesn't even mean that every time I listen to it I adore the experience.  It's part of the nature of music, in my view, that connection with any particular piece of music depends in part upon your emotional state when you listen to it, and while I'd like to think I'm not too bad at assessing what kind of music will 'work' for me at a particular time, there are no guarantees.

No, the number one slot was awarded, whenever it was I sat down and tried to create a ranking (far too long ago, a full revision is required rather than the occasional patching that tries to stuff extra albums into the list), because this was the album that, on the occasions when it DID connect, seemed to be most capable of providing a rich, immersive, complete experience.  Where the balance between songs contributing to the whole and songs providing their own individual areas of contrast seemed to work.  Where the sonic detail made every moment worth listening to ('Q Sound' is not just a gimmick, the album truly does sound exceptional on good equipment).

And frankly, I suspect the fact that an album with 9 tracks managed to have 2 tracks that I found totally overwhelming to the point of being physically affected was a major point in its favour.  Even having 1 track fitting that description is rare, I don't think any other has ever qualified for 2 spots on the list.  Not that there's an official list for that criterion.

Of course, thematically it's an utterly miserable album that's almost always either about water or death or both.  But hey, I respond to that kind of thing - at least, I do at times which is precisely why I don't listen to the album ALL the time.  If you don't ever respond to that kind of thing then I guess you wouldn't like it.  But if dark and moody is your thing and you've never heard The Soul Cages, I heartily recommend it.

Oh, and why am I talking about an album that came out 20 years ago (eek! I just realised this, it really IS 20 years ago now, and about 18 since I first heard it), instead of contributing to the avalanche of opinions about Night of Hunters?  Well, because I don't know just what I think about it yet. Not completely. I definitely do like it, a lot. But I'm still getting to know it and it also seems quite rich and immersive.  Anyway, most of what I think of it really developed in October, so talking about it in November about the September post would be cheating, wouldn't it? ;-)

PS Yes, I really did get to listen to a recording of a Tori Amos concert within a couple of days of the concert occurring.  From thousands of miles/kilometres away.  Ain't technology wonderful?