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Music blip
May. 21st, 2014 09:32 amSuddenly I'm listening to a whole bunch of music on YouTube. This has been threatening to happen for a while now, as my appetite for new music has outgrown my budget. The trigger seems to have been delving into John Luther Adams, who won the Pulitzer Prize this year for a piece called "Become Ocean" that was commissioned and premiered by the Seattle Symphony. (You can listen to their more recent Carnegie Hall performance of the piece, along with works by Varese and Debussy, streaming at WQXR.) As I read more about Adams, I discovered that he considered Lou Harrison a mentor. I'd been faunching to listen to some Harrison, whose name keeps popping up as I poke around in 20th century classical music, and there's a whole bunch of it on YouTube. I've particularly enjoyed the Third Symphony so far, but am also intrigued by his music for gamelan.
Meanwhile, via discovering Alex Ross' profile of Adams for The New Yorker, I started reading Ross' archives on the intertubes and found his profile of Nico Muhly, who is a 30-something composer who has collaborated with all kinds of people, including Bjork, and has already made quite a name for himself. So I listened to a couple of *his* pieces on YouTube, and I was impressed by "Gait," which was performed as part of the Proms in London in 2012.
Yesterday I went to YouTube to listen to some Harrison, and the front page was recommending a piece by Arvo Pärt that I hadn't listened to yet, the "Trisagion for String Orchestra". Well, I've been meaning to delve deeper into Pärt for a while now (I've long loved his "Tabula Rasa," which I now realize is using prepared piano to sound a bit like gamelan), so I checked out the "Te Deum" after that. (Was YouTube remembering that I had listened to Pärt's Fourth Symphony previously, or was it noticing that I was listening to other music it considered similar to Pärt's, or was the suggestion of Pärt random?)
This is not to mention the Sixth Symphony of Allan Petersson that I was pointed to by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ron_drummond. At an hour, it's a lot of music to absorb, but I've listened to it twice already. There's a whole lot more Petersson there too.
And much, much more. YouTube's an ocean of music, and I'm becoming ocean.
Meanwhile, via discovering Alex Ross' profile of Adams for The New Yorker, I started reading Ross' archives on the intertubes and found his profile of Nico Muhly, who is a 30-something composer who has collaborated with all kinds of people, including Bjork, and has already made quite a name for himself. So I listened to a couple of *his* pieces on YouTube, and I was impressed by "Gait," which was performed as part of the Proms in London in 2012.
Yesterday I went to YouTube to listen to some Harrison, and the front page was recommending a piece by Arvo Pärt that I hadn't listened to yet, the "Trisagion for String Orchestra". Well, I've been meaning to delve deeper into Pärt for a while now (I've long loved his "Tabula Rasa," which I now realize is using prepared piano to sound a bit like gamelan), so I checked out the "Te Deum" after that. (Was YouTube remembering that I had listened to Pärt's Fourth Symphony previously, or was it noticing that I was listening to other music it considered similar to Pärt's, or was the suggestion of Pärt random?)
This is not to mention the Sixth Symphony of Allan Petersson that I was pointed to by
ron_drummond. At an hour, it's a lot of music to absorb, but I've listened to it twice already. There's a whole lot more Petersson there too. And much, much more. YouTube's an ocean of music, and I'm becoming ocean.
