Just listened to: Corelli: Opus 1 & 3: Church Sonatas (2014) recorded at St. George’s Church in Cambridge on Linn by The Avison Ensemble. Stately but not stuffy. Pretty but not precious. Backgroundable but not boring. And full of emotion—especially Opus 1, which often turns my ears with its late Renaissance simplicity and the remarkable equality of stature given to the second violin.
Opus 3, published eight years later and thus further into Corelli’s renown as both violinist and composer, is less egalitarian—still lovely, but tilted some toward the primo. It’s also more filigreed and its tonality and vibe more evocative of daytime public radio, thanks in some part to keyboardist Roger Hamilton occasionally switching from chamber organ to harpsichord, an instrument for which I’ve yet to develop a taste.
But the real question is: Is it harder to use all four limbs to play five quasi-independent musical voices on a pipe organ or to sing into a microphone while using all four limbs to drum?
The pleasure I remember deriving—and still derive—from performing my greatest individual musical triumphs—singing “Once In A Lifetime” at high school commencement, earning the Valjean understudy role in FUSE’s semi-pro staging of LES MIS, delivering “She Loves Me” at my FUSE cabaret debut, rendering the national anthem at Medlar Field—does not compare to that which I remember deriving from any time I have managed to inhabit vocal harmony, feeling the buzz of the air between me and other singers, triumphant performance or no: the Boyz II Men arrangement of “Yesterday” at high school senior reflections night at Daylesford Abbey, the fifteen minutes of abortive choir rehearsal of “An Irish Blessing” in the lobby of Teen Mania Ministries, “Helplessly Hoping” with Matt and Ben as part of Puddintown Roots, “Something’s Coming” with Madeline, James, and Clara at a later FUSE cabaret, even the two-part improvisations Carla and I frequently used to entertain ourselves with while commuting or traveling as twentysomethings.
What’s more, I hardly remember the embarrassment and chagrin accompanying my many disappointments and failures in solo performance—ranking twenty-third out of twenty-four baritones at States, melting down and dropping out of Voice 100J, forgetting the lyrics of a simple Vineyard song at Mommom’s funeral, not earning the actual Valjean role in FUSE’s staging of LES MIS. Instead, the disappointments that still stick are the ones that resulted in me missing an opportunity to feel vocal harmony: failing to make Penn State’s Concert Choir and learning that standing at the back of the tenor section of State College Choral Society relegates me to hearing only other tenors.
The above observations make one thing clear to me: I want to be in a vocal group that lets me live inside the buzz of the buzz of tight vocal harmonies. The trick will be to find one whose membership could put up with my relative lack of sight-reading chops. Bonus if we could be genre hoppers; I don’t think I’d like doing only barbershop, only classical, or only pop as much as I’d like doing it all.
Just listened to: Villains (2017) by Queens of the Stone Age. The tall, crooning goblin king of 21st-century hard rock slicks his hair back with Ronsongoop and manages to remake Low, Blackstar, and (especially) The Man Who Sold The World in his own, more muscled—but equally louche and uncanny—image. Tritones, chord planing, chromatic movement, and descending major thirds abound. Plus, it’s more fun than any of those rightly esteemed Bowie forebears. You can even dance-magic-dance to the album’s first single. (And he does.)
On that note, after some time this morning on a walk asking for Your help sussing out an answer to that perennial question about what I want to do as it regards music, having missed out on Wednesday’s fifth anniversary celebration of the open mic Stacy hosts at The Speakeasy, I think I have an answer tonight: The music I want to make must feature tight, playful harmonic vocal interplay.
To please Carla, I’m tempted to say I don’t want to be part of a university-style acapella group, but there’s a nontrivial chance that’s only because she has stated she doesn’t care for the genre. It’s true I might prefer something more classical crossover-y, but I’m not sure. It could be a Crosby, Stills & Nash thing. Regardless, I think I know myself here: It’s tight harmonies I can feel—unlike those I can barely hear from the back of the tenor section of a large choir—that find me at my musicmaking happiest.
Just listened to Cheat Codes (2022) by Danger Mouse & Black Thought. Nothing new here except the marquee pairing itself, who bring, as expected, a conscious boom bap, densely worded and rich in murky, retro samples.
Challenging art teaches you that lesson [that you are not yet what you could be]; great art insists on it. A great novel is, among other things, a document that is more human than human, that goes further than it has to in the effort to convey the human experience. A great, challenging novel knows things you don’t, says things that will not flatter you, and will not stop doing its work until it’s rearranged something in your chest. And who could stand that? We’ve spent years learning that discomfort is always, always a sign of harm. And so we took the only reasonable action a therapeutic civilization could take with an art form built on productive discomfort: we got rid of it. We replaced it with #content, which is art that has agreed as a condition of existence never to ask anything of you at all.
His partial etiology isn’t convincing, tempting though it may be because I share his animus for real coddling I do observe around me. Even the phenomenon for which he is attempting provide an etiology is questionable: There’s nothing new about people shying away from demanding art, whether the demand is moral, as he seems mostly to have in mind here, or cognitive, owing to formal obscurity.
But I could sing his partial definition of a great novel.
I lack the vocabulary and leisure to write much about the cracklingly alive music of the great 20th-century Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, seven hours of whose greatest music can be found in this playlist. But what I can tell you is that he comes across to me as an intensely focused über-Puck, as ingenious as he is impish. He alternately grins maniacally and aches with grief as he employs chromaticism, weird harmonies, percussive pianism, asymmetric meters, novel bowings and pluckings (including one named after him), oddly located sforzandos and other displaced accents, and a dozen other tricks from his rather large bag to make all kinds of unexpected musical turns. He hides peasant tunes in music that pushes tonality just shy of its breaking point. He makes life fiendishly difficult for violinists and pianists.
To some, like my friend Travis, who has been a great sport to listen all the way through Bartók’s repertoire with me, all the above is in service to nothing more than making mischief on the human ear. To me, in its own, arch and difficult way, Bartók’s music captures the joy and sorrow of living.
Carla, the lovely, lateral thinker that she is, having heard some snippets, compares Bartók to free jazzmen. It’s an apt comparison—except that they’re improvising, and he wrote all his mischief down. I’m not sure which is more impressive.
Just re-listened to: Goes West (2019) by William Tyler. Poppy, lilting guitar Americana, like so many Alison Krauss tracks, but without the singing and with drums. In other words, hold music nonetheless capable under the right conditions—which apparently include doing the dishes alone on an unusually cool, overcast June evening—of eliciting tears.
When I claim to be Anglophile, what it seems to me today to mean more than anything else is that I deeply enjoy some of the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Not just the evergreen chestnuts The Lark Ascending and Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, either. If you were to translate the electrical impulses of my heart into sound, you would hear those, yes, along with most of his nine symphonies, at least one song cycle, some incidental music, and Job: A Masque for Dancing (maybe his greatest work).
Just listened to: Harmonies du soir (2011), a Liszt recital recorded on Decca by the late Nelson Freire, who trades in neither treacle, nor mud, nor exhibitionism. Just music.
Just listened to: Days of Ash (2026) by U2. Their most politically charged release in over forty years (or maybe ever), and their first release in over twenty years that I’ve willingly listened to front-to-back more than once. Sonically, it’s sure U2, alright. Lyrically, too—and while in some past U2 offerings that’s been a liability, here their earnest on-the-noseness is endearing instead of cringeworthy, probably because of the smack-dab timing of the release. Lent Rocks, I guess. And the times they are a’crazy. Hear the word of the Lord according to Bono. Forgive us, O Lord, for we have sinned.
My taste in music is an extension of Dad’s, rooted as it is in pre-1980s rockism and in melody-forward (but not treacly) Western classical music circa 1800–1950. I’m more than okay with that. I feel happy about it, in fact. It gives him and me a relational bridge, a line I have frankly underexploited. It also feels nice to know that a part of me I enjoy comes from somewhere. Is it weird to be thankful for your own taste in music?
For whatever it’s worth, here’s a six-hour playlist of Tchaikovsky recordings I’d love to hear again, harvested from a listening project with Travis. Among the pieces in it that I haven’t yet writtenabout are:
Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35 (1870/1880)
Heifetz sure brings the fire, but it’s Julia Fischer—at twenty-two years old—who brings the truest spirit to this happiest of Tchaikovsky’s major works.
Opera is generally not for me. Eugene Onegin is no exception. But “Kuda, kuda vï udalilis,” Lensky’s famous pre-duel aria, sung here by Sergei Lemeshev, who made the role of Lensky his stock-in-trade, is the exception to the no exception.
The Year 1812, Solemn Overture, Op. 49 (1880)
Antal Doráti, Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, and Mercury Records re-recorded 1812 Overture four years after being the first to release a recording of the piece featuring the sound of actual cannon fire and church bells—because to Doráti, the first bells weren’t big enough and to Mercury, it was time to sell some stereophonic vinyl. So this time they recorded the heaviest carillon in the world, panned the vintage cannon fire sounds left-to-right across the newfangled soundstage, and released what became a gold record and an audiophile touchpoint. Evidence that 1812 is best rendered more as feeling than as music. Enough feeling, even, to make this pacifist American march jubilantly across his living room, stick both middle fingers up at an imaginary, retreating army and shout, “Yeah, that’s right, Bonaparte! Fuck off all the way back to Fontainebleau!” Solemn Overture? Hardly—although my second-favorite recording of this piece, a 1996 rendering by Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Leningrad Military Orchestra under Vladimir Ashkenazy and infused with Civilization VI gravitas by St. Petersburg Chamber Choir replacing some of the strings, does manage to bring the solemn along with big (and pleasantly messier) bells and similarly spatial cannon fire.
Serenade for Strings in C major, Op. 48 (1880)
Tchaikovsky at his most fey (definitions 2b and 3). Either that or a synthesizer pad set to “Space Mozart.” The strings here, with no woodwinds or brass to ground them, run the risk of opening a portal to fairyland or to another galaxy, where the people are like us but not—except that they are definitely wearing powdered wigs. Enchanting.
Capriccio italien, Op. 45 (1880)
Pyotr’s failed submission for the score of The Godfather, which he then resubmitted as a potential score of ¡Three Amigos! But seriously, this 15-minute fantasia is the most thoroughly pops piece—other than maybe the subtle one with the cannons—by a composer who’d probably feel some mix of bewilderment, vindication, and embarrassment to find out he churned out at least a half a dozen of them.
Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64 (1888)
King Melody finally puts on some muscle that isn’t just for Fourth of July shows or Boston Pops concerts. And the second movement features the horn solo equivalent of slow, hopeful tears. When you listen to it, imagine playing through it while your city is being actively shelled by the Nazis.
Here’s hoping that somehow that blatty first movement is a grower, because—the other movements! Second: Typically pretty Tchaikovsky (my daughter said was “very nice”) lent operatic, Italianate gravitas by Pappano and his Roman band. Third: Five minutes of charming, sometimes Looney Tunes pizzicato that remains grounded by its serious interpretation. Finale: I laughed out loud euphorically at this vigorous street party.
In a concordant, resolute response to Damon Krukowski’s brief “Revisiting the Pyramid of Inequality that is Streaming Music,” I remind myself that if I want humanity to keep recording music that isn’t of mass appeal—and I do—then assuming I have the means, I must buy records from the recorders and not merely rent them from the tech fiefs.
Just listened to: a bunch of recordings of Tchaikovsky’s familiar symphonic poem Romeo and Juliet (1870/1880) as my inaugural part of a co-listening project with Travis. Of those, I enjoyed all of the following:
Bernstein conducts NYPO as if Tchaikovsky had written the piece as the score to a 1950s movie.
Muti conducts Philharmonia and Fischer conducts Budapest as if the composer had written the piece as the score to a 21st-century movie (which is weird in Muti’s case because he made the record in 1977).
Abbado conducts Berlin as if Tchaikovsky had written the piece as the score of real-life, magical fairy tale.
Doráti conducts LSO as if Tchaikovsky had written the piece so that Rite-of-Spring-era Stravinsky could conduct it (or eat it for breakfast).
Pappano conducts Santa Cecilia as if Tchaikovsky had written the piece as an opera.
Again, all are worth hearing, but I enjoy the Abbado third-best, the Doráti second-best—because it’s just so different and exciting and snarly—and the Pappano the mostest. Because let’s face it: Romeo and Juliet is squarely the sort of story out of which operas are born. The hi-fi recording helps here, too, of course.)
Just listened to: Teeth of Time (2025) by Joshua Burnside at the recommendation of my friend Josh (no relation). Arresting, sometimes brusque, close-mic’d, shiny-brogue Irish neo-folk to whose genre description we might occasionally add the affixes “glitch” or “-tronica.” Highly recommended.
One niggle: Would it be too much to ask Burnside to endow his songs with proper endings? I acknowledge that the title of the last track is “Nothing Completed” and that there’s a certain formal congruence between that idea and the fact that almost all the tracks here either fade into nothing quickly or come to a sheer, abrupt stop, but if he’s trying to tweak our aesthetic noses with this, he has in my case succeeded.
Seen from another angle, this is Adagio for Strings, redux, except in the form of a single-chord prolation canon and probably even better suited to accompany Platoon. That Pärt wrote this to grieve to death of a man he’d never met fascinates me.
Just listened to: Christmas Songs (2004) by The Eddie Higgins Trio. Straight-ahead Christmas piano trio jazz of the sort you get for free on a Roku music channel.
Lately, I have grown slightly bothered by the aloneness of two of my favorite things to do: listening to recorded music and reading books (and poetry). In most cases, these pursuits involve me walking, standing, or sitting by myself taking in artifacts of work done by people I don’t know—often people who I couldn’t know this side of eternity because they’re dead. Of course, none of that entails listening to records and reading books solo can’t be good. Often, the artifacts are insightful or beautiful enough to move me toward thanksgiving to the Ultimate Creator, to engender joy or peace, to inspire good deeds, and even adjust the course of my life.
No, the bother comes from the non-sharing of these very benefits. I suppose addressing that bother is partly why I blog. Yet blogging is an indirect way to share. It’s not exactly interpersonal. And interpersonal is the way of Life.
So. Today I took two small steps toward making music appreciation and book reading interpersonal: (1) I called and left a voice message for Travis suggesting we take periodic turns suggesting we both listen to specific classical music recordings, perhaps even simultaneously even though we’re a continent apart, and then talk about them; and (2) I called and spoke with Aaron suggesting we recite passages and stanzas to one another in person, in phone conversation, or via voice message whenever something really hits us.
Just listened to: a recording of Messiaen’s L’Ascension (1933) by Paavo Järvi conducting Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich on Alpha Classics (2019) while on a short sunset walk. Because sometimes you wanna go beyond la frontière Debussy. A devout, twenty-something, 20th-century French organist composes a short, innovative, delicious four-course symphonic prix fixe from a mathematically constrained but phenomenally boundless (thus predictably unpredictable) harmonic palette, neither tonal nor dodecaphonic. And a world-class, Grammy-winning Estonian conductor and his first-rate Zürcher waitstaff serve it with all the attention and grace you expect at a Michelin-starred restaurant.
