The YouTube Channel for the Instructional Videos of the Music Discussion Network (MDN) is http://youtube.com/MusicDiscussionNet. MDN’s website is http://Music-Discussion.Net/, which includes the same videos, but also Additional Information and Links, as well as Discussion Areas. So far, I have completed instructional videos on Bob Dylan, Josquin, Laurie Anderson, Handel, Rush, Chopin, and Music in The Simpsons.
I just listened to Tori Amos’s 2009 “seasonal” album Midwinter Graces for the first time. Not surprisingly, it’s not overly “church-y,” which is consistent with the “reacting against her religious background” aesthetic of some of her earlier songs. What she mainly does is take segments of existing, “traditional” Christmas carols (various combinations of words, tunes, rhythms, chords, etc.) and folds them into “arty” songs that are thus perhaps each around 60% original and reflective of her view of the season as being most usefully seen as not being particularly “Christian” OR “secular.” It reminds me a little of Jane Siberry’s live, 1997 album Child: Music for the Christmas Season.
Amos often somewhat modifies a carol’s familiar words to de-emphasize its religious tone (although she also retains certain Latin words), and in some cases she combines aspects of two carols with her own ideas. Flowers, stars, candles, harps, and angels thus become relatively “generic” (both in her adaptations and in her original “Snow Angel”), and she transforms the idea of a “silent night” into an original love song: “A Silent Night with You.” I found her combination of “Lo, How a Rose” and “The Holly and the Ivy” (“Holly, Ivy and Rose”) to be the most effective.
Almost all of the instrumentation is for orchestra and/or piano (or the occasional synthesizer or harpsichord), sometimes with a modest amount of percussion. Thus, the ninth track (the original “Pink and Glitter”) is fairly jarring when it suddenly introduces a kind of Sarah Vaughan, big-band jazz sound, which then abates for the following adaptation of “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” and the two, concluding, original Tori Amos songs: “Winter’s Carol” (very Kate Bush-like, and with its words from the 1864 fairy tale “The Light Princess”) and “Our New Year.”
The TV series Metal Evolution is 6 episodes too long (11) & spends as much time on glam & grunge as thrash & on Poison & Nickelback as Metallica, etc. Anyone who doesn’t care about heavy metal is going to find more than two episodes quite enough, and anyone who does is probably going to know way more than anything provided in the series. (The questions asked are just not good enough, the biggest problem being that actual pieces of music are almost never discussed.) I don’t CARE if Nickelback plays more interesting stuff live than evidenced in its radio hits: its radio hits are terrible (although I do find “Bottoms Up” a half-decent example of an irresponsible, excessive-drinking song), and Creed was mostly just warmed-over (and thinned-out) early Pearl Jam.
I just saw the new, David-Fincher-directed “Hollywood” adaptation of Stieg Larsson’s book, Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women, which is a much more apt title than the English version: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). [No plot spoiler follows!] I didn’t find Lisbeth Salander (by American actress Rooney Mara) to be all that different from in the 2009 Swedish version (by Swedish actress Noomi Rapace), mostly because her troubled, hacker-investigator character is so vividly present in the “Millennium Trilogy” books themselves. I personally find Daniel Craig rather “beefcake-y” to be playing mild-mannered Swedish journalist Mikael Blomkvist, so Swedish actor Michael Nyqvist (from the first adaptation) makes way more sense to me. The primary settings remain in Sweden, but almost all of the characters speak in English, despite the fact that a fair bit of the background audio and images are in Swedish, so it is by no means obvious that English would REALLY be spoken. Both versions deviate from the book in several ways, and sometimes the same ways. The synth- and effects-heavy score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross works pretty well. It makes the most sense for Lisbeth’s “indie” (pierced, inked, etc.) aesthetic and “odd” mental state and for the quick-cuts that happen in the first half of the film–before she and Mikael start working together.
Alex Ross (the music critic of The New Yorker) has “helpfully” suggested that Schubert (d. 1828) and Wagner (d. 1883) trace an “eerie harmony” continuity from Italian composer Carlo Gesualdo (the Prince of Venosa, ca 1566-1613) to the “present day” (i.e., Italian nobleman and composer Francesco d’Avalos, a descendant of the family of the unfaithful wife Gesualdo famously murdered). Vaguely suggesting that d’Avalos’s son Andrea may have been the one listening to some unspecified hip-hop as you left the ancient building in Naples is seriously NOT GOOD ENOUGH. I could find only one photo of “Prince Andrea d’Avalos” – with dark, short hair and glasses, wearing a tux at some kind of international fundraising event in 2003, probably around 25 then. No signs of hip-hop! There are too many other people with the non-Prince name, though, to figure out much more.
Was Gesualdo (1) a tortured genius who blasted through the boundaries of harmony two or three hundred years before anyone else did, or (2) a person of considerable means who didn’t have to follow any rules (in his personal life, such as killing his unfaithful wife and her lover, OR in his music) and thus also didn’t really have to know what he was doing? Either way, the correct parallel is probably not so much Wagner or the Second Viennese School, as Ives! If you’re interested in this, you might also like Werner Herzog’s 1995 biography on him (Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices). It definitely has some strong-minded Option 1 types, but I think I’m still going to go with Option 2!
The last nine albums I added to my iTunes library are: Peter Gabriel’s OVO (Millennium Show), Long Walk Home (the soundtrack from Rabbit-Proof Fence), Scratch My Back, and New Blood; Tori Amos’s Abnormally Attracted to Sin, Midwinter Graces, and Night of Hunters; and Kate Bush’s Director’s Cut and 50 Words for Snow. Number of songs: 127, range of duration: 0:59-13:32, average duration: 5:00, number of songs without guitars, drums, or synthesizers (i.e., with orchestra, piano, and/or choir): 61 (48%). Three minutes, three chords, three verses, three choruses …… not so much. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)
Peter Gabriel’s New Blood (2011) is a fascinating album, comprising orchestral arrangements (by John Metcalfe) of some of Gabriel’s best album tracks from 1977 to 2002: such as, “The Rhythm of the Heat,” “San Jacinto,” “The Intruder,” “Wallflower,” “Digging in the Dirt,” and “Darkness.” Disc 1 has vocal versions, and the Special Edition’s Disc 2 mostly has instrumental versions that don’t include approximations of the vocals. Those renditions are thus “karaoke” songs (the “empty orchestra” being literally orchestra, in this case), presumably for people–like me–who know most of these songs really well.
There are NO versions of such more obvious Gabriel hits as “Games without Frontiers,” “Biko,” “Shock the Monkey,” “Sledgehammer,” “Big Time,” “Steam,” or “Come Talk to Me,” but it does include four songs from the 1986 hit album So: “Red Rain,” “In Your Eyes, “Mercy Street,” and “Don’t Give Up”–the vocal version featuring Norwegian musician Ane Brun providing a guest vocal quite unlike Kate Bush’s original. It also has two songs from the 2000 soundtrack OVO – The Millennium Show (“Downside Up,” featuring his daughter Melanie Gabriel, and “The Nest That Sailed the Sky”), plus (after a five-minute ambient noise track) a “bonus track” of “Solsbury Hill.”
The Special Edition disc also has “Blood of Eden” (in a vocal version) and there were two additional digital-download-only songs. I think “Here Comes the Flood” would also have worked pretty well, but I suppose there are already quite a few alternate versions of that song.
I like Darren Aronofsky’s movies, including pi, Requiem for a Dream, and even his relatively obscure “flop,” The Fountain. The Wrestler was a much more mainstream type of thing.
Black Swan strikes an effective middle-ground between arty and commercial. Natalie Portman is quite good with the material, including channeling her actual childhood ballet experience. However, the character goes quite easily off the deep end, with “body”-obsessed fantasies, etc. (including what her rival, played by Mila Kunis, calls a “lesbo wet dream”) that seem inspired by David Cronenberg’s more bizarre things of the 1980s, but without the movie really ever providing an explanation (other than the character having an unpleasant mother, played by Barbara Hershey) for why or how she may be mentally ill in the first place.
I actually thought that the director’s space- and time-shifting meditation on life and love, The Fountain, was great, even though it failed commercially and had a very difficult production life (e.g., a drastically-slashed budget and Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz replacing Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett).
Durrell Bowman 