Not all messages are displayed:
show all messages (52 of them)
two years pass...
so, that zeitkratzer disc ended up being ok, but in all cases not the best versions of those pieces, so not as all that as hoped
this, though:
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/reviews/album-james-tenney-john-cage-sonatas--interludes-hatnowart-7939022.html
http://www.jazzloft.com/p-55572-sonatas-interludes.aspx
I saw Tenney play Sonatas and Interludes at Mills the year before he passed -- I've been hoping for a studio recording of the piece ever since, and it's finally here. I've enjoyed a lot of recordings of this piece, but nothing ever comes close to the resonant & mysterious sound of the original 1950 recording by Maro Ajemian. Every piano is so different, so inevitably, Cage's instructions on how to prepare the piano can only be so precise; at some point, each performer is just supposed to use their ears and choose sounds that feel right to them. In practice, how this works out is that most people approach the piece primarily as a percussive one, and create a bunch of sonically interesting 'notes' filled with lots of noisy overtones, each of which sound great on impact. But it is not a modal piece, it does modulate, it goes through many little twists. What this basically means is that on many recordings, the chords end up being fairly atonal, or at least brittle, rattled out, on the noisy side of the spectrum. Which even now still sounds very novel, but in all honesty, also the reason why I rarely make it all the way through most recordings.
Tenney knows each movement of the piece by heart, and so well, that his preparations for each individual note pay attention to the chords that they are going to be utilized in. When he plays it, it becomes a shockingly consonant & harmonic piece; the chords don't clatter, they ring out. This recording only hints at what it was like to be in the room with the piano; loud notes, hit hard, would seem quieter than the softly hit notes with overtones that would shoot back and forth through the entire concert hall. You can kind of still hear that on this recording, it's acoustic music that sounds like electronic music at times. This makes it a very difficult piece to record -- part of the appeal of the original Ajemian document is the fact that it is a far-field, mono, somewhat fuzzy recording. Too many higher fidelity recordings are stuck between recording the piano from across the room and losing the details, or sticking the mics so close that the percussive transients sound too harsh or require over-compression, so the engineer has to compromise -- you can't get the sound. But the Tenney version survives documentation much more easily, mainly because it's not just a percussive piece in his hands, it's a tonal one.
Can't believe it's been out for months before I even heard about it, but -- hands down, this is the recording of the piece if you're only buying one, even if you think you don't like this piece, or don't like Cage, there is something very different about this one
― Milton Parker, Wednesday, 31 October 2012 18:37 (eleven years ago) link
two months pass...
one month passes...
four weeks pass...
ten months pass...
Can't wait to see that. Still in theaters only, no SF screenings announced yet.
Schneemann is an amazing figure. Her work is still shocking half a century later, which is the only reason in the world I can think of why she isn't more widely known.
― Milton Parker, Monday, 10 February 2014 18:37 (ten years ago) link
I only knew her work in film -- and she is known (as far as a structuralist filmmaker can be known) but there is so much more.
I liked her writings, her paintings, her collages...just found everything about her likeable. Want to see this again.
― xyzzzz__, Tuesday, 11 February 2014 23:43 (ten years ago) link
one year passes...
five years pass...