Jerry Garcia Band-Live at Shoreline DVD October 9, 2007
Posted by Amer Baloch in : Uncategorized , add a comment
The first and only official Jerry Garcia Band DVD release ( DVD 339 at the Media Center ) Filmed in front of 15,000 deadheads who had intially come out expecting to see the Grateful Dead. Alas, tragedy struck the Grateful Dead’s keyboard chair for a second time in their illustrious career and they had to cancel. Jerry Garcia saved the day and with the help of Melvin Seals and John Kahn, delivered tremendous versions of crowd favorites including Dear Prudence, And it stoned me, Deal and Second that Emotion among others. This has been heralded as one of JGB’s finest perfomances and it is delightful to be able to listen and see the band in all its glory.
The End of Early Music October 4, 2007
Posted by Tom Moore in : early music, historically-informed performance , 1 comment so far
Bruce Haynes
Bruce Haynes. The End of Early Music: A Period Performer’s History of Music for the Twenty-First Century. OUP, 2007. Call number: ML457 H38 2007
Once upon a time, there was something known as early music. This was not so much a repertoire, a musico-historical epoch, as an attitude, a counter-cultural group. There was classical music, the boring old standard-repertoire taught at conservatories, and played in the same old way by people who fetishized the lineage of their teachers, and their teacher’s teachers, and then there was early music, the music of Bach and his predecessors, played by amateur performers (often musicologists) on “old” instruments (recorder, harpsichords, viola da gamba), something which fit right in with the reclaiming of folk music and folk instruments by the hippie resistance to manufactured mass culture. At the same time Albert Ayler and John Coltrane were exploring the outer limits of free jazz, and Jefferson Airplane combining psychedelics and folk-rock, amateur ensembles with krummhorns, sackbuts, shawms, and other dead instruments were reviving centuries of forgotten repertoire from Machaut onwards. Early music managed to be cutting edge by going deep into music which had been only of interest to historians, and transgressive by suggesting that this music and the music which followed did not belong only to its self-anointed priesthood, which seemed to be only mumbling half-understood inherited formulas, with no sense of the enlivening spirit within.
Time passes, and nothing from 1967 seems very current anymore, with the possible exception of Purple Haze. The amateur (and hippie) tinge to early music was washed away by decades of musicians who managed to perform early music professionally on period instruments, and with an historical awareness of the performance issues involved. Their success drew the barbed words of musicologist Richard Taruskin, himself once an amateur performing-musicologist, pointing out the lack of authenticity involved in this recuperation of both unknown and well-known repertoire. The End of Early Music may be seen as a response to the criticisms of Taruskin and others.
Oboist Bruce Haynes is one who has been involved with historically-informed performance for decades, since the first successes of four or five decades ago, and unlike the younger Taruskin, whose recordings are safely entombed on LP in music libraries, his recordings are still commercially available. His survey of the history and issues involved with period performance is compulsively readable. Though the volume has the standard scholarly apparatus of notes and bibliography, there is nothing of the dry-as-dust scholarly compendium about it. An innovation which is particularly useful is the provision of sound examples at the publisher’s site, even if means that the book can be best used with your network-enabled computer close at hand.
The notion that concert-going has become a secular ritual substituting for more explicitly religious rites has become widely accepted, but Haynes goes farther in looking at the amount of fetishism and ritual involved in musical interpretation and consumption in general, disassembling the various fetishes we take for granted as part of musical experiences – the notion of the canon, of absolute music, of genius, of score-fidelity, and others. Evidently I sympathize with Haynes’ position, but even so I think it must be clear to any reader that he has done his work well.
[This post cross-posted at Opera Today]
MMM - Mariana Museum of Music October 1, 2007
Posted by Tom Moore in : brazil, brazilian , add a comment
The Church of St. Francis, Mariana, Minas Gerais, Brazil
Brazil, as well as being a worldwide exporter of its popular music, has a centuries-old tradition of classical music, dating to its colonial era (1500-1822). The rich mining area known as Minas Gerais experienced an incredible artistic flowering in the eighteenth century, powered by the wealth generated by the extraction of gold and precious gems. The former capital of the state, Ouro Preto (Black Gold), is studded with lavishly decorated churches in the Baroque style, and was declared a World Cultural Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1980, the first Brazilian city to receive the designation. Not only did the gold from the mines pay for building and decorating churches, but it also paid for the musical settings of the liturgies which were said.
It is only in recent years that musicological study has been recovering and publishing these musical works. One important project was that coordinated by the Mariana Museum of Music and supported by sponsorship from Petrobras, the Brazilian petroleum corporation. Over three years the project produced nine sets of scores and accompanying recordings. Five years later, it may be difficult if not impossible to purchase copies of the scores and CDs, but the website of the project makes available free scans of the original manuscripts, free downloads of the scores, and selected free downloads of audio. Unfortunately the English language version of the site is incomplete, only covering the first three sets issued.
Below I have linked the pages for downloads for each volume.
Vol. 1 Pentecost
Vol. 2 Mass
Vol. 3 Holy Saturday
Vol. 4 Conception and Assumption of Our Lady
Vol. 5 Christmas
Vol. 6 Holy Thursday
Vol. 7 Popular Devotion to the Saints
Vol. 8 Litany of Our Lady
Vol. 9 Funeral Music
Free CDs from the Emerald Isle October 1, 2007
Posted by Tom Moore in : Uncategorized , add a comment
Quick! How many Irish composers can you name? Any? Ireland is world-famous for its traditional music (there is even a regular Irish music session in nearby Raleigh, at Tir-na-Nog), but its composers of classical music are less well-known. The Contemporary Music Centre, based in Dublin, is trying to do something about this, with an excellent and informative website, including an online shop. You have to poke about a bit before you discover that the shop offers five free anthologies of Irish contemporary classical music on CD – all you have to pay is the (modest) cost of shipping from Ireland to the US. Free is good. Typical wait for delivery: about three weeks. Before parting with your shekels you can listen to mp3 clips of each piece at the site.
