Maybe I'd spend the $1,500 on a marimba
You never know what you'll find on YouTube. This is Philip Glass's "Openings" on a marimba, of all things. I'm very fond of this piece as it was composed for the piano. The 3-on-2 rhythm makes it sound more complicated than it is; a piano amateur can easily play it. How this guy can get the same effect with four mallets in two hands, I have no idea. I love it, despite the false notes sprinkled in.
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11 comments:
I'm afraid I'm not even a piano amateur, but that was lovely. I like it when we are able to bring forward interesting things being done in music -- Eric Blair will tell you that it's been a concern of mine for a while -- so thank you for this post.
Yes, what Grim said.
I think I first became aware of Glass for the music he did for "Hamburger Hill", the ending credits here: http://youtu.be/bYOHeTNsNFM
I saw that film when it came out, and the music still sticks in my mind after all these years.
I heard this "Openings" piece as background music in the universally reviled Richard Gere remake of "Breathless," which I apparently alone in the universe just loved, enough to watch it repeatedly. This was in the age of VHS, and before Netflix or Amazon made it easy to find a tape of most movies, especially universally reviled ones, so I had the devil of a time identifying the music from the credits when the movie happened to come on TV. (This also was before the time of stop-action buttons on the TV.) I was so thrilled to find not only the name of the piece, so I could buy a copy, but also the piano score! I was in Heaven. (This was before www.sheetmusic.com and the like, when you were lucky if you could even find a store selling music scores, let alone anything obscure.)
It's really a lot easier now finding books, music, and sheet music.
And now you've made Eric's usual point, on these music posts, about the myriad advantages of technology in this area. :)
It's a good point, and a valid one. My usual question, then, is where are our Beethovens? We have this remarkable access to music; we can hear classics long gone, music separated by hundreds of years, which Beethoven himself may never have heard. We not only have all these inspiring examples, but easy access to education, including music education.
I'm always excited to find the hidden treasure -- your example here, or the harpist I met the other week. What I wonder about, though, is why -- with all this to choose from, to inspire us -- why are there so few? Why do even the best of them not approach the power of Beethoven or Bach or Wagner? And why are they so hidden?
Maybe the increased ease of hearing a variety of music is incompatible with the overpowering urge to create one's own. How many composers can write well without the intimate knowledge of one or more musical instruments? I think fewer people learn to play when it's so easy to play recordings.
But it beats me. I don't have a composing bone in my body; I have no idea what it takes to make a composer. Maybe we have to consider that you're more likely to find fantastic music if you review the combined results of centuries than if you have to look only at a short contemporary period.
We've been over this point before:
The reason that "new" Beethovens don't seem to be there is technology, plus, the culture that produced Beethoven and his contemporaries doesn't exist anymore, and hasn't since WWI.
That you and I and everybody else knows about Beethoven is just the long tail of memory (and again, helped by technology).
Well, I was hoping for a new answer. Hope and faith are two of the great virtues, after all; and so it may be, even if you're right, that a few of us may rekindle the old civilization after the next fall.
Or something like it. The Medievals wanted the Roman empire anew, and got instead Charlemagne and King Arthur. That's not so bad.
Drum circles!
Actually, I'd love to see drum circles catch on around here. Not a substitute for Beethoven, of course.
I would like to point out that in Mozart and Beethoven's time, they were essentially writing "popular" music - for that era in time. Given that perspective, I would submit that today's popular music does have it's own versions of Mozart and Beethoven. The first that comes to mind is Alicia Keys.
Oddly, I discovered Phillip Glass accidentally, through a Nike commercial of all things- but the music wasn't his, it was Jonathan Elias (full piece of the music from the commercial here), but it sounded like Phillip Glass, and in looking for who did the music for that commercial, I came across Glass as well.
I think part of what we like in these pieces is what we like in Bach- there is a simple element in a simple initial pattern at the core that is immediately comprehensible, but we're then taken on a journey through the variations and divergences of that starting point. Nature works like this too, so there is that relationship to beauty as that which is familiar to us, as in the patterns of nature which surround us.
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