Hamlet Sweeney and I climbed the stairs to the auspicious Balcony TV studio a little while ago. Thankfully I didn’t have to lug the keyboard with me, just the cajon. We played ‘Sunshine’ which, after the gig in Whelan’s the other night (30 April) with the full band, is fast becoming one of my favourite Hamlet songs.
We’re starting a four-week residency in the Purty Loft on the 14 May (not the 15th, as Hamlet says in the video). Come along!
I found The Anderson & Roe Piano Duo on YouTube yesterday. Graduates from Julliard, these two have done some really fantastic work reimagining works such as Strauss’s The Blue Danube waltzes, Astor Piazzolla’s Libertango and John Williams’ Star Wars music to delight those who hear and see them.
The playing is flawless, but what really fizzes is the video work. I haven’t played many piano duets, but it’s really quite an intimate experience. Since they spend so much time alone there, I’m sure most pianists feel like the keyboard is theirs alone when they sit in front of the eighty-eight keys and so sharing the space with someone else is quite a charged environment. One can only speculate as to the amount of piano duet music written for pretty students by admiring teachers! (Greg) Anderson and (Elizabeth Joy) Roe’s videos allow the viewer access to the physical element of piano duetting and they use the medium to explore the narrative suggested by the music they play. The most recent video, of Mozart’s Sonata in D for two pianos, is very well judged and uses various methods to sustain our visual interest, my favourite being the pianists’ hand reflections mirrored in a beautiful editing trick.
Of course Anderson & Roe are not writing music for the drawing room, but for 2000-seater concert halls, and so they purposefully rewrite the music to tangle themselves together. It must take them so long to rehearse! They claim not to do it for the ‘rock’-style, but some of their acrobatics are just plain dangerous (one false move and delicate pinky collides with sweeping elbow…ouch…piano career scuppered). That’s what makes it such good viewing! We love that stuff, right? I personally could take less of their yearning, passionate moments. Yeah, we love Eric Clapton’s/John Mayer’s guitar faces but for some reason that’s allowed in a way that some of this pair’s antics just aren’t. IMHO. (Which, when you think about it, should really be rendered imho, for extra humility…)
Enjoy 🙂
Really good cartoon about orchestras by Matthew Guerrieri (guest-posted on Adaptistration).
Via Jonathan Grimes.
I was determined to start back strongly after the Easter break with the girls choir I conduct. I’ve been experimenting with seating arrangements for the forty or fifty of them that turn up every week(!). For a while there I arranged them in a circle to try and eliminate the talking in the back row phenomenon. It sort of worked and certainly loosened things up a bit; I could walk around the circle and encourage sound production where necessary.
The sixth years have their conformation coming up – quite a big deal, I realised when the teacher produced the book of music they’d be singing. I arranged them in as few rows as possible length-ways in the room where we rehearse and did a good hour’s work with them. Starting with standing up (a huge challenge for some of them!), breathing and warm-ups – explaining why all these things were important – we progressed to the simple canonic Agnus Dei that was in the book. The good thing about this music is that they all pretty much know it already. Of course, that can also be a bad thing…we got into a discussion about what humility is (“…it’s like when you invite someone into your house…”) as I got them to think about how to sing the words. The last note in the phrase is a semibreve on the word ‘us’, so we also had to think about where to place the ‘s’.
In contrast, we also worked on the refrain of the Gloria. This had an optional harmony and, buoyed by our good work to this point, I forged ahead… We sang the melody all together, then I taught them all the harmony line. By alternating tune and harmony a few times we were eventually able to split into the two parts. A great achievement for them – can’t wait for next week!
My brother-in-law, Dan, recommended that I listen to Battles a few months ago after he saw them do a gig in Dublin. I just found some great photos from the gig on my friend Steve Ryan’s site.
Excellent music that is layered with interesting and infectious sounds and beats (and a fantastic loooong rallentando!).
Waiting for the water to heat so I can finish the washing-up this morning, I just came across Nicholas Bate’s ‘The Rules of Life‘ e-book on Eclecticity. (I also just read John Althouse Cohen’s ’15 rules of blogging for myself’, where he cautions fellow bloggers to write thoughtfully.)
Maxims and advice abound on the vast internet and selectivity is the name of the game. To indulge myself in the metaphor of my title: there are lots of flashes going off, attracting our attention, but it’s up to us to focus and record the things that can be classed as either ‘important’, ‘investing’, or ‘interesting’.
Something I noticed about ‘The Rules of Life’ is that Bate encourages his readers to take a moment each day to mull over the truths he presents so they begin to sink in. As much as we want to behave like machines and file things away, bookmark them, post links to them, we don’t work that way and my nice metaphor doesn’t really transfer to a human being’s brain. We need to read, to re-read, to question, to think, to sleep on it, to talk about it. Machines we most certainly are not.
This is still sinking in…!
Today was the fourth rehearsal of a jazz trio comprising me (on keys), Barry Rycraft (on bass) and Satya Darcy (on drums). We worked solely on original material this time, after having started on standards. The guys are both finishing the first year of the jazz studies degree course at Newpark and their enthusiasm is infectious.
We’ll certainly be looking into recording an album and doing some gigs over the next months.
If you get a chance to hear this group of Trinity College Dublin students playing the music of Sigur Rós, I’d recommend it (again). Here, they perform ‘Inni mer syngur vitleysyngur’ (Within me a lunatic sings).
jay wilson :: music 