Evan Tobias, the author of the ridiculously creative music education blog Catalysts & Connections, points us to Nate Harrison’s audio installation Can I Get An Amen?, which details the history of the ubiquitous “Amen break”. While presenting a fascinating historical narrative about an omnipotent pop-culture sound artifact, the piece also makes an important statement about the current state of copyright and fair use.
Galen Brown over at Sequenza21 comments on my last post and informs me that Radiohead samples Paul Lansky’s first computer piece, mild und leise, on “Idioteque” from their Kid A album. Here’s the story, as told by Lansky himself. Actually, I knew this (that Radiohead sampled Lansky). My friend, who teaches middle school music (very progressively, I might add) does a unit on sampling for his kids. He plays “Idioteque” by Radiohead followed by the Lansky work, asking his students to try and identify the portion of the work that Radiohead samples.
Yes. I saw it last Thursday when I ventured out to Joe’s Pub in the East Village to catch the pianist Christopher O’Riley playing Radiohead. I have to confess with slight embarrassment that I am completely unfamiliar with Radiohead’s music, but know they’re popular among many classical musicians. At any rate, I was a bit skeptical about the concert from the beginning. Rock music transcribed for piano? (Well, Matt Haimovitz made a version of Jimi Hendrix’s rendering of the “Star Spangled Banner,” so maybe it’ll work.) As I sat and waited for the show to start, I began wondering why people were here. Were they Radiohead fans? Christopher O’Riley fans? Or classical music fans interested in how a fellow artist is reaching out to new audiences? I belonged to the latter category, while the rest of the crowd seemed to be in the first.
When O’Riley began his set–the second of two for the night–I retained my initial skepticism. After the third tune he began to talk to the audience about the music, about transcribing it for the piano, about esoteric Radiohead knowledge (he asked for hands in the crowd for who was the biggest Radiohead nerd, which O’Riley himself ended up being proudly), and his love for the music. O’Riley simply loves Radiohead. So much so that he transcribes all their music for piano. And his love for the music comes out in his playing of it. The next few tunes, actually, the rest of the set, sounded a lot different to me than the first few tunes. Maybe he wasn’t warmed up. Or maybe I began to understand what he was doing. My friend Evan told me that timbre is a big part of Radiohead’s music and that he was curious about how this would translate to the piano. There’s color in O’Riley’s playing. I didn’t once miss the drums on any tune (well, since I didn’t know them, how could I miss them?). There were moments when I was completely transfixed by the music and by O’Riley’s delivery of it.
I think I was a bit cold to O’Riley’s idea at first because I had already made some assumptions before the show. O’Riley is a concert pianist so he’d probably make the arrangements piano-y, like with lots of arpeggiations, virtuosic flourishes, and so on, right? Wrong. There’s no fancy piano stuff in these arrangements–just the music. And honestly, I was relieved when I realized that this wasn’t going to be a show-off-my-piano-chops kind of event. The truth is that this kind of playing requires its own kind of virtuosity and intamacy with the music that not every artist could pull off. (Kind of like a classical musician who thinks jazz is easy trying to swing.) But Christopher O’Riley pullls it off convincingly.
While you won’t catch me playing the complete The Clash at CBGB anytime soon, I think O’Riley is on to something in terms of bringing his art to a larger audience in a pretty cool venue. Gone were the traditional concert conventions and I think people might have been a little happier because of it. In this setting, people were free to chat if they felt like it, sneeze and not be glared at, eat tiramisu out of a martini glass, and go to the bathroom in the middle of a piece. That’s cool and this kind of looseness in no way implies that the artist on stage is compromising his artistic integrity. I don’t know if a crowd like this would be hip to a Milton Babbitt, Charles Wuorinen, or Iannis Xenakis joint, but I wouldn’t put it past them. It could work. I can think of one or two ways. (Coming soon . . . Hybrid Groove Project.)
P.S. Listen to O’Riley on NPR’s Performance Today.
The Tower Records in Harvard Square has been singing its siren song to me all week long. It lures me in seductively, flaunting its assets–a good sized section devoted entirely to new music–while simultaneously draining mine. Ever since the Borders in Ann Arbor scaled down its classical music section I haven’t had many opportunities recently to thumb through the bins and discover an interesting and exciting CD. My safaris through Tower these past few days have yielded four trophies: a box set of Conlon Nancarrow’s Studies for Player Piano (Wergo); Still Lives (Lovely), a CD featuring three works by Alvin Lucier, including Marilyn Nonken performing Music for Piano with slow sweet pure wave oscillators; Salvatore Sciarrino’s La bocca, i piedi, il suono (Col Legno) for a quartet of alto saxophones with a back-up band of one hundred saxophones; and Vespertine by Bjork.
Music has an amazing ability to reconnect you with another time and place. Earth, Wind & Fire, “September,” Emotions, “Best Of My Love,” Foo Fighters, “Up In Arms.”
A blog by saxophonist Brian Sacawa.
Hosted by WordPress, and Fjords01! Web design, based on Qwilm. Contributors: Dedicated Servers.