What are you listening to right NOW!

The third movement of the second Brandenburg Concerto. Sorry for the upcoming didacticism. I'm a sententious fucker, I know, (wake up, Nate :) ) but I can't help it. Oh well. Anyway...let me share, a bit, for anyone interested..

It's a concerto grosso, that is, instead of a solo instrument backed up by the orchestra, we have a small ensemble backed up by a larger: here, a trumpet, an oboe, a violin, and a recorder. It's a little fugue: a subject, a bit of melody, is introduced by the first voice, the trumpet, then repeated, in a different key, by the oboe, while the first voice accompanies with a counter melody. Then the third voice, the violin, repeats the subject, with countermelodies in both the trumpet and the oboe. Then the fourth voice, the recorder, enters and we're off into fugue land, the subject coming in and out in the different voices, embellished, altered, other pieces of melody, other episodes, all based on the subject, winding through. So many notes! And yet still cheerful and unified. It's hard to reconcile this kind of joyous exuberance within this kind of baroque complexity. Yet here it is.

This, by the way, would have been performed, around 1720, In Köthen, in North Germany, where a music-loving Prince had assembled an orchestra, a Kapelle, of the greatest virtuosi in the land, and had hired, for his Kapellmeister, a composer and performer of other-worldly talent, becoming both friend and patron to the greatest musician who has ever--who probably will have ever--lived.

(Some conflict, by the way, arises. The Prince gets a new bride, who doesn't like music, and our Prince is forced to choose. But that's a whole another story.)

Anyway, if you like this, it's worth, I think, sticking around, after the ovation, for the encore--a repeat of the piece, and this time Ms. Michala Petri--a premier recorder virtuoso--is presented, by Claudio Abbado, an alternate instrument.

Anyway.

 
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I mentioned that I liked Amazon's Bosch, noting the intro, which, when I dip back, I usually don't skip, because it kind of gets me.


Anyway, I was curious about the music, finding out it was a snip from Caught a Ghost, who I had never heard of (which means nothing; I know little about contemporary music). Anyway, here's the video, and it's pretty cool--scenes from Orson Well's adaptation of Kafka's The Trial, with Anthony Perkins as Joseph K.

(Did I mention this was pretty cool? :) )

 
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Spike said:
The third movement of the second Brandenburg Concerto. Sorry for the upcoming didacticism. I'm a sententious fucker, I know, (wake up, Nate :) ) but I can't help it. Oh well. Anyway...let me share, a bit, for anyone interested..

It's a concerto grosso, that is, instead of a solo instrument backed up by the orchestra, we have a small ensemble backed up by a larger: here, a trumpet, an oboe, a violin, and a recorder. It's a little fugue: a subject, a bit of melody, is introduced by the first voice, the trumpet, then repeated, in a different key, by the oboe, while the first voice accompanies with a counter melody. Then the third voice, the violin, repeats the subject, with countermelodies in both the trumpet and the oboe. Then the fourth voice, the recorder, enters and we're off into fugue land, the subject coming in and out in the different voices, embellished, altered, other pieces of melody, other episodes, all based on the subject, winding through. So many notes! And yet still cheerful and unified. It's hard to reconcile this kind of joyous exuberance within this kind of baroque complexity. Yet here it is.

This, by the way, would have been performed, around 1720, In Kothen, in North Germany, where a music-loving Prince had assembled an orchestra, a Kapelle, of the greatest virtuosi in the land, and had hired, for his Kapellmeister, a composer and performer of other-worldly talent, becoming both friend and patron to the greatest musician who has ever--who probably will have ever--lived.

(Some conflict, by the way, arises. The Prince gets a new bride, who doesn't like music, and our Prince is forced to choose. But that's a whole another story.)

Anyway, if you like this, it's worth, I think, sticking around, after the ovation, for the encore--a repeat of the piece, and this time Ms. Michala Petri--a premier recorder virtuoso--is presented, by Claudio Abbado, an alternate instrument.

Anyway.

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Brandenburg Concertos, lol, it's very on the nose for a classical fan.

It's like a linguistics professor confessing that "Elements of Style" is his favorite E.B. White book.

Good performance of this piece, had not seen this one.
 
Sent into a YouTube rabbit hole by Dean Jay's post above, I bumped into this and watched it. Again. A few times. A few things to say:

First, it is, of course, a beautiful scene--so kind of joyous, in itself, and so bound to the movie (a, as one you tube wit called it, heartwarming film about four friends having a romp through the woods, meeting friendly locals along the way.)

It also, when I first saw it (back before the war with the Inuits) turned me on to bluegrass music and the way-cool kind of hippie connection with it, as in, (an achingly nostalgic memory, now, of a favorite album* ) Will The Circle Be Unbroken, by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and friends.

And the actors: Ned Beatty and Ronny Cox, both definitions of a kind of immensely talented professional actor, the kind whose IMDb pages are, like, awsome; Burt Reynolds, a real movie star who, it doesn't hurt to be reminded, was just too freaking cool; and Jon Voight, who was a real charismatic and talented actor before he fathered Angelina Jolie and became, in his old age, the world's greatest bung hole. Anyway.

* For you kids, an album was a way to store music, kind of like a flat frisbee**, that, to play, would eventually require insanely expensive elaborate devices with multiple complex electronic components. (Some of my peers had space-age turn tables, powerful receivers, graphic equalizers, and speakers the size of refrigerators in their dorm rooms.)

** For you kids, young people used to play games, out of doors, that required various degrees of movement. A frisbee was a round piece of plastic that, with the right throwing technique, could fly, seemingly under its own power, long distances.


Who's pickin' a banja here?
 
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Just stumbled across this yesterday. This guy is averaging 50 views per video over a decade.

It's kind of amazing how good you can be at something these days, and still be completely unknown. When I was a kid, if someone could play a power chord twice in a row, they bought them a gulfstream.

Edit, apparently youtube won't let this be posted on external sites. The song is called "under the sea" by a guy named Digby Jones.
 
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