See also Bach + Quartet in this journal.
Wednesday, October 18, 2017
Monday, June 24, 2019
Da Capo*
The Small quotation is from a page describing his transcription
for string quartet of Bach's Goldberg Variations:
https://manontroppomusic.wordpress.com/goldberg-variations/.
* See too other Log24 occurrences of "da capo."
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Friday, August 8, 2014
Ten Years
01:13:08.25,01:13:12.35
(STRING QUARTET PLAYING
SLOW, LUSH MELODY)
01:13:22.59,01:13:26.23
They’re fucking sixteenths,
Steve, stop milking them.
01:13:26.36,01:13:29.78
Folks, disagree,
but do it nicely, and please…
01:13:30.47,01:13:33.38
…try not to get caught up in mistakes.
01:13:35.17,01:13:38.21
When I was your age,
I met the great Pablo Casals.
01:13:38.34,01:13:40.85
I was so intimidated
I could barely speak.
01:13:40.98,01:13:43.19
He must have sensed this, because…
01:13:43.31,01:13:46.99
…instead of a chat,
he asked me to play.
01:13:47.12,01:13:49.93
He requested the prelude
to the Fourth Bach suite.
01:13:51.62,01:13:54.80
I focused, took a deep breath,
began, the notes started to flow,
01:13:54.93,01:13:58.67
the music’s in the air, and it was
the worst music I ever made.
01:13:58.80,01:14:00.28
(STUDENTS CHUCKLE)
01:14:01.13,01:14:05.44
I played so badly,
I got halfway through and had to stop.
01:14:05.57,01:14:07.71
“Bravo,” he said, “Well done.”
01:14:08.94,01:14:13.85
Then, he asked me to play the allemande.
“A second chance,” I think to myself.
01:14:15.48,01:14:17.05
I never played worse.
01:14:18.48,01:14:22.06
“Wonderful. Splendid,” he praised me.
01:14:22.19,01:14:26.73
And when I left that night,
I felt terrible about my performance,
01:14:26.86,01:14:30.50
but what really bothered me
wasn’t my playing, it was Casals.
01:14:30.63,01:14:32.30
The insincerity.
01:14:33.90,01:14:36.50
Years later, I met him in Paris
01:14:36.63,01:14:40.41
and by then I was professional,
we played together.
01:14:40.54,01:14:45.08
We became acquaintances,
and one evening, over a glass of wine…
01:14:46.94,01:14:51.32
…I confessed to him what I thought
of his horseshit all those years ago.
01:14:51.45,01:14:53.22
(LAUGHTER)
01:14:55.12,01:14:59.09
And he got angry. His demeanor changed,
he grabbed his cello,
01:14:59.22,01:15:02.50
“Listen,” he said.
And he played this phrase.
01:15:03.63,01:15:07.58
(PLAYS DYNAMIC, DRAMATIC PHRASE)
01:15:19.08,01:15:22.06
“Didn’t you play that? Fingering.
01:15:22.18,01:15:25.96
You did.
It was novel to me. It was good.
01:15:26.08,01:15:31.09
And here, didn’t you attack
this passage with an up-bow like this?”
01:15:45.14,01:15:49.08
Casals emphasized the good stuff,
the things he enjoyed.
01:15:50.87,01:15:55.65
He encouraged. And for the rest,
leave that to the morons,
01:15:55.78,01:16:00.85
or whatever it is in Spanish,
who judge by counting faults.
01:16:00.98,01:16:03.62
“I can be grateful,
and so must you be,” he said,
01:16:03.75,01:16:09.03
“for even one singular phrase,
one transcendent moment.”
01:16:09.33,01:16:10.33
Hmm?
01:16:11.40,01:16:16.64
– Wow.
– Yeah, wow. Pablo Casals. Champion.
01:16:17.90,01:16:21.82
Once more, with feeling please. Feeling!
01:16:25.21,01:16:29.05
(SLOW, LUSH MELODY RESUMES)
See also a video of this scene and a post from this date ten years ago.
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Friday, May 6, 2005
Friday May 6, 2005
Fugues
"To improvise an eight-part fugue
is really beyond human capability."
— Douglas R. Hofstadter,
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Order of a projective
automorphism group:
168
"There are possibilities of
contrapuntal arrangement
of subject-matter."
— T. S. Eliot, quoted in
Origins of Form in Four Quartets.
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Monday, February 28, 2005
Monday February 28, 2005
Terrain
On the 77th annual Academy Awards:
“… in the Sarabande of Suite 6 Ma’s phrasing suggests we are in the same spiritual terrain as Beethoven’s late quartets.”
Amen.
For more on Bach, quartets, and film, see Eight is a Gate and 8/8/04.
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Sunday, August 8, 2004
Sunday August 8, 2004
Quartet
An illustration from July 26,
Jung’s birthday and the date
of Alexander Hammid’s death:
of the Self:  Four Quartets: “… history is a pattern |
Alexander |
From today’s
|
lexander Hammid, a filmmaker whose
“… legend has it, supported by Casals himself, that he was conceived when Brahms began his B-flat Major Quartet, of which Casals owned the original manuscript, and that he was born when Brahms completed its composition.”
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Monday, July 12, 2004
Monday July 12, 2004
Small World
In memory of
Laurance Rockefeller,
who died yesterday at 94
"J. S. Bach's 'Goldberg Variations' is a self-contained world, immersion in which is transformative….
At the end of Variation 30, Bach writes simply 'Aria da capo.' I have written it out for the convenience of the players. This recurrence of the Aria, after its long journey through thirty variations and especially coming immediately after the exuberant Quodlibet (Variation 30), is magical. It is the same Aria, yet subtly different: transformed."
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Monday, July 28, 2003
Monday July 28, 2003
City of God
Today's site music is
The central aim of Western religion —
"Each of us has something to offer the Creator... the bridging of masculine and feminine, life and death. It's redemption.... nothing else matters." -- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)
The central aim of Western philosophy —
Dualities of Pythagoras
as reconstructed by Aristotle:
Limited Unlimited
Odd Even
Male Female
Light Dark
Straight Curved
... and so on ....
"Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy."
— Jamie James in
The Music of the Spheres (1993)
"In the garden of Adding,
Live Even and Odd….
And the song of love's recision
is the music of the spheres."
— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in
City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000)
Today is the feast of St. Johann Sebastian Bach.
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