Fazil Say is an amazing Turkish Piano player that combines modal techniques with an acute sense of beauty and fragility.
He has said elsewhere that he composed this while walking through a crowded fair. The experience of this piece is immediate and emotional, but some how mediated; as though the memories' recount of events that were either too painful or to wonderful to record.
Showing posts with label 20th Century Classical. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 20th Century Classical. Show all posts
The California EAR Unit is an American chamber ensemble dedicated to the performance of contemporary classical music. The group was founded in March 1981 and is based in Los Angeles, California.
In this piece they are performing a piece originally arranged by John Adams.
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century is a voyage into the labyrinth of modern music, which remains an obscure world for most people. While paintings of Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for a hundred million dollars or more, and lines from T. S. Eliot are quoted on the yearbook pages of alienated teenagers across the land, twentieth-century classical music still sends ripples of unease through audiences. At the same time, its influence can be felt everywhere. Atonal chords crop up in jazz. Avant-garde sounds populate the soundtracks of Hollywood thrillers. Minimalism has had a huge effect on rock, pop, and dance music from the Velvet Underground onward.
The Rest Is Noise shows why twentieth-century composers felt compelled to create a famously bewildering variety of sounds, from the purest beauty to the purest noise. It tells of a remarkable array of maverick personalities who resisted the cult of the classical past, struggled against the indifference of a wide public, and defied the will of dictators. Whether they have charmed audiences with sweet sounds or battered them with dissonance, composers have always been exuberantly of the present, defying the stereotype of classical music as a dying art. The narrative goes from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties, from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies. We follow the rise of mass culture and mass politics, of dramatic new technologies, of hot and cold wars, of experiments, revolutions, riots, and friendships forged and broken. The end result is not so much a history of twentieth-century music as a history of the twentieth century through its music.
His blog here is fantastic.
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