Birthdays Across Three Centuries

This is a pretty straightforward post, inspired in the usual way. It began three days when a young pianist I was coaching in a chamber group announced that it was his eleventh birthday. The group is working on the very well-known and high-spirited Rondo all'Ongarese ("in the Hungarian style") from Haydn's Piano Trio in G Major, a work which features a tongue-twister of a main tune with which the pianist and violinist must contend throughout. (This newly eleven-year-old pianist has no fear and never seems to trip - although we're not close to the tempo in that linked Argerich performance.)

Sharp Objects

Somehow in all these years of blogging, I've never written about my obsession with the first movement of Charles-Valentin Alkan's Concerto for Solo Piano. Actually, I did mention it in passing once here, and I've just added it to my otherwise rather static list of Favorite Music Works - a list which probably deserves a larger-scale re-visit. Leaving it off of that list was a big oversight, although I think my affection for this remarkable thirty-minute movement has only grown since then. I took a long walk this summer where I listened to the whole movement twice in a row, and I listened to it all on several other walks.

Sonic Signature Sequels (Sixty Second Symphony)

In my last post, I wrote about a new seven-second snippet written by Mason Bates as a sonic logo for the Charlotte Symphony - and I debuted my own first try in the genre; but I knew in my heart that it wouldn't be my last attempt. Sure enough, I now have six total sonic signatures to my name - which, to be honest, isn't that big a deal. That's less than sixty seconds of music! But I have found it to be a really gratifying exercise, especially in writing for full orchestra.

Seven Seconds or Less

Recently, a colleague shared an NPR story with me about how the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra had commissioned composer Mason Bates to write a very short "sonic logo" to be played by the orchestra. The story begins by connecting this to iconic logo sounds like the NBC and Netflix signatures which are really just a few gestures - less themes than motives. (The generic Netflix one barely qualities as a motive as there's really not much to it. It is iconic by the brute force of its ubiquity.) You may hear Bates' final product here:

Unexpect yourself

[I settled on the clumsy blog post title as an homage to the Philadelphia Orchestra's notoriously awful marketing tag from fifteen years ago.]

I've written before about my ambivalent attitude towards the "great" Joseph Haydn, a composer whose skill and influence I would never question, but whose music simply doesn't move me that often. Among other things, I find his supposed knack for humor to be pretty overrated, although he can hardly be blamed that an unexpectedly loud G Major chord (hear here at 0:37) has lost a little of its punch due to serious overexposure. 

We'll get back to that in a second. First, here's a little story from a few weeks back.