Month: December 2012

I have an uncomfortable relationship with "classical" music. I almost never listen to it, despite having grown up on it, and despite having close friends and relatives who are classical musicians of various sorts. Most the time, if I listen to classical music, it's for only two reasons: 1) I'm with a friend or relative who's taking me along to something, or 2) I'm seeking some nostalgia for some point in my life, e.g. I sometimes return to Rachmaninoff or Bach bits that are deeply familiar to me.

Yet when I listen to classical music, I enjoy it. So why don't I seek it out? I speculated once to a friend that it was too "intellectually challenging" – that is, I'm unable to appreciate it as "background music" the way I listen to most music (and as my blog category attests: Background Noise).

Today, though, I actually discovered and enjoyed a new classical composer I'd literally never heard of before – at least that I can remember. Erik Satie was an active French composer at the turn of the last century (19th to 20th), associated with the avant garde and sometimes seen as a precursor to Debussy (whom I rather like, too).  I even ran across an anecdote that I thought amusing:  There was a Debussy concert once, and Satie was in the audience. After the performance, someone walked up to Satie and said, "Did Debussy steal that from you?" – to which Satie answered: "That is Satie, but Debussy does it better."

Satie liked to not just compose music, but tried to invent whole new genres and idioms. His music is still popularly used sometimes in movie soundtracks, too. One "genre" he coined was what he called a "gnossienne" – that's an utterly invented word, but ties to his dabblings in gnostic philosophy. I'm always appreciative of made-up words, and I like these little pieces very much.

What I'm listening to right now.

Erik Satie (composer), "Gnossienes 1-3." [update 2015-06-17: video link replaced as previous was broken]

Some of his works were much more unusual. He composed something he called "Vexations," which consisted of a snippet intended to be played slowly, and repeated 840 times. Here is someone performing the full 9 hours and 41 minutes. This is a hint as to why John Cage thought so highly of Satie.

I’m not a musician. At all. I’m intimidated by the mere idea of trying to learn to play an instrument – I have hangups about it, even. Sometimes, I think I could have been a musician, though, given a very different childhood, where my parents weren’t so forgiving of my complaints of “it’s too hard” with respect to my brief forays into trumpet lessons or piano lessons. I like music, and I think about it a lot.

I have an acquaintance who was a coworker of mine back in the database days. I respected him hugely for his multitalented approach to solving business problems, and we had worked together some, though not as much as I would have liked, on a few projects.

So… in facebookland, he’s been sending me links to his son’s musical projects. His son seems to be attending the highly reputed Berklee in New England. I know something of this rarefied musical world, 3rd-hand, because of my bestfriend Bob’s musical career as a conductor and professor of music.

Until now, I hadn’t really paid attention to these links – there’s so much in facebookland that I simply don’t pay attention to, at all. But this morning I clicked the link and surfed around this music-for-musicians type website: mostly for people doing “high art” of various contemporary styles of music, such as house, electronica, hip-hop, etc. The site is called indaba.

Here’s the song that sent me there. I’m trying out the embed function for the website.

What I’m listening to right now.

[UPDATE: The embedded music from the site called “indaba,” stopped working. This called “link rot” – a common problem on any long-running blog. I had found replacement link, but THAT link rotted, too. So now, there’s no link.]

Trick Smil3y, “Drenched (Trick Smil3y Remix).” I guess there’s some contest to remix this piece and he’s participating. I know very little about how remixing even works or what it means, artistically. But I enjoy listening to it and many of the various other tracks I surfed across on the site. I didn’t actually “vote,” however – registering a vote required integrating to facebook, which I have resisted for data privacy reasons because I deeply distrust facebook corporation despite using it – the same reasons that I have taken to almost always putting my own images, links and thoughts on this blog rather than on facebook directly. [Update: I confess I finally voted. I’m not very good at sticking by my corporate boicott principles, am I?]