A couple of years back I purchased the score for Finnissy’s piano collection English Country-Tunes, a beautiful score and equally arresting music. The first time I listened to it it deeply terrified me. Following that, and following along with the New Complexity composers, I purchased Ferneyhough’s Lemma-Icon-Epigram. Another stunning piano work. (And one, equally, I’d never be able to play.) Since then I’ve purchase a couple of other beautiful modern scores.
To the left are his four solo albums released after leaving Roxy Music. They felt a logical progression of rock to cerebral to meditative to a fusion of them all. The right of that above are the two (early) collaborations with Robert Fripp. The music is equal parts each musician. Below that, his first four “ambient” albums. Process music (like much of the 20C modern music I listen to) but as wallpaper as opposed to foreground. The lower left, in the middle of his early ambient works, is the album with David Byrne. Also process; not wallpaper.
A few years back I watched the Swedish sci-fi film Aniara [ IMDB | Wikipedia ] and it shook me. The prompting to watch was from some now-lost review that described it as eccentric and bleak (my remembered words, not theirs) and highly recommended it but with warning w/r/t that last characteristic. And it is that last characteristic that continually resurfaces to shake me.
Twice recently I’ve ordered sheet music for scores that are in the public domain. One for Bach’s Musical Offering and one (well, two) for the Sibelius Symphony No. 5, the full orchestral score and the piano reduction.
The Bach work is one I often listen to, passively but with inevitable moments of actively, and it’s also a notable work of creative notation. I wanted to look at the structure of the Ricercar a 6 which is a six-voice fugue performed (most of the time?) on keyboard–ouch!–but each piece in the set has its own interesting characteristics. I listened to the Kuijken/Kohnen/Leonhardt recording from 1975 growing up and so is the “official” one to my ear.
I’ve wanted to study the Sibelius symphony–considered one of the greatest symphonies ever written, ymmv–ever since I started working with orchestral composition. Public domain rules are byzantine and generally I think a score needs to be around 70 years old before it becomes available. Older scores I’ve looked at are notoriously badly edited (with questionable phrase markings or capricious choices of accidentals or just misprints, though not seeing more curated versions I may be wrong), so to mitigate any weirdness in the orchestral score I also got the piano reduction.
Continue reading Printed public domain sheet musicI’ve just started the 5th movement, Fire, in which our heroes are trapped in a conflagration in the field of local villagers. (In my research notes, I have it covering pages 94-115 of the 2020 Penguin/Vintage edition I use as reference.) At this point I am struggling with the idea of program music in contrast with soundtracks. A few months back I had an abbreviated, stumbling Twitter conversation with an individual Much Better Informed but we ended up having the same opinions of soundtracks-as-pure-music. That is: a low one. In these days of a renaissance of quality composers, it’s admittedly a bit unpopular to get all academically scoffy about music written for movies.
