Show 114: Halloween!

This show is scheduled to air today, October 31^st, on Halloween.  It is a re-broadcast of the show from one year ago, because I don't really have enough scary music to make an entirely new Halloween show.  The backgrounds to the pieces are interesting, and next year I will probably remove my spoken introductions, and put in a few more pieces from somewhere.

Also, in contrast to more recent blog posts and podcasts, this post has lots of awesome images.

Part A

1  Introduction    It is Halloween, and tons of little people are out on the street trying to scare everyone with their costumes.  It seems like a good time to play some scary music!

Unfortunately, I know very little scary music.  Scary classical music really came into its own in the early nineteenth century, and even then, only in program music, and musical theater and opera.  Anyway, that’s going to be our theme.

2  Bach: Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565    For some reason, Bach’s perfectly innocent Toccata in D minor has become a favorite scary tune.  There’s nothing scary about it, except that it is a big, showy piece that mad geniuses have often played in the movies.  Here it is, and I hope you don’t get too scared!  This is James Kibbie, and it is a very non-scary performance.

3  Barnes & Barnes: Fish Heads    Halloween is also a time when we celebrate the macabre, and the weird and the disgusting.  For instance, here is Fish Heads, by Barnes and Barnes, from a Dr. Demento anniversary album!

4  Ligeti: Music from 2001: A Space Odyssey    Some of the scariest music I know was written for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Here is a selection of it.  The composer is Gyorgy Ligeti.

5  Brahms: Deutches Requiem    Brahms’s German Requiem is a choral work to remember the dead.  One number in it is about "all flesh is as grass," and is really the only somewhat ominous-sounding piece in it, except for The Last Trump, or rather, the Last Trombone, which I shall play for you sometime.  Here is Alle Fleisches ist wie Gras, which means exactly what it sounds like:  All flesh is as grass.  (In German, you capitalize all Nouns.)  [Otto Klemperer, Philharmonia Orchestra]

6, 7  Mussorgsky: The Gnome, and The Old Castle    From Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, here is The Gnome.  It is only scary to little kids, and maybe not even to them!
Next is The Old Castle, which seems haunted to me. [Jahni Mardjani, Georgian Festival Orchestra.]

Part B

8   Mussorgsky: The Catacombs, and With the Dead.    The next two pieces in Pictures at an Exhibition are The Catacombs, and With the Dead.  Mussorgsky is supposed to have written these pieces to describe an actual exhibition, but it must have been a strange one, if there was a picture called With the Dead in it.  Actually, what I’m hearing is this.  Mussorgsky depicted the people walking from one picture to the next, sort of a group march, and between pictures he had this promenade.  But after the Catacombs, which, incidentally were an extensive system of tunnels under the City of Rome in the first century, in which the Christians and slaves hid from the Roman security, because of course, they were hunted.  Today, we know, there are many tombs down there, some from before the Christians, and some of them were the Christians themselves.  So we hear a minor key version of the promenade, presumably the museum group walking with great fear and trembling among the scary pictures.

9  Mussorgsky: Night on Bald Mountain    This piece by Mussorgsky was used by Walt Disney in Fantasia where it was shown to represent a fantastic dance in a horror setting.

10  David Seville: The Witch Doctor    The famous song from the Sixties, sung by the creator of the Chipmunks.

11  Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms    Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms is a choral work, with lots of amazing orchestral techniques.  It sounds haunting, but is not at all intended to be scary.  But this movement, starting with the phrase Exaudi, sounds weird and obsessive.  Exaudi means Hear us, in Latin.

12  Holst: Mars the Bringer of War    This piece is by Gustav Holst, a British composer, and this is one of the movements from The Planets, a very influential musical suite.  Just listening to this one movement, you can see how Holst influenced movie music, especially Space music.  The piece is in quintuple time, that is 5 beats to a bar.  To make it clear, I have inserted a little clip with the opening notes simplified to just three instruments.  [John Eliot Gardiner]

Part C

13  Dead Puppies    Dead puppies, by Ogden Edsl.

14  The Monster Mash    Monster Mash, by Bobby “Boris” Pickett.

15  The Time Warp    The Time Warp, from the Rocky Horror Picture Show.  The movie The Rocky Horror Picture Show was released in the late Seventies, and quickly became a weekly event in lots of College Town cinemas across the country.  People would show up in costume, and sing along with the numbers.  There were a number of famous names in the cast: Susan Sarandon, Meatloaf, and Tim Curry, to name just three.  The Time Warp is probably the best known song in the movie.

16  Simon and Garfunkel: Richard Cory    A song by Simon and Garfunkel, about a man who shot himself.

17   Beatles:  A Day in The Life    John Lennon’s strange song from Sgt Pepper.

18  Bach: Prelude    This Bach prelude is performed by Brian Slawson, who calls it The Hammer.

19  Michael Jackson: Thriller    The well-known hit by Michael Jackson, featuring a rap by Vincent Price.

Part D

20  John Lennon: Revolution 9    This is a whimsical piece by John Lennon featured in The Beatles, also called the White Album.

21  Kandosii: Sludge    A recording by a band that does not exist any longer: Kandosii, based in Shamokin, Pennsylvania.

22  Mozart:  (Don Giovanni) A cenar teco m'invitasti    This song from Don Giovanni is entitled “You invited me to dinner.”  Don Giovanni is a nobleman who makes a habit of seducing young women and then throwing them out.  One time he invites the father of one of these girls to dinner, but when the old man discovers that the Don has pretended to be his daughter’s fiancée and spent the night with her, he challenges the Don to a duel, and gets killed by Don Giovanni.  Then his ghost, animating a stone Statue, turns up at the Don’s castle, saying that the Don had invited him to dinner.  The Don is scared stiff, and eventually is hounded into hell by the stone Statue.  In the song you can hear the Statue announcing its arrival, and Don Giovanni stammering a reply, and the Don’s faithful servant Leporello muttering fearfully to himself.  [Colin Davis, Covent Garden]

Show 211: Rachmaninov

by Boris Chaliapin

I discovered Rachmaninov late in life, so I haven't built up a large collection of his works; like any newbie, I have mostly sort of omnibus CD's; none of them actually advertise themselves as "The Last Rachy CD you'll Ever Need!!!", but they sort of are that.

Anyway, that's what this Saturday's show will be.

Remember, the next week it will be Halloween, and I will present something essentially similar to the show from last Halloween, with some updates.

Show 210: Mostly Music for Piano

My apologies, but the broadcast somehow was shorter than it should have been.  Anyway, here is the "podcast".  By the way, I have learned that there is a very specific file type called a podcast, which can be downloaded by a portable music player, but here we only have a bunch of mp3 files.

Part A

Introduction [Hélène Grimaud playing a transcriptions of the Bach organ fugue in A minor BWV 543]
Scarlatti: Piano Sonata, in D Minor, K 9 [Claudio Colombo]
Albinoni: Concerto a 5 in D minor  [I Musici, Heinz Holliger]
Mozart: Piano Sonata No 8 in A minor, K 310 [Walter Klien]


Part B

Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin, for piano, i - Prélude, ii - Fugue  [Kathryn Stott]

Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin, for orchestra, iii - Forlane  [Academy of St. Martin In-the-Fields]
Beethoven: Sonata No 23 in F minor, Appassionata- Op 57, i - Allegro; ii - Andante; iii - Allegro [Vladimir Horowitz.  The Allegro is on Part C, below.]

Part C

Scriabin: Twenty Four Preludes Op 11 No 8 In F Sharp Minor [Mikhail Pletnev]Beethoven: Romance for Violin in F Major No 2 Op 50 [Igor Oistrakh]
Debussy: Images for piano, Set I, L 110- No 1- Reflets dans Leau  [Kathryn Stott]
Station Break - Tune


Part D

Waltz No 6 in D Flat [Denes Varjon]
Polonaise No 3 in A [Halina Czerny-Stefanska]
Fantaisie Impromptu Op 66 [Halina Czerny-Stefanska]
Mazurka in D minor No 2 [Denes Varjon]
Grande Valse Brillante [Halina Czerny-Stefanska]
Waltz No  7 in C Sharp minor [Dinu Lipatti]
Nocturne in E Flat No 2 [Denes Varjon]

Archie

Just a test: The whole show

Show 209: Performing Bach on the Piano

I got an idea for the theme for this show at the last possible minute, so this is being put together in hurry.  The inspiration for the show is this video:



To make things absolutely clear, when Bach was writing his music, the modern piano (or even any sort of piano) did not exist, or was in the experimental stages.  Bach may have played a very early piano a couple of years before he died.  But this means he could not have possibly written the greater part of his keyboard music for the piano.)

But today, most ordinary musicians who don't have harpsichords, and people generally, play Bach on the piano.  To some, this is sacrilege.  But Andras Schiff explains why it actually makes musical sense to play Bach on the piano as well as on the original intended instrument.  He goes on to explain what the original instruments must have been, for the 48 Preludes and Fugues (the so-called Well Tempered Clavier), which was one of Bach's best-known composition cycles.  They were not intended all to be played on the same instrument.

Musicians of our time who actually preferred to play Bach on the piano include Glenn Gould (who died a few years ago), Angela Hewitt, Andras Schiff, and Murray Perahia.  There's absolutely no doubt that the lowly piano, which so many middle-class families own, is a perfect miracle of engineering and instrument development.  (Unfortunately not a very durable miracle.  In my humble opinion, someone should consider inventing an --acoustic-- Piano made out of fiberglass and plastic, even if there is a small lessening of tone quality.  The piano is, regrettably, one of the few instruments whose value actually depreciates, unlike a violin or a flute, for instance.  And it is due to the sort of construction used.)  So it is all the more satisfying to hear Andras Schiff's endorsement of the appropriateness of using one to play Bach.

As a general principle, most musicologists and music-lovers agree that there is great benefit in hearing music by any great composer performed on instruments similar to--or identical with--those the composer imagined his music to be written for.  I do not take an extreme view of this; once you've heard a piece on "original instruments," there's nothing wrong in preferring to hear the piece played on modern instruments.  But we owe the composer at least one listen on the original, or authentic, instrumentation.  But, let's face it, using non-authentic instruments is just a whole lot of fun!

Show 207: Music and Humor

I forgot to post the podcast for this episode.  This was an important show, so here's the blog post for it.

Humor and music don't mix very naturally, but when they do, it really works well.  We start off with humor that does not depend on text: purely musical jokes; then follow up with funny songs.

Show 208: Other Movements

In this show we try to introduce you to less-well-known movements in works where we're already familiar with a better-known movement or two.

Egads! I just found out why some of my shows SOUND SO HORRIBLE!

Because it is so difficult to get WXPI 88.5 off the air, we have to connect our stereo to one of our phones, or a computer, and get it off the Internet.  About 30% of the time, the broadcast sounded terrible; there was a lot of rumble and distortion in the signal, and I was beginning to suspect that TuneIn Radio (which hosts the Internet feed) was sabotaging my program, for reasons unknown.

Then, for various reasons, I found out how to access the Station's radio archives.  (Radio stations are either required to maintain archives, or choose to maintain archives, I don't know which.)  I was actually trying to locate an old program by somebody else, when I became curious and hunted down one of my own Saturday night broadcasts, and---OMG!!  It really was terrible.

Then I pulled the thing into Audacity (which is audio-editing software, and almost the only way you can trim the archive file to exactly a single broadcast), and looked at the segment of my show that was in one of the files; about a whole hour of it, station breaks and all.  And I saw that it had been compressed.

A word about compression.

As you know, the volume of a program varies naturally from moment to moment; when I'm talking, for instance, the volume between one word and the next is almost zero.  In contrast, the volume of a piece of music is never zero, but also varies with the volume of the music.  Here are some examples:

If further explanation is necessary: in this example, both left and right channels have roughly the same volume throughout.  Observe how the spoken part has lots of silences, especially at the end, before the music starts.  Some of the very soft sounds are just me breathing, if you can believe that.

Now, I'm going to compress this clip.  This is where the software amplifies the soft parts, and softens the loud parts.  This makes the contrast between loud and soft a little less, so that the music will be audible inside a car, but not too loud (so you can concentrate on driving instead of the volume control).  The resulting signal looks like this:

Observe that, in comparison with the original sound clip, the "soft" parts are not as soft, and the "loud" parts are just about as loud as before.  This is a tricky transformation; the program must, at each point in the clip, calculate the "average" volume for the fraction of a second around that point, and juice up (or juice down) the clip for that moment, and go on to the next.  To really see the effect of compression, you have to look at both the images and compare.

Now, when I manually compress my program, I leave my introduction alone.  But it appears that if the sound file is too soft, in the judgment of the Station program (SAM), it compresses the entire file.  This means that even the soft sounds of a breath I take is amplified, until it sounds as if I'm having an Asthma attack.  Similarly, the very soft sounds of the music in the quiet passages are amplified, and we hear the rumble of passing trucks near the studio where the recording might have been made.  This is a lesson for us: compression must be undertaken judiciously, and not left to the studio computer.

In my desperate attempts to avoid distortion, I was actually making the perceived distortion worse.  So last week, I made each file as loud as possible.  This made the program SAM believe that the file was nice and loud, and needed no compression.

I continue to do my own compression, because some passages are so incredibly soft, you have to wonder what the recording engineers are thinking.  These files played over a weak radio transmitter will almost disappear entirely.  But now I know that I have to save all my sound files at maximum volume, and everything will be fine.