Eric S notapenguin's blog: "musicstuffs"

for the library did allow me to borrow, not just photocopy, the whole Reissiger score- it turns out that the staff card that I now have lets me borrow items offsite. Hee. I'd wondered for years since getting the job if I was eligible for a card, then got the card a few months ago, then waited to use it until now; borrowed the Reissiger trio and a volume of three string trios by Haydn's student Ignaz Pleyel (of whom Mozart said, it would be a good day for music, were Pleyel to succeed Joseph Haydn- slight paraphrase, I don't have a reference to the exact thing). Neither of them, apparently, copyrighted. Glee. For now... rest. Was going to get some meds I need and some exercise, but I am rather sleepy. Then later, will continue transcribing at least the more interesting movements of the Reissiger for practice (I'm not convinced that the slow movement qualifies, but the Allegro risoluto, with its opening theme anti-reminiscent... erm, I mean, which Brahms seems to quote with the main theme of the finale of his 2nd string quartet- has its points. The English Wikipedia doesn't have an article on Reissiger right now, or last I checked, though the German-language one does- but if someone does start one, I might upload the first page of the trio, or the second, to show what this sometimes-intersting composer, most famous in the 19th century for a piece that became known as "Weber's Last Waltz" and misattributed to Carl Maria von Weber... (!!)...-- was capable of. (Not at all famous now, no- though a few works of his are recorded, and a few have been recently republished, including some sonatas for winds, a mass, and etc., etc. - so it didn't go without saying that the piece I borrowed hadn't been published since it was first in the 1840s, I just don't know of any more recent publication, and I am usually fairly well-informed about those things- but will double-check in sources I've learned about more recently.) Eric (edit: and indeed, a somewhat later piano trio of his, his opus 181 - this is trio 11 opus 125 - received modern republication in 2000, from Amadeus-Verlag in Winterthur, Switzerland, which has published quite a few composers on my personal lists.)

My "haul" today at the Friends of the Library Booksale:

purchased six musical scores for 50 cents apiece.

• The sonata for flute and piano by Paul Hindemith (from 1936);
• Twenty-five Melodious Studies for the piano, opus 45 by Steven (István) Heller (I already have a score of his opus 46 and a recording of his opus 47...!)
• Ten studies for pedal–playing for the organ by Flor Peeters (b. 1903) (etudes that are also a theme and variations);
• An organ concerto (also playable by harpsichord) by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (yes, one of JS's sons) in a 1963 edition;
• Three works written for musical clock or similar instrument by Mozart, but transcribed for organ (I have two of them transcribed for two pianos, but had forgotten that; at 50 cents, who cares... and they're wonderful stuff)
• And ten duets for clarinet and various other instruments by Alexander Glazunov.

*gryn*

I see that both of Fauré's piano quartets are being played in Ithaca in the next week or two- the first in a free concert downtown with works by Mozart, Karel Husa and someone whose name I don't at all recognize, and in the same church in which I heard that quartet a few years ago- there are often concerts there; his second, in a concert with works by Dvorak and Cornell-based composer Steven Stucky, in a concert hall on the Cornell campus). I don't think I knew that when I wrote the last blog- yay for coincidences :).

on reading someone's profile, but this had gone through my mind before-

if someone were to ask me (or if I just wanted to suggest, to be less prideful about it- I believe in ego, I'm less pleased about pride, some other time on that) - where next in classical music- of course that depends on where from, on tastes in general...

there are a few composers after Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Brahms, Vivaldi, say I'm tempted to recommend though. For instance if you don't know Fauré's (Gabriel Fauré, 1845-1924) chamber music, his violin sonatas, cello sonatas, piano quartets and quintets, etc. - I think you're missing out on something here.

(The list of works I've heard in live concert is not really long, especially since I've attended very few in the last... five years? more!... - but I've had the pleasure of catching two of these works, one of Fauré's violin sonatas and one of his piano quartets - quartets for piano, violin, viola and cello, before anyone asks... the sonata back in college, the quartet more recently, the two works themselves written at almost the same time (the sonata written 1875-6, and the quartet written 1876-9 but revised until 1883. I note in some confusion that the composer was thirty when he began the sonata, one of his more popular works- the number of recordings, for one thing, is ... a lot. Though if he's really known at all "outside of some circles" it's by his Requiem, and back when, I practiced a viola arrangement of his lovely song Apres un Rêve - probably a viola arrangement of cellist Pablo Casals' cello arrangement... (the song is from 1877- finished earlier than the quartet, but not the sonata... oh. I assumed that since it had opus 7 instead of opus 13 - like the sonata - or 15 - like the quartet - that it was rather earlier; but the sonata is actually an earlier work. I do remember, I think, that he had trouble getting the sonata published! But not for lack of spirit and beauty- and singing melody... the music from toward the end of his life- the 2nd violin sonata from around 1917, the two cello sonatas (1917, 1921), the piano trio... tends to wind around and be harder to follow, except for the finales, which, with dramatic instinct ;), he always makes hell-for-leather by comparison, rather like Vierne in his quintet see-last-post; but ... they have their fans too, me among them...)

There's a few places on the web to hear a work or two of his for free (classicalarchives.com comes to mind, I think?) at least in MIDI, possibly in live performances also.

Was just listening to a broadcast from British Broadcasting - yay, BBC3!! *g* - a week ago, of a quintet written when my grandfather was a teenager, at the end of that so very Great War *pfft*, year 1918... should have put up a message explaining that as I've been learning to do on Y!M and etc. ) for anyone trying to contact me- anyway. I have a recording of the piece, but I'm glad I decided to listen to this. The BBC started webcasting a half-decade or so back, and before then, I would read their listings with envy piled on envy; Radio 3 is one of the best stations a classical music-obsessed listener could want to hear, and now I can hear it. The BBC only keeps most things (more and more, in the years since they started webcasting; at first they only archived a few programs) on their servers for a week after broadcast, and this was an all around better and easier-to-hear performance *g*. One case in point: it's a work in three movements. Count them: three. But every time I listened, I would hear two. That's because the first two movements are in a similar slow, quiet tempo. What separates them, though, is-- more than I thought! Thematic material; a substantial pause; character; a real cadence - the first movement ends with quiet, gentle C major chords (the only real peace in the work, I'd say)... The finale does open with a quote of the material that haunted the first movement, but unlike the first two movements, it soon becomes energetic, its themes become well-defined of "line"- a passionate, brief and right ending to a passionate but lengthy work :). Vierne is, like Lichtenstein's Josef Rheinberger, much better known for his music for pipe organ, and also like Rheinberger, his chamber music- sonatas for violin and for cello, piano quintet, Rheinberger's string quintet and two string quartets (, and once very popular piano quartet, many mentions of performances of which I saw in old issues of music magazines from the late 19th century...! and four trios for piano and strings...), etc. ... - is of very high quality, very rarely played. Opportunities to hear these pieces I'm very glad of, but "do not try to rationalize your obsession, sir" :^) ... eh, I enjoy them, and that is that. (Hah. One wishes that were that!...) Eric

Of the pieces I've written, one of my favorites is a (... unfinished. Bleah.) "passacaglia, interlude and fugue" for flute and piano, written by me around... seven years ago or so. (At least, when I visited a Canadian friend in 1999, I'm pretty sure it already existed, along with a similar piece I had written that I did finish.) I thought for some reason that I'd written it using Encore 2.1.1, which I had and used at the time, and used the program to convert it to MIDI. Part right, it turns out- I wrote a (substantial, for me!!) sketch on paper, entered that into Encore, fiddled with it, fiddled with it a lot more, then made the MIDI (even though the fugue was still only begun). Today I search through my overlarge collection of sketches (ten begun for every one finished) of pieces of music, and I find the 78 bars I'd written into a small music notebook. ... Well, ... ok then. (Was looking for something nice and substantial and mine and in my opinion pretty good, too... to try my LilyPond skills on... and what is this in front of my face...) (The MIDI is at www.lightlink.com/schissel/midi/sf3.mid for such as want to hear what Encore made of it years back; LilyPond doesn't do MIDIs well, really, that I can tell.) Oh, and credit (or blame...) for the idea of introducing the repeated theme twice at the beginning unaccompanied before the flute comes in, I owe to hearing Sir William Walton's second symphony before starting my piece, whose final movement, also a passacaglia, does the same thing... Eric

to say... may be adding a poem about music, if I can get it done and get it right... and a brief essay-of-sorts about musical form, if I can get it from ideas in my mind to something written. Because sometimes a person (that'd be me, so...!) feels that he can do something well, and that it plays to his strengths, and hey... he needs the practice. (Some of the files that now sit in my image gallery- the Mozart, for example- really have given me practice using LilyPond, the program that created them; I now know how to do this-and-that, a few things I did not know just a month or so ago- and I have been using the program for over a year. Not that a year is so long in context, but... still! Of course, given my habit of not really reading the documentation. And... ... er... just how long the documentation is- it was already a complex program, meant to cover a lot of cases, when "version 2.0.1" came out, and is even moreso now, I think. Complex program, big many-case online manual. So what I was looking for was in the manual, but... ... oy. Have to look in the index in the right place, or... read the whole thing, which by now, I should have done... (I can't use more recent versions than 2.0.1 - a quick check shows that's the version I have, lilypond -v -- without upgrading my operating sy... ok, we heard you already!!! ... critics, everyone's a critic... Complex != complicated... complexity has, sometimes, a connotation of justification, of proportionality to the situation, that complication does not always.) So now I know how to control beaming, so that the beams go under rests instead of being separated by them (see some of those Mozart concerto pages); and how to "force" naturals/accidentals, as would happen in most regular scores- if there were 100 notes in a bar (Ack!!) and two of them at opposite ends of the bar were G-sharps (and the key-signature had G-natural) - the one on the right would have a (#) to remind the performer that the sharp at the beginning still held true, no interruption/natural... having shown up in the interim *g*. Whereas without using a notation -- G? -- in LilyPond, it would just show a g notehead, no reminder (#), etc. of course. Good to know for this other project I'm doing, which will look better with "nice" beamings etc. (And which I can't show here- I have permission to do it but not to distribute it.) Going to go listen to a Baroque sort-of-opera on BBC now. Toodle-pip, as Martin (a fellow I knew) did say and more than once.

Bit of a late-month or even very-post-birthday (!) splurge, after deciding that, well, I couldn't decide (and needed to catch a bus- so!) Piano music, by (Sir) Arnold Bax on one, by Franz Liszt on the other. Going to listen to them later today. I've heard some of the pieces- the two piano sonatas on the Bax disc, for instance, and at least the 2nd Ballade on the Liszt- but not these performances. Eric off to work around 10:30 (Eastern) so... night's! (And just what were those knights doing in the gardens of Spain... must have been the time of the Crusades. Yep, that'd be it.)

... died yesterday of complications from a chest infection.

Neither a least favorite nor a "top-ten" composer of mine but he did write some fine stuff, including a symphony for brass that I think the Brown University orchestra tackled in a concert I went to while my sister was there (at the uni and in its orchestra, as hornist).

...Probably best-known for his film music which I don't yet know- I do like some of what I know of his concert work (the sixth of his nine symphonies probably best of the six of them that I've heard, have also heard some other memorable - I say that positively - music- some works I wasn't so inclined to hear again though memorable in that other way, I guess. I might see if I can give one such work, his fourth symphony, another chance; it's been since 1990 or so since that time I heard it :) I do mean and stand by what I said elsewhere- inventive composer and from what I have heard both deep and witty; what I know of works I haven't yet heard- that 9th symphony that's been recorded twice and which I've read much about and am curious about, yes... - suggests that he could be not only deeply witty (to recall- it was either Rorem's or Lambert's distinction between the French and the German as deeply superficial and superficially deep...!) - but also could be quite deep.

The moment of the works I've heard that sticks in the mind most, though... the jig in the second(?) movement of his second string quartet which starts in popular mood, very jaunty!... and is then struck by attacks physical and dissonant. EEP.

(And that same 6th symphony, as pointed out on a website, both pays homage to Charlie Parker- and one of its three movements is strictly serial; a point I'd never caught...)

My thanks to the soul of a musician for adding to music in so many ways...

(images of pages of music) but were posted in a viewable-only-to-me folder's subfolder- had to move the subfolder's contents manually out, it's a good thing it wasn't too very well populated :). Sorry about that. And now I go off to obviously much-needed therapy.