a trip through some iTunes purchases and a late sendoff

I made the following purchases from iTunes recently. They are on a loop and, as such, are worthy of blog inclusion.

Nico Muhly's Skip Town
Holy crap this one is good. After a cursory listen I was left wondering how he had done it. Those can't be live musicians, right? Stick with it until there's about 38" left; some lounge music (or whatever) briefly intrudes before he pounds the rest out in the previous character. Seriously. So good. He wrote the score for The Reader and his blog is infinitely better than the piece of crap you're currently reading.





















Chrisopher Theofanidis's Rainbow Body
I know this one has been making the orchestral rounds lately but it's for a damn good reason: this piece just flows like one, long, elegant idea. It makes me want to work on my transitions (plus it doesn't hurt that he has the best last name of any composer I've ever heard).





















Stephen Chatman's Nature Songs
MPR woke me up a few weeks back with "The Voice of the Rain" from this set and I've finally gotten to gettin' it. He is actually a distant relative (my mother's cousin, I think) who is vastly more successful in Canada than I will ever be. But who cares as long as he writes music this good to listen to?

















And for a non-classical example, I just got Bon Iver's new EP, Blood Bank. Seriously, folks, if I could suggest one song from this screed to spend $0.99 on it would be "Woods" from this album. It's an a cappella choral piece based on 4 lines of poetry that spins out from a single voice into a freakin' cacophony. This sucker takes 4'45" to get over and done with and, by the time it's finished, I am always weepy and introspective. It's oh-my-god good.















In sadder news, I totally had not heard that Lukas Foss died! I can't believe that. I met him briefly in 2000 when he gave a pre-concert lecture before Peter Serkin, Eiji Oue and the Minnesota Orchestra gave the world premiere of a massively-hard, serialist piece called Solo Transformed for piano and orchestra (it was so difficult that Serkin actually had to use a score and a page turner). I'm not lying when I tell you I had to be re-convinced to be a composer after I heard this. It made me feel the entirety of knowledge I had yet to learn (or still have to learn as the case may be) and totally scared the S-H-I-T out of me.




















The friend who told me about Foss's death also relayed a possibly-apocryphal-but-funny-nonetheless story about him losing his place while conducting the Milwaukee Symphony. Apparently, the maestro leaned over to the first chair cellist and earnestly asked, "Where are we?" and the bewildered answer he got back was, "Milwaukee."

His alleged response was to simply say "oh," straighten his back and continue conducting as if that was actually what he wanted to know. I hope that's true. I really, really hope that's true. Rest in peace, sir.