tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40032072009-09-30T01:17:52.726-04:00No CommentMiscellaneous ruminations on random subjectsDavid Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comBlogger107125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-82390680626712783232009-09-28T22:21:00.004-04:002009-09-28T22:26:18.852-04:00Blogging Pachelbel Note: I've received some really helpful information about the history of recordings of the Canon from Robert Fink and will need to absorb and research some of the information he's provided me. That means going back and changing some of the entries already posted (e.g., I now know that the Paillard I listened to is not the 1968 version but a 1989 recording). I won't re-order theDavid Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-3783548339731844622009-09-28T00:41:00.005-04:002009-09-28T22:26:46.788-04:00Blogging Pachelbel #10 -- New Bach Collegium: Based on a close listening, I'm guessing this recording is misplaced in my chronology. The New Bach Collegium of Leipzig was founded by Max Pommer in 1979, and based on this recording, I'd assume they play modern instruments (it's at 440), but in a historically-informed style. Certainly this performance is quite lovely, in fact -- a breath of fresh David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-45179003728847947172009-09-28T00:19:00.005-04:002009-09-28T02:07:45.289-04:00Blogging Pachelbel #9 -- Vienna Baroque Ensemble: This appears to me to be a recording in search of a reason for being. That is, the results seem to me to suggest that the performers said to themselves "There are so many recordings of this piece already -- how can we make ours stand out?" They appear to have concluded that the appropriate response was to completely forego the use of legato.
The David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-51065201628011848832009-09-27T23:58:00.005-04:002009-09-28T21:17:31.696-04:00Blogging Pachelbel #8 -- Gerhardt/National Philharmonic: Another workaday performance -- they play the notes and rhythms on the page within the style they've been trained to follow.
The era of this recording is not entirely clear -- the continuo bass is very heavy, with an unimaginative tinkly harpsichord playing nothing but unidiomatic unrolled chords on the beats of the bass line, and a hint David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-55633365660999838702009-09-27T23:23:00.006-04:002009-09-28T00:13:09.560-04:00Blogging Pachelbel #7 -- 101 Strings: I've already discussed this performance in the post on the Paillard recording, where I was attempting to come up with a justification for the cuts seen in the Baumbartner and Muenchinger/Stuttgart recordings, and the apparent need in the Paillard to de-emphasize the same passages that got cut in the other two recordings. My surmise was that performance David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-47556766446511207542009-09-27T23:10:00.008-04:002009-09-28T02:03:26.710-04:00Blogging Pachelbel #6 -- London Philharmonic: This is yet another "professional" performance, and sounds like nothing more than a sight-reading session from unedited parts. All non-slurred notes are aggressively detached, and the 8/16 octaves of the bass line are aggressively out of tune (as though it was no accident). There is no dynamic contrast -- they just play the notes. There is no change David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-85713178341590188462009-09-27T22:07:00.032-04:002009-09-30T01:13:41.725-04:00Blogging Pachelbel #5 -- Royal Philharmonic: Well, now we come to the commercial recordings. Everything that comes before seems to me to be a serious effort to convey the content of a piece of Classical (upper-case C) music. This recording is quite clearly a commercial rather than an artistic endeaver.
Notably, this recording lacks both artistic integrity and musical quality.
Surprisingly, thisDavid Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-83036282415411949712009-09-27T18:41:00.035-04:002009-09-28T01:52:30.265-04:00Blogging Pachelbel -- An Interlude: I thought it might be helpful to include here within my Blogging Pachelbel discussion the messages I posted to the AMSList starting on Sept. 20th. What follows is an edited version of the content of those posts.
Recently while wending my way through my usual political blog reading, I came across a post from Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos titled "Mozart and David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-87663375277759965242009-09-27T03:20:00.008-04:002009-09-28T01:42:32.679-04:00Blogging Pachelbel #4 -- Ettore Stratta: I have read in various places that this is the recording that was used for the 1980 film Ordinary People, which many credit with really bringing the piece to the popular audience outside of its previous popularity among fans of Baroque and light classical music. I intend to do some research on that to see if I can pin it down or not. For now, a few David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-19287611173375849132009-09-27T01:57:00.027-04:002009-09-30T01:16:23.546-04:00Blogging Pachelbel #3 -- Paillard: [Editorial note: when I wrote this I was under the impression that the recording I was listening to was the original 1968 version, but I've since found out that I was using the 1989 re-recording, which is shorter by a whole minute. When I get access to the 1968 version, I'll replace this entry with my review of it and add an additional entry about the 1989 David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-57538919716664471712009-09-27T00:59:00.013-04:002009-09-28T01:23:35.183-04:00Blogging Pachelbel #2 -- Muenchinger/Stuttgart: Had I listened to this recording before the Baumgartner, I would have been scandalized, because this recording makes a cut around the same place as in the Baumgartner, but, as ugly as the Baumgartner recording is, the cuts here do much more violence to the essential nature of the piece.
It seems obvious that the Baumgartner recording is related to David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-91946936701471404332009-09-27T00:50:00.006-04:002009-09-27T19:45:09.734-04:00Blogging Pachelbel #1 -- Baumgartner: I'm skipping Fiedler right now because it's not available for MP3 download, and the CD won't arrive for a few days.
This is a stunningly slow recording. It clocks in at 6:16 to begin with (the only slower recording is the Paillard), but that's without 10 measures that are cut from the performance. First, it skips the first two measures of the bass. It then David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-12014099636844812202009-09-26T23:30:00.026-04:002009-09-30T01:17:52.739-04:00Blogging Pachelbel: I've been obsessed the last few weeks with the history of Pachelbel's Canon. I got interested because my viol consort had originally planned to do Purcell's Three Parts on a Ground (Z. 731), which is for the exact same instrumentation, and I thought we should get the Pachelbel under our belts while we were at it. For various reasons we decided not to do either piece, but I'd David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-38471669685183928032009-04-22T21:50:00.005-04:002009-04-26T23:58:00.893-04:00"Neuroenhancing" Drugs: I was just reading Margaret Talbot's article in this week's New Yorker about so-called "neuroenhancing" drugs, titled "Brain Gain: The underground world of 'neuroenhancing' drugs." I am struck by what seems to be an underlying assumption among many of those who find these drugs useful, that life in general works a lot like college. Anyone who's been out of college for a David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-88741677466187241922009-01-15T16:44:00.002-05:002009-01-15T16:59:35.387-05:00Planes Crashing in your Back Yard: A plane taking off from La Guardia airport this afternoon ditched in the Hudson River around 48th Street at a little before 3:30pm this afternoon. This happens to be the stretch of the Hudson visible directly outside my window.
I posted some pictures of the view from my bedroom window recently. Here is a picture taken today at 4:15pm indicating the approximate David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-7338777547754603332008-12-03T17:58:00.005-05:002008-12-03T18:24:38.438-05:00Why I despise Microsoft: I read in The Register today about Microsoft's release of a plugin for Firefox that will allow you to view Open XML documents (MS's controversial XML-based document format). But the article in The Register gave no download link, so I thought "Grrr. Annoying Register writers -- don't they have any sense?"
So, I went to MS's download site, and put in "OXML Firefox" and gotDavid Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-80962055913873746472008-11-29T17:09:00.002-05:002008-11-29T17:39:35.824-05:00Why I Still Despise Apple: I'm not generally anti-Apple -- I admire much of what they have done in making high-quality products and still do -- but today I had problems with Safari for Windows 3.0.x crashing on me, so I figured it was time to upgrade to the latest. So, I Googled for it and came to the download page:
Note the choices. First, email is checked off by default, whereas an honorableDavid Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-5515544993743180952008-11-29T15:33:00.003-05:002008-11-29T15:39:35.804-05:00Headline in 2030: "Republicans Killed the Planet!" Kevin Drum is writing about the frightening ways in which recent climate change research shows that things are going bad much more quickly than our most pessimistic models forecast:
It would be nice to think that perhaps our current climate models are too pessimistic; or even that they're right but maybe we'll end up at the low end of the David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-87887875466769682122008-11-29T15:30:00.000-05:002008-11-29T15:30:38.483-05:00Health Care Reform as Investment/Stimulus: Health care reform seems to me like it ought to be a major priority in an economic downturn, since it's one of the major inefficiencies sapping the economy of vigor. Not doing so is an example of "eating your seed corn," in that because you feel like you can't afford to invest in something important, you end up prolonging really bad policies that eat up David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-29173110445892143052008-11-29T15:28:00.000-05:002008-11-29T15:28:40.121-05:00The Future of the Republican Party is as Important to Democrats as the Future of the Democratic Party: Some partisan Dems (of which I'm a charter member) are hoping that Palin's influence waxes rather than wanes, on the theory that the more she mesmerizes her pary, the better it is for long-term Democratic interests, since she can only take the Republicans into enhanced irrelevance.
I'm all for David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-75835889259040618552008-11-20T21:15:00.002-05:002008-11-20T21:25:23.109-05:00I Still Can't Believe It Happened: Today I went to the bank to deposit a check. When I was finished, the teller asked if there was anything else I'd like, and I jokingly said "I wouldn't mind taking some of that 6" stack of $50 bills off your hands!" She replied "No freebies today" and we both laughed as I replied "Maybe another day..." and walked away from the window. On the way out I went to David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-3668554499619715502008-11-10T15:36:00.003-05:002008-11-10T15:41:56.854-05:00The "Wisdom" of the American People: Just when the election of Obama has made you think the American populace has come to their senses, we have this:
Sales of handguns, rifles and ammunition have surged in the last week, according to gun store owners around the nation who describe a wave of buyers concerned that an Obama administration will curtail their right to bear arms.
How incredibly David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-52136497641627595002008-11-07T19:52:00.004-05:002008-11-07T20:07:04.011-05:00New Jersey Ballot Layout Problems: I was not one of the people who ridiculed West Palm Beach voters back in 2000 for being unable to properly read their ballots, but my roommate was. So, he and I were both chagrined to realize after we voted that we'd neglected to completely fill out our ballots. Here's a pieced-together scan of the sample ballot sent out to all NJ residents before election day:
David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-90689152338956134092008-11-07T17:55:00.003-05:002008-11-07T18:05:05.379-05:00Early Voting Long Lines? One thing that has puzzled me is exactly why there were long lines for early voting two weeks before the election. If you didn't have early voting, everyone would be voting on a single day. With early voting, you've got 10-12 days where the polls are open, so, theoretically, you'd be dividing up the voters into groups 10-12 times smaller than you'd have on election day.
David Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4003207.post-79288984365425466162008-11-07T17:32:00.005-05:002008-11-07T17:53:23.150-05:00Spread the Wealth: Leaving aside the odious attack on progressive taxation that is the basis for the right's fetishization of "spreading the wealth" as "socialism," I've always felt that nobody has pointed out that Obama wasn't talking about redistributing wealth through progressive taxation, but about the way that providing tax relief to the middle class injects money into the economy that comesDavid Whttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12597283856869684173noreply@blogger.com