Ask a music scene micro celebrity

[electrical]

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Miserere is phenomenal - I honestly think it is better than Sorrowful Songs, and I am not ever a fan of a capella work in any genre.

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Just hit Amazon on your recommendation. I realized I didn't really have an excuse not to have it.

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As for Glass, I agree there too - have you heard many of the 'new' recordings of his - i.e. the Nonesuch re-recording of Einstein on the Beach?

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I have not heard them. Although he took great pains to erase the human element of his pieces, one of the great satisfactions of listening to his more demanding pieces is thinking about the poor bastards who had to play it, and the very rare performance nuance that sneaks in emphasizes the real human accomplishment.

Digital recording and editing were probably a godsend in the mind of the "pure" composer, in that they allow literally "perfect" transcriptions to be recorded, but I remain more impressed by music actually performed by people. Raymond Scott used to pine for a machine that could play his compositions, and even made a crude electro-mechanical sequencer to play some backing parts for tape recordings, because he was frustrated by the struggling of his band to play to his exacting standards. As it turns out, the struggle is one of the most engaging parts of a Raymond Scott tune. I shudder to think how awful his music would be if actually performed by samplers in perfect lockstep.

Conlon Nancarrow embraced the mechanical player piano for his compositions, but he had to adapt his notation and composition to the quirks of the piano, and this is where the tension between composition and performance displays itself and makes his music worth hearing. Take a look at his scores sometime -- they're like somebody shot two barrels of birdshot at a page of staff rule. If he could just type it into a sequencer and have it come out like water, I doubt he would have come up with any of his little temporal innovations like the constant accelerando, or the simultaneous regressing/accellerating lines. In particular, I wonder at what he called his "X-shape," where two themes played simultaneously; one playing forward accelerating in tempo, while another played in reverse, de-celerating, creating a central eddy motif where the two lines synchronize for some time.

This "X-shape" must have resulted from the discovering that he could punch a roll and then re-thread it in reverse to punch a counterpart composition. Perhaps he accidentally threaded a roll without rewinding it one day. These little epiphanies are only possible if your band or performance device once-in-a-while occasions accidents, and I am grateful Nancarrow did his work before midi sequencers and digital pianos were available.