About the McWetlog

The McWetlog is Jonathan Crowe’s personal blog. It’s where he writes about the things that turn his crank, such as astronomy, paleontology, photography, science fiction and snake keeping. A writer, editor, and all-round pain in the ass, Jonathan lives in Shawville, Quebec.

Music

Following the Ninth

Following the Ninth is a documentary about the impact of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony around the world today. According to the IMBD listing, it’s supposed to be coming out in March. In the meantime, here’s a taste.

Books read: July 2010

Footprints in the Dust: The Epic Voyages of Apollo, 1969-1975, edited by Colin Burgess. The People’s History of Spaceflight series gets more disappointing with each volume. For the period from Apollo 11 to Apollo-Soyuz, this volume assembles chapters from different contributors, with mixed results — the Apollo-Soyuz chapter reads more as the author’s memoir of watching the launch than as a history of the mission. Particularly patchy about the period’s Soyuz missions and Skylab, and reveals very little about Apollo 11 through 17 that is not already covered in A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin (still the book on Apollo: Amazon.ca, Amazon.com).

Shatnerquake by Jeff Burk. A novella in which all the characters William Shatner has ever played are sucked into our universe with the mission to destroy William Shatner. The Guardian’s Damien Walter calls it “a comparatively mild example” of the bizarro fiction genre, an underground genre focused on the weird — “literature’s equivalent,” says Bizarro Central, “of the cult section of the video store.” Concerning Shatnerquake: truth be told, the concept is a lot more awesome than the execution; the writing was weak and there were a lot of missed opportunities to do something more with the material. Bizarro fiction intrigues me, but I’m now wary of the quality.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buying a Piano by Marty and Jennifer Flinn. Yes, I already have a piano — a digital Roland I bought more than two years ago — but this book was still worth reading. While I don’t regret what I purchased, and where I purchased it, even after reading this guide, boy do I wish I had it back then: it’s really useful intelligence for potential piano buyers who would otherwise go unarmed against marketing bullshit, and it sets out the differences between pianos, what to look for, and what not to worry about. Bought remaindered.

Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime, by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. Truth be told, I’ve always been a junkie for inside baseball of the political kind, and this book, which when it came out was the talk of Washington, provides me with that hit. With the revelations about the inner workings of the campaigns — the disaster that was the Clinton campaign, Edwards’ self-destruction, and McCain’s failure to properly vet Palin — it’s abundantly clear that the best-run campaign won. I wonder if that’s a truism. E-book bought through Apple’s iBooks.

Cod by Mark Kurlansky. Short but expansive history of the Atlantic cod, which went from insanely plentiful on the Grand Banks to commercially extinct in five centuries. I skipped over the recipes and wanted more history (the Basques, Massachusetts, the slave trade, the Icelandic cod wars, the collapse of the Newfoundland fishery); it could easily have been three times as long and still too brief.

Beethoven: The Universal Composer by Edmund Morris. Short biography of my favourite composer; looks like a good starting point before tackling longer, more serious biographies; light on the works themselves but provides good context. E-book bought through Apple’s iBooks.

Footprints in the Dust ed. by Colin Burgess: Amazon.ca • Amazon.com
Shatnerquake by Jeff Burk: Amazon.ca • Amazon.com
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buying a Piano by Marty and Jennifer Flinn: Amazon.ca • Amazon.com
Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin: Amazon.ca • Amazon.com
Cod by Mark Kurlansky: Amazon.ca • Amazon.com
Beethoven: The Universal Composer by Edmund Morris: Amazon.ca • Amazon.com

Street pianos

Play Me, I’m Yours is street art by Luke Jerram that’s going on right now on in New York City and London: 60 pianos in New York, 21 in London, available for members of the public to play. (It was in London last year, as well as a few other cities since 2008.) As a concept it’s neat, but I can’t help but wonder whether, outside artistic centres like New York and London, you wouldn’t end up with one version of “Heart and Soul” after another.

More entries below »

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A classical music festival in the Pontiac

This is interesting: a six-concert classical music festival taking place not too far from here, on a farm just outside Luskville (about halfway between Shawville and Ottawa). Festival Pontiac Enchanté’s concerts take place in a converted hayloft that seats about 100 people; accordingly, the music program focuses on solosts, duets, trios and quartets. I may try to take one or two of them in, if I can find the time. Starts tomorrow. Via Classical Ottawa.

Michael Giacchino’s Star Trek score

Star Trek album cover (thumbnail) I’ve been listening to Michael Giacchino’s score for the new Star Trek movie (Amazon.ca, Amazon.com, iTunes). It’s quite distinct from previous Trek movie scores by, say, Jerry Goldsmith or James Horner. The tone seems lighter, the tempo much faster, than those other scores; and with cues redolent of the 1960s (I was reminded of Elmer Bernstein at a couple of points), the music seems a throwback to the music of the original series. Even Fred Steiner’s cues for “The Corbomite Maneuver” or “Balance of Terror,” looped again and again for ominous enemies in subsequent episodes, had a briskness to them, to say nothing of the fluffy fun inherent in Jerry Fielding’s music for “The Trouble with Tribbles.” I quite liked it — a good fit for this less ponderous and less earnest reinvention of Star Trek.

Even if you haven’t heard of Giacchino, you’ve probably heard his work. He also scored a few Pixar movies: his score for The Incredibles was, I thought, very good, and he’s also done Ratatouille and Up.

Haydn

Maclean’s is apparently making a major push on behalf of Joseph Haydn, the 200th anniversary of whose death is being marked this year. Jaime Weinman complains about how underrated he is; Paul Wells adds his two cents in a blog entry.

Haydn is another gap in my musical knowledge (I’ve been spending too much time obsessing over Beethoven and, to a lesser extent, Chopin) that I’m going to have to address at some point. Lord knows when — my father just gave me a CD collection of Brahms’s piano works, and I’ve been studying up on him. But I’m sure I’ll get to Haydn eventually, since my tastes run more to the Classical/early Romantic period than earlier or later. Oddly enough, the three symphonies of his I have so far have left me kind of meh, so maybe I need to broaden my sample, give him another chance.

Beethoven interpretations

Paul Wells lists and ranks a half-dozen boxed sets of the Beethoven symphonies, which brings up a point that I’ve only recently figured out: it is not only permissible to have more than one recording of a work of classical music, it can also be desirable to listen to different interpretations of the same work.

The more I learn about classical music, the more I realize how much this is true. I recently picked up a 10-disc boxed set of the Beethoven piano sonatas performed by Vladimir Ashkenazy; at less than $40, it’s hella cheap, like the Zinman Beethoven symphonies that Wells touts. I’d previously been collecting the John O’Conor performances on Telarc, but they’re now hard to find and I can’t complete the set. Which is a pity: O’Conor appears to be a Beethoven specialist, whereas many other performers recording the sonatas seem to be Romantic specalists like Ashkenazy for whom Beethoven is not the primary focus of their careers.

On balance, I think I prefer O’Conor’s interpretation to Ashkenazy’s. O’Conor is crisper and faster: for example, he plays the second movement of Opus 28 (Piano Sonata No. 15 in D major) in 5:47, whereas Ashkenazy takes more than eight languourous minutes. It’s not consistent: sometimes O’Conor is legato where Ashkenazy is staccato; sometimes it’s vice versa. These are, of course, interpretations: they’re making decisions about how to play these pieces. As I learn more about the sonatas (which, by the way, are my passion and my life and my favouritest music ever), as I pore over the scores and read books like Charles Rosen’s (Amazon.com, Amazon.ca), I notice where those decisions are being made. I hope that at some point I’ll have learned enough to understand why they’re being made.

In the meantime, though, I’m giving myself permission to buy more music.

Beethoven links

Standalone websites about my favourite composer tend to have a lot of the same basic biographical information, with varying degrees of detail, but are frequently less strong on the musical analysis. Public radio sites are better at the music, but less comprehensive overall.

CBC Radio 2: Beethoven’s Greatest Hits (includes a must-listen podcast in which Bramwell Tovey, at the piano, walks us through all nine symphonies)
BBC Radio 3: The Beethoven Experience (includes brief notes on the 32 piano sonatas)
The Beethoven Reference Site
Mad About Beethoven

Fact and fantasy in Immortal Beloved

Like Amadeus, Immortal Beloved (Amazon.ca, Amazon.com), the biopic about Beethoven, plays fast and loose with the facts. Bernard Rose’s hypothesis about the identity of Beethoven’s mystery addressee is not widely accepted. Not only that, but the dates don’t add up. The letters in question date from 1812, when his nephew Karl was already five years old; Karl’s suicide attempt occurred two years after the premiere of the Ninth Symphony (whereas in the film Beethoven appears considerably older in the latter scene). And Napoleon’s attack on Vienna occurred six years after the Third Symphony. And so forth.

(But then Mozart didn’t die the evening of the premiere of The Magic Flute, either, and and in fact went on to write one more opera. And Salieri didn’t try to kill him. So go figure.)

Even so, Immortal Beloved makes interesting use of contemporary texts by or about Beethoven. The letters, of course, exist and are quoted. The funeral oration outside Währinger cemetery, given by Schindler in the movie, was written by the playwright Franz Grillparzer and actually delivered by Heinrich Anschütz, but the text is more or less the same. And in the scene after Beethoven’s deafness is revealed, a voice-over reads from Beethoven’s own Heiligenstadt Testament, written despondently in 1802 when he realized his deafness was incurable.

It was an interesting experience for me to watch the movie while checking my old copy of Hamburger’s Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations (Amazon.ca, Amazon.com), which includes all these texts. It’s a sneaky way to build verisimilitude when you’re otherwise playing at fantasy.

(They even had an explanation for the appearance of “Muß es sein?” and “Es muß sein” in the manuscript of String Quartet No. 16 — how much Beethoven geekery is that?)

Oboes

I used to play the oboe. For reasons that will soon be made clear, I recently took a look around to see what a decent intermediate oboe — i.e., a low-end professional instrument or high-end student instrument with all the keys — would cost. The last time I heard a quote was in the mid-1980s; things have gotten much more expensive since. A plastic oboe fulfilling these criteria runs about $4,000. A top-end instrument — grenadilla wood bore, silver keys — runs $5,000 to $7,000. About four times what I thought.

It’ll be a while before I oboe up, I think. Meanwhile, some links.

Oboe manufacturers: Covey; Fox (they also do bassoons and English horns); F. Lorée (they also do weird oboes, i.e., oboes d’amore, piccolo oboes and bass oboes).

God help me, an oboe blog, with plenty of others in the sidebar to look at later.

An NPR story from 2006 about the New York Philharmonic’s new oboist, and what he goes through to make their own reeds. Yes: oboe pros make their own. It’s spooky to think that he spends as much time making reeds as he does practicing.

Earworm Elmer

Elmer Bernstein is responsible for several earworms that have been plaguing my consciousness of late, viz., the themes for The Magnificent Seven and The Great Escape and the National Geographic fanfare. He did many others — see his Wikipedia entry — but those are the ones that are stuck in my head. And now that I’ve mentioned them, just try and get them out of your head. You’re welcome.

Miyazaki DVDs; Howl’s Moving Castle; Joe Hisaishi

Two more of Hayao Miyazaki’s movies were released to DVD in February with new English-language voice tracks — Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) and Porco Rosso (1992). Of course we got them shortly thereafter, though it’s taken me a while to tell you about them. The executive summary is that they are both good and you should buy them both, but I thought I should say a bit more. As usual, I’ll say everything except what the movies are about; you can find that out through the links.

Nausicaä is widely regarded as Miyazaki’s masterpiece, though I believe he himself is less happy with it. I can’t imagine the impact it made in 1984; I’ve seen so much of his later work that it’s difficult to evaluate. Princess Mononoke (Amazon) covers many of the same themes, and is in many ways a more mature and successful work. Nausicaä, though, was Miyazaki’s “first” film — the first he wrote and directed, if I’m not mistaken; he’d directed and worked on other animé before. It has all the topoï that keep recurring in his later works: young protagonists, strong women, flight, reconciling humanity and nature; no unamibiguously good or evil characters.

Porco Rosso, on the other hand, may well be Miyazaki’s least Miyazaki-like, simply because the characters are mostly adult. The conflicts are personal rather than epic, which would place Porco alongside Kiki’s Delivery Service (Amazon) and Spirited Away (Amazon), were it not for the clear children’s focus of the latter two movies. In its focus on flight, it’s quintessentially Miyazaki, though airplanes are quite mundane in comparison. Except for the fact that the protagonist has the face of a pig — pigs show up a lot in Miyazaki’s more recent films, don’t they? — it has few fantasy elements.

One thing I found maddening was how elliptical these two films — especially Porco — could be. Too many plot points — key plot points — were left dangling in Porco: the FAQ clears up some of them, but the film by itself leaves you guessing. A little ambiguity is by no means a bad thing — but in the right places, please. (A similar bit about Nausicaä’s clothing changing colour was insufficiently clear.)

In other Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli related news: the English-language dub of Howl’s Moving Castle will be released in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco on June 10, with a wider U.S. (and hopefully Canadian?) release on June 17. Mark your calendars and check your theatres.

Finally, Joe Hisaishi is responsible for most of the music on Miyazaki’s films, and let me tell you, he’s responsible for some of the most insidious cinematic earworms I have yet encountered. What’s frustrating about that is that the soundtracks are hard to find. You can usually find “image albums” — music based on the storyboards — as imports on Amazon, but they’re something on the order of $35. So far I’ve only been able to find soundtracks for the two most recent U.S. releases on Amazon; certainly they’re not on iTunes.

Missed the LOTR Symphony

Shit. How did I miss this? (Richard didn’t.)

Shore’s scores

The CD of the Return of the King soundtrack showed up yesterday, courtesy of a little birthday gift certificage from the brother. (“Because it’s my birthday, and I wants it.”) Howard Shore’s stuff is fun to listen to — your usual movie soundtrack symphonic score with signature themes à la Wagner, only it’s a kindler, gentler Wagner, just like Tolkien, whose own Ring saga is much more humane. (The Silmarillion, on the other hand, is just as brutally operatic.) And if they release a CD of the two-hour, eight-movement symphonic version — as in it’s structured as a symphony, not just played by a symphony orchestra — which had its North American premiere in Montreal last night, I’ll snap that up too.

Holy Shat

The Shat is reportedly going to release another album (via the Kottke). The first album he shat out was The Transformed Man, highlights of which are available in the Shatner-Nimoy extravaganza, Spaced Out.

Note: Entries prior to November 2003 did not have categories assigned to them, and are not included in category archives; please consult the monthly archives.