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Sound of things

Maaike — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:59:33 +0000

As promised in my last post, here are some of the steam engines that I captured in the lovely Manchester Museum of Science and Industry. I spent the good part of an afternoon there together with Cypher, and returned completely relaxed and de-stressed. I guess it’s good to see some proper machine mechanics in this virtual Twitter/Flickr/Facebook world. Almost like returning to Mother Nature. Father Industry? Unfortunately, the sound quality isn’t very good; you don’t hear much of the beautiful low tones. But with a bit of luck and filtering, I might be able to solve that and mix them into some kind of music. To be continued.

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Steve Reich/Kraftwerk @MIF09

Maaike — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 19:14:34 +0000

Just returned from a lovely weekend in Manchester, thanks to Cathy and Sarah from MIF and B&H. Considering the only thing I ever won was a dartboard (when I was 6, and my parents didn’t allow me to play with it, out of fear I’d accidentally kill someone – like I could, with those throwing skills of mine), this was actually the coolest prize ever: two nights in a pretty sweet hotel in Manchester, dinner for two and tickets to Steve Reich! (Oh yeah, and Kraftwerk as well. but like Steve Reich The Hazing film Jesse Stone: Thin Ice trailer

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, I never heard Kraftwerk until now).

The gig was announced as a double bill, so I had my hopes set quite high: would Kraftwerk and Steve Reich interact? Would they team up and take Reich’s music to a whole new, stadium-sized level? With video, special effects, robots? Would Kraftwerk play Reich (they’re four, and very good at counting, or so I heard). Not really, unfortunately. Turned out that the two acts were completely separate, with the focus clearly on Kraftwerk, and Reich basically being a support act.

Is this bad?

Yes. It is. I don’t know how you experience your rock concerts, but for me and many others, support acts are necessary evils that you have to sit through until your long awaited, much-swooned over, eagerly-anticipated rock group/dance act/boyband finally arrives. You use them to get a beer, go to the loo, have another drink, get your food, find your seat, call your mum/friend/ex or fight over who can be at the front of the crowd. This is what happened in Manchester as well. We were seated halfway, surrounded by people who clearly didn’t give sh#t about Reich’s music. They walked, talked, phoned, had a pasty and a beer, making it virtually impossible to hear anything. The sound quality didn’t help in that respect.

And that’s OK, isn’t it. That’s what support acts are like, and I don’t want to take it out on the people around me. But what’s not OK, is that the music of someone who has been so influential, and (at least where I come from) has people queueing to even get in a performance, is so rudely transported from a concert hall to a stadium with so little consideration or care on how to do this. A stadium is not a concert hall; sound behaves differently, music behaves differently, people behave differently there.

And it could have worked so well. With proper sound, Reich’s music could have been transformed into a massive aural soundscape that envelopes you, in which you can immerse and come out again, like a swimming pool for your ears. Light effects, a laser show perhaps? Video walls could have shown the passion of the musicians, and set up some communication between the performers and the audience. The musicians were awesome, they deserved better than a stadium that was only one-third full, and 60% of them facing the other way because they were queueing for the bar.

So a tad bit disappointed there, even though the piece itself was actually quite wonderful; very atmospherical, with broad lines, swinging curves and swoops, and a very cool rock instrumentation (drum, bass, piano, two guitars). And hey, I got my meet and greet with Steve! And even though it was a quite literal one (Hi there, I wanted to thank you for your music…- BENG Kraftwerk intro, impossible to talk any longer- OK, bye), I did get a scribble from Steve Reich on my Daniel Variations CD booklet, and with a bit of imagination, you can even see my name in it.

Oh, and Kraftwerk itself was magnificent. I was blown away, and even got the odd bout of nostalgia now and then (hey, was that an Apple Lisa on the screen?) Even though I never ‘officially’ listened to them, it turned out that I knew al their tunes. They inspired me and Cypher for yet another trip to the Manchester Science and Industry museum, where we recorde lots of steam engines with very Kraftwerky sounds. Will post them here soon.Ghostride the Whip download Half a Person release Doctor Dolittle film

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Now here&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;#039;s what I call groovy timps

Maaike — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 21:10:26 +0000

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on timpani! Edit: are my ears way off, or is he playing the opposite of what I’m seeing? I hear high-low, but unless he’s got some weird contra-tuning, I could swear I’m seeing low-high.

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Steve Reich Twitter competition @ Boosey &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Hawkes

Maaike — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:11:04 +0000

For those of you who haven’t heard yet: someone created a fake Steve Reich Twitter account; Boosey & Hawkes took it back and launched a Twitter competition Sideways trailer

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. Price: two tickets for Steve Reich and Kraftwerk in Manchester! Dear B&H, I’ve created some extra space for my answers. Is that OK with you?

Tweet no 1: yeah, I’ve joined!

Tweet no 2: the first time I heard Steve Reich’s music wasn’t that eventful apparently, because I can’t remember. Unlike the first time hearing Ravel’s Bolero (back in 1983 when I was 8 years old, in Ms Gardien’s drawing & arts class at elementary school, played on a soapy green casette player on a sunny afternoon). But the first time I heard Steve Reich played live, in the Muziekgebouw in Amsterdam quite recently, I cried my eyes out. Which was not really something I expected- at all! I’ve written about it earlier, here’s what I thought back then:

Yes, it’s repetition, and yes it does fill the niches of my head like only Reich’s music can do, but I didn’t really anticipate the emotional impact this piece had on me. It’s something I usually only experience with Shostakovich or Mahler, and sometimes Arvo Part as well; the kind of music that bypasses your intellect and crawls under your skin and stays there, nagging, pointing out all the absurdities of this world we live in, and at the same time sending these incredible messages of hope, doom, sadness and soul stirring joy. All together, one after the other, as F.M. Alexander would say. This music is beyond being beautiful; it’s music that’s true.

Tweet no 3: found it with Google.

Tweet no 4: tweeted my location.

Tweet no 5: Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker (double interview with her & Reich – in Dutch), Paul Hillier, Louis Andriessen, Jacob ter Veldhuis

, Sonic Youth.

Beautiful visual representation of Reich’s music:

Tweet 6: Igor Stravinsky, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, Moondog, Ewe people of Ghana

Coltrane- Favorite things, a piece we’re practising on marimba right now:

Tweet 7: Pjotro’s musical suit. Uber-stylish and guaranteed to make even Kraftwerk dance Check http://bit.ly/qlmun

Tweet 8: Contest tweet no 8: Meredith Monk – anything from Atlas. Here’s why: http://bit.ly/OxO2l Her voice+his percussion

Tweet 9: my percussion teacher, because he rules on marimba & Ghanaian percussion AND because he brings music to amateurs like me.

Tweet 10: Daniel Variations

Bonus question: What a question…honestly, I wouldn’t know what to say if I met you, but I’d really like to try And world peace of course.Dot.Kill psp

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History repeating

Maaike — Wed, 20 May 2009 19:14:39 +0000

On my weekend break to London, I went timpani hunting in the Tower of London. Apparently, Handel, in search for the biggest timpani he could find for his Messiah, borrowed two huge timpani off king George that were originally owned by the French and captured by the English in the Battle of Blenheim.To hide them from the French, who frequently hopped over to do some more fighting, the English hid the timpani in the Tower’s Bell tower.

Unfortunately, those timpani weren’t on display (although this was compensated by a collection of armors worn by Henry VIII that made Blackadder look pale in comparison), but I did find a lovely piece of historical analogy between them and my own timpani.

According to the secretary of the Oranjeharmonie that sold me the timpani, they date back to at least 1938, possibly earlier. When the second world war started, the Oranjeharmonie was summoned to join the Cultuurkamer, a German institution which every performing artist was forced to join in order to keep performing. The Oranjeharmonie refused, and instead, hid all their instruments. Their timpani were too big to take home, so instead they were hidden in … a local school’s bell tower. Now, how sweet is that?

Fortunately, my search didn’t end up completely fruitless: I found some lovely drums:

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And an unexpected surprise at the inside of a drum-turned-money-collector: a manual for changing heads! So, what’s so cool about that, I hear you wonder. Not that much to many, I guess, but I write manuals for a living, so I’m a bit weird in that respect. And just look at it, it is beautiful, right?

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Into the heart

Maaike — Tue, 05 May 2009 08:21:39 +0000

Isn’t it wonderful when things come together and start to make sense. All this time, I’ve been chasing various musical interests, seemingly randomly switching from traditional choir singing to playing African perucssion and timpani to investigating language sounds and overtones in singing. Well, looks like it wasn’t so random after all, as I found out last Saturday when I went for a workshop in Dhrupad singing.

This ancient form of Indian classical music is one of the most stripped versions of singing I’ve experienced so far. I mean, take a piece of singing, strip it of lyrics, melody, harmony, expression, intent, put what’s left under a magnifying glass, and right there it is, it just opens up into such an incredible world of stillness-in-sound. It’s almost like a tone, a sound itself becomes an entire world to explore, somewhere where you can physically move around, walking towards the edges or diving straight into the center.

Which makes me wonder: what on earth were we thinking when we started to represent sound by little black dots on paper, and then forgetting about what they represent? It causes both sloppiness (’I got that note approximately, that’s good enough’) and useless restriction (’I need to sing/play what’s on the paper, everything else is wrong’). I don’t know if anybody else feels this way, but when I sightread music, I seem to lose most of my ability to listen to what’s happening around me. Almost like my eyes shutting out my ears. Anybody else recognising this?

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Maaike — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 21:26:45 +0000

These two are really mine!
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And here’s what they looked like in 1938:

Still some work to be done on them, they haven’t been used for 20 years, and perhaps I should start looking for a place where I can actually play them without disturbing 5 sets of neighbours. But who cares about minor details

WMMF day 3 &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; 4

Maaike — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 23:27:09 +0000

On day 3, we went to hear yet another Reich piece: Different trains. And yet again, I was struck at the difference a live performance makes. Much more than regular classical music, I really feel that audio recordings simply don’t do justice to the intricacies of his works. The other pieces were OK, and I really loved Adriaansz’ New

, especially the last bit, with a part that I’d love to play: two tuning forks, and amplified timpani. Amplified timpani. What an amazing sound. I’d really like to try such a setup myself, it’s sound that you don’t really hear any longer, but rather feel. Whoah!

Day 4 took us to the Orgelpark, which I hadn’t been to before. It’s an amazing place, an old church converted into a concert hall with four pipe organs. Reich’s Four organs

was originally scored for four electronic organs, but this performance on pipe organs definitely added something extra, more depth and more power in a way. Contrary to electronic organs, pipe organs seem to convey a lot more feeling, emotion perhaps. This is also because of the mechanics of pipe organs; because it takes a while before each key stroke is realised into sound, it somehow adds a human touch to the piece. Mechanics making it less mechanical, so to speak.

The absolute highlight of this concert, however, was Jan Welmers’ Litanie State of Play hd Den of Lions movie download . After Reich and Glass, who both were played on higher registers, it was such a wonderful change of scenery when all of a sudden, we were diving into the deep, sonorous sound of the Sauer organ

. What a wonderful experience, sometimes resembling Mahler-like string sections (I could swear I heard some echo’s of Mahler 2), sometimes echoing fragile flute lines, and basically touching everything in between. I could have listened to this piece for hours.

Last day tomorrow, what a pity.

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WMMF day 1 &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; 2

Maaike — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:20:54 +0000

Why can’t it be WMMF every day? I guess for the same reason that it can’t always be Sinterklaas Boarding Gate film Drowning Mona film

, and the feeling is actually pretty much the same. After yet another day at the office, I pack my bag and head for the Muziekgebouw

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I really don’t know which piece I like best so far, but I was most surprised at Reich’s Daniel Variations. Yes, it’s serial, and yes it does fill the niches of my head like only Reich’s music can do, but I didn’t really anticipate the emotional impact this piece had on me. It’s something I usually only experience with Shostakovich or Mahler, and somtimes Arvo Part as well; the kind of music that bypasses your intellect and crawls under your skin and stays there, nagging, pointing out all the absurdities of this world we live in, and at the same time sending these incredible messages of hope, doom, sadness and soul stirring joy. All together, one after the other, as F.M. Alexander would say. This music is beyond being beautiful; it’s music that’s true.

One other aspect that I really appreciate is the sense of community that’s surrounding this festival. I noticed that when I go to a pop or dance concert, part of the fun is in the anticipation and sharing that with like-minded people. So I visit forums, leave messages, perhaps meet up with people. For classical music, this kind of opportunity didn’t really exist, or, rather, wasn’t offered. As I’ve reported earlier, WMMF is present on all kinds of social networks, and it does catch on, it really does. There’s opportunities to interact with Festival stuff via Twitter; pictures are presented at Flickr, there’s a festival blog, loads of interactivity. And loads of young people in the audience!Find Me Guilty divx

World Minimal Music Festival

Maaike — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 08:54:11 +0000

I’ve been anticipating this one since July

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And I wouldn’t be Dutch if I didn’t comment on the incredible value-for-money ratio of this festival. Look at what you get for the price of one (1!) regular Concertgebouw ticket:

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02-04 (23:30) film:

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03-04 (20:30) | Matangi Kwartet, Amstel Saxofoonkwartet and Slagwerkgroep Den Haag