101: Domo Arigato Maestro Roboto

A new podium presence, a sick beat, and a challenger to Norman Lebrecht

Name That Tune

This week’s Name That Tune was submitted by Listener Jeremy. Here’s your hint: On the day of this composer’s death, a headline that appeared in the New York Times read “The Lost Month: How a Failure to Test Blinded the U.S. to Covid-19.” No Googling!

As always, your goal is to provide as much accurate analysis as possible. First try to get the nationality, year, and genre, then make educated guesses about the composer and — if possible— the piece. If you know the piece immediately, send us an email at toneprose@substack.com instead of commenting so the rest of us can have fun guessing. 

Last Week’s Results
Tone Prose 100
Britten, Violin Concerto

Joey was the only one to take a swing this week and I think he came up with a very respectable bucket: Enescu, Wieniawski, Kodaly and Schulhoff. I think this was a dashed hard excerpt to identify as Britten, as shown by the fact that the rest of you were too cowardly to attempt it (or perhaps you were too busy listening to 55 pieces of 21st century music.)

Think you can stump your fellow Listeners? Go ahead and try!

Head to our Google Form to upload a 30-second clip of an unidentified piece of classical music for us to try to identify.

NEWS!

According to Heise Online (auf Deutsch) the Dresdner Sinfoniker will make history this coming October when they perform under the direction of a robot maestro. Let’s forget for a second that this gimmick has already been tried before, because this time, it’s different: the piece slated for performance under the robotic overlord is Wieland Reissmann’s #kreuzknoten (and yes, I believe the hashtag is part of the title) which was specifically written to play to the robot’s inhuman strengths: one of the robots arms will conduct half of the orchestra in a grand ritardando while the other arm directs the remaining musicians in an accelerando.

Project Report: Caténaires x Ableton

I (Joey) recently uploaded a YouTube video that is slightly out of my wheelhouse as a Classical Pianist™. In this video, I perform a piece of the modernist piano canon, “Caténaires” by Elliott Carter. “Caténaires” is the second of two pieces in a larger work called Two Thoughts About the Piano, and is by far the more popular (relatively speaking) work, mainly because of its rhythmic drive. The piece consists of a single ‘melodic’ line, in an unbroken string of rapid sixteenth notes from the first note to the last, ratcheting up the excitement to the very end.

I appreciate this piece because I often have found myself thinking that atonal music lacks accessibility for two reasons: 1) lack of repetition, and 2) lack of pulse or other rhythmic drive. To address the second one, I’ve often found myself thinking something along the lines of, “This piece just needs a sick beat!” 

Though this piece doesn’t necessarily address my first complaint about lack of repetition, its texture naturally creates rhythmic interest. So, it made the perfect piece to put my money where my mouth is, and add a sick beat to atonal music. As the Tone Prose’s resident pop music enjoyer, I’ve been into beat making/pop music production for many years, and I even taught a course called Digital Music Production at the Borough of Manhattan Community College last year. 

So with no further ado, please enjoy, Elliott Carter’s “Caténaires” crossed with Joseph Vaz’s drum machines.

 FAQ

What did you use to make this?

To create the beat, I used Ableton Live, a commonly used digital audio workstation in Pop World. Then I put it together with the video on Microsoft Clipchamp, an absolutely terrible piece of software.

What are you listening to in your headphones?

Alas, I’m not listening to the beat; I recorded the piece live while listening to a metronome in my headphones. Afterward, I made the beat to go along with how I played it.

Does the beat have anything to do with Carter’s music?

Theoretically. I tried to match most of the cross rhythms in Carter’s piece with drums in my beat, but I also wanted to keep a sick beat going as much as possible.

How long did this take you?

Too long! Probably around 20 hours to make the beat, and longer to learn the piece. Fortunately, knowing how to play the piece will serve me more tangibly than this goofy project will.

Do you think this will help you in your quest for a tenure-track academic position in classical music?

How rude!

How can I help you?

Though an excerpt of this video did pretty well on Instagram, that hasn’t translated at all to YouTube views. If you’re so inclined, please send this to any friends/niblings/young people who appreciate a sick beat! 

What are you into?

There’s a new player in town on the “English-language Classical Music News” beat and after getting acquainted with it, I (Will) thought I’d give it a bit of notice in the newsletter.

From their website: 

IntoClassical is an online news source, community, and multimedia outlet that aims to educate, inspire, and promote interest in — and love for — the art of classical music.

Our mission is to serve classical music fans and fans-to-be with timely news, enlightening conversations, and entertaining media about the world of classical music.

Our vision is a world in which classical music feels as fresh, alive, and exciting as other popular forms of music; classics are cherished, new works are embraced and popularized, and a thriving ecosystem of musicians, composers, arts organizations, and other supporting roles is financially and artistically supported — with IntoClassical serving as a central hub of news and community.

IntoClassical has come to my attention because their marketing folks are making some clever moves, namely popping up in the comments sections of Slipped Disc, classical music’s answer to TMZ. It’s a smart promotional idea. Right now, Slipped Disc is the only site of its type, but it’s run by an attention-starved cretin named Norman Lebrecht who posts everything from reported news articles to the rankest rumors by totally unvetted sources.

IntoClassical basically wants to be Slipped Disc but normal. That’s a commendable project, but it’s an uphill battle. Because SD has been the one place for classical news and gossip, everyone assembles there. That means that you actually will find some intelligent discussion in the casbah of the casbah of its comments sections.

From what I can tell, IntoClassical hasn’t gotten any traction in terms of generating discussion on its site, but I hope that with enough tenacity, they’ll get there.

I think they’re bigger problem is that as it stands now, they’re mimicking a couple of Lebrecht’s mistakes. Slipped Disc is a good news aggregator, but Lebrecht never links to his sources, which I personally think is internet malpractice. I dip into SD not infrequently to see what’s going on, but I never link to it on this newsletter; I always find the actual published source that Lebrecht is parroting or paraphrasing and link to it directly.

Right now, IntoClassical is doing Lebrecht’s thing where, by and large, they only link to internal pages on their own site. Everyone’s got to generate clicks, but it strikes me that if you want to be taken seriously, you need to properly credit your serious sources.

Tone Praise

Andrzej Panufnik, Symphony No. 1

Panufnik: a name that I (Will) have known for probably twenty years but until just this past week, I never bothered to look into his music.

Folks, don’t do what I did: if you don’t know Panufnik, start listening now. The YouTube channel that I’ve linked here has been releasing Panufnik’s symphonies day by day, and they are all really really good. I think this might be a composer in need of a revival.

Tone Prose is a co-production of William White, Joseph Vaz, and the Listeners (i.e. you.)