The Post-Rockist is a rabid supporter of public radio, and it’s not just because it provides us an excuse to ponder the imponderable, like whether or not Carl Kasell could take Garrison Keillor in a cage match. NPR’s music coverage has been slagged off in the past for catering a little too much to the soft rock Sufjans and easy baked Wilcos of the world, but they still manage to churn out some solid gold nuggets when the time is right. Czech, for instance, the odd confluence of bloody-nosed power rocker Andrew W.K. discussing the brilliance of powder-wigged organist J.S. Bach in this special report. W.K. provides one of the most sincere, passionate, hyperbole-laden affirmations of all that is right and wonderful about music — Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 specifically — in a segment just shy of three minutes. I’d tease you with a quote, but it’s just too perfect and compact to break into little pieces.

Andrew W.K.: If you’re reading this, consider this an open invitation to be a guest blogger on the Post-Rockist any day. My e-mail’s in the sidebar.

Apropos of Andrew, here’s W.K. covering a Japanese song I’ve never heard of with a little, shall we say, classical piano intro:

“Kiseki”
Download audio file (Kiseki.mp3)

Meanwhile, NPR’s All Songs Considered hosted a “Tiny Desk Concert” with Bill Callahan, which can be viewed here. I’ve yet to write much of anything about Callahan’s latest record, Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle, but it’s without a doubt one of the most engaging I’ve heard all year — cynical, stout, and darkly humorous, Callahan and his sideways-facing baritone may be a little heady for some, but his songs manage to stop me dead in my tracks. I hesitate to fall into the cliché of calling this performance “intimate” just because its set at a tiny, crowded desk, but it’s hard not to notice how quietly reverent and eerily empathic all five musicians are in this all-too-brief three-song set.

Although, after writing those not unexpected adjectives, I wonder if that means this Tiny Desk Concert would fall under the category of all-too-predictable NPR music coverage? Oh well, this is no time to get self-conscious; it’s just music. Harrowing, beautiful music — enjoy it.

Download audio file (Room1.mp3)
Living Room Music I

Download audio file (Room2.mp3)
Living Room Music II

Download audio file (Room3.mp3)
Living Room Music III

Download audio file (Room4.mp3)
Living Room Music IV
(all selections from John Cage: Music for Percussion)

I don’t listen to John Cage as much as I used to; in part because I don’t have as strong of an urge as I once did to listen to outlandish or difficult music in an attempt to “prove” that I have diverse taste, and in part because I’ve come to realize that incredibly inventive and challenging music can still be presented to me in a palatable pop format, complete with catchy hooks and choruses to keep my short attention focused.

Yet the other day I was listening to my iPod on shuffle mode when “Living Room Music I” came on, and I had to do a double-take. The shifting patterns of crisp, polyrhythmic beats — was this the start of a new Panda Bear remix I had downloaded off Gorilla vs. Bear without realizing it? No, there was no predictable build-up of fuzz and effects; everything stayed refreshingly sparse and concise.

I suppose if there’s any proper way to be reintroduced to John Cage, complete chance would be the way to do it. After listening to “Living Room Music I” thanks to the random assortment of iPod shuffle, I went back to revisit the entire 8-minute movement. The point of the piece, in short, is that all sounds in time constitute music, sounds are all around us in nature, and even interior spaces as mundane as a living room count as a natural environment. “Living Room Music” is a percussive piece created for four musicians who are instructed to use (from the score): “Any household objects or architectural elements… [including] magazines, newpaper… table… furniture…. largish books… floor, wall, door.” This was put together in 1940, decades before Tom Waits started banging on kitchen cabinets to create the percussion for Mule Variations and charging $100-plus for paperless tickets to see him at the Fox. (Although, listening to “Living Room Music III” I don’t know how an organ constitutes an ordinary “household object.” Hmmm. Sounds like cheating to me.)

Think about it — 1940! That was back when Jimmy Dorsey and the Glenn Miller Orchestra were all the rage. This sounds starkly original in contrast, it could almost pass as a release from the noughts. (The exception being “Living Room Music II” with its vocal exercises built around Gertrude Stein’s “The World is Round” — the performance screams 1970s public access and black turtlenecks.) The music is clean and economical, perfect acoustical feng shui for my new living room and continuing posts on homeownership.

I don’t know what these guys are singing about. I’ve heard of Bizet–he wrote Carmen and was French–but that doesn’t matter with music this moving. Although I’m sure that my experience would be heightened if I knew what they were singing, I still get chills from this piece.

A piece on classical music on NPR this morning guided me here, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be listening to this recording for the rest of the day and over and over again. Just another reminder that any indie kid or bowery tough who hasn’t given the occasional classical piece a try is really missing out on spectacular music. No shame in having a music collection where Battles and The Beatles are surrounded by Bach and Bizet.

Glenn Gould-”Liszt’s Piano Transcription of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, First Movement”
(from The Art of Glenn Gould)

The Flaming Lips-”Can’t Get You Out of my Head”
(from The Fight Test EP)

In this segment of “Must a Post-Rockist Embrace Classical?” we look at the cover song through the lens of classical music.

The Rockist’s greatest pet peeve is the cover song. With such a great insistence on originality, the cover song can be to the snobbiest of music lovers nothing but uninspired and uncouth filler at best, cause for hatred and disrespect at worst. The only thing that can fill a true Rockist with more ire than a cover song is a cover band.

It is true that the cover song can act as filler in a live set, but a good cover can also produce a new kind of artistic expression of a well known piece of music. Please note my diction: “piece of music.” It’s the same way classical musicians describe the work of composers. Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, in all its greatness, is a piece of music to the orchestra conductor, who guides his or her symphony in an interpretation of the piece. In my recent exploration of classical music, I was surprised to find that Beethoven’s 5th Symphony has been played thousands of different ways. One would think that there is only one way to play those first four notes, possibly the best known opening four notes in the history of music. But there are myriad ways to do so, some better than others.

Glenn Gould is known as one of the greatest and most eccentric pianists of the twentieth century. A great introduction to Gould the man and his philosophy of music can be found in the movie “Thirty-two Short Film on Glenn Gould.” The movie makes Gould out to be even more eccentric than he actually was, but there is much insight to be found there for any music lover.

Gould made his name with his interpretation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a piece that was viewed by most classical musicians of the time as an unbeautiful exercise in technique and nothing more. Gould chose it as his first recording and, to this day, it is the best-selling classical album of all time. Gould was just as zealous for the modernist composers of the twentieth century as he was for Bach, but he hated Romantic composers for the most part and could not stand Mozart. Both his musical prejudices and insights helped him to formulate and record extremely unconventional interpretations of standard works of the repertoire. Sometimes these interpretations fell flat. Sometimes they revealed new layers and tonalities that no one had heard before.

I write about Gould because he was a performer of the most creative kind. He was not a composer, although he did compose some pieces of music. But his genius lay in those interpretations of others’ music. He, like all great classical musicians, are cover artists.

Pop music does not enter the world as sheet music. It is produced, recorded, mixed, finished, pressed, and sold. It may be produced as sheet music by Hal Leonard and other sheet music publishers, but it exists aurally in our minds and consciousnesses. However, pop music is still structured sound that can be altered in new and exciting ways by others without losing the essential qualities that make it whatever it is at its first entrance into the world.

Ergo, I give you The Flaming Lips’ cover of Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” Most Flaming Lips fans, even the only occasional fan, has heard this. You have no idea its a Kylie Minogue song until a minute in. But it is unquestionably “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” only it loses its glossy dance-y quality and becomes epic and almost spiritual. Yes, it is a bit of a lark in some ways, but take the interpretation not as a mockery of a well-known pop hit, but as new, vibrant watercolor added onto an older canvas. Or, in this case I suppose, as somber, muddy-textured oil over pristine pastels. J.M.W. Turner bleeding and blending rich, soaking paints over a Warhol monoprint.
–Posted by Scotter

Clarinet Concerto in A Major
Wolfgang Mozart
The Best of Mozart

Must a Post-Rockist embrace classical music? The intention of this site is to write about music sans the snobbery of the High Fidelity-esque record store clerk or the critic who only likes the “true” punk or “true” music or whatever. But is it possible or even necessary to move beyond rock snobbery by exploring the critical and aural space occupied by classical music which, of all music genres, enjoys snobbery and exclusivity even more than rock music?

In a recent Studio 360 interview, classical composer William Bolcom speaks about the intersections between classical and pop, how they influence each other often, and how, in America in particular, there is a reluctance by most classical and pop musicians, critics, and fans, to acknowledge each other in any non-derisive way:

“Our [musical culture] has always been sort of exclusivist. There’s high-line music over here and there’s that lousy pop music over there…We’re supposed to enjoy it so therefore if it’s enjoyable then maybe it’s suspect–that’s part of the protestant tradition. I’ve always been an enemy of that. [And] that’s the problem with composing. They don’t know what to do with your complicated side versus your pop side and [don't] realize you’re the same person. That whole wall has been, I think, a great enemy to both our classical or serious art institutions on one hand and I think it has empoverished pop music.”

While I disagree with Bolcom’s unconscious (or perhaps conscious) designation of classical music as the “serious” musical institution, I do agree that pop fans have much to love in classical music and that classical fans have much to love in pop music. Although certainly many of you out there enjoy both, I would aver that the majority of music listeners in this country do not even try to listen to both (especially those people out there who “love all kinds of music,” an exclamation that, in my more rockist days, used to make my blood boil and burn).

In the year ahead, the Post-Rockist will occasionally offer reflections upon the intersections between pop and classical music, to find if there is a common ground, if a Post-Rockist must embrace classical music, or if it would be best if never the twain shall meet.

Exhibit one: Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A Minor. I’m an amateur to classical music, and so I went directly to Mozart since he’s, like, famous or something.

Holy molley this is a fantastic piece of music. The clarinet lifts my soul out of my bedeviled chest and lays it upon the softest of pillows. The concerto is a blanket, it is a parent’s lap, a love-soaked bath of sound, clothing your entire being, forcing your eyes closed, and leaving you tenderly in a fetal position. I don’t really believe too much in an afterlife, but if one exists, it will sound like the Second Movement of the Clarinet Concerto in A Minor.

I hope you’re not too much of a rock snob to give it a good listen. It does the same thing to me as Jeff Buckley’s Grace.

If you have any ideas about the relationship between pop and classical or if you want to share your relationship to either, please share in the “Comments.”

Posted by Scotter