Friday Not-So-Random Five
I decided in honor of the new year, I’d do something a bit different this week. Instead of
doing a random shuffle on my IPod, I separated out my favorites of the modern classical pieces that I discovered this year. Some of these are brand new recordings just released this year; others are older recordings that I just happened to discover this year.
1. **Igor Stravinsky, “Suite #1”, from “Shadow Dances” performed by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.** Beautiful piece for a small orchestra. Very typically Stravinsky; some strange tonalities, but they’re mostly very subtle. This is modern classical music that even people who don’t generally like modern classical can appreciate.
2. **Tan Dun, “Water Passion after St. Matthew”**. A piece written by the Chinese composer Tan Dun in honor of the 250th anniversary of the death of JS Bach. This is *definitely* not a piece for people who don’t like modern classical music. Mostly atonal, except for a few sections. It’s got some fragments from Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion, with a very strong influence from Chinese opera. It often sounds oddly Jewish. I haven’t made up my mind about
this yet; it’s going to take a few more listenings before I really get it. At times, I think it’s brilliant, and at times, I think it’s just strange. In any case, it’s worth the
effort of listening to, to hear the voice of a very notable modern composer writing in
an utterly unique style.
3. **Steven Reich and Maya Beiser, “Cello Counterpoint”**. I’ve been a fan of Steven Reich for a long time. He’s a modern composer from the minimalist school, whose music is strongly
influenced by the time he spent studying with African drummers. This piece is just dazzling; it’s all played by Maya Beiser, but she’s recorded 7 different tracks, and plays the 8th live over the mixed recordings. This is an amazing piece of music.
4. **John Corigliano, “Fantasy on a Bach Air”**. A piece by John Corigliano, also in honor of JS Bach, built around a melody from a Bach air. Corigliano is my favorite modern composer; he tends to write a lot of very atonal stuff, but unlike composers like Stockhausen, he manages
to do it in a way that’s pleasant to listen to. He finds different kinds of musical structures for the music, which still appeal to your ear.
5. **Phillip Glass, “Overture from Les Enfants Terrible”**. “Les Enfants Terrible” is one of Phillip Glass’s latest operas. It’s distinctively Glass, but at the same time, it’s very different from much of Glass’s past work. It’s much more willing to be openly dissonant, and
to use larger, longer structures and more complex rhythms than most of Glass’s earlier work.

1. **Kate Bush, “Pi”**. I’ve been waiting for this to show up in my shuffle for the FRT! Kate Bush, singing the digits of π!
2. **Suzanne Vega, “Knight Moves”**. This is an old favorite of mine. The lyrics have some
personal significance, but it’s a lovely song.
3. **Explosions in the Sky, “Have You Passed Through This Night?”**. Post rock, very much in the
vein of “Godspeed You Black Emperor”. Not as good as Godspeed, but still pretty good.
4. **New Grange, “Weetabix”**. Very nice bluegrass tune performed by a supergroup of sorts. For the
anniversary of the founding of Compass Records, they put together this band of the top Compass
artists. It’s quite a lineup. Allison Brown on banjo (of course; AB is the founder of Compass);
Tim O’Brien playing a guitar-style Bouzouki (a bouzouki is strung like a mandolin – four pairs of strings tuned in fifths), but it’s much lower, in the same range as the guitar); Mike Marshall
playing Mandolin; Darol Anger playing fiddle; Todd Phillips on bass; and Phillip Aaberg playing piano.
5. **Rachel’s, “Artemisia”**. Yet more post-rock, this time from the more classical side. Rachel’s is one of my favorite groups, just overall amazing, wonderful composers and performers. Listening to
Rachel’s is a little slice of heaven.
6. **Hugh Blumenfeld, “Longhaired Radical Socialist Jew”**. The only gospel song that I like! Hugh is a great singer/songwriter and english professor. This is a hysterically funny song. To give you a sense of what it’s like, here’s the first verse: “Well, Jesus was a homeless lad/With an unwed mother and an absent dad/And I really don’t think he would have gotten that far/If Newt, Pat and Jesse had followed that star/So let’s all sing out praises to/That longhaired radical socialist Jew.”
7. **Solas, “The Wiggly Jigs”**. Solas is a great traditional Irish band, led by an unbelievable multi-instrumentalist named Seamus Egan.
8. **Flook, “Asturian Way”**. A great tune from my favorite trad Irish band.
9. **Dirty Three, “Stellar”**. Another really wonderful classical-leaning post-rock band.
10. **King Crimson, “Eyes Wide Open”**. A brilliant piece off of Crimson’s latest.

1. **Trout Fishing in America, “I Get Ideas”**. Trout is a great band; they do both children’s
music and adult music. This is one of their children’s songs, but I love it anyway. What’s
not to like about a song that features shampooing with peanut butter?
2. **Gordian Knot, “The Brook The Ocean”**. Gordian Knot is an instrumental progressive rock band consisting of bassist Sean Malone, and whoever else he feels like playing with. GK has included Bill Bruford, Adrian Belew, Trey Gunn, Steve Hackett, Mike Portnoy, and a ton of other amazing people. This is a spectacular track, a thoroughly great exaple of GK.
3. **Fairport Convention, “John Gaudie”**. A classic old folk tune performed by Fairport Convention.
4. **Martin Hayes, “The Crooked Road/The Foxhunter’s Reel”**. Martin Hayes is a phenomenal Irish
fiddler. In general, he plays things at a very reasonable pace, and is very sparse and elegant
in his ornamentation. This tune is pretty much his way of saying “Yes, I *can* play as fast and fancy as any of those snotty showoffs, I just usually *choose* not to.” Amazing musicianship, played with the same kind of elegance that characterizes his normal playing. I’m glad that he doesn’t do
*everything* in this showy style, but for a once-in-a-while thing, it’s positively brilliant.
5. **John Corigliano, “Etude Fantasy 4. Ornaments”**. A modern classical piece for piano written
by one of the finest composers in America. Corigliano isn’t an *easy* composer to listen to, but
he’s well worth the effort.
6. **Broadside Electric, “Bucimis”**. Broadside is a local-ish (Philadelpha/Central NJ) band that
plays electricified folk music. They specialize in old broadsides from Childe’s ballads, along
with Irish and Klezmer themed instrumentals. This is an instrumental track of theirs, which is
based on a *Bulgarian* folk dance in a meter of – get this – 15/16. (4 fast 2s, followed by one 3 that takes as long as two of the twos, followed by one more two; repeat until dizzy.)
7. **Psychograss, “Big Gravel”**. Funky newgrass from a Darol Anger led band consisting of some
of the most brilliantly twisted players in modern bluegrass: Darol Anger on fiddle, Mike Marshall on Mandolin, the great Tony Trischka on banjo, Todd Phillips on bass, and David Grier on guitar.
8. **Kate Bush, “Nocturn”**. A beautiful piece off of Kate’s latest.
9. **Darol Anger’s Republic of Strings, “The Seagull/Bay Day”**. Another brilliant effort from Darol Anger. The man has *such* a range!
10. **Marillion, “Interior Lulu”**. A wonderful, long piece from my favorite neo-progressive band. This one has a very interesting structure. It starts out with an intro that sounds very much like recent Marillion work. Then it flashes back into a sound like the genesis cover band that they were when they started out, and gradually changes until they sound like todays Marillion again by the end. Very, very cool.

By way of PZ, I just found [the website of Jonathan Coulton](http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songs/), a musician who seems to specialize in humorous and geeky songs. The music is good; the lyrics are absolutely fantastic.
Here’s an example that he gives away, called “Mandelbrot Set”. (For embedding it here, I drastically stripped it from 160K stereo sample to just 16K mono; go to his homepage to get the real, full-quality version.)

Just to give you an idea, here’s the lyrics for the first verse:

Pathological monsters! cried the terrified mathematician
Every one of them is a splinter in my eye
I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve
I fear the Cantor Ternary Set
And the Sierpinski Gasket makes me want to cry
And a million miles away a butterfly flapped its wings
On a cold November day a man named Benoit Mandelbrot was born

Go. Listen. Buy!

1. **Porcupine Tree, “Prepare Yourself”**. Porcupine Tree is a strange bad, which started out as an elaborate joke. This is off of their most progressive album, “The Sky Moves Sideways”. It’s a brilliant piece of work.
2. **Dream Thater, “Blind Faith”**
3. **Dirty Three, “Dream Evie”**. Ah, Dirty Three, one of my favorite post-rock ensembles. Very classical sounding group, wonderful.
4. **Tortoise, “By Dawn”**. More post-rock; unfortunately, I find Tortoise rather dull.
5. **Harry Bradley, “Miss Thornton’s”. Traditional Irish music played in exquisite style by one of the great masters of the Irish flute. Not to be missed if you like Irish music.
6. **Tony Trischka Band, “Feed the Horse”**. Tony Trischka is one of the great masters of the banjo; he’s Bela Fleck’s banjo teacher. Tony was doing the jazz thing on the banjo long before Bela. This is off of Tony’s first album with his new band. It’s a terrific song, but it’s got some of the most nonsensical lyrics I’ve seen.
7. **The Flower Kings, “Bavarian Skies”**. A track from the latest album by the gods of neo-progressive rock.
8. **Flook, “Wrong Foot Forward”**. More Irish. Flook is one of the most amazingly fun, high energy, creating trad Irish bands around. Basically, take one of the best Irish tinwhistle players in the world; put him together with one of the top Bodhran players, a solid rhythm guitar player, and a terrific *tenor* flute player, set them loose and watch what happens. I’ve yet to find *anyone* who’s heard them who doesn’t love Flook.
9. **Rachel’s, “Last Things Last”**. Rachel’s… Another really great post-rock ensemble; like the Dirty Three, they’re very classical. But they’re even better at it than the DT or the Clogs. (And the name of the group is “Rachel’s”, not “The Rachels”, not “Rachels” plural, but the possessive of “Rachel”.)
10 **Marillion, “The Damage”**. Marillion’s my long-time favorite prog-rock band. “The Damage” is a track off of their latest album. Not an exception track by Marillion, but almost anything by Marillion is at least good.

It’s friday, so it’s time for more of my highly warped taste in music.
1. **Tempest, “Turn of the Wheel”**. Tempest is a really cool band. They’re a cross between an electrified folk band and a neo-progressive rock band. Strong Irish and Swedish influences on the folky side, and a vaguely ELP-ish sound on the rock side.
2. **Mel Brooks, “In Old Bavaria” from the Producers**.
3. **The National, “Baby We’ll Be Fine”**. Probably my favorite track from this album by the National.
4. **Hamster Theatre, “The Quasi Day Room Ceremonila Quadrille”**. HT is an offshoot of Thinking Plague. Every bit as strange as TP, but with their own early-music influenced sound. Great stuff.
5. **Kate Bush, “King of the Mountain”**. Kate’s first new album in a very long time, and it’s really fantastic. Very mellow, but with a lot of depth.
6. **Dream Theater, “Take the Time”**. Dream Theater is an amazing neo-progressive/metal band. This is off of an album of theirs that isn’t my favorite, but *anything* by Dream Theater is at least pretty good.
7. **Bela Fleck, “See Rock City”**. An amazing piece of newgrass virtuosity by Bela Fleck. Honestly, I wish he’d dump the Flecktones, and get back to doing more newgrass. The last couple of flecktones albums have been pretty mediocre, and when I’ve seen him live, he seems much more engaged when
he’s doing the newgrass type stuff with folks like Edgar Meyer, Sam Bush, and Mark O’Connor than he does with the Flecktones.
8. **Spock’s Beard, “NWC”**. I’m sure I’ve mentioned Spock’s Beard before. They’re a great neo-progressive band. They started off sounding like a cross between old Genesis, Rush. and Gentle Giant, but they’ve evolved into their own very distinctive sound. Absolutely fantastic. This is a fantastic instrumental track. (And I just got email from them that they’ve got a new album coming out towards the end of November!)
9. **Shirim, “Nokh A Gleyzl Vayn”**. Great bouncy track from the greatest modern jazz-influenced Klezmer band around.
10. **The Clogs, “Lantern”**. The only vocal track on the newest album from one of my favorite post-rock ensembles. Just fantastic. The Clogs never cease to amaze me.

It’s friday again, which means I get to bore you with my bizarre taste in music.
1. **Spock’s Beard, “A Guy Named Sid”.** SB is a fantastic neo-prog band, one of my favorites. This is a track off the first album after their long-time lead singer/songwriter left the band. It’s definitely a big change in sound for them, but they’re still excellent.
2. **King Crimson, “The King Crimson Barber Shop”**. A few years ago, my wife bought me a set of special KC reissues. The reissue of “Three of a Perfect Pair” included a bunch of extra tracks – remixes of “Sleepless”, extended versions of some of the instrumental stuff – and an *extremely* silly barbershop quartet sung by the guys.
3. **Marillion, “Berlin”**. Marillion is a progressive rock band that’s been around for quite a while. This is off of *their* first album after their long-time lyricist/lead singer left. They didn’t do quite as well as SB did after the singer left: the first couple of albums with the new singer just didn’t stand up to the older stuff. (Although they did eventually find their feet again; they’re recent work is fantastic.) This is probably the best track off of the first album with the new lead singer.
4. **Scott Vestal and the BG’98 Band, “Home Sweet Home”**. Scott Vestal is one of the best banjoists in the world today. He plays everything from very traditional Scruggs-style bluegrass to incredibly out-there purely improvised jazz. In the late 90s, he recorded a series of yearly albums of mostly traditional instrumental bluegrass. It’s really pretty cool to see just what a bunch of really talented guys can do with even something as silly as this old folk song.
5. **Sonic Youth, “Jams Runs Free”.** A very typical Sonic Youth track off of their latest album. It’s a bit *smoother* than some of their older stuff, but it’s got the same sound to it – the semitones, dissonance, and other strangeness; it’s just more subtle.
6. **The Clogs, “Sticks and Nails”**. More post-rock. The Clogs are an excellent classical-leaning post-rock trio. This is a very dark, percussive, dissonant piece.
7. **Darol Anger’s Republic of Strings, “Father Adieu”**. A really wonderful track from of one of Darol Anger’s new projects.
8. **The National, “Friend of Mine”**. An alternate face for some members of the Clogs. The National is a very interesting band – you can definitely hear the connection to the Clogs, and yet it’s also very traditional country-rock style songwriting. Good stuff; not necessarily something that I’d want to listen to every day, but really great once in a while.
9. **Broadside Electric, “Seafood Invasion”**. An instrumental track from a really great Philadelphia area electric folk group. I learned to play the tin whistle from the whistle player in this group.
10. **Kaipa, “A Complex Work of Art”**. A *wonderful* track from the re-united Kaipa. Kaipa is the band where Roine Stolte of the Flower Kings got his start. It sounds like a cross between old Yes and the Flower Kings.

1. **Steven Reich, “Explanations Come To An End Somewhere”**: one movement from one of Steven Reich’s recent works, the “You Are” variations. I think it’s some of the best stuff he’s ever written.
2. **Fiddlers Four, “Pickin’ the Devil’s Eye”**. Another Darol Anger project, and as usual, it’s very cool. This is basic old-time country fiddling, full of energy and fire.
3. **Seamus Egan, “To An Old Rose”**. Seamus Egan is a brilliant Irish musician; he’s one of the finest Irish flutists in the world, and he also plays tenor guitar, regular guitar, banjo, keyboards, lap steel, and who knows what else. This is a tenor guitar waltz, very mellow, very beautiful.
4. **Hamster Theatre, “La Sacre D’Merde”**. Strange but brilliant band. They’re a Rock-in-Opposition spinoff of Thinking Plague with very heavy early music influences. I also love their titles… “La Sacre D’Merde” is basically “The Rite of Shit”; the title of the album is “The Public Execution of Mr. Personality”.
5. **Rachel’s, “Old Road”**. “Rachel’s” is another of those post-rock ensembles that I’m so wild about. They’re a very classical one; the closest comparison would be to the Clogs, by Rachel’s is *better*. In fact, they’re by far the best of the PREs that I’ve found so far. There just aren’t words for this kind of music, it’s too good. And I discovered them entirely by accident! I was looking for something else, and just happened to notice this thing tagged “PRE”.
6. **Dirty Three, “Stellar”**. Yes, more post-rock. Dirty Three is wonderful.
7. **John Corigliano, “Elegy”, 2nd movement of the Clarinet Concerto .** Corigliano is one of the finest composers in the world today. As a clarinetist, I’m particularly enamoured of his clarinet concerto. This is played by Stanley Drucker. I used to think that Drucker wasn’t such a great clarinetist, based on his recordings of Mozart and Weber’s concertos. This recording completely changed my mind; Drucker is the very finest performer of modern compositions on the clarinet. It’s obvious that he’s just not as *interested* in the older stuff; the modern stuff is what he loves.
8. **The Andy Statman Klezmer Orchestra, “Galitzianer Chusud”**. There was also a piece from this group in last week’s FRT. I’m particularly fond of this one, because my father is a Galtizianer. (Galitzianers are Jews from the Galicia region of what was Russia when they lived there. My mother’s family are Litvak’s (Latvians). The Litvaks and the Galitzianers were traditionally rivals; the old joke among Litvaks is that if you’re not careful, your children will grow up to marry a Galitzianer.)
9. **Rachel’s, “And Keep Smiling”**. Two Rachel’s tracks in one FRT! Hurrah!
10. **Psychograss, “Stroll of the Mudbug”**. Psychograss is yet another Darol Anger project, also featuring my former banjo teacher, Tony Trischka, not to mention David Grier, Mike Marshall, and Todd Phillips. A group of musicians with more skill than this gang is damned hard to find, and they have a *great* chemistry as a group. It’s newgrass with a good bit of jazz.

Haven’t done one of these in a while. In light of the “Geek-off” this week, I made a playlist out of what I think of as my “geekier” music, and let ITunes assemble a random list from that playlist.
1. **Elizabeth and the Catapult, “Waiting for the Kill”**. E&tC is a NYC band that plays what they call “baroque pop”; pop music, with heavy jazz and classical influence. I heard them interviewed on the local NPR station, and immediately grabbed their first album – isn’t just an EP, but it’s fantastic. This is the best track.
2. **Flook, “The Tortoise and the Hare”**. The worlds greatest trad Irish flute-based band. Flook is really unbelievable: so full of energy, it’s impossible to *not* like them.
3. **Frank Zappa, “Drowning Witch”**. Old stuff from Zappa; incredibly goofy, and yet pretty darn cool musically.
4. **Genesis, “Here Comes the Supernatural Anaesthetist”**. A very strange track off of Genesis’ masterpiece from their Peter Gabriel days, “The Lamb Lays Down on Broadway”.
5. **Gordian Knot, “Komm Susser Tod, Kom Sel’ge”**. Bach, performed on the electric touch bass guitar.
6. **Mogwai, “Acid Food”**. Another one of those “Post-Rock Ensembles” that I’m so fascinated by. Mogwai is simply amazing; a bit more loud than the Clogs or the Dirty Three, but brilliant.
7. **Moxy Fruvous, “King of Spain”**. My wife’s favorite MF song. MF is a Canadian band that specializes in goofy a-capella. “Once I was the king of spain, Now I eat humble pie, I’m telling you I was the king of the Spain, Now I vaccum the turf at Skydome”.
8. **Steve Reich & Maya Beiser, “Cello Counterpoint”**. An amazing composition by Steve Reich. It’s all performed by Maya Beiser on cello – there are *16* tracks of Maya, all overlaid. Unbelievable. She performs it live with a recording of 15 of them, and plays the 16th live.
9. **Thinking Plague, “Blown Apart”**. Another post-rock ensemble. By far the strangest of the PREs that I listen to. Thinking Plague often goes totally atonal; and even when they don’t, they have a strange sound. One fascinating thing about them is that the vocalist treats her voice as just another instrument in the band. She’s in no way a “lead vocalist” like you’d find in a traditional band; she’s just another instrument in the mix. Her voice is as likely to be part of the background rhythm supporting the guitarist as it is to be singing a melody.
10. **Philip Glass, “Train 1” from “Einstein on the Beach”**. A small piece of Glass’s strange but brilliant opera. The opera is about four hours long, with no intermission. This section is formed from arpeggios played by saxaphone and keyboard, plus a chorus singing a pulsing counterpoint. Other parts of the opera consist of the voices chanting numbers. It’s strange, and not the easiest thing to listen to, but it’s worth it.