The Agonist - Music

Jukebox Saturday Night

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:54:32 -0700

Utterly random songs I love!

Barenaked Ladies: Brian Wilson

Restless Heart: Back to the Heartbreak Kid

The Swell Season: Into the Mystic (cover)

Vince Gill: Go Rest High On That Mountain

Three Dog Night: Never Been to Spain

Jay Farrar: Highways and Cigarettes

What have you?

Barry and Gen Y

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 19:15:45 -0700

Charles McPhedran is an Australian who's lived in New York City for the last two years. He recently completed an MA in Political Science at the New School for Social Research. He opines on Obama here

musical times continue to change

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 01:15:15 -0700

Artists deal directly with Walmart and direct to the public.

Dr John back in New Orleans

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 22:35:00 -0700

One of the seminal books of all time for me was the electric kool aid acid experiment. It gave me a insight into the USA of the sixties, and realised I was born too late :O

now the nighttripper is scuffling with the folk in New Orleans

Birmingham man completes Mozart's Horn Concerto

Fri, 30 May 2008 14:11:26 -0700

Birmingham, UK | May 29

Birmingham Post - Birmingham composer and horn-player Stephen Roberts will give the premiere of his completion of an unfinished concerto by Mozart at Worcester Cathedral on Friday night.

Known as the Horn Concerto no.0 in E-flat, the concerto was sketched by Mozart in 1781. It has long been known in fragmentary form, with the second movement performed and recorded on its own under the title Concert Rondo over the last 50 years.

Harborne-based Mr Roberts, who is professor of orchestration at the Royal Military School of Music in Kneller Hall, Twickenham, has made a completion of the two-movement work making use of newly-discovered fragments, including a 60-bar gap in the second movement, which have come to light and been published in America over the last 15 years.

A founder member of the Fine Arts Brass Ensemble, Mr Roberts now concentrates on composition, with a major commission recently premiered by the National Orchestra of Wales in Cardiff. He is the former principal horn player in the English Symphony Orchestra, with whom he will perform the concerto, directing the orchestra as well as playing the solo part.

Preparing a performing edition involved filling in a number of small gaps as well as orchestrating some passages. Mr Roberts said that he often uses Mozart as a model in teaching orchestration: “He’s so clear, and writes so well for the orchestra,” he said. “I’m always looking at his scores, so I felt quite within the idiom when I came to take this on.”

The performing edition is published by Mr Roberts’ own company Tanglewind, originally set up to publish compositions and arrangements for

Fine Arts Brass, which also published Elgar’s lost choral setting of The Holly and the Ivy after it was rediscovered in the 1970s.

Friday night music videos

Fri, 09 May 2008 20:28:11 -0700

Some found music I like a lot. Add yours or just enjoy these.

Wilco: Impossible Germany

Jay Ferrar: Highways and Cigarettes

Susan Tedeschi: (Mama) He Treats Your Daughter Mean

Kenny Wayne Shepherd: King's Highway

The Corrs: Little Wing

Drive-By Truckers: Easy on Yourself

The Gibson Brothers: Forty Years of Trouble

Makin' Music with John Mayer

What's your REAL top ten?

Sun, 04 May 2008 17:54:53 -0700

I ripped this idea off from Stephen King's latest column in Entertainment Weekly. His point was to put his playlist where his mouth was, rather than list what he thought were his favorite songs.

Step 1: Open up your PC music library.
Step 2: Sort your tracks by number of plays.
Step 3: List the results in this thread.

Let's see what you really listen to when you're at your computer.

Two Minutes and 42 Seconds in Heaven

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 04:39:02 -0700

Joshua Allen | April 21

The Morning News - I schedule 35 minutes a day for recreation. That’s all I need to refresh myself from the rigors of punching holes through the guts of this world. Recreation typically consists of lifting something heavy or posting a new sonnet to my blog. But sometimes I want to unwind with a fine carafe of Popov and some good tunes on the hi-fi. I yearn to—in the words of Boston—lose myself in a familiar song, close my eyes, and slip awaaaaaaaaaaaay.

Here’s the problem: “More Than a Feeling” is four minutes and 47 fucking seconds long. I don’t have time for that kind of nonsense. That’s, like, one-seventh of my recreation right there.

Guitar Gods

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 21:08:50 -0700

Christopher Parkening

Michael Kelsey

Antoine Dufour

Dominic Frasca

... excuse me while I go outside and smash my guitar.

Pop Eats Itself: Winehouse and Hancock

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:25:10 -0700

While Herbie Hancock was getting on stage to receive his Grammy for River: The Joni Letters, the other star of the night was thousands of miles away. The Grammy Awards this year was a tale of two very different artistic trajectories indeed. A year ago, Amy Winehouse was virtually unknown outside of her native UK market; Hancock has been a force on the jazz and pop scenes since the mid 1960s. On the heels of her retro masterpiece Back to Black and a series of media exposes on her troubled personal life, Winehouse catapulted into the global pop music consciousness virtually overnight. Girls dressed like her on Halloween; her often-unkempt face appeared on magazines from Boston to Beirut; she took home five Grammy awards, although visa problems prevented her from showing up in person to collect them. All this time, Hancock has quietly pursued his usual string of jazz-pop albums and touring. Two events - the rise of Amy Winehouse and the crowning of a Herbie Hancock jazz record as album of the year - speak to a potent and intriguing force in today's pop culture. How did Amy Winehouse get so popular so quickly and what does the wild success of her album say about the contemporary pop music market? And how is Hancock's long career and Grammy triumph reflected in the young diva's work?

Musical Violence, Pt.3: Order and Repetition

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 10:08:26 -0700

Violence as Order

"I believe that music should be collective hysteria and spells, violently of the present time."
- Pierre Boulez

In many ways, the shape of Western music history since the Middle Ages can be likened to a gradually sloping hill, followed by a very sharp incline, then terminating in a cliff. Although the last 800 years of music have been marked with periods of relative stasis, the general trend seems to have been towards greater and greater technical complexity with each successive generation of musicians. Like the story of evolution on this planet, recorded Western music started with its plainsong chant (the musical equivalent of single-celled organisms), then added more voices to that, started adding instruments, greater compositional complexity and scope, denser structures, etc. By the mid-18th century, courts all over Europe had their very own collectives of musicians all playing specialized instruments and reading little squiggles on a page to translate the abstract sound ideals of composers into sound. Music was getting so complex that someone even started to have to stand in front of all these musicians and beat his arms around like a bird just to keep everyone in the same place.

Musical Violence, Pt.2: Noise and Disorder

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 10:05:06 -0700

Before continuing with some examples, let's ask a fundamental question: what is sonic violence? Since the perceptive apparatus of every individual is quite different, we can't ascribe the principle of musical violence to any of the technical parameters of music. Where a young man might hear a deep groove in a hip-hop track, an old man might hear nothing but repetitive noise in the same piece. Thus, dissonance is not in itself violence, although in Western music is has often taken the role of the deviant force that is purged throughout the work. Similarly, volume (amplitude) is not in and of itself violence. When we get into the realm of registration and timbre, however, certain sonic qualities can emerge that are - when combined with the proper volume - intensely violent. The motorcycles that drive under my window day in and day out, for instance, are an assault on my ears: to everyone except the individuals driving the machines, the combination of extreme decibel levels and that roaring, grimy quality of the timbre is enough to make me feel tortured, if just for three seconds. Sirens and alarms are similarly calibrated to be as conspicuous as possible.

Music as Ritualized Violence, Pt.1: Introduction

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 10:03:28 -0700

The ancient Scots blared bagpipes before a battle in order to stir the emotions of their own fighters and strike fear in the hearts of the enemy. Ottoman Turks accompanied their regimens with a battery of clanging percussion, and the sound of cymbals was described in European concert music for the next couple hundred years as the "Turkish style." In perhaps one of most disturbing scenes in Apocalypse Now (a rare distinction in a film with so much of "the horror"), American helicopters conduct a bombing raid on Vietnamese hamlets with Wagner's "The Ride of the Valkyries" blasting on their speaker systems. In 1989, the US army blared loud music in an attempt to induce Panamanian president Manuel Noriega's surrender. The method was called "acoustic bombardment."

"classical" music for a Saturday night

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:19:58 -0700

Inspired by Quiet Bill.

Yoo Toobs below the fold...

Let's kick back and listen to some good tunes.

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:00:53 -0700

Too much intraparty sniping, too much Bush'n'Cheney, too much financial woe, and my boss is still an asshole.

Let's twist one up and cruise with the muse.

yoo toobs below the fold