Alex Ross: The Rest Is Noise

Robert Ludlum titles for the 20th-century music lover

The Kurtág Codicil
The Szymanowski Desideratum
The Goeyvaerts Predicament
The Danielpour Instantiation
The Gubaidulina Parallelogram
The Pfitzner Funkademonium

Matthew Guerrieri adds:

The Boulez Encyclical
The Bolcom Entrapment
The Golijov Junta
The Reich Reich

Rex Levang adds:

The Del Tredici Phantasmagoria
The Prokofiev Gambit
The Schirmer Inheritance (wait, that's an actual Eric Ambler novel)

[Not to mention Ludlum's The Scarlatti Inheritance — ed.]

And: The Ferneyhough Refactoring (Lisa Hirsch), The Adès Addendum (Robert Jones), The Eötvös Ziggurat (Charles Noble), The Ussachevsky Cipher (John V. Burke), The Zemlinsky Abecedarium (me again). The Ludlum Compendium is now closed. I'll forward all these to Matt Damon.

Previously: Composer-based band names.

Everything is dead

If you're feeling depressed over the fact that classical music is a "dusty, dying form," as the Guardian recently stated, you can take comfort in the fact that rock is dead, too, as the same paper reports today. And that's not the only thing that's dead. Hip-hop is dead, Nas remarked not long ago, although some have taken issue with him and stated that the death of hip-hop is dead instead. Jazz may well be dead. Cinema is certainly dead. Newspapers are slowly dying. Television is dead. And, of course, blogging is dead. Unless, perhaps, it's the desperately attention-grabbing "X is dead" headline that's bit the dust. One thing I know: at last night's Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen concert, Beethoven was alive.

Festive playlist in honor of Night After Night and Dr. L.P.

— Bach, Goldberg Variations, Simone Dinnerstein (Telarc)
— Daniel S. Godfrey, Wrinkled Moon (Koch)
— Haydn, Symphonies Nos. 88-92, Simon Rattle, Berlin Philharmonic (EMI)
— Thurston Moore, Trees Outside the Academy (Ecstatic Peace!, forthcoming)
— Handel Arias, Ian Bostridge, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (EMI)
— New Impossibilities, Silk Road Ensemble and Chicago Symphony musicians (Sony)
— Strauss, Salome, Teresa Stratas, Karl Böhm, Vienna Philharmonic (DG DVD)
— Vivaldi, Ercole, Zachary Stains (!), Alan Curtis, Il Complesso Barocco (Dyamic DVD)
— Michael Harrison, Revelation (Cantaloupe)
— Cage, Complete Short Prepared-Piano Works, Philipp Vandré (Mode)
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Discovering Orson Welles (University of California Press)
— Complete Sibelius Edition, boxes 1 and 2 (BIS)
— Brahms Sextets, Nash Ensemble (Onyx)

Note: All these items arrived in the mail in the past week. The list is not meant to imply any resemblance between Steve and Lara's blissful union and the plot of Salome.

Kozinn runs amok

The New York Times's Allan Kozinn shows himself to be a natural-born blogger as he covers new music at Tanglewood. Unfortunately, ArtsBlog is reluctant to post comments of an innocently nonsensical nature, or so it seems in my case.

Sailing to Tristan

While waiting for Act III of the Bayreuth Götterdämmerung to begin, I embarked on a meandering series of Internet searches, which led me to the Tristan Times, the online newspaper of the remote island of Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean. Searches on the site yielded nothing in the way of "Wagner," or, for that matter, "music." The name derives from the 16th-century Portuguese explorer Tristão da Cunha. Nonetheless, I think the island should invite Werner Herzog to stage the Ring, with a small but picturesque volcanic eruption at the end.

Update: I endorse ACD's ode to Thielemann.

Where I stopped reading (I)

From the Guardian: "...classical remains a dusty, dying art form. You can put William Orbit's orchestral work on at the Manchester International Festival or let Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood write for the BBC Concert Orchestra, but you can't make anyone under 40 care."

What more could you want?

E-mail from iTunes: "New Music Tuesday: Yo-Yo Ma, Common, High School Musical 2, and more...."