Popular / You're Gonna Be Popular

If you've ever browsed the Amazon mp3 music store, you've run into X5 Music Group. Definitely. (99 Most Essential Relaxing Classics. 99 Most Essential Mendelssohn Masterpieces. etc. etc. and so on and so forth. etc. ad infinitum.)

My initial reaction was to write them off as one of those cheap labels that aggregates second-rate performances for the unknowing masses. MY BAD. I haven't looked into every album, but the 99 Most Essential Opera Classics (which unfortunately no longer seems to be available) was worth every penny of the $1.99 that I spent: Kiri Te Kanawa, Joan Sutherland, the London Phil and Placido Domingo - these are big names.

A little research: X5 boasts 1,116 albums in Amazon's digital store, more than half of which are classical. In three years, the Stockholm-based company has become the best selling classical label in the US.

Alright! Someone is selling classical music in the US! Except: 99 Most Essential? Every. single. album. has a gimmick. A few favorites:

Classical Music As Heard in Hip-Hop


The 99 Most Essential Classical Pieces For Your Mind


AND OF COURSE:
Classical Workout - (you guys: I'm seriously considering it.)

An album titled 50 Greatest Hits of Opera! (exclamation point included) makes me a little queasy; on the other hand, the slick graphics and, yes, the themed gimmick seem to be working. If this is what it takes to get Americans to listen to classical music, I can be behind that 92%.



Bonus: they're starting a new series: Rise of the Masters. The chosen composers are marketed à la PiratesoftheCaribbean, and you can get an iphone app that "composerizes" your photo into "what you’d look like if you were a classical master composer." I am not even kidding.

Messing With The Flavor / Oh The Flavor That You Savor

Nico Muhly: The Next Food Network Star?
(I really hope so.)

How composing is like cooking, and so much more.



(Muhly has two new albums out: A Good Understanding, and I Drink the Air Before Me.)

Yeah, I Want To Remake The Horizon

"While [Mahler's 10th Symphony] may even today still be as powerful and evocative as ever, it has, so to speak, entered the realms of the historical, where its relevance is limited to a gone-by era outside of our physical grasp. Herbert was fascinated by the thought of being able to listen to it as though the past 100 years had never taken place, as though our ears were still capable of perceiving its grandiose architecture without having been exposed to atonality, dodecaphony and the advent of electronic sounds. His intent was to beam the score straight into the 21st century, giving new birth to it through an act of digital re-contextualisation aimed at establishing connections between the "what is" and "what was"....[U]nderneath its veil of controversy, Herbert has recorded a work that is as heartfelt as it is free from any kind of novelty gadgets. His recomposed (or, more precisely, relistened) edit is both a wordless radioplay and a meta-Symphony, incorporating the piece, its reception and potential context all in one."

(From a Taruskin-heavy but really interesting review by Tobias Fischer at tokafi)

(Mahler: Recomposed By Matthew Herbert)

(Same series!: Ravel & Mussorgsky Recomposed By Carl Craig)

I'm A New Soul

Steve Reich's new album "Double Sextet, 2x5" is streaming IN ITS ENTIRETY on the NPR website. It's a new sound, and it's been getting great reviews...


(bonus: Reich does an interview with Pitchfork and Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore? It happened.)

Weeping Chandelier

It's not often that I post on just-music-that-I'm-listening-to, but I'm crazy about this particular album, and here's why:

1. It's a collaboration between the "world's foremost Death Oompah band," the Tiger Lillies, and the new music lovin' Kronos Quartet.
2. The instrumentation consists of: (1) avant-garde cabaret band (accordion! musical saw! theremin! falsetto vocals! percussion! contra bass!) + (1) string quartet.
3. All of the lyrics are culled from previously unpublished poems given to the band by Mr. Edward Gorey.

(If that's not of some musicological-literary note, I don't know what is.)
Bottom line: released in 2003, The Gorey End is weird and compelling. BOTH. And that is why I've been listening to it on repeat.




(Amazon)