Playlist Week of 8-28-10

* Buxtehude: Sonatas, Op.1 (Holloway/Mortensen/ter Linden) (Naxos CD†
* Buxtehude: Sonatas, Op.2 (Holloway/Mortensen/ter Linden) (Naxos CD)†
* Buxtehude: Seven Sonatas (Holloway/Mortensen/ter Linden) (Naxos CD)†
* J.S. Bach: Magnificat, etc. (Collegium Vocale, et al./Herreweghe) (Harmonia Mundi CD)
* J.S. Bach: Violin Sonatas (Manze/Egarr/ter Linden) (Harmonia Mundi 2CD)†
* J.S. Bach: Goldberg Variations and Canons (Egarr) (Harmonia Mundi 2CD)†
* Rebel: Violin Sonatas (Manze/Egarr/ter Linden) (Harmonia Mundi CD)†
* Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op.21, etc. (Ens. InterContemporain/Shäfer/Boulez) (DG CD)
* Schoenberg: Suite, Op.29, etc. (Ens. InterContemporain/Boulez) (Sony Classical CD)
* Schoenberg: The Piano Music (Pollini) (DG CD)
* Oliver Nelson: The Blues and The Abstract Truth (Impulse! CD)
* Miles Davis & John Coltrane: The Complete Columbia Recordings (d.1-5) (Columbia 6CD)
* John Coltrane: Live at Birdland (Impulse! CD)
* Roy Haynes Quartet: Out of the Afternoon (Impulse! CD)
* Elvin Jones/Jimmy Garrison Sextet: Illumination! (Impulse! CD)
* Sun Ra: The Mystery Board (11-2 or 3-1972) (SBD/boot 2CDR)
* Anthony Braxton: 9 Compositions (Iridium) 2006 (d.8) (Firehouse 12 9CD+DVD)
* Mary Halvorson Trio: Dragon’s Head (Firehouse 12 CD)
* Mary Halvorson, et al.: Calling All Portraits (Skycap CD)
* Matthew Shipp: Harmony and Abyss (Thirsty Ear CD)
* The Blue Series Continuum: GoodandEvil Sessions (Thirsty Ear CD)
* The Blue Series Continuum: The Sorcerer Sessions (Thirsty Ear CD)
* Antipop Consortium: Antipop Consortium vs. Matthew Shipp (Thirsty Ear CD)
* El-P Featuring the Blue Series Continuum: High Water (Thirsty Ear CD)
* Pat Metheny Group: Quartet (Geffen CD)†
* Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited (mono) (Columbia/Sundazed LP)
* Bob Dylan: Blonde On Blonde (mono) (Columbia/Sundazed 2LP)
* The Beatles: Beatles for Sale (stereo) (2009 remaster) (Apple/EMI CD)
* The Beatles: Rubber Soul (stereo) (2009 remaster) (Apple/EMI CD)
* The Beatles: Revolver (stereo) (2009 remaster) (Apple/EMI CD)
* Rolling Stones: “Handsome Girls” (live July 1978) (d.1-3) (SBD/boot 4CDR)‡
* Van Morrison: Astral Weeks (Warner Bros./Rhino LP)
* Grateful Dead: Carousel Ballroom, San Francisco, CA 3-31-68 (SBD CDR)
* Grateful Dead: Road Trips, Vol.3, No.3 (Fillmore East 5-05-70) (d.1) (GD/Rhino 3+1CD)
* Grateful Dead: Dick’s Picks, Vol.14 (Boston 11-30 and 12-02-73) (GD 4 CD)‡
* Soft Machine: The Soft Machine (ABC/Sundazed LP)
* Soft Machine: Volume Two (ABC/Sundazed LP)
* Soft Machine: Third (Columbia 2LP)
* Genesis: Foxtrot (Charisma – UK LP)
* Genesis: Selling England By the Pound (Charisma LP)
* The Flaming Lips, et al.: Play The Dark Side of the Moon (Warner Bros. CD)
* Robert Pollard: Moses On a Snail (GBV, Inc. CD)
* Circus Devils: Mother Skinny (Happy Jack Rock Records LP)

†=iPod
‡=car

Commentary:

Your letter gave me great pleasure indeed, above all because you are one of the extremely rare kind of people who are of such importance to our musical culture. I mean: it is not the professional musician, the musician who lives by his art, who is needed to keep musical culture going; it is the amateur, and it always has been the amateur who has really promoted and encouraged art. This is all the more gratifying since your profession is one that claims much of your time; and what is astonishing is the way you have come to know my music—I am thinking of piano pieces and scores that are really very difficult to grasp, difficult to read, difficult to decipher, and which demand great knowledge of various aspects of music. I am extremely delighted at having discovered such as musician as you.

It makes me extremely proud to have received such a letter particularly from you, and for me it will remain one of a few letters that have given me the greatest pleasure in my musical career.

-- Arnold Schoenberg: Letter to Jacques Martet, 6 January 1950 (Letters (ed. by Erwin Stein), University of California Press, 1987, p.279).

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I planned to tell you what painting meant—means—to me. In fact, it was the same to me as making music. To me it was a way of expressing myself, of presenting emotions, ideas, and then other feelings, and this is perhaps the way to understand these paintings—or not to understand them. … I expressed myself in the same manner as I did in music…[A]s a painter I was absolutely an amateur. I had no theoretical training and only a little esthetic training—this only from general education but not from an education which pertained to painting. In music, it was different [NB: Schoenberg was an autodidact]…They would probably have suffered the same fate as I have suffered. They would have been attacked and scolded, and I don’t know what else I should say: I mean the same would happen to them what happened to my music. They would have been understood or not understood.

-- Arnold Schoenberg: Interview with Halsey Stevens (1949) (quoted in The Visions of Arnold Schönberg: The Painting Years, Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2002, pp.91, 185).

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We see that in every painting of Schönberg, the inner wish of the artist speaks in the form which best befits it. Just as with his music (inasmuch as I a layman may affirm), Schönberg also in his painting renounces the superfluous (therefore the harmful) and proceeds along a direct path to the essential (therefore to the necessary). He leaves alone, unnoticed, all embellishments and artistic detail…I should most like to call Schönberg’s art the painting of essence.

-- Wassily Kandinsky: “Die Bilder” (1912) (Id., p.182).

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Once, in the army, I was asked if I was really the composer Arnold Schoenberg. “Somebody has to be,” I said, “and nobody else wanted to, so I took it on, myself.”

-- Arnold Schoenberg: Letter of Thanks to Those Who Sent Their Good Wishes on the Occasion of Schoenberg’s 75th Birthday, 16 September 1949 (Letters, p.290).

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Image: Arnold Schoenberg: Green Self-Portrait, 1910. Oil on wood 33 x 24 cm. (from The Visions of Arnold Schoenberg, p.100).