Author: Mark Berry

My Favorite Riots

Jokes about Canadians acting un-Canadian abound on Twitter in the wake of the Vancouver riots last night, but those in the Great White North have a wonderful tradition of purposeless rabble-rousing.

As the Nova Scotia Archives pointed out on Facebook, Halifax celebrated the end of World War II with hooliganism: 

In 1955, Montreal reacted to the suspension “Rocket” Richard by taking out their displeasure on pretty much anything they had around at the time. They do this kind of thing a lot in Montreal over hockey and Guns ‘n’ Roses.

They rioted in Vancouver when the Canucks lost the Stanley Cup back in 1994. Back then, they reacted with shock (only in “a big American city” does this sort of thing happen); it’s old hat now.

Better Know a Composer: Arnold Schoenberg

If you want to get a good picture of how Schoenberg’s aesthetic thought changed over time, his solo piano music is the place to start. In no other genre can you so clearly hear the shift from free-wheeling intuitive expression to a historically conscious formalism grounded in a desire to redeem Western music.

Here’s an essay that appeared in the program for Russell Sherman’s recital of these works last night at Mannes as part of the Institute and Festival of Contemporary Performance. Take a look. If you’re interested, I’m happy to point you to other things to read, and recordings as well. 

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You can listen to Steuermann’s recording from the 1950s of the Three Piano Pieces, Opus 11, here. Also, here’s a video of Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin talking about Schoenberg’s Violin Fantasy.

Sherman’s Schoenberg

On Monday, Russell Sherman is performing all of Schoenberg’s piano music in a recital at the Mannes School Concert Hall in Manhattan, the opening concert in the annual Festival for Contemporary Performance.

Sherman’s personal link to Schoenberg is his teacher Edward Steuermann. More than just a student of Schoenberg, Steuerman was the composer’s go-to pianist in Berlin and Vienna. Here in the US, Steuermann  premiered the Piano Concerto in 1944 with the NBC Orchestra and Leopold Stokowski. (Originally, Schnabel was the scheduled pianist, which may have offended Steuermann.)

Despite this close connection to Schoenberg, Steuermann taught very little Schoenberg to his students, according to Sherman. Here he is in an interview with Gunther Schuller:

“Well, he hardly taught me any modern music, and even Schoenberg he wasn’t much interested in teaching. But he used to say–in that Polish way–‘That’s your music. You do what you want with it; I don’t have to teach that to you.'”  

(You can listen to Steuermann’s recording of Schoenberg’s Opus 11 here, but not here.)

I had a chance to talk with Sherman a week or so ago about the recital; we talked more about hockey than music. Apparently, Sherman’s quite the Rangers fan, and we bonded over memories of some great Canadiens teams from the 1970s.

To fill out the program, Sherman’s performing Beethoven’s Opus 109 sonata, and he’ll tell you in his opening remarks why he chose this piece.

MoogFest Set for October in Asheville

Instead of writing more about Les Paul and Google’s homepage guitar logo, I thought I’d direct your attention to another music-technology innovator and the festival named in his honor.

Last week, MoogFest announced the bands appearing in October down in Asheville, NC on October 28-30. The headliner is Flaming Lips, but Battles are also appearing. A video that runs down the list is here.

Last year, I posted a video of Robert Moog explaining his Minimoog synthesizer. This year, to celebrate its founder’s birthday, the Moog company put out its own YouTube video on the history of its most celebrated product:

Two More Elements, One More Periodic Table Blog

Today, as “they” (being a group of scientists from around the world) announced two new elements for the periodic table, I am adding yet another online-only resource to learn more about it.

On Slate.com, Sam Kean provides some interesting, sometimes offbeat, context for each of the elements with his “Blogging the Periodic Table.”

Between Kean’s blog and the University of Nottingham’s YouTube series, you’ll be surprised how fun high-school chemistry can be.

Watch and Learn: The Periodic Table

I never learned the periodic table. I’m not proud of this, but I can’t go back in time to high school and change my course load now, can I?

What I can do, though, is watch the University of Nottingham School of Chemistry’s Periodic Table of Videos on YouTube and atone for my irresponsible educational decisions. Now I know what Strontium is.

I tried listening to songs about the periodic table, but they didn’t help at all.

Thanks to openculture.com for pointing the Periodic Table of Videos out. If you’re cheap and like smart stuff, openculture.com is for you.

How to Talk About Hard Music: Menuhin and Gould on Schoenberg’s Violin Fantasy

If you want a primer on what’s so great about Schoenberg–and what’s so bad–you can do worse than this:

Schoenberg scholarship has only recently started addressing the problems that Gould and Menuhin brought up here over five decades ago. It just goes to show you how theorists’ focus on post-tonal coherence, and musicologists’ obsession with finding links to the classical-music past, has held us back from really getting at how this music sounds.

The open-mindedness that Menuhin displays is striking. So is the clarity of both performers’ descriptions of the music; their no-nonsense approach lets their insights shine through. This is a master class on how to talk about “difficult music” without pretension and with depth.

After a six-minute debate on the merits of Schoenberg’s Violin Fantasy, they play it. Look who’s got his part memorized: