The complete symphonies of Carl Nielsen: a Retro Diary

I’m just sayin’ that if Greg Kinnear and William H. Macy could have a baby in Denmark in the 1860′s…

UPDATE: Here is the link to Dave’s thoughts on the Nielsen Extravaganza.

Last night the great Dave McIntire and I met to listen to the symphonies of the Greatest Dane, Carl Nielsen, eat fine foods, and consume alcoholic beverages of the highest quality. Are we nerds? Perhaps. Do we have excellent taste in food, beverage, and music? Fucking right. What follows is my thoughts on the proceedings as they were happening. As soon as he is ready, I’ll put a link to Dave’s take on the evening, but for now here’s a link to his blog so you can get a taste of the man’s writing, which is somewhere between 10 and 50 times better than what you’ll read here. As with the Sibelius symphonies live blog, we tried to use different conductors, orchestras, formats, etc. Did we succeed? Is there such a thing as success in this endeavor? I would argue that there is, and the success is that we listened to a shitload of Carl Nielsen music. Let’s go to the recap!

Read on…

Hey, remember when “Clapping Music” sounded pretty complicated?

It’s kinda like this…

A few weeks ago I was having dinner with a composer friend who introduced me to a lot of music that I didn’t know much or at all. We listened to The Zombies, the lasting memory of which was their superb pitch that makes me hate American Idol and The Voice even more. We listened to Mikel Rouse, whose inner sense of rhythm veers dangerously into half human/half genius-robot territory. We listened to “Marquee Moon” by Television with the epic Tom Verlaine guitar solo. And we listened to a couple of his own works, including a piece for percussion called Chronomosaic.

Here is a good time to mention that I studied music in college and received a Masters Degree in Instrumental Conducting, so the concept of reading a score is not alien to me in any way. But this score, which was given to me to follow along with a recording, was insane. I flipped through the first couple pages and saw that it was all in 9/8 time and didn’t pay too much attention to where the actual notes were within the measures. And then it started…