1
Ives playing Ives - a decidedly lo-fi recording, but Ives brings a certain I-don't-know-what to his own composition ("The Alcotts" section of the Concord Sonata) that isn't present in any other version I've heard.
2
Speaking of 20th-century composers, if I ever become a full-time aesthete, haunting avant-garde salons and whatnot, I plan to adopt this look. Hearing this Boulez recording of Ionisation recently made me wonder if Brian Wilson was listening to Varèse around the time of Pet Sounds and the original Smile sessions. To me, there are some clear similarities - the layering of different percussion instruments and, of course, the use of fire sirens and (though not in Ionisation) theremins. I think there's something about the reverby room sound on the Boulez version that makes me think of the sounds Wilson was getting at Gold Star and Western Recorders. In other versions of Ionisation, I don't hear the connection as much. The Varèse-Zappa connection has been well documented (and the Varèse-Bird connection!), but, perhaps unsurprisingly, I've never heard Varèse mentioned in the same sentence as the Beach Boys.
3
Any list of the greatest guitar riffs of all time that does not include some version of Johnny Kidd & The Pirates' "Shakin' All Over" is not to be taken seriously. Check out Jimmy Page trying to remember it here.
4
Last week, I saw a screening of Glenn Ligon's film The Death of Tom at the Whitney, attracted by the prospect of hearing the score performed (actually spontaneously re-composed) by Jason Moran. The film and Moran's performance were worth walking through a hail storm for, and I got a lot out of the discussion after the screening. The topics included Ligon and Moran's mutual love of Monk; Ligon's artistic decision to let his original conception of the film go and yield to the opportunities afforded by an epic camera/film stock fail and Moran's music, ending up with a very different film than he'd envisioned; and Moran and the Bandwagon's ongoing process of wrestling with Bert Williams' massive-for-its-time hit "Nobody" (a hidden track on Ten and a main motif in Moran's Death of Tom music), with renditions often breaking into violent deconstruction and stopping just short of total destruction. There's a good interview of Ligon, conducted by Moran and covering some of the same topics as the Whitney discussion, here.
5
I recently found a great anecdote from the history of architecture that says something about the 20th-century tendency toward refinement (in the sense of removing impurities, extraneous elements) in design (although both of the architects in question were often less restrained in practice than the anecdote may suggest). To tangentially relate this last item to music, I'll note that it comes via the website of Ken Vandermark, the great Chicago saxophonist who I saw recently with Joe Morris and a couple years ago with Jason Moran.
Showing posts with label architecture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label architecture. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Chicago Notes, Part One: Midwestern Mystics
The Selected Ballads has been away for a while, partly due to a trip to Chicago. Some notes from the Great Metropolis on the Prairie:
For the first time in several years, I revisited Millennium Park and the adjacent Art Institute. Last time I was there, the Cloud Gate was being buffed to remove the seams between the individual mirror squares that make up the surface of the "bean". Now, there's not a seam in sight, and one could almost believe the whole thing had been poured into a mold. Looking again at Frank Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion, I was thinking what a thrill it would be to stand in front of a big audience and unleash a highly amplified open E chord into that space. Has anyone ever asked Jeff Tweedy or Steve Malkmus about that?
If it does nothing else, Renzo Piano's addition to the Art Institute, the Modern Wing, provides a much-needed connection between the museum and Millennium Park, both at ground level and via a bridge that rises from park level to the 2nd floor of the new wing. Fortunately, it's also a pretty nice piece of architecture - well-detailed, restrained in its use of a limited palette of colors and materials, and in harmony with both the park to the north and the main Institute building to the south (apparently, there are some problems, though). A lot of care was taken to make the new wing energy-efficient, including the admittance of quite a bit of natural light, which actually made me realize that I prefer to feel a little less connected to the outdoors when looking at art in a museum. Maybe it was the beautiful day I visited on, but the natural light entering (from the less art-damaging northern direction, as per Piano's design) the Modern Wing started to make me wish I was back outside, a feeling that disappeared once I was back in the main body of the Institute.
On the other side of the Institute, Dan Kiley's '60s-era South Garden may now be overshadowed by all the design action to the north, but it has aged well and remains a high point of Modernist landscape architecture. Kiley's design sets up a simple grid, gets the grades, materials, and proportions right, and basically gets out of the way to let a by-now-mature grove of cockspur hawthorns create an environment quite apart from the nearby Loop.
Visiting the exhibit, Looking After Louis Sullivan, was a bit like going to church for me, as I consider myself an initiate in the great master's dualistic-mystic cult of organic-geometric architecture. The show featured the work of four photographers, including the heroic martyr to architectural preservation, Richard Nickel, as well as some of Sullivan's own drawings. Among these drawings, I spent a long time studying the incredibly intricate, pencil-drawn plates from A System of Architectural Ornament, According with a Philosophy of Man's Powers, a commissioned work completed near the end of Sullivan's life. A diagram (titled "Manipulation of the Organic") showing how a relatively simple natural form like a leaf or a seed pod could, by following nature's example, be elaborated and abstracted into a complex piece of ornament, reminded me of some of the ideas of Sullivan's approximate contemporary Gaudi (an adjacent drawing, showing a similar process of elaboration with geometric forms, also had some resonance with Gaudi's work). Just because both men took inspiration from the forms of plants and obsessively elaborated geometric forms doesn't mean they were aware of, or in any way influenced by, one another's work, but it's an intriguing possibility.
I also visited the Garfield Park Conservatory, one of the masterworks of another of my heroes, Sullivan's fellow Midwestern mystic, landscape architect Jens Jensen. The conservatory, and specifically its fern room, were recommended to me as a must-see masterpiece, but I had a hard time believing than an interior landscape could be in the same class as Jensen's great parks and gardens. It is, though. The fern room is a complete landscape, a complete work of art even, as meticulously thought out and calibrated for various effects as a traditional Japanese garden, but with more of a concern for hiding the hand of man. The fern room is both an immersive, mist-shrouded prehistoric fantasy and a landscape composition that would reward close study. This story, which is also summarized on a plaque in the fern room, gives a sense of Jensen and the perhaps more genteel times in which he practiced (whether or not the story is 100% factual hardly matters).
For the first time in several years, I revisited Millennium Park and the adjacent Art Institute. Last time I was there, the Cloud Gate was being buffed to remove the seams between the individual mirror squares that make up the surface of the "bean". Now, there's not a seam in sight, and one could almost believe the whole thing had been poured into a mold. Looking again at Frank Gehry's Pritzker Pavilion, I was thinking what a thrill it would be to stand in front of a big audience and unleash a highly amplified open E chord into that space. Has anyone ever asked Jeff Tweedy or Steve Malkmus about that?
If it does nothing else, Renzo Piano's addition to the Art Institute, the Modern Wing, provides a much-needed connection between the museum and Millennium Park, both at ground level and via a bridge that rises from park level to the 2nd floor of the new wing. Fortunately, it's also a pretty nice piece of architecture - well-detailed, restrained in its use of a limited palette of colors and materials, and in harmony with both the park to the north and the main Institute building to the south (apparently, there are some problems, though). A lot of care was taken to make the new wing energy-efficient, including the admittance of quite a bit of natural light, which actually made me realize that I prefer to feel a little less connected to the outdoors when looking at art in a museum. Maybe it was the beautiful day I visited on, but the natural light entering (from the less art-damaging northern direction, as per Piano's design) the Modern Wing started to make me wish I was back outside, a feeling that disappeared once I was back in the main body of the Institute.
On the other side of the Institute, Dan Kiley's '60s-era South Garden may now be overshadowed by all the design action to the north, but it has aged well and remains a high point of Modernist landscape architecture. Kiley's design sets up a simple grid, gets the grades, materials, and proportions right, and basically gets out of the way to let a by-now-mature grove of cockspur hawthorns create an environment quite apart from the nearby Loop.
Visiting the exhibit, Looking After Louis Sullivan, was a bit like going to church for me, as I consider myself an initiate in the great master's dualistic-mystic cult of organic-geometric architecture. The show featured the work of four photographers, including the heroic martyr to architectural preservation, Richard Nickel, as well as some of Sullivan's own drawings. Among these drawings, I spent a long time studying the incredibly intricate, pencil-drawn plates from A System of Architectural Ornament, According with a Philosophy of Man's Powers, a commissioned work completed near the end of Sullivan's life. A diagram (titled "Manipulation of the Organic") showing how a relatively simple natural form like a leaf or a seed pod could, by following nature's example, be elaborated and abstracted into a complex piece of ornament, reminded me of some of the ideas of Sullivan's approximate contemporary Gaudi (an adjacent drawing, showing a similar process of elaboration with geometric forms, also had some resonance with Gaudi's work). Just because both men took inspiration from the forms of plants and obsessively elaborated geometric forms doesn't mean they were aware of, or in any way influenced by, one another's work, but it's an intriguing possibility.
I also visited the Garfield Park Conservatory, one of the masterworks of another of my heroes, Sullivan's fellow Midwestern mystic, landscape architect Jens Jensen. The conservatory, and specifically its fern room, were recommended to me as a must-see masterpiece, but I had a hard time believing than an interior landscape could be in the same class as Jensen's great parks and gardens. It is, though. The fern room is a complete landscape, a complete work of art even, as meticulously thought out and calibrated for various effects as a traditional Japanese garden, but with more of a concern for hiding the hand of man. The fern room is both an immersive, mist-shrouded prehistoric fantasy and a landscape composition that would reward close study. This story, which is also summarized on a plaque in the fern room, gives a sense of Jensen and the perhaps more genteel times in which he practiced (whether or not the story is 100% factual hardly matters).
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Who(se building) You Callin' Ugly?!?
Wow, the AIA just got smacked down really hard for calling the New York Times building NYC's ugliest. Meanwhile, I enjoyed reading the results of Vanity Fair's architecture survey, which includes some praise for the Times building. Knowing what everyone knows about architects and their egos, I shouldn't have been surprised by how many of the architects polled voted for their own buildings, but I was still a little surprised by how many of the architects polled voted for their own buildings. Self-promotion is part of the job, though, especially ITE*.
*in this economy
*in this economy
Monday, June 28, 2010
A One-Block Journey Into The (Retro-) Future
For a brief, but awe-inspiring, sample of what the City of the Future was supposed to look like, walk down East 24th St. in Manhattan between Park and Madison in the direction of Madison Square Park (actually, at certain times of day, it's even better to start a block further east). You'll walk between, and be dwarfed by, the Met Life Tower and the Met Life North building. Although the buildings were designed and constructed decades apart, the effect is one of immersion in a single architectural vision. You have to look up for the effect to be complete, since, for me, the sky bridge spanning 24th St. is the key element of the composition.
I don't think I've ever photographed this block, but in any case, it has to be experienced in person. Google Street View will give you a taste, though.
Bonus Links
The Met Life North building was begun in 1928, one year after Metropolis (coincidence???), and topped out about 70 stories short of its originally intended 100-story height. Here's a rendering of the original, uncompleted design.
I don't think I've ever photographed this block, but in any case, it has to be experienced in person. Google Street View will give you a taste, though.
Bonus Links
The Met Life North building was begun in 1928, one year after Metropolis (coincidence???), and topped out about 70 stories short of its originally intended 100-story height. Here's a rendering of the original, uncompleted design.
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