Cortically Magnified

One music album that I used to play a lot of was called Night of Short Lives. It was published in the 90’s under the artist name Frame Cut Frame. It’s very hard to describe what kind of music it was. The publisher called it “unclassical music”, because the music had the classical texture, but not the classical form. The CD was just one of those random things that I had.

My wife and I have a box of CDs that we hadn’t opened in maybe 10 years. We moved them across three continents because we don’t want to get rid of them, but with streaming services, we had very little reason to take them out of the box. We don’t even have a CD player in the house anymore. But there are treasures. We finally decided to take them out during the break.

I walked past Melbourne University’s Grainger Museum, which is dedicated to the Australian composer Percy Grainger. Kudos to the Wiggles for adapting one of his compositions into a children’s song.

A mini-review of the recently released “Miles Davis John Coltrane The Final Tour: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6” album. The first track of the album, recorded in 1960 in a live show in Paris, documents a dramatic moment in the history of modern music. The European concert goers were expecting the dreamy world of Kind of Blue and some pleasant show tunes. They didn’t know that John Coltrane was going to unleash the furious sounds of the future to them.

Charles Ives (1874–1954) is the quintessential American composer. Some of his compositions are as American as cherry pie. Take the Country Band March (1905), for example. It brings you straight to the turn-of-the century America: It’s a collage of folk tunes, patriotic songs, and marching band music, but you only hear a melody briefly, and then it’s either interrupted rudely or mutated gracefully into another. Very often two or three motifs are played simultaneously so you can’t decide which one to follow.