Today, I heard for the first time Morten Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium (1994), and was amazed by it. I’m not a religious person at all, but sacred music is such a massive part of the history of music—Western music, yes, but really all music across cultures—that it’s just one of those things you can’t get away from, if you care about traditional music forms at all. For European classical music, especially, the role of sacred music is huge: a vast amount of the earliest written music was church music, and even into the 19th century you find composers writing masses. Hell, …
Category: MUSIC
Word of Mouth
When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time trawling through city library’s LP collection. At the time, I didn’t realize how unusual it was that the collection included so many of jazz records, including albums from such a wide range of artists. The CD collection was really good, too, but I didn’t have a CD player, and was dependent on my buddy Mike to dub CDs for me so I could listen to them (which he generously did, but I tried to avoid doing it too often to avoid abusing his generosity). LPs, on the other …
Modern Jazz Voicings: Arranging for Small and Medium Ensembles by Ted Pease and Ken Pullig
As always, I’m posting this quite a while after finishing the book. Despite having gotten a decent foundation in classical music theory, and some jazz theory of the sort a young improvisor learns, I never managed to find a good source for horn arrangements. A while back, I was inputting an arrangement I did for jazz quintet and orchestra (meaning classical orchestra), when I realized that I didn’t know much about how one goes about actually doing proper jazz arrangements, especially the kind of classic block chords used in sax soli, horn section arrangements, and stuff like that. Not that …
Muse Sick: a music manifesto in fifty-nine notes by Ian Brennan
As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. This one, I read not long ago, after purchasing it through a book bundle. This is the first thing I’ve read by Ian Brennan. As John Waters states in his foreword to the book, even when one disagrees with Brennan, what the guy has to say is interesting. I didn’t find myself disagreeing with him all that much, to be honest—certainly less than I expected to. The book has two sections, with the first part being basically …
“The First Quest” AD&D Double LP
UPDATE (18 Feb 2019): More information on this album was emailed to me by someone named Michael (‘Mick’) Baker, after my spamblocker apparently ate his attempt to post it as a comment. Here is the email in full: Thanks for a nice article, I actually have the ‘First Quest’ album and i got it in the mid 80s on a hunch that one track on it, may be the one i was looking for, and it turned out right :), The track The Living Dead is a slight variation of the intro into the awesome 85 film ‘The Return of …