As I mentioned recently, I’ve been sick with the flu lately. I was lucky to get a rapid-acting treatment (though I had to pay extra for it!) in the form of a medication administered intravenously, but it’s still been necessary to rest, and I’ve been isolating from the rest of my family as we’re trying to avoid anyone else catching it from me. I’ve been too muddled-brained to do much writing, but I have gotten some reading done, and also started studying some music theory again. (Randy Felts’ Reharmonization Techniques, specifically. Like all music theory books, I find I need …
Category: MUSIC
O Magnum Mysterium by Morten Lauridsen (1994)
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, …
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 …