I just came across this compelling piece on A Blog Supreme: “You aren’t too dumb to like jazz“. It refers to the Jazz Boyfriend phenomenon, which I admit freely, I had never heard about before but makes some kind of strange sense nevertheless. Well, it seems that, just like you have sports’ widows (you know, the women in the lives of those men who spend countless hours in front of the TV watching hockey, football, baseball, etc.), you also have jazz widows, who can’t understand for the life of them why that “serious” music (jazz in this case but you must admit that we could just as easily substitute “classical music” for this and it would work) holds so much appeal to their better (?) half.

Are jazz (or classical music) fans so different from the rest of the crowd? I have often wondered. I have just had about enough of the “It’s too complicated”, “It’s not for me”, “Are you kidding? I’d never listen to that kind of music!” comments I keep on hearing. For years, I’ve been telling whoever will listen that you don’t have to classify music like this. I am very much of Kurt Weill’s opinion: “I have never acknowledged the difference between serious music and light music. There is only good music and bad music.”

Do I listen to jazz? Yes, of course… quite a bit, actually. For me, jazz has become just another branch on the tree of serious music and has now been around long enough to be codified, just like classical music is. Will I have a potential mate take a jazz/classical music compatibility quizz and then decide if he is the one? Maybe not… but, heck, it would be nice if he at least pretended to understand some of my infatuation with the genre(s).

Proof that jazz can appeal to the full spectrum of emotion, Bill and Samba by Lorraine Desmarais Big Band…

Lucie

Years back, the Mozart effect was more a marketing gimmick than a scientific proposition. By the way, did you know (or care?) that they recently proved that the Mozart doesn’t really exist. (Gasp!) Whatever the latest results, I still believe that you can always find music that will soothe your soul, whether it’s Mozart, Tchaikovsky or Debussy, who cares…

The latest craze? Apparently, kids getting high while listening to music! Hello? Well, it seems that kids these days listen to MP3s that induce a state of ecstasy. As proof (!), a Youtube video shows a teen flipping out while listening to “music” – largely droning noise, rather. At the end of his article, the Wired journalist (a respected publication I must say) even warns the reader that “the following video is only for informational purposes and should only be viewed by responsible adults”. What is this very “dangerous” work? Steve Reich’s Eight Lines! This is meant to be taken as a second degree joke, right?

Well, excuse me while I go and get high on Philip Glass or Arvo Pärt, as performed by Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà…

Lucie

I told you a few months back about the pedal harpsichord, an instrument built by Yves Beaupré, on which Luc Beauséjour now regularly works and performs. In this video, you can appreciate the very appealing colours of this instrument in possibly the most famous work for organ, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor.

We have heard much about Chopin’s anniversary, quite a bit about Mahler’s, a little less about Schumann’s, but 2010 is also Samuel Barber’s 100th anniversary of birth. If the American composer is famous for his Adagio for Strings (used in numerous movies in recent years), he also is the author of an opera (Vanessa), various concertos (his piano and violin concertos are true gems of the 20th century)  and a ballet (Medea). One of his favourite works of mine remains Knoxville, Summer of 1915, a 1947 work for voice and orchestra. The text is taken from a 1938 short prose piece by James Agee.

We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child. It was a little bit mixed sort of block, fairly solidly lower middle class, with one or two juts apiece on either side of that. The houses corresponded: middlesized gracefully fretted wood houses built in the late nineties and early nineteen hundreds, with small front and side and more spacious back yards, and trees in the yards. (James Agee, Knoxville)

Barber very successfully paints an idyllic, nostalgic picture of Agee’s native hometown, as narrated by a child who seems, at times, to transform into an adult. The work has a very dreamlike quality and the free rhapsodic form parallels Agee’s own choice in developing his work.

Knoxville is considered Barber’s most “American” work, looking both at the supporting text as well as the imagery created by the music.

Lucie

In preparation for the Gramophone Awards on October 1, readers are invited to vote for their Artist of the Year.  Two conductors on that very select list are closely involved with the Quebec musical scene: Kent Nagano, music director of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, music director of the Orchestre métropolitain and future music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

You have until August 31 to check the shortlist, listen to CDs and select the artist who has most impressed you over the past 12 months. Details are here…