4 posts tagged “music”

Beethoven

December the 16th is Beethoven's birthday if you didn't know (I mean who doesn't know that?!).  So if you're in the DC area, you can tune to wgms (104.1 or wgms.com with live feeds) to hear a lot of him mixed in with the traditional holiday crap.

He's definitely one of my favorite composers and it's probably a toss up between him and Chopin for most stuff I've played.  His stuff is so much fun to play, if sort of a pain in the ass to learn.  My favorites are all "named" sonatas (do I like them because they're famous or are they famous because they're awesome?).  I usually tell people that I'd pick what I'd want to learn by whether it'd let me show off or not.  And all of these fit squarely within that category - flashy, technical pieces that everyone loves.  In the order that I learned them:

• Tempest - This was the first one that I played.  I forget how young I was, but I remember not liking it at the time, but I think I've changed my mind. 
  
• Pathetique - I love the opening movement.  It's such a shock as the first note slams into you and then goes super quiet before going loud again.  Imagine me as a youngish teenager getting to basically play with as much force and contrast as I was capable before suddenly cutting into a quick tempo :)
  
• Moonlight - Everyone, and I mean everyone, has heard the first movement:  it's beautiful, haunting, blahblahblah.  It's boring as shit to play.  On the other hand, no one knows the 3rd movement which is set at a presto! tempo and consists primarily of long runs of arpeggios.  This was the first piece where my hands were actually tired after playing.  The 3rd movement was also the piece that got me into learning Beethoven in the first place.  I was really little when I heard someone perform this at one of the recitals that our piano teacher would hold for all her students and wanted to play it ever since.
  
• Waldstein - The opening 2 bars are a perfect example of Beethoven's ability to make music out of a very simple arrangement of 4 notes.  It opens with a repeated staccato of chords with no melody!  He keeps at it somehow creating a melody out of that mess.  Wonderful piece to play, but again your wrists are so tired at the end.  The 3rd movement has a beautiful melody and it's one of my favorite pieces to play.  Feature of note is that on your right hand, you've got a continuous trill in your thumb and forefinger while the melody moves through the rest of the fingers and even sometimes into the trill fingers.  Try keeping that going fast without dropping the trill!
  
• Appassionata - I'd always wanted to play this piece when I was younger, but it was still out of my ability level.  I lost to some dorky russian kid who played this at a competition when I was playing the Pathetique.  My consolation was that I didn't practice 8 hours a day like he did or wear girly gloves before the competition so his hands would stay warm.  I still hate him.  This is the only piece that I've got an mp3 recording of me playing the first movement.  Although writing this reminds me that I should get around to converting all the tapes of me playing when I was a kid to digital audio.  Anyway, if you've gotten this far, here's my recording (if you've known me after college, you've heard this before). Vox is generating an error when I try to upload it so you just get a link (also it's really really quiet and I probably need to adjust the volume setting next time when I upload it).
  

I know I've been sorta quiet on the blogging front, but it's been pretty busy at work, which is my normal blogging time :)

No, he's not dead.

wow hardware store.  It's apparently an original weird al song.  The fan video is really good. 

Not going to embed the other actual weird al videos I just watched, but they're also hilarious :)  white an nerdy.  Ebay

What's your musical horoscope?  (Put your music player on shuffle and write down the first 10 songs that come up.)  Inspired by Stephanie.

My horoscope looks so strange.

beethoven - first movement of the moonlight sonata
waltz #1 - eliott smith
beatles - obladi oblada
aphex twin - blue calx
notwist - neon golden
machines of loving grace - richest junkie still alive
beatles - you like me too much
les miserables - the confrontation
herbie hancock - cantaloupe island
u-ziq - intellitag

What's your middle name?  Is there a story or history behind it?

Wong.  Eh, there's not much to say about it.  It's old.

Baton

A more amusing story is that when I was in conducting class (long setup story that we're going to skip), we had this filipino instructor (crazy good clarinetist and Armed Forces School of Music Conducting Instructor) named Mr. Asercion.  Super enthusiastic with loads of engrish and he always referred to everyone by their last names (former navy).  Anyway, the roll apparently listed us as "middle last, first" - I know that still doesn't make sense, but whatever.  Everyone else in the class thought it was pretty amusing since mine was the only one he messed up on, but he was fun and cool so I let it slide.

So when it was my turn to be on stage, he would just yell out "Wong!" and then I'd walk up on stage to conduct in front of the class while he would yell out time signatures that we'd have to switch among.  He didn't find out what my last name was until he was a guest conductor a year or two later and my hs director (who had no idea what my middle name was) asked him why he kept calling me wong.

Boo, my brother just told me that he recently passed away :(  He was easily among the best musicians that I had the pleasure of learning under.