General Music Thread

fourteenwings

I just learned that December was a mess of releases from all the Disney/Nickelodeon starlets who sing;

Sofia Carson

Two new songs (Guess I'm A Liar and Hold On To Me) Since I follow her the closest, I'm now trying to read the coded messages behind her recent releases:

I Luv U (love song with R3HAB)
Miss U More Than U Know (love songwith R3HAB)
Guess I'm a Liar (song about not needing a man, without R3HAB); I don't know what it is about this song or maybe songs like this in general that always give me a "Doth Protest Too Much" feeling.
Hold On To Me (no R3HAB again, and not even as catchy as Guess I'm a Liar)

Dove Cameron

One new song; We Belong. Does she have to swear in all her songs? Frankly, I'd also want to swear all the time if I'd just broken up with Thomas Doherty, but it's still inappropriate.

Her songs are okay to listen to most of the time but I don't listen to them more than once or really even give them a chance because of all the F-bombs.

Olivia Holt

Had a great moment with R3HAB earlier this year in the form of love u again (small "u" versus Sofia's capitals). Her latest, talk me out of it is like... it reminds me of some very cheesy British pop music from the 00s with modern instrumentation laid over it.

Overall, I'm starting to think she has a drinking problem.

Fun fact; 8 entire people wrote Olivia Holt's love u again, and none of them are Olivia Holt.

They are: Nicholas Audino, Ella Eyre, Fadil El Ghoul (R3HAB), Dan Goudie, Lewis Hughes, Chiara Hunter, and Ash Milton.

This is a song in which 20% of the lyrics are just "YEAH YEAH".

Victoria Justice

I had to do a double take; Who? The danged goodness heck who? The girl whose last single had to be a tie-in with Zumba has finally been released from music jail? The one who I believe is possibly more talented than most of her peers and released a killer cover of A Thousand Miles that even my dad likes?

Now that I've said all that, her new release, Treat Yourself, is honestly the most embarrassing thing on this little list. I understand that due to current events, the "I'll be everyone in my music video" thing is really taking off, but like... frankly, this is embarrassing.

Combined with the trite, illogical self-care lyrics... yeah, I'll take Sacred Cow Victoria Justice from my memories any day over this new version.

Taylor Momsen in The Pretty Reckless

Okay, not Disney/Nickelodeon, but that was basically her moment in those days too.

The Pretty Reckless were always quite serious about their music, and that hasn't changed at all. 25 is pretty great, if a significant departure from the overt rock I remember them from.

This next one falls squarely in You Cannot Be Serious Territory

Aly & AJ

Yes, that Aly and AJ, of The Potential Break Up Song, they are back for real for reasons I do not know. All those reasons are, presumably, bad.

Slow Dancing is like the creative inverse of the new Pretty Reckless song. About the same length, and a style that evokes those same elements, but this is such discount JOYNER (or HAIM, I guess) that I can't even give it a serious shot. There are better folk sister duos out there, and I'll stick to them.

I say this now, but I'll totally still be listening to this versus a lot of the more EDM stuff on this list. I'm quite glad that this ridiculous style of Americana music is coming back in various forms.

fourteenwings

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssssssssssssssss.

glennmagusharvey

opinion: the song itself sounds more like it's saying "Secret Asian Man" than "Secret Agent Man", because the way it's sung the /ʒ/ part is really dragged out and overpowers the /d/ sound. and the following /t/ sound is basically elided out.

lrdgck

A little curiosity.

The fun fact about these Mesoamerican black metal acts is that they remind me a lot of our own underground. These same kitschy album covers, hand-drawn by pencil.

glennmagusharvey

I wasn't expecting something so tonal for a modern classical work. It tends to be wilder. Then again, this does also use some jazzy sounds and other modern harmonic/tonality and rhythmic tropes.

Zennistrad

I just bought a physical CD for the first time in years, solely because I literally could not find this album on any place that wasn't a streaming platform:

https://open.spotify.com/album/2Igh2fzSH0FezYXzGmdFQV

It's a really interesting blend of violin and cello with French House, which is not something you hear every day

lrdgck

Heh, sounds quite curious, but my computer bluescreens whenever I click on the link so I guess I'm forced to pass for the time being.

glennmagusharvey

My mom was recently having an issue with her computer crashing whenever she visited Amazon, heh.

What is it with webpages these days...in the good old days they only crashed the browser...

Stormtroper

That sounds concerning tbh, I can't imagine a good reason why a browser could cause a BSOD beyond malware or something, that it happens when she's visiting an online store adds to that.

lrdgck

More about music, somebody put out a series of synthwave covers of Mgła songs. Mgła is black metal if you were to ask. Synthwave covers of black metal songs. Surprisingly, it kinda works.

glennmagusharvey

[note: this track is an extended version of a looping track]

lrdgck

You know, recently a certain set of circumstances led me to listening to this:



It's a song "Antikhrist" ("The Antichrist", obviously enough) by Russian heavy metal band Aria (Ariya, Ария). They're one of the big names in Russian metal and are commonly known as the Russian Iron Maiden, as you may tell from their sound.

Which led me to the thought that I'm about to share.

Y'see, for that matter, Iron Maiden themselves are perhaps best known for "Number of the Beast". From the modern perspective, if I may say so, it's positively... quaint. Like, those thirty or forty years ago you sang a song about Satan and this made you the baddest, meanest rocker on the block. The music is easy to approach, listenable if a bit on the louder and heavier side, so on. Now, after all the Nazis, church burnings, and all the assorted shit, it's kinda like watching a bunch of posturing kids. I mean, I don't even remember Iron Maiden having the reputation for drugs.

glennmagusharvey

I've never even heard of this composer before.

This sounds like an enhanced version of classical-period stuff. Like, classical period with some additional sparkles.

Emilie Meyer was born around the same time as Chopin/Schumann and lived about as long as Brahms did.

lrdgck

The Reddit has a thread on the drama behind Batushka. If you don't get it anyway, don't worry, I don't either even though I had it explained by a guy who claimed to have known at least one of these in person.

Also, I didn't know there are so many parody Batushkas. I thought it was like, there's the two Batushkas, and a bunch of internet memesters posting parody edits.

glennmagusharvey

The "problem"(?) with this sort of drama is that it is costly to go through in real life, and not the funny shit that it ends up being when read about by someone disconnected from it.

glennmagusharvey

Reynaldo Hahn (August 9, 1874 – January 28, 1947) was a Venezuelan, naturalised French, composer, conductor, music critic, diarist, theatre director, and salon singer. Best known as a composer of more than 100 songs, he wrote in the French classical tradition of the mélodie.

Piano Concerto in E major (1930)
Dedication: à Magda Tagliaferro

1. Improvisation: Modéré très liberement (0:00​)
2. Danse: Vif (12:12​)
3. Rêverie (15:02​), Toccata (23:00​) et Finale

Angelyne Pondepeyre, piano and Orchestre National de Lorraine conducted by Fernand Quatrocchi

Graham Johnson writes that Hahn "was never truly of the twentieth century"; he was for many years regarded chiefly as evoking the spirit of fin de siècle Paris. He was not in sympathy with the more obviously modern music of the early decades of the 20th century, but he moved with the times. According to a 2020 analysis:

Trained in the canons of Late Romanticism by his mentor and patron Jules Massenet, he succeeded in adjusting his style to the modernity of the Années folles, composing musical comedies with echoes of jazz, foxtrot and Argentinian tango, making masterly use of the saxophone and the piano in his orchestra … a catalogue of compositions ranging from chamber music – the sublime Piano Quartet and Piano Quintet – to ballet and the orchestral repertory.
Hahn's biographer Jacques Depaulis writing in 2006, comments that many composers suffer a period of neglect after their deaths and are then rediscovered, a process known in France as "la traversée du désert" – crossing the desert. In 1947 a British newspaper remarked that Hahn "is hardly remembered today outside the boundaries of France". In 1961, 14 years after the composer's death, the musicologist Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt dismissed Hahn as "a talented gossip who had a gift for grinding out operettas and little, tastefully performed ballads in limitless quantities". In the last decades of the 20th century there was a revival in interest in Hahn's music: Johnson (2002) refers to "an ever-widening range of his mélodies to be heard regularly on the concert platform".

glennmagusharvey

Holy crap this is some good stuff, and I've never ever even heard of the composer's name before.

Arthur De Greef (10 October 1862 – 29 August 1940) was a Belgian pianist and composer.

Piano Concerto No. 1 in C minor (1914)
Dedication: Dédié à son ami et maître Camille Saint-Saëns

1. Modéré - Largement (0:00​)
2. Scherzo -- (further in) un peu moins vite -- Beaucoup moins vite - au mouvement (11:13​)
3. Assez lent (18:10​)
4. Animé (25:34​)

Jean-Claude van den Eynden, piano and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Liège conducted by Pierre Bartholomée

Arthur de Greef studied at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels (1873) where he had lessons from: Louis Brassin (piano), Joseph Dupont (harmony), Hubert-Ferdinand Kufferath (counterpoint) and director François-Auguste Gevaert (composition). In 1879 – 17 year's old – he graduated with a first prize for piano, together with Isaac Albeniz. For further study he went to Franz Liszt in Weimar, where he stayed for 2 years. After that he travelled as a concert pianist through Europe and North America. He also collaborated with Camille Saint-Saëns in a series of piano concerts. He also befriended Edvard Grieg who called him: "The finest performer of my music I have ever encountered".

lrdgck

This was posted as an answer to the question "how would cowboy throat singing sound like".

glennmagusharvey

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stimmhorn

The track above is titled Schnee, and I'm wondering whether it's the entire release or just one track on the album of the same name.

glennmagusharvey

hey @lrdgck, do you recognize this filename?

experimental Baciary - Wódko Ma doomer remix

lrdgck

Yeah, what of it?

glennmagusharvey

Oh, just wondering where it came from, that's all.

lrdgck

I was surprised to discover this piece was not composed as a part of the soundtrack to Conan the Barbarian.

glennmagusharvey

There are various videos showing performances of this two-keyboard sonata on two pianos or two harpsichords.

But this one plays it on one fortepiano and one harpsichord.

glennmagusharvey

https://catalog.library.vanderbilt.edu/discovery/fulldisplay/alma991036275219703276/

Someone named Bernard Fitzgerald takes two arias from two different operas by Handel, and arranges them into one piece, a slow section followed by a fast section. Gives it an entirely new name. Publishes it in 1967.

Now the internet has a bunch of people who know this as "Adagio and Allegro Marziale" by Handel. And it has no HWV catalogue number, and I am confused for a while while trying to find this on the internet. Until I find this one catalogue entry from Vanderbilt revealing where the music actually comes from.

lrdgck

Does this mean that the joke about a music teacher selling an old work backwards as his own has basis in reality?

glennmagusharvey

Well, in this case it was the arranger who is the largely unknown one.

I just looked up Bernard Fitzgerald and apparently he has written some other works for trumpet and piano, which seem to be in the didactic repertoire (i.e. meant for teaching, rather than oriented toward performance), so my guess is that he's more active in that realm.

glennmagusharvey

Looking up more background for various pieces that get played by music students.

One of them is "The Puppet-Show", a piece written for violin and piano, with a simple violin part that only uses first position (i.e. the position of the hand on the finger board; "first position" is the most basic one, where the hand is at the far end of the neck, next to the pegs), and features distinctive left-hand pizzicato. The work is labeled as Op. 5 #1 from a composer named Josephine Trott...about whom very little is known.

Here's the best I found.

http://www.feliciasmusicstudio.com/trott.html

Apparently was involved in the founding of the Denver Symphony, as well as publication in French, among various other things.

Makes you wonder about the lives of everyone around you that you don't know about.

Another piece is the "Romanza Appassionata" by Carl Maria von Weber. von Weber was a well-known classical composer, so you'd expect information about him to be easy to come by...but apparently this work is not listed amongst his works on Wikipedia. Only after some digging did I find the work on IMSLP, but listed as having uncertain origin and instrumentation. In short, no one knows where it's from. It's just consistently credited to him, and assigned to students learning trombone or presumably also cello or bassoon.

Both of these pieces are quite nice little character-pieces for a solo instrument with piano accompaniment.

Stormtroper

glennmagusharvey