I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: BROOKLYN RIDER-Tiny Desk Concert #44 (January 26, 2010).

This is one of the darkest Tiny Desk Concerts I’ve seen.  Meaning it is rather poorly lit.  I’m not sure why it is so dark in the office–oh, I see that it’s 4;30 PM.  But this string quarter isn’t hindered by it (although they do remark on it before the final song).

The notes state that the quartet (two violin, a viola and cello) loves Debussy and Brahms but they also write their own music and have teamed up with a Kurdish kamancheh player (or as the one player states, a Japanese shakuhachi player and an electronics musician).

The first song, “Vagharshabadi Dance” is an Armenian dance written by an Orthodox priest named Komitas. And they are quite animated as they play it.

In the introduction to the second piece called “Second Bounce” (which is a companion to a Debussy piece, which they play next). Colin Jacobsen (violin) says that he based it on the way a super ball’s first bounce is expected but the second can go anywhere.  And the notes they play are often unexpected (and bouncy).  They’re also quite hard (the viola player (Nicholas Cords) says the piece hurts his hand).  That piece is only a trio–they wanted to mix it up a bit.

The Debussy piece “String Quartet in G Minor: 2nd Movement” is very nice.  It’s got a lot of pizzicato (from all the instruments) while the others play a cool riff.  Johnny Gandelsman (violin) sat out of “Second Bounce” but he gets some great “solos” in this one.  I don’t know all that much by Debussy, but I like this.

“Ascending Bird” is sort of their theme song–an arrangement of a Persian folk song.  It has some incredibly fast riffs (even from the cello (Eric Jacobsen)) and some interesting scratching on the strings.

Check them out here.

[READ: March 6, 2015] “The Monkey Did It”

I had just read a short story by Murakami, so I was interested to read this piece by Galchen, whose insights are, I think, spot on.

She talks about Murakami’s latest book, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and she uses the simile  that Murakami’s works are like Torricelli’s Trumpet or Gabriel’s Horn–finite space with infinite surface area.  And while I wouldn’t say that I thought of that myself, I would say that I have often thought that his stories seem so simple (at least in plot) but there is so much more in them.

I like the way that she talks about his books as having a plot that sums up pretty easily, but within the plot several other new threads are opened.  And they are more metaphysical at the same time.

In the novel friends vanish, but that is not the main plot.  Rather, Tazaki is haunted by the fact that his friends abandoned him some time ago.  His girlfriend Sara tells him he needs to figure this out.  So he sets off on a kind of quest.  Galchen notes that the girlfriends in his stories are always encouraging the main characters to do these quests.

Galchen doesn’t want to spoil the novel, so she talks about Murakami’s short story “A Shinagawa Monkey” which follows a similar pattern.  In that story, Mizuki Ando realizes that she keeps forgetting her name.  It’s embarrassing and she’d like it solved.   She goes to a doctor who tells her what the problem is (a monkey has stolen her name, of course).  Galchen says that the “problem” (getting your name back) of the story is easily solved, but it opens up so many other questions–a talking monkey?

I also like that she talks about Murakami’s novels overall.  This is not one of Murakami’s more supernatural novels–it could be argued that, despite some weird dreams, that there’s nothing supernatural in it at all.  But “…the supernatural novels of Murakami make the ordinary settings of Colorless, with scenes in train stations and car dealerships, feel at times even more ghostly and strange than the deep wells and dream hotels of its siblings.”

In a concluding comment she notes that Murakami has said about writing short stories: “you merely enter a room, finish your work and exit.”  She  has often preferred his short stories to his novels–his novels are “more dream-filled and ruminative,” they appear pixellated.  But she says that it is the indirectness of the novels that makes them more coercive.

I keep stating that I want to read more Murakami.  And I do.  But this isn’t the time yet–I have many other things in queue–but soon I will and I look forward to the experience.