February 27, 2006

Peter Murphy - Who?

ver hear the beginning of a song and think, "That's crap" and turn it off before it goes too far and then later on hear it again all the way through and something catches you even though you still don't really like it and then you listen to it more and more and before you know it you love that song even though it's weird and the singer has a wavering voice and you don't understand it and you're not sure what the hell is going on, and then you go out and buy more CDs by the same guy and most of it seems unlistenable but you still listen and can't help but discover that on every CD are at least two songs that make you grateful that you bought the CD even though the rest are a waste but not long after you listen to some of the others and they seem to get better and more interesting the more you listen and end up loving even more songs even though you know your wife hates that music and you don't really think to play him for your friends who are much more conventional in their tastes?

Well, that in short is my experience with Peter Murphy. He started out in the late 70s with a band called Bauhaus, credited with inspiring the whole Goth aesthetic, not something I'm all that interested in.

Somewhere around the early 90s I was researching music for a 4-hour music workshop I was doing, The Spiritual Power of Music, and I picked up Holy Smoke by the Murph, regarded by many fans apparently as a sell-out album that they would call Holy Shit.

I found a few tracks fascinating, but mostly I found his odd baritone/falsetto wavering microtonal vocal style strangely attractive. Especially songs like "Keep Me From Harm" and "You're So Close." (Listen for a sample of his voice.)

A few years ago, I relistened to that CD and decided to try a couple more, so I bought Deep, which has his one real hit "Cuts You Up," and the phenominal song "Marlene Dietrich's Favourite Poem" and Cascade, which has the great "I'll Fall With Your Knife".

Recently I went out and bought a couple old Bauhaus recordings to see where he came from. Real alienated industrial punk music. I also picked up the rest of his solo albums and have been getting off on "Idle Flow" from his Unshattered CD. Wish they had a fuller sample of the chorus on that song. I love what he does with his harmonies. (He sings virtually all his own harmonies.)

Musically, until his voice kicks in you'd think the music was by different bands.

His lyrics don't necessarily make sense, except if you're in that dreamlike half-awake half-asleep state. Here's the lyrics to Idle Flow:

Idle flow
I've been running too slow
I use so much time
Now I'm working to grow
Don't regret our ties
This endless flow
You take these fears
When you say they go

Your touch honey- smooth
Your shining calm
So what if blood's spilt
You're my light you're my balm

Your forest a dream
Where scream melt to bliss
Where love has its book
Your name written on it

I'm asking you're giving
Idle flow
I'm running you're waiting
So what if bloods spilt
Idle flow
Idle flow
I'm asking you're giving
Idle flow

Here's an interview that will give you some idea of his thoughts on that.

Can't say I'd recommend him to you. His vocal style and lyrical bent is extremely idiosyncratic. Just gotta say that I love his music and his voice. I don't know why...

UPDATE: Actually, I just realized they play the Idle Flow chorus on his website as part of the Intro.

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February 2, 2005

Why is Mozart Great?

intended to write an essay. But then I thought it best to simply artistically arrange quotes about his music.

One thing to keep in mind: Inspired music requires inspired performances. Do some research to find those recordings. Avoid the TV-style compilations. Mozart's music is so transparent that poor recordings and uninspired performances destroy him.

In art there is Leonardo da Vinci, in literature there is Shakespeare, in music there is Mozart. Itzhak Perlman

Like all geniuses of his rank, he stands as a law to himself: incommesurable, incalculable, sublime. Robert W. Gutman

He is the most generous composer who ever lived. He showered upon us melody after melody, character upon character, beauty, upon beauty. Robert Harris

Mozart tapped the source from which all music flows, expressing himself with a spontaneity and refinement and breathtaking rightness...What we expect to find in Mozart is perfection in whatever medium he chose to work. Aaron Copland

When it comes to Mozart, you're speaking of the most extraordinary perfection that exists. There isn't anything that is more perfect in music. And then on top of it the music is so complete; there is never a piece of music by Mozart, it doesn't make any difference if he is 4, 5, 6, or 26, it's perfect, totally perfect. Pinchas Zukerman

Listening to Mozart, we cannot think of any possible improvement...21 piano sonatas, 27 piano concertos, 41 symphonies, 18 masses, 13 operas, 9 oratorios and cantata, 2 ballets, 40 plus concertos for various instruments, string quartets, trios and quintets, violin and piano duets piano quartets, and the songs. This astounding output includes hardly one work less than a masterpiece. George Szell

Mozart encompasses the entire domain of musical creation, but I've got only the keyboard in my poor head. Frederic Chopin

What was evident was that Mozart was simply transcribing music completely finished in his head. And finished as most music is never finished. Displace one note and there would be diminishment. Displace one phrase and structure would fall. I was staring through the cage of those meticulous ink strokes at Absolute Beauty. Peter Shaffer

Mozart does not give the listener time to catch his breath, for no sooner is one inclined to reflect upon a beautiful inspiration than another appears, even more splendid, which drives away the first, and this continues on and on, so that in the end one is unable to retain any of these beauties in the memory. Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf

As an artist, as a musician, Mozart was not a man of this world. To a certain part of the 19th century his work seemed to possess so pure, so formally rounded, so "godlike" a perfection that Richard Wagner, the most violent spokesman of the Romantic Period, could call him "music's genius of light and love." Alfred Einstein

Mozart is an utterly unique phenomenon, indisputably and forever on the credit side of life's ledger, so sovereign and omnipresent that he reconciles us somewhat to the debit side. Indeed, Mozart seems to be reconciliation itself, a kind of redeeming miracle. Wolfgang Hildesheimer

In Mozart's music, all intensity are crystallized in the clearest, the most beautifully balanced and proportioned, and altogether flawless musical forms...For one moment in the history of music all opposites were reconciled; all tensions resolved; that luminous moment was Mozart. Phil Goulding

Does it not seem as if Mozart's works become fresher and fresher the oftener we hear them? Robert Schumann

If we cannot write with the beauty of Mozart, let us at least try to write with his purity. Johannes Brahms

Mozart is the highest, the culminating point that beauty has attained in the sphere of music...Mozart is the musical Christ. Piotr Tchaikovsky

Mozart's mature instrumental music represents our civilization's sign for the beautiful. We cannot think of him without thinking of beauty; we cannot refer to beauty without recalling his music. I believe this is so, not necessarily because his works are more beautiful than those of other composers, though this may well be true, because he created--or, at least, brought into the forefront of aesthetic consciousness--a special kind of beauty, one that thenceforth came to exemplify the idea of superlative beauty itself. Maynard Solomon

It is hard to think of another composer who so perfectly marries form and passion. Leonard Bernstein

In Bach, Beethoven and Wagner we admire principally the depth and energy of the human mind; in Mozart, the divine instinct. Edvard Grieg

Mozart resolved his emotions on a level that transformed them into moods uncontaminated by mortal anguish, enabling him to express the angelic anguish that is so peculiarly his own. Yehudi Menuhin

Designing an opera by Mozart is like doing something for God--it's a labor of love. Maurice Sendak

A light, bright, fine day this will remain throughout my whole life. As from afar, the magic notes of Mozart's music still gently haunts me. Franz Schubert

Mozart is the greatest composer of all. Beethoven created his music, but the music of Mozart is of such purity and beauty that one feels he merely found it--that it has always existed as part of the inner beauty of the universe waiting to be revealed. Albert Einstein

Mozart makes you believe in God because it cannot be by chance that such a phenomenon arrives into this world and leaves such an unbounded number of unparalleled masterpieces. Georg Solti

Once, when filling out an application for a summer job, on that line next to "other" under the heading of Religion, I wrote Mozart. The personnel officer was not amused, but then, I hadn't intended it as a joke. For there was a time when I was convinced that Mozart was at least as divinely inspired as Moses, Christ, the Buddha, Lao-tzu, or Mohammed, and I suppose I still am. For in no other works of the human imagination can the divine spirit be heard more distinctly than in the miraculous music this often vulger, unpleasant, and difficult man produced during his pathetically brief thirty-five years. Were this book to do him justice, the section devoted to Mozart's music would take up more than half the total pages. Jim Svejda The Record Shelf Guide to the Classical Repertoire (3rd edition)

I always thought that if you went to heaven, you would meet all the great people; anybody who came up there would all gather in huge rooms. But Mozart has a room all by himself. Victor Borge

This is the music that they are going to play for me when I enter heaven, or wherever Mozart may be. Marcel Maurice on the "Quintet for Clarinet in A major" as told by Richard Stoltzman

The angels, left to themselves, play Mozart, and the dear Lord likes especially to listen to them then. Karl Barth

Others may reach heaven with their works. But Mozart, he comes from there. Joseph Krips

Mozart is inexplicable. Mitsuko Uchida

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If you feel that you need an in-house teacher to guide you through Mozart, you will find none better than Robert Greenberg, whose many lectures for The Teaching Company on classical music and Mozart are legendary for their humor, intelligence, and sheer listening pleasure.

Someday soon I will list my favorite inspired classical recordings.

*** The meaning of music lies not in the fact that it is too vague for words, but that it is too precise for words. Felix Mendelssohn

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