Stockhausen

Both The Week and The Economist had featured obituaries of Karlheinz Stockhausen on Saturday. The composer, called a "genius-madman" by one and "seeker of new sounds" by the other, died in early December at 79. Both magazines pointed out that his picture appears on the famous cover of the Beetle's Sgt. Pepper's Longly Hearts Club Band. I tracked down my copy of it but couldn't figure out which one was Stockhausen. Marilyn Monroe he was not!

With his death recent, KVOD chose to broadcast his Gruppen for three orchestras and Stimmung. I listened and wondered about them. Stimmung, a sextet for unaccompanied voices, made no sense whatsover and I was glad when it was over. For Christmas I've requested Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century and I'm curious to read what Ross says about Stockhausen. I just couldn't get any enjoyment out of his music.

Not related, on Friday night I participated in a new Boulder "event" -- a group performance of Phil Klein's UnSilent Night. There were about 60-70 participants, mostly students from the CU school of music and others interested in the CU Pendulum program. Armed with boom-boxes and powered speakers attached to mp3 players, we wandered for about an hour along the Pearl Street mall, playing segments of Klein's performance piece. The sound, with percussion, bells, chorus and organ reflected off the walls of the buildings and merged with the crunch of feet on the frozen snow. We were all met with smiles of wonderment from shoppers and those wandering the decked-out mall on a cold evening. One woman came up to my wife and asked "What religion is this? It's great!". It was and let's hope it happens again next year.

Symphonies being broadcast.

I was curious about the broadcast frequencies of symphonies by some of the greatest symphonists. Here's a small table of the broadcasts of symphonies over KVOD (Denver, CO) for the years 2005, 2006 and 2007 (through yesterday):

Composers	Symphonies Composed	KVOD 2005	KVOD 2006	KVOD 2007
Beethoven	9	159	224	243
Schubert	9	139	195	156
Schumann	4	81	114	100
Mozart	42	384	451	401
Haydn	104	384	525	569
Saint-Saens	3	38	52	40
Brahms	4	63	96	80
Dvorak	9	48	99	94
Sibelius	7	56	60	66
Tchaikovsky	6	40	74	78
Mahler	10	26	12	7
Bruckner	9	14	9	3
Prokofiev	7	45	44	42
Shostakovich	15	16	35	22

Poor Mahler and Bruckner. Of course what this table doesn't show is the distribution of the broadcasts. For more details see
classicalfmradio.org and click on the button 'Show an interesting report on broadcast symphonies'.

PS: Working from a comcast connection can be a real pain. I've got a cron job which pings my comcast gateway regularly and I'm really getting a lot of dropped pings.
I sure wish there was some competition here -- and don't even mention qworst (qwest).

La Valse

One of the most played pieces on KVOD is Ravel's "La Valse", ranked 15th over the last 4 years. It's not one of my favorites, but I understand the need to broadcast it. It was written for orchestra and that's what is normally played. However, this past week I attended a concert at the University of Colorado where I heard a piano version, one that apparently Ravel arranged. I had never heard it done this way. The pianist was Vladimir Stoepel, a Russian pianist now living in Berlin. He preceded the performance with a brief explanation that Ravel was heart-sick at what had happened in World War I and wanted to reflect the coming darkness he felt was coming to Europe. It was, indeed, a dark and wrenching piece, full of power. Stoepel played with great passion. To sit and hear such a performance; to recognize the to-me syrupy themes and yet to sense the dispare was thrilling. Now if only some of the FM radio stations would broadcast this version instead of the incessant orchestra suite.