First, unlike previous issues (whether the original ten-inch LP or the 1996 French release), the new disk restores the session in its entirety-recorded for radio broadcast-to the order of its performance, as originally heard, starting with the broadcast producer André Francis’s introduction and Monk’s own brief but touching remarks, in French. ![]() The new reissue by Sony France of Thelonious Monk’s first and, to my ears, greatest solo piano session-recorded in June of 1954, on a tinny piano in a Paris room that sounds like a panelled basement-is a model for improving a familiar release over and above a sensitive remastering. ![]() Cast in one sonata-form movement of Mahlerian scope, it blends influences of Schubert, Ligeti, and Brahms with Adès’s own moods, which are frightful and disarming by turns. My connection to the “ Piano Quintet: 1” (2000) is not personal but communal: like Berg’s Violin Concerto, it is one of those pieces that many composers admire. ![]() You don’t so much listen to the piece as give way to it, powerless at the musical ivy that is progressively crawling around your ears. Notice the odd perseverance of the opening tango rhythm, how instruments are often used in extreme ranges or seem slightly out of tune it’s all part of his singular way of creating durable music themes at the same time that he seems to be destroying, or at least muddying, them. (I was a master’s student in composition there Adès was completing his undergraduate degree.) This is very much the young Adès, a little saucy and impudent, but also respectful of the past. My link to the Chamber Symphony is personal: I was present at the world première, in Cambridge, in February of 1991. I’ll put forward two works to which I feel a particular connection. The parallel with the career of Benjamin Britten has been, to put it mildly, noticed. Since the end of his college days, at Cambridge University, he began writing works that were not merely highly praised but that began at once to enter the general repertory. A British native, Adès is one of the leading transatlantic composers of his generation the Met presented his first grand opera, “ The Tempest,” in 2012. Since I’m eagerly looking forward to going to the Metropolitan Opera to hear “ The Exterminating Angel”-which is already a smash hit-this week, I’ve been boning up on my Thomas Adès. He has to get his biology degree first.- John Seabrook But for the beat-maker, at least, success is about “longevity,” as he says in the video, and “what you do next,” not just “one and done–never that.” Tank God won’t likely be living like a rock star any time soon. Thanks to the enormous success of the song, Tank God and Post Malone might even have the chance to find out what feeling like a rock star is really like. “Rockstar” grafts Post’s plaintive, vaguely Hank Williams-style delivery onto hip-hop rootstock in way that transcends traditional musical genres, and perhaps even suggests a future for pop music in which collaboration, rather than appropriation, is the norm. Nothing about the sombre mood of the track suggests joy or ecstasy, leading this wishfully thinking parent to suggest to his eighteen-year-old son that the song is actually a cautionary tale about rock-star life. ![]() Inspired, Post immediately spat out the song’s hook, “I feel just like a rock star.” They met by chance, in a studio in New York, and Tank played Post the track, which creeps along at eighty beats per minute, through a dark valley of 808s, its sonic pathway studded with kicks and snares and canopied with high hats. According to a video on Genius, the John and Paul of “ Rockstar” are the song’s lyricist, the twenty-three-year-old Post Malone, née Austin Richard Post and the song’s beat maker, Tank God, a biology major at the University of Hartford, in Connecticut. With the Internet, it became guitar-tab sites, behind-the-scenes videos, and self-appointed annotators, now partly organized by the Web site Genius, which is where I wound up not long ago, seeking the dope on “ Rockstar,” by Post Malone. Since then, it has been a lifetime of liner notes, fanzines, and guitar mags. That was what knowledge meant to me, early on, and it propelled my pseudo-scholarly interest in pop music. After my sister Lizanne gave me “ Rubber Soul,” my first album, in 1965, when I was six, I spent the rest of my childhood trying to differentiate between the John, Paul, and George songs. When I hear a song I like, I want to know not only who made it but also its origin story.
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