Paul Zukofsky/Gilbert Kalish: Music for a 20th Century Violinist (Desto)
Purchased at Jerry's Records, from the Duquesne University collection
Another of my anecdotes.
During my first year at Carnegie Mellon, the music and computer science departments held a series of guest lectures on the topic of computers and music. Radical, right? Considering CMU was such an important computing center, they were a bit behind the curve.
The first guest lecturer was Iannis Xenakis. He was demonstrating his work, and others, generated on his UPIC system. One of my professors stressed that this was a big deal, but I didn't understand how much until some years later.
Another of the lecturers that year was Max Mathews. I had even less of an idea of how important Max was; he and his research team basically invented what we now know to be D-A conversion. All digital audio stems from his work.
(If you're going to tell me that it's more complicated than that, I know. I'm giving the quick version.)
Max's lecture to the music department had to do with generating equal temperament vs. just intonation and other frequency systems. He played a recording of a computer-generated five note passage in one tuning, and then another, and challenged us to identify each. I got it wrong each time, indicating to me that I could hear the difference, I just got which was which mixed up.
The there's a detail that Roger Dannenberg recalled. Max said he had been working with a violinist concerning tuning systems. He said he wasn't at liberty to say who it was, but that he had the initials P.Z.
Everyone thought he meant Pinchas Zukerman. He actually meant Paul Zukofsky.
If you see Zukofsky's name on a recording, you know it will be of the highest quality. He was not only a specialist in 20th violin literature, he clearly enjoyed playing these works.
I think I have previously mentioned the Duquesne collection that's being sold off at Jerry's. Most LPs are going for $3 each. I found this 3LP set in the Duquesne boxes, and thought, hot damn! Score! One of the nice things about buying albums from that collection, is that most things I want to buy have barely been played before, if at all. This sounds completely clean, I doubt any Duquesne student ever had it put on.
I was a student at Duquesne myself, and would often listen to things in their record room. Was this in the collection at the time? How could I have missed it?
I find that often these types of "Music of the 20th Century"-type collections don't have what I want. Not so here. Henry Brant! John Cage! Morton Feldman! George Crumb! Stefan Wolpe! I know I have at least one recording of the Cage piece elsewhere ("Nocturne") and probably the Feldman ("Vertical Thoughts 2"). Because it's three records of material, there are those composers I would normally pass on: Walter Piston, Wallingford Riegger, Arthur Berger. I don't dislike those composers, they just don't especially interest me in particular. It's probably good to be made to listen to them in between what are the marquee names for me.
Oh, and Nicolas Slonimsky wrote the liner notes. Home run.
I didn't know of this collection's existence before seeing it in the Jerry's bins several hours ago. that seems shameful. We seem to be spewing out so much data, so many materials, and yet a vital document such as this can be lost to even someone such as me.
There are things that have happened, are happening, that have recently made me think a lot about my own past and future. I may sound happy in the paragraphs above, but the truth is I'm very saddened by something in my personal life. For the one to three people who read this regularly, I'm fine. You don't need to worry. An old friend is very close to death, and that's all I'll mention for now. Music continues to be my solace, even if this particular music seems like a strange choice for grief. Maybe I appreciate the works' classicism, the attempts at timeless beauty. Isn't that one of the reasons we do what we do?
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