Music – Page 8 – A Honey of an Anklet

Paging Mr. Bernard Herrmann

Via Arts & Letters Daily, new book by Jack Sullivan catalogs all the music in the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

The 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much uses Arthur Benjamin’s Storm Clouds cantata, which was commissioned for the 1934 version of the film. In the remake an assassination is to take place at a climactic cymbal crash. The bad guys, here as elsewhere in Hitchcock’s works, are surprisingly musically literate. They play recordings for the assassin.

Notes from computational musicology

One more point of necrology for 1956 that I missed: jazz piano master Art Tatum. John Burnett writes a profile, quoting Billy Taylor:

“He really heard so many things,” Taylor says. “The piano was out of tune, he’d make it work so that even the note was out of tune, he’d use that.”

Oh, it’s on

Leta shows a complete lack of musical discernment.

Paging Mr. George Kaplan

Stories that would have turned out differently if the protagonists had had cell phones.

Be prepared

Birthday links for John Cage at wood s lot.

Fearful symmetry

Via robot wisdom, composer Dmitri Tymoczko has written visualization software that makes sense of the harmonic movement of a piece of music.

“Tools like these have helped people understand music with both their ears and their eyes for generations,” Tymoczko said. “But music has expanded a great deal in the past hundred years. We are interested in a much broader range of harmonies and melodies than previous composers were. With all these new musical developments, I thought it would be useful to search for a framework that could help us understand music regardless of style.”

The homepage for ChordGeometries 1.1 includes a link to the published paper and three some short animations to accompany a fragment of a Chopin piano prelude. I’d love to see what a Billy Strayhorn piece like “Lush Life” looks like.

Some links: 1

Via Boing Boing, public domain MP3s of popular songs from the 1900s and teens.