C is a good letter
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I unironically like this cover.
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Can’t let C pass without
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I had lots of Cs too but I am with you and trying to just post one. It was hard choosing!
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I promised some more UGK earlier, so now seems like a good time.
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One last C for the night
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Well, we got some Dishwalla earlier, so here’s another jam from a probably significantly less-remembered 90s one-hit wonder.
The Bs I didn’t post
| Breaking Glass | David Bowie |
|---|---|
| The Ballad of El Goodo | Big Star |
| Be My Wife | David Bowie |
| The Bee and the Cracking Egg | Comets on Fire |
| Black Cadillacs | Modest Mouse |
| Black Like Me | Spoon |
| Bottle Rocket | The Go! Team |
| Bridges, Squares | Ted Leo & The Pharmacists |
| Breather | Laika |
I pasted it and it showed up like this, I don’t know how to fix it without making it look ugly again
it’s tempting to slap a sure thing like Clair de Lune up here, but nope, C is for Chaconne, i.e. J.S. Bach’s Violin Partita #2 BWV1004 in D minor, the fifth movement of which is known in english as the Chaconne.
Composed in 1720, it’s an epic piece of music written for a simple solo violin. The word chaconne refers to its structure: Bach writes a short four-bar chord progression and then repeats it 64 times to make a sixteen-minute monster of 256 total bars. You can think of it as 64 variations on a theme, but there are also longer arcs and loops within loops.
It would be rough to rank my favorite fifty classical composers but plopping Bach at #1 is easy: in the post-Homer world, for me Bach and Shakespeare are the two celestial glitches, they are permanent & unlimited and that they were human beings makes me proud and is maybe the most hopeful thing I can think of. We’ll be performing them in thousands of years on worlds beyond Mars, for as long as we stay human.
Tons of Bach’s music is charming and approachable, but the Chaconne, not so much
two versions performed by Perlman:
–live video version (starts at 13:48)
–recorded version (my favorite)
If you listen, try to hang in there through the first surge, which ends about seven minutes into the piece
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I have to admit I was kind of expecting Canon in D.
Classic (not classical) instrumental:
man just before lockdown I had to play the George Winston version of that for a wedding. Also when I was a kid my school had this elaborate thanksgiving ceremony where all of us students trudged down an aisle for an hour ferrying food to a stage like a kingdom of ants who finally hit the jackpot. While we walked, music teachers performed a chamber music version of that piece, which still sounded fresh because it was before the wedding industry had rebranded Pachelbel’s Canon into the chicken dance of classical music, back when every kid only knew the title and never questioned the odd image it evoked of Pachelbel on a hill, raining thunder and doom from his legendary death cannon
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It always fascinates me how classical pieces become “popular” or standard, like how did weddings land on Canon in D in particular, etc.
Anyway, this is what we played at my wedding instead, since I had a friend who was a cellist and it’s hands down one of my favorite pieces of music ever. And yes, I know it’s popular, but it isn’t the “wedding standard” like Canon is. I’m honestly not sure if this would fall under C or P, but fuck it, I’m linking it today.
No, my friend is not Yo-Yo Ma, and the piece sounds decidedly less full on a plebeian cello (meaning one that doesn’t cost 6 figures or more), but it was still very good
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All right here’s another R.E.M. one
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the more i hear of the police the more i like them
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They were fantastic. Also, their drummer is probably one of the top 10 rock drummers of all time.
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Yeah I only got really into The Police beyond the radio hits like 4-5 years ago and all five of their albums slap. I think Zenyatta Mondatta is my overall favorite.
i’ve heard pieces of atlantis before and didn’t realize it was a song about atlantis, you never hear the first part of it.
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yup Bach cello suites are always gonna be good no matter how many car and/or bank commercials lean on them. Bach wrote six suites for solo cello, and each one has six separate movements, so besides the mvmt you linked that we all like (the prelude from Suite #1) there are 35 others out there, e.g. the Sarabande from #5, the Sarabande from #6, the Prelude from #6, the Prelude from #4, the Bourree from #4, the Menuetto from #1, easy to keep going.
And obv a big issue with classical music is finding the “best” performances/versions/arrangements of a piece. If you want chaos then ask four cellists which version of the Bach cello suites is the best—the next thing you’re gonna hear is the splintering shattering sound of their combined fight-or-flight reaction, which will add up to five spontaneously broken hips and one sensible coffee table. If you get any cellist names out of them then some that will come up a lot are Casals, Rostropovich, Fournier, Starker, and Schiff. Casals is probably my favorite for that first prelude, but he recorded it in the 1930s and the sound quality is iffy, which bugs many people.
If anyone ever needs a recording/performer recommendation for a specific piece of classical music then absolutely feel free to PM or @ me, genuinely happy to pitch in, slaloming through this stuff can be super confusing