Listening to music at work

Working at a job that requires you to sit in front of a computer screen all day allows for the opportunity to listen to new and various genres of music. In my time at WhiteHat Security, I've discovered and listened to hardstyle, cool jazz, various shoegaze bands, dream pop, skrillex (for a very short period), some amount of alternative/indie rock (Wild Nothing, Beach House-type), and psychedelic trance. A month ago or so I stumbled across Youtube user Hexameron's account, and discovered a love for Wyschnegradsky, Mosolov, Popov, and other Soviet avant-garde composers of the early 20th century. They were most active before the terrible 1930s in Russia, and are marked by odd tonalities, a love of Scriabin's piano sonatas, and most of all, complete obscurity. Wyschnegradsky composed and notated music based on a microtonal (quarter-tone) scale. See for example, his "Twenty-four preludes in all the tones of the chromatic scale diatonicized with thirteen sounds", excerpts available here. Mosolov, before he went all formal, was extremely avant-garde (see here for a playlist of his music). Popov, an alcoholic who eventually died of alcoholism, is an example of otherwise great composers who couldn't handle living in Soviet Russia. His Symphony No. 1 is all over the place, but he had the talent of Shostakovich. I'll leave it to Alex Ross to say it better.

From here I discovered a playlist, "Russian Piano Concerti 19th 20th century", compiled by user PaulRx4, composed of 132 videos of mostly unknown music. Over the course of the last two months I have slowly worked through the unordered list, discovering and enjoying most in the process the following composers' music: Adigezalov, Balanchivadze, Dvarionas, Mary Davitashvili, Ustvolskaya (to some extent), the Scriabin piano concerto (played this one to death), Dobrowen, Levko Revutsky, Tatiana Nikolayeva, Revutsky, Rodion Schedrin, Veselin Stoyanov, and honorable mention to Rachmaninov's First piano concerto. My "Classical Music" collection on YouTube is now 40 subscriptions deep, having found also this young composer's website: Corentin Boissier and his simply insane writeups of music collections and the enormous amount of music he has uploaded; the aforementioned Hexameron and his great playlists of unknown compositions; and this user, who juxtaposes images of anime with, to my ears, unlistenable music. 

This is all very engrossing and today I have finally reached the bottom of that playlist.

Update: Honorable mention to Dimitar Nenov, who wrote this very beguiling toccata.

Update 2: Another mention to Nenov for this Piano Concerto. More about that later.

2014 Growing season

Looking back over my post history I noticed that no blog posts about gardening were posted all of last year. What a shame, as it was definitely one for the books. Perhaps in this day and age of proliferation of media in which to express oneself it's harder to remember you have a blog, to write all sorts of stuff. 

me me me

In youth, a certain mother taught one not to use me or I or myself in speech or written language. The problem is that this really slows things down and sometimes sounds very stilted. It's not a good substitute to use the third, or worse, the second person, when describing personal experiences, characteristics, or what not, and makes writing things like dating profiles on online sites so much harder. How is one supposed to talk about one-self? Be helisexual or something? So here's some catharsis:


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