Archive for the ‘music’ Category

Anyone who knows me well knows that music plays a large role in my ability to cope with life. Sometimes this means creating music at the piano, and sometimes this means listening to music which inspires me. This inspiration can come in a variety of shapes and wears many different emotions on its sleeve. Some pretty consistent favorites include:

The Police
Steely Dan
Rush
Rachmaninov
Radiohead
Bach

Now of course I’m fairly picky about how I choose to listen to these favorites. With the classical selections it becomes even more of an issue because of the number of different recordings you can have of one particular thing. A perfect of this is the ever popular Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 3. After the movie Shine, this piece of music became very popular, even getting a lot of “air time” on the peer to peer sharing networks. The recording floating around though, was the one from the movie – the one of Helfgott playing. Blech! What a horrible recording of such an amazing piece of music. I know classical music snobs prefer one interpretation over another – I’m not getting that snooty here. His playing just wasn’t up to “concert level” and really affected the recording. Throw in a piano that’s not prepared very well, and you’ve got a really lousy recording. That’s assuming the recording is done very well, including the actual recording, and the mastering done later.

So, I was saying I’m picky as to how I listen to music. I wish I could afford to be an audiophile, but I can’t so I’ve had to find cost effective ways of pleasing my picky ears. Right now I have three pairs of pretty decent headphones, and a headroom headphone amp from the headroom website. This is definitely the way to go if you’re looking to have the best Hi-Fi setup possible for under $300.
Now I’m not going to subject my headphone amp to the microbes and what not (kudos to anyone who gets that reference) that are inevitably floating around the dialysis center, so it stays home. I do bring with me my ipod, and my Sony MDR SD-10 noise canceling headphones though.

How I was able to survive without these for 20-some years I do not know, but they are now with me pretty much everywhere I go. They’re an ear-bud type headphone, meaning they go into the ear canal, and act as an earplug of sorts – sealing into the ear very well. They’re also noice canceling, which is awesome in a dialysis clinic. The way this works is pretty simple. A small microphone listens to what’s going on in the room (ambient noise). It then interjects this wave inversely into what you’re listening to, effectively canceling out the ambient noise. It works more effectively in certain frequency ranges, but basically drops the sounds going on around you pretty noticeably. Where you really notice it is in a jet. You put in the headphones, which cuts out a lot of sound anyway – then you turn them on, and you suddenly have complete silence. It’s like the engines fell off of the plane (I always have to look out the window to make sure they didn’t). This allows you to listen to music critically, even in relatively noisy situations (like a dialysis clinic for example).

So wait … I started this post to talk about Coldplay.

Making it through four hours of dialysis is sometimes difficult, but having good music seems to really really help. Finding music that I really like though, seems to be very difficult. I basically enjoy listening to anything – but when I listen to music with the express intent of having an emotional experience, the normal radio fare just won’t do.
For a long time the only “new” music I was really, and thoroughly enjoying, was Radiohead. Pretty much everything they’ve made has hit me somewhere inside in a way that helped me express something (at least to myself).

Enter: Coldplay – Parachutes

This album is really getting me. I’ve probably listened to it in its entirety 30 times now, and I am still enjoying it. There’s something about the musical composition that becomes a soundtrack for whatever I’m doing. It’s complex and interesting enough to be listened to over and over – and still after many listens is revealing new secrets.

It’s great when you listen to music that’s well made … you begin to find new things each time you listen. That is, if you have some means of listening to it the way it was meant to be heard. This might not be interesting to anyone but me, but I love listening to a song I’ve listened to 100+ times, and realizing one of the musicians is doing something I haven’t yet heard. I don’t know how many hundreds of times I heard Tom Sawyer by Rush before finally realizing that Neal Peart intermitantly releasing the high-hat creating a very subtle effect for those listening closely.

This was like an Easter Egg – a treat for me the listener.

Coldplay isn’t overly complex in terms of their technical ability. You know right off the bat you’re not listening to virtuosic talent like Neal Peart or Stewart Copeland, and you never have one of Geddy Lee’s incredible bass lines layered underneath some awesome guitar solo. And while there is some piano layered in, it’s not Evgeny Kissin playing Chopin’s Preludes, or Volodos playing the Rachmaninov No.3 – Nonetheless the music seems to be very interesting, and pleasing to my ear. I would even say that it’s climbing my favorites list.

Songs like High Speed and We Never Change renew my faith in the ability of modern musicians to create music that is not solely for the record labels, but might actually be something pleasing to their own ears. Each song seems to be its own journey, and the album as a whole seems to be very well put together.

I’m beginning to sound like a music critic I know, but this is one of those areas of my life that I take seriously.

…. don’t get me started on piano performance and recording