Rappers, Ranked by Vocabulary Size

Enjoy.

Books That Inspired Classic Rock

The list, care of Bookish.

10 Musical Compositions Inspired by Gabriel García Márquez

Happy listening.

Rachmaninov Manuscript to Go to Auction

Symphony #2. Interested? Bring your checkbook.

A Pogues Musical by the Creator of "The Wire"?

It's a thing.

Is Bob Dylan a Musician or a Poet?

The New York Times discusses that question, here.

Music Inspired by Classic Fantasy Stories

The list, care of Flavorwire.

Just Because

The Great Gatsby Movie Score

Jay Gatsby will be meeting.... Jay-Z.

The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins

McSweeney's Interviews Beck

McSweeney's has a Q&A with Beck about his new book, Song Reader.

From the piece...

McSWEENEY’S: So here we are, late in 2012, and you’ve just put a heck of a lot of effort into crafting a set of songs that you’re only going to release as sheet music. Where’d that idea come from, originally? And what is it about a project like this that seemed exciting to take on?

BECK: The idea has been around since I started releasing music. After one of my first records came out, in the ’90s, a publisher sent me a sheet music version of the album—someone had transcribed it for piano and voice. The album itself was full of noises, beats, bent sounds, feedback—it had a lot of sonic ideas that were meant to be heard, as a recording. Seeing those songs reduced down to piano parts made me feel like they’d become abstractions. At the time, I mentioned to the people I worked with that it might be better to write a group of songs specifically for a songbook, rather than trying to force the songs from my record into written arrangements. But years of touring and making albums didn’t leave time to do the project properly. We finally began the process back in 2004.

Play It Again, and Again

The trade in music manuscripts is usually tranquil, but many specimens of inestimable value are going under the hammer.

From an article in the Financial Times...

Every so often the usually tranquil trade in music manuscripts is rocked by a remarkable event, and the sale of the André Meyer collection in Paris on October 16-17 will be one such. In Dr Roe’s view, this is the most important private collection of musical manuscripts and early printed scores in Europe. It was compiled as a labour of love by the Paris-based textile magnate André Meyer (1884-1974), who generously opened it to researchers; Rostropovich worked there on Debussy’s early albums, and it was there that Stravinsky joyfully rediscovered one of his manuscripts for The Rite of Spring. Since Meyer’s death it has been locked from view.

Among the treasures now going under the hammer is the libretto for Monteverdi’s lost opera Ariana, the first collected edition of Bach’s keyboard partitas, a first edition of Rameau’s Traité de l’Harmonie with the composer’s annotations, and a signed autograph manuscript of Schoenberg’s Opus 10 string quartet. And something to set the pulse racing: an unpublished page of piano exercises by Beethoven, with a sketch for a major composition – which neither Roe nor anyone else can identify – on the reverse. It was bought by a collector after Beethoven’s death, then presented as a gift to Chopin when he visited Vienna in 1830: it may comfortably exceed its estimate of €100,000- €150,000.

To scholars, an untampered-with manuscript is of inestimable value, being a unique indicator of a composer’s intentions. This is why the dismemberment (for commercial reasons) of Beethoven’s sketchbooks after his death was such a disaster, and why Roe and his colleagues are so opposed to the well-meaning but misguided “restorations” which some of the biggest libraries have carried out.

An Ode to Libraries

Chuck Berry - Neoclassicist

The Millions takes a look at Chuck Berry...the poet.

From the post...

Chuck Berry has had a hard life: reform school, two prison terms, financial exploitation, bankruptcy, racial discrimination, and much else. It is not his manner to rehearse his private grief in public, though the sly braggadocio of “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” and the crypto-autobiography of “Johnny B. Goode” trade playfully on his public image. Whether the pathos of “Memphis, Tennessee” derives from his own domestic sorrows is, strictly speaking, beside the point, though in a song this tender and touching, no supposition seems entirely extraneous. At any rate, “Memphis, Tennessee” is one of the greatest story songs in American music, all the more affecting for being so offhand and bouncy. (Berry himself, so he says in his Autobiography, played the swooping bass and “the ticky-tack drums that trot along in the background.”) What appears on first listening to be just another comic ditty about frustrated pedophilia (or so I used to interpret the top-forty version by Johnny Rivers that I knew as a child) turns out to be the desperate plea of a divorced father barred from any contact with his six-year-old daughter. The narrative builds to its final revelation piece by piece, with incidental details carrying an emotional load too freighted to be acknowledged outright: that the girl is furtively trying to reach her father; that the father has taken refuge with relatives; that although he now lives in the sort of place where messages are written on the wall, he once lived in a house high on a ridge overlooking the river; that the girl’s mother, not he, has broken up the family. And all of this – the heartbreak, the loss, the wit – by way of a conversation with a telephone operator.

Top 10 Batman Music Tracks

The list, care of Pop Matters.

Where Harry Potter Meets Lady Gaga

The All-Time Coolest Musician/Author Collaborations

How about Kurt Cobain and William S. Burroughs? Or Bono and Salman Rushdie? See the list, here, on Flavorwire.

Bach Cantata at Auction

It was purchased at a princely sum.

From a piece on Gramaphone...

The manuscript, which sold to a private collector in the US, is the Taille (tenor oboe) part for Ich liebe den Höchsten von ganzem Gemüte, BWV 174, and is the first example of Bach’s musical hand to appear on the open market for 16 years. It shows the script of two of Bach’s copyists - probably his pupil Samuel Gottleib Heder and another, known only as ‘Anonymous IV’ - in the early movements, with Bach’s own unmistakable handwriting appearing for the final chorale (the Passion chorale of Martin Schalling, used five years earlier in the St John Passion). It is a fascinating insight into Bach’s working practises, coming, as it did, in 1729 – mid-way through his period as kapellmeister at the Thomasschule, a job he combined with directing the music at the principal churches in Leipzig. 

The Harry Potter Theme

Creating a Masterpiece