match stick box: mozart's quickie

Saturday, May 9, 2009

mozart's quickie - ave verum corpus

Tonight, I will be singing with two ensembles of which I am part, UC Men's Chorale and the Alumni Chorus of UC Berkeley, for the donor/retirement dinner for Robert Cole, the departing musical director of CAL Performances. I am much grateful for the opportunity to sing for him again (once before for CAL Performances' centennial). Cole, who will also conduct, chose Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus as his swan song. He heralds it as one of the greatest and most beautiful pieces of music written. I agree, and I would find it hard-pressed to encounter anyone who group up listening to western music to not find it so after listening. Below is a recording; of course, digital recordings contain very little of the live performance's aura, but this can give you an idea.

Among many features of this piece, I find its length most remarkable. The oscillation between the quiet moments and its swells, the archs of its phrases and the moments of scalar transcendence are all scored fluidly within a minute-and-a-half.

2 comments:

SeanvolioMay 9, 2009 at 3:22 PM
Here's to hoping it sounds this good tonight!
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robert andrew perezMay 9, 2009 at 3:29 PM
we're gonna be great. hopefully, kevin and i can get a recording of it going.
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originally intended be strictly be a poetry blog for unrefined ramblings, i've expanded msb in attempt to further assimilate into the blogging community by creating a space for personal commentary on general literature, visual art and miscellaneous cultural contribution. i do not pose as an impartial spectator nor an academic critic. i am merely a man-boy who participates in the act of looking at art and generating ideas. and i write poetry. the name of the blog is derived from a faux manuscript made for a poetry workshop given by a mentor, lyn hejinian. the manuscript, though eventually becoming a glorified chapbook, was--in its formative stages--a series of boxes with poems printed on each face of the cube. i ran with the idea of poems as objects and wanted to concretize verse in the most literal way, matching boxes that were stuck inside of each other. cutting and construction of nesting boxes proved unnecessarily taxing, so i settled for naming the book match[ing] box[ing] stick[ing]. this blog attempts, at the digital level, to view cultural artifacts as physical objects with the agency to crush like an anvil or tickle like a feather. i guess we'll see.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

mozart's quickie - ave verum corpus

2 comments:

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