Reich

2.     Tehillim. Auditory canals were awash with the sounds of Philip Glass in my twenties, not for wanting to hear them always but because they were unavoidable. I didn’t quite know at the time that Glass was just one composer in so-called American minimalism that included Terry Riley, John Adams, and Steve Reich. Minimal is the last word you would use to describe the gargantuan, even Wagnerian, efforts made by some of these people subsequently. Steve Reich’s music confronted me from the start because it was at once raw, repetitive in beautiful ways, and simultaneously free and structured. His ensemble music must be a workout for the performers but for me, who is musically incompetent, this music is a ride. I play Reich’s piece using parts of Psalms 18, 19, 34, and 150 at least a couple of times a year. Although full of effect and affect, it is completely unaffected. TehiIlim was released on ECM in 1982, so I would have purchased it about then from the Melbourne University Bookroom, which had a record department upstairs. You can see its orange SECURITY sticker. That creambrick add-on to the Law Buildings has since been demolished, in the interests of better public space and visual harmony. The round red sticker denotes that the album belongs to me and not someone else in the shared student housing we turned into Carlton bohemia during that period. You can’t do that anymore, the rents are too high. Hal-le-lu-hu ba-tzil-tz-lay-sha-mah, as the Psalmist sings, Praise Him with sounding cymbals.

Shostakovich

Russian jazz flourished a time then vanished,

Memory of what could have been, that now

Too soon keeps beat to how the state allows

Tightrope sonatas, acclaimed or banished.

Fluttering phantoms of the silent screen

Pay the impoverished improvisor

With minutes of trills, hours the wiser:

Entrance hat-trick steam-train exit has-been.

Songs exiled in the middle of the night

Never to return, return on the keyboard –

Listen to them, paralysed once with fright.

Preludes a survivor has-been has

And slams against a wall (for the record)

Momentous threnodies, some Russian jazz.

Beatles

1.     A Hard Day’s Night. This is happening because I was asked and because I'd like to. I must post ten albums that “greatly influenced my taste in music.” I will defy the rules and talk about these recordings, drawing only from albums in my own collection. All the Beatles albums are brilliant. Time and familiarity does not dull them because we are in the middle of a creative storm direct to tape. This one is my first big sound at-home encounter with the Parlophone masterpieces. They are doing several things at once. They are merging the elements of existing American rock and roll into combinations of voice and sound that transform it into something higher and more thrilling. They are replacing hackneyed English lyric with a cross of street talk and BBC comedy that takes everyone by surprise. They comprise a band of four vocalists who can all compose and improvise at a moment’s notice. Our family saw the film at the Queenscliff Cinema that summer and I remember the main effect being well, the music, but equally the fact that these people everything they said and did was utterly hilarious. That Goons-like infectiousness is another underlying element of their perennial charm.