Amazon's computer emailed me today, offering for my consideration a book I'd never heard of before: The Craft of Modal Composition, by Thomas Benjamin. The author instructs readers on how music before the High Baroque style worked, most especially sacred music by folks such as Palestrina and earlier.

Which brings back memories.

In high school Music Theory class we were instructed (briefly) on classic theory, and given the assignment of an old hymn to set in four-part harmony. I set it as if I were Josquin, apparently; the teacher said I should've been born in the Renaissance.

Not long after I was composing piano music in a post-tonal, neo-modal style, where melodies and harmonies flitted around on keys rather than in them. It was only recently that I figured out the mechanisms of the classical style. This, despite my love of Haydn!

Perhaps my love of neo-classical music, with its do-it-wrong-on-purpose procilivity, infected me too early. I went from 1580 to 1920 just without much trouble.

In the mail today a number of books came in. One, I believe, came courtesy of Amazon. Here they are:

• Invariances, by Robert Nozick
• The End of Barbary Terror, by Frederick C. Leiner
• Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams

How many are for work, and how many for pleasure? All three are for both, of course.

One of the more pleasant extraneous things about going to an orchestral concert — far more pleasant than dressing up or sipping champagne from plastic glasses — is listening to the warming-up period, before the performance, and during intermissions. I like the tuning-up sound clouds, too. It's a pleasant sort of cacaphony, like a frog chorus or cicada gamelan.

Now some guy's recorded a whole bunch of these, and calls them his compositions. Oh, well . . . if John Cage can claim four minutes and a few odd seconds as his own. . . .

The Firebird is the first work by Igor Stravinsky I heard as a rational being. (When I was a kid, my older sister played The Rite of Spring on the old hi-fi; but I barely remember such sessions. I was not of the age of reason, yet, and not ready to accept either Apollonian or Dionysian music for what either are worth.) Now I'm listening to Stravinsky's first ballet again, in a performance conducted by Ernest Ansermet.

Two things:

1. This is very odd music, the whole ballet. The suites constructed from the complete ballet are more sylistically uniform.




2. This performance is excellent.

It's good to get back to the beginning and re-experience delights one first had when young.

I'm nicely surprised by the performance by L'Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under the baton of Ernest Ansermet, of Sibelius's Fourth Symphony. Lighter touch than usual. It almost feels of a kind with the Sixth Symphony, an affinity I hadn't noticed before. (I had previously bought into the idea that this symphony was enigmatic and daring and all that; not pastoral!)

I've just started listening to the new box set, Ernest Ansermet: Decca Recordings 1953-1967. The Sibelius follows performance of Stravinsky's Pulcinella Suite, also not bad. (The first disc featured a Bach piece, a brisk-but-elegant performance of Haydn's Philosopher, and a well-directed but not quite well-performed rendition of Beethoven's great Fourth Symphony. I'll be listening to this disc a lot, I'm sure, despite its flaws.)

I cut my Stravinskian teeth on Ansermet's interpretations of Stravinsky masterworks, on LP, years and years ago. Now it's interesting to hear Ansermet again, eons later. I can hardly wait to crack open another Decca set I just got, an eight-CD box set of Ansermet doing Stravinsky classics.

Why buy this set too? Because I just can't get enough Stravinsky? (Close.) But the answer is a bit different: I've never heard the one-act opera Mavra, and it's included. Still, I'll be keeping that as a treat; I've a lot of music to go through before I get to that final CD.

Besides, I would have to take Sibelius's Fourth off my queue long enough, wouldn't I?

Chris Sciabarra often features a song of the day on his Not a Blog blog. Today I'll echo his program, featuring one of my favorite songs, Es sang vor langen Jarhen, by Arvo Pärt. I've nothing really to say about it, other than that it is very beautiful.

I don't listen to songs much. I usually prefer music without voices. As I type these words, another Pärt piece hits my ears via headset: Fratres. It is even better than the song.

Joshua Bell — classical music's prettiest (er, handsomest?) male violinist — busks in Washington, D.C., and almost no one notices:

Bell earned $32 and change. The Post quotes him as saying, "That's not so bad, considering. That's 40 bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn't have to pay an agent."

Or, ahem, taxes.

The event was pitched to Bell as a test of whether, in an unlikely setting, "ordinary people would recognize genius." Whether or not she recognized his genius, at least Brazil native Edna Souza, who has been shining shoes at L'Enfant Plaza for six years, recognized something unusual. She dislikes buskers — she says they are make too much noise and prevent her from talking with her customers, which isn't good for business.

But asked about Joshua Bell, she says while he was also "too loud," "he was pretty good, that guy. It was the first time I didn't call the police."

I had never heard of the composer before hearing his work, a French Horn Concerto. It is magnificent! His basic approach strikes me as sound (ha!), and his stories of George Antheil might even interest those not interested in his music.

There exists great music for concert band. And some of it doesn't even sound like band music!

It's the Sousa Sound that is what I think of as the classic sound of the band, and it is limiting. Oh, sure, Vaughan Williams and Holst wrote great music for it, such as their suites. But those suites still sound like band music, resembling nothing less than the close cousins to Sousa's marches.

And I'm not saying I don't like Sousa. But still, the Sousa Sound is not something I often seek when I seek good music.

Well, there are works for the ensemble that don't sound like what we've come to expect. Holst's Hammersmith, for example.

But I've just heard Vincent Persichetti's Masquerade. And what a great work it is. And how little like band music it sounds! I didn't even notice that it wasn't orchestral for the first few minutes of listening.

So, I add it to Hindemith's Symphony in B-Flat, Hovhaness's Symphony No. 4, and a handful of other works that stretch the medium, that don't echo everything else you've heard from the band.

I just listened to it on my favorite Live365 station, which is now playing (as I type) Poulence's great and glorious Gloria.

(You may notice I put in a lot of Amazon links. I do this in the course of spellchecking the works I cite; it comes second nature, now. I don't really do it for the money, which hasn't kept me overflowing in CDs or books. But hey: if you really want to throw a few pennies my way, just click to buy on Amazon. Or go to wirkman.com (the once and future home of my never-ending e-garage sale) and use the search button there.)

Yesterday was an Honegger day. I attended a performance of the oratorio King David at the Trinity Episcopal Church in northwest Portland. On the way home, listening to my iPod, I had my first chance to really give Honegger's Symphony No. 4a listen; I had purchased the work recorded on CD the previous month, but had not properly given it my full attention until the wet, dark drive home.

King David was magnificent. This is very good music, and the marches and choral sections, especially, were well done. The narrator in the performance was spectacular, and I was also greatly impressed with the musicians and singers, especially the choir, which performed flawlessly. And everybody in the audience enjoyed the over-the-top performance of the woman who played the Witch of Endor.

The oratorio may not get judged my favorite such work of the 20th century; it is, though, on par with Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, if not quite up there with Milhaud's Les Choéphores or Stravinsky's Persephone (the latter being, I believe, the most under-appreciated work by this great composer; the former being the greatest utterly serious effort by that prolific genius). Which is good company. (Note that most judges would place Stravinsky's Sophoclean drama on top. I do not, though I'm a big Stravinsky fan. I just don't agree with most critics, I guess. To me, Stravinsky's Persephone is his greatest work in the opera-oratorio tradition. Could it be that is because it is his most lyrical work, his most tuneful, his most sumptuous?)

The Honegger symphony is something else again. It is the most French of this Swiss-French composer's symphonies. Amusing, in that it is subtitled Deliciae Basilienses, or Delights of Basle, and thus constitutes one of the great symphonic-form tributes to a specific place. (My favorite being, I guess, Bohuslav Martinu's Sinfonietta La Jolla.)

I still think Arthur Honegger's greatest symphony is his second, the one for strings, with ad libitum trumpet at the end. His fifth, subtitled Di Tre Re, or on three D's, is generally considered his weakest, but is, I think, a grand example of absolutely flawless technique that is cerebral enough that most performances can't grab the attention of most listeners; I'm finding it I like it more and more each time heard, though. (Someday, it may become my favorite of Honegger's symphonies; only time and repeated listenings will tell.)

All in all, an Honegger Day is a good day!

One of my favorite pieces of recent music for piano is a short piece called Anxiety. It's written by my cousin, and you can hear a student perform it by downloading it (click the LISTEN link to the piece) from her site.

I liked it the first time I heard it. I have it in my iPod queue, and it often comes up to my ears. I've grown to like it more, even though it's a tricky piece to play, and I've not even mastered the first few phrases yet (what a hopeless pianist I am!)...

The rest of the suite has never grabbed me that much (though it obviously has merit), but what I like about the piece is pretty obvious: it's theme is a great little (if rather strange) melody.

Other piano music on my iPod's playlist? Well, music by Henry Cowell (Anger Dance, Banshee, Three Irish Legends, Aeolian Harp), George Antheil (Jazz Sonata), Leo Ornstein (Suicide in an Airplane), John Adams (Phrygian Gates), Claude Debussy (Preludes, Images), Frederic Rzewski (Down by the Riverside, Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues), and William Bolcom (Graceful Ghost Rag).

And that's just my green iPod mini; my silver one has a completely different collection.

But no matter how much I may like the obviously great works by the great composers of the last century, I still keep coming back to Anxiety. I'm not an anxious person . . . any longer. I'm no longer working for employers doing things I'd rather not be doing. So my anxiety level is very low. But this piece called Anxiety . . . it captures a stance in the world that I find . . . congenial. Its odd rhythm (5/4, syncopated), its perfect resolution of its first dissonance (non-diatonic!), its ABA form (making the asymmetric symmetrical by formal organization!), these work together to artfully strike an off-kilter kind of spiritual poise.

I've tried to capture this odd feeling in some of my own compositions, but have not succeed as well as has composer Andrea L. Reinkemeyer. (And early in her career, to boot.)

I would like to hear a professional performance of the work. As it is, I still struggle with trying to play it myself. Maybe if I learn it, I could sneak into a piano store and play it on the instrument it almost demands, a nine-foot Bösendorfer.

My sister heard violinist Leila Josefowicz perform John Adams's great concerto a while back. Barefoot (the violinist, not my sister). Now I see this violinist has a CD out. Might be worth checking, comparing to the first CD recording of that work.

For seven seconds I had mistakenly thought I was listening to the music of Aaron Copland. Radioio was playing over iTunes, and a new piece came on, and my brain quickly flashed Copland.

But my brain was wrong. Seven or so seconds later, I identified the work as Charles Ives's Third Symphony.

Yes, this first work of Americana in the quasi-modernist sense can be mistaken, for a short period of time at least, with music of Copland.

Or perhaps my synapses just misfired.