I really like this piece. This was the only performance I could find of it on YouTube and I posted it only for the prelude part of the piece. The fugue is much less interesting, I think.
The Well-Tempered Clavier Part 2 No.5 composed by Bach
Archive for the 'Video' Category
I haven’t looked at this site in-depth but I’m Cooked seems like a pretty good idea. Users can upload and share videos of themselves cooking. Christopher Walken even has some videos. I’ll be looking at it further and will try to give a better report later.
I really don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this.
Invention 13 Accordion Solo (UNCUT)
Cooking Terms
Yes, this clip is funny but strangely intriguing. I guess cooks in the 1950’s also didn’t know what basic cooking terms meant (see this post). I also must say that I don’t 100% agree with their definitions of certain cooking terms.
ADDED: Where does one even begin unpacking this little nugget from the 1950’s. It seems to capture every negative and positive stereotype from that era. Obviously, a feminist critique of it would be suitably scathing. The wife is portrayed as a bumbling idiot whose sole purpose in life after marriage is to create an idyllic home life for her husband. So much so that she makes a cake for her spouse for lunch. Who does that???!!!! Also interesting was the fact that the narrator was male while the person demonstrating proper cooking techniques was female. Is it all women who need cooking advice from this benevolent narrator? Also, what’s the deal with the narrator saying, “even Margie” all the time. Is she really that stupid? And nice marital advice, your husband’s first day of work after the honeymoon and you are already encouraged to cover up your mistatkes in the kitchen. Yeah, let’s start keeping secrets early in the marriage-one can’t start that too soon.
But, politics aside, let’s talk about the food. This clip purported to explain a number of cooking terms and it did: cream, stir, beat, fold, boil, soft-ball stage, knead, stew, simmer, braise, dredge, brown, roast, bake, sear, marinate, scald, white sauce, and jelly making. Whew, that’s quite a few cooking concepts to explain in 10 minutes.
What struck me was how poorly all the food looked. The cake was a little lopsided and the frosting was so messy. The braised meats looked like astronaut food. I know some of this has to do with the camera and film quality but considering their cooking methods, I’m not surprised. It brings to mind a book by James Lileks, The Gallery of Regrettable Food (buy here). You won’t believe how poorly food from the 1950’s looked and the ghastly recipes.
I also was struck by the recipe for Scalloped Cauliflower. Why the milk was scalded is beyond me and the incorporation of the milk into the roux (a term the movie did not choose to explain-that’s the fat and flour mixture) was guaranteed to create a lumpy sauce. The cook in the clip didn’t even use a whisk! (Perhaps those did not exist in America then, I suppose, but how do you manage without a whisk?) Plus, I love how the narrator calls for cheese but does not specify what kind of cheese. The whole thing is just so high-flown that the instructions are almost unusuable. No one as idiotic as Margie would be able to make any of those dishes just because she had seen this video. There’s just not enough detail in the clip to provide any sort of real cooking advice.
Finally, I am mystified as to their distinction between the terms braise and stew. Apparently, braising requires a dredge in flour while stewing does not. That distinction just doesn’t do it for me. I am also similarly mystified by their description of marinating. The instruction is to saturate the food you mean to marinade. I found that to be a rather curious term to use becuase, to me, saturation means a lot of liquid in proportion to the amount of food. In fact, there is so much liquid so as to make sure that the food is unable to absord any more liquid. Seems like a poor way to make vegetables-I imagine soggy, over-flavored veggies. Uggghhh.
ADDED: I forgot that Mr. Lileks has some very regrettable food on his website here. Check it out; both for the pictures and the commentary.
Invention No.1 BWV772 (J.S. Bach)
This little video highlight many of the aspects that I love about this piece and Johann Sebastian Bach in general. In music, an invention is simply a short composition with a two-part counterpoint. (I am no music scholar so I’ll just leave it at that.) Bach wrote 15 Inventions (along with 15 Sinfonias, which are compositions with three-part counterpoint). He wrote them (in 1723) as training exercises for his students. This is his inscription from the collection:
Straightforward Instruction, in which amateurs of the keyboard, and especially the eager ones, are shown a clear way not only (1) of learning to play cleanly in two voices, but also, after further progress, (2) of dealing correctly and satisfactorily with three obbligato parts; at the same time not only getting good inventiones, but developing the same satisfactorily, and above all arriving at a cantabile manner in playing, all the while acquiring a strong foretaste of composition.
Well, enough about the technical aspects of the piece. What I wanted to write about was why I love this piece so very much. Bach’s music, even in these simplest forms, exhibit a clarity of idea and soundness of structure that is astounding. In this piece, he takes a simple motif of this:
and turns it into something sublime and complex but still pleasing to the ear. It is just so well ordered that even while playing the Invention on other instruments (the pieces were written for piano students) like two guitars the pleasantness and sheer musicality of the piece is not diminished.
And order, I think, is the key concept in Bach’s music that appeals to me. He is able to take similar or disparate voices and weave them into a single orderly piece that still retains the identity of the individual voices. He is, in short, able to find order in a messy world and that is rather refreshing to hear in this world we live in.
Last note: I watched a French film named Chaos awhile back. The end credits were scored by Bach’s Aria from his Goldberg Variations. I thought it was a perfect salve to the utter disorder of the lives of the characters in the film. If you have a free night, try to watch it. It’s not a bad film and I’d love to hear if others had a similar reaction to the choice of that piece.
Gould plays Goldberg Variations var.26-30 & Aria Da Capo
I am always eager to share J. S. Bach’s music when I can. These pieces are the end of his Goldberg Variations, which I find to be absolutely enthralling. I also am a great admirer of Glenn Gould. This video does a great job of showing off his virtuosity.
