Name: Orson Welles reads Walt Whitman by brainpicker
Duration: 3 min 28 s
Description: Background, context, and poem text: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/28/orson-welles-reads-walt-whitman-song-of-myself/

From the album Sometimes out November 13, 2015 on Western Vinyl.  Vinyl LP format will be out on January 22, 2016.

Pre-order:
CD/LP http://westernvinyl.com/shop/wv138
iTunes hyperurl.co/d3h29c
Amazon hyperurl.co/56ffvu

Rare live performance in New York on November 27th at Le Poisson Rouge w/ Lubomyr Melnyk

Golmund:
Label page http://westernvinyl.com/artists/goldmund
Twitter https://twitter.com/Goldmund
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/keith.kenniff
Instagram https://instagram.com/kenniffs/
Artist site http://www.unseen-music.com/

Raised in the rural town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Keith Kenniff aka Goldmund started playing piano at age 20, while studying percussion at Boston’s Berklee College of Music.  Though he may not be a household name, Kenniff's evocative, distinctly American music has become quietly ubiquitous in the past few years, often appearing on NPR, in films, on TV, and in ads for Apple, Facebook, and Google among others.  As an artist who spends a great deal of his time producing music for others, it might be surprising to find out that when he has the opportunity to relax and re-center himself, he often chooses to produce music for himself.  Recorded over the course of three years, the material on his new album Sometimes functions as a journal, documenting brief moments in Kenniff's day when he could turn to the piano as a source of solace and unending creative possibilities.  Kenniff wrote and recorded everything on the album with the exception of the track "A Word I Give", which is a collaboration with preeminent Japanese pianist Ryuichi Sakamoto, who once described Goldmund's music as “…so, so, so beautiful…”.  

Kenniff's pseudonym is taken from the Herman Hesse novel Narcissus and Goldmund in which the Goldmund character leaves the cloister where he was living and studying in search of meaning for his life.  The story resonated with Kenniff when he was searching for a moniker to represent his solo piano work, "I think the way I approached the piano was in the same way: impulsive—searching and feeling things out in the dark."  On Sometimes he continues his explorations in the dark; each of the album's 17 pieces were improvised, and recorded in one or two takes, often late at night, after work-for-hire was finished, and the kids were in bed.  In an interview with NPR's Weekend Edition Keith Kenniff discussed his appreciation of Civil War era music, and it's ability to covey "…so much story in so few notes."  Similarly, these improvisations manage to be richly evocative despite their technical and compositional simplicity, using subtle details and dynamics to express what might otherwise be inexpressible.  

Throughout Sometimes, Kenniff fully employs the wabi-sabi aesthetic that has always defined Goldmund recordings.  "I like mistakes, I like when things don't go perfectly. I do have a tendency to want for things to be perfect and precise, but I have to also realize that a lot of things I like about music and art are very rough and impulsive, the slight imperfections that give something or someone a unique voice," says Kenniff.  He goes on to explain that these pieces served as a way for him to "step outside of whatever I was doing and return back to a place of discovery very much like when I first started playing."  As we follow him on his path of discovery, we get a glimpse into the world of a young man expressing his myriad feelings and experiences with honesty, and inherently imperfect gestures, which is part of what makes them so relatable and powerful — the local, for a few moments, resonating with the universal. 

Goldmund - "As Old Roads"

Background, context, and poem text: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/28/orson-welles-reads-walt-whitman-song-of-myself/

CONTEXT / POEM TEXT

Orson Welles reads Walt Whitman

Ebb & Flow

The Secret Lighthouse

Music Director Jaap van Zweden is joined by pianist Yefim Bronfman in a performance of Beethoven's 2nd piano concerto. The concert was recorded live on January 22, 2019, and concluded with Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 2.

BEETHOVEN: Concerto for Piano No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 19
Yefim Bronfman, Piano

RACHMANINOFF: Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27

Jaap van Zweden, Conductor

NYP 19-32

Host: Alec Baldwin
Producer: Mark Travis
Executive Producer: Vince Ford
Underwriters: Kaplan Brothers Fund; Audrey Love Charitable Foundation; The National Endowment for the Arts; MetLife Foundation

Photo credit: Chris Lee

Jaap van Zweden Conducts Beethoven and Rachmaninoff

You can learn to play this piece. FREE scores and parts, among other materials, are available online: kronosquartet.org/fifty-for-the-future

Composed by Zakir Hussain
Arranged by Reena Esmail
Performed by Kronos Quartet and Zakir Hussain
© 2017 Kronos Arts Publishing
℗ 2019 Kronos Performing Arts Association
Commissioned for Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire

Produced by Kronos Quartet and Reshena Liao
Recorded August 2018 at 25th Street Recording, Oakland, CA
Engineered by Zach Miley
Assistant engineer: Gabriel Shepard
Mixed by Zach Miley and David Harrington at Decibelle Recording, San Francisco, CA

Zakir Hussain - Pallavi

This is a piano solo piece inspired by situation of isolation due to coronavirus outbreak that is being taken globally. The melody of this piano song fluctuates between sweet and bitter, fear, calmness and uncertainty. It is tender but harmful at the same time.

Isolated

Liam Mour - Dreaming Of A Better Place

Composed, Produced, Mixed by Liam Mour
Mastered by Zino Mikorey

© ℗ 2021 Ode To Youth

www.odetoyouth.net
www.odetoyouth.bandcamp.com
www.instagram.com/liammour_

contact: info@odetoyouth.net

Dreaming Of A Better Place

In 1968, Dr. Bernie Krause was leading a booming music career. A prodigiously talented musician and early master of the electronic synthesizer, Krause was busy working with artists like the Doors and the Beach Boys and performing iconic effects for blockbuster films. Then Warner Brothers commissioned him to create an album incorporating the sounds of wild habitats, so he headed into Muir Woods with his recording equipment. What he heard changed his life and triggered a fifty-year odyssey.

Then and there, Krause decided that he wanted spend the rest of his life recording and archiving the music of wild animals and wild places. He quit Hollywood and began traveling the world. The soundscapes he recorded were full of epiphanies about the origin of our own culture and music, about the profound connectedness of creatures, and about the unseen tolls of human activity. Previous wildlife recordings isolated the calls of individual creatures, but Krause recorded habitats as a whole. He soon proposed a new theory of ecosystem functioning: that each species produces unique acoustic signatures, partitioning and occupying sonic niches such that the singing of all of the creatures in a healthy ecosystem can be heard, organized like players in an orchestra. 

Today, Krause’s astonishing archive contains sounds made by more than 15,000 species. It is, as The New Yorker aptly put it, “an auditory Library of Alexandria for everything non-human." Fifty percent of the recorded habitats no longer exist due to habitat destruction, climate change, and human din. We spoke with Krause about the beauty of and perils facing wild music, the extraordinary science of soundscape ecology, and how sound impacts the welfare of animals. The music in this episode is from Wild Sanctuary (www.wildsanctuary.com).

Orson Welles reads Walt Whitman

brainpicker

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