Phil Christman

In honor of the thirty pages I must turn in Monday, and of my many comrades who will spend their weekend hunched, like me, over a keyboard, I offer four bits of music that don’t excessively distract but also won’t lie back and be wallpaper, either.

John Adams’s Grand Pianola Music is hard to describe, though “Grand” is definitely among the right words. He has written of being influenced by the experience of walking up and down the hallways of conservatory practice rooms, hearing a “sonic blur of twenty or more pianos playing Chopin, Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, Hanon, Rachmaninov, and much more.” This is a sonic blur of awesomeness.

Then on the other hand, maybe I’m in the mood for intensely repetitive hypnotic Krautrock. In which case I’ve found this particular hipster touchstone pleasant, in a forbidding, Germanic, eat-your-cabbage kind of way.

Thomas Tallis’s forty-voice motet begins softly, then, with infinite subtlety, as if it has just begun to overhear itself, it calls, responds, corresponds, amplifies, until by degrees it has grown into a sonic structure that dominates the room. Surely, this is what Creation sounded like.

To begin and end an inspirational session of just about anything, there’s Caetano Veloso’s “Ile Aiye,” possibly the happiest song ever recorded. Plus (extra special bonus) adorably hip college kids class up a recital with a little Tropicalia.