Mark Swed's classical CD and DVD gift guide

Someday the naysayers will be right, of course. Nothing lasts forever. But classical CDs and DVDs remain plentiful, and it was a great year. Buy, wrap and give the real thing while you still can. Downloads make lousy gifts.

“Dinastia Borja” (Alia Vox), a sumptuously illustrated book with three sumptuously recorded CDs of some of the most enthralling Renaissance music you’ve ever heard, may be the one you want for yourself. The latest lavish set from the Catalan viol player and conductor Jordi Savall — and my choice for recording of the year — provides a revelatory survey of the Borgia Dynasty in music from its multicultural origins in medieval Muslim Valencia through 16th century Italy. No, we didn’t invent world music a few years ago.

Click here for a look at more memorable recordings.

-- Mark Swed

Photo of Jordi Savall: AFP/Getty Images

Comments

[Donald Frazell]

No, jazz did, nearly a hundred years ago. Having a little Islamic influence does not equate to World. Wheres the rhythm? But may be good music, sounds interesting, but hardly "world".

[NaFoMS]

Nobody "invented" world music. It has been around for thousands of years. We simply know it better now because our means of communications improved. And rhythm is exactly where it always is in all kinds of music: it is the way musical sounds (and silences between them) are organized in time.

[Donald Frazell]

No, thats the european viewpoint. Just because we define it that way in the dictionary, it aint necessarily so.
Rhythm is the equal and essential driving force of music. It is the structure, the skelton AND muscles. Not just organized spaces between notes, as European music is seperate from others, and not world music in anyway. It was based on the lyre and the flute, harmony and melody, rhythm given a backseat and viewed as gauche. The solitary or unified drums only there to keep a beat, that is NOT rhythm, or a literally retarded view at best.

Taking one music and adding a little bit from another to give it ambiance doesnt make it world music. Literally combining three or more would be more like it, which jazz has always done, European, African, and that "Spanish" tinge. The closest Euros got is Flamenco, being of gypsy-Indian background, and its influence on Spanish classical, especially guitar, pieces. And why Miles Davis "Sketches of Spain" was so successful. Otherwise, jazz musicians look to European classical musics for harmonic development, melody is found many places, and complex rhythmic concepts in Africa and India.

World music is like world art, both came about in their Modern embodiments, and jazz IS modern music, not this absurd Duchamp/Cage nonsense to amuse those with no contact with reality. Too much time and money on some peoples hands to stay attached to the real world. Art is best when musical and poetic, and both when still of the streets, as Bach and Chopin remained. When taken away and isolated it become self absorbed and effette, and loses the power of nature and mankind, and God. Falling into the fallacy of the indivudals feelings as important. Self expression is for children, adults explore our world, and involve ourselves with its growth.

And there lies rhythm. The pulse of life, of communities, of relationships layered and complex, yet truly one. Rhythm is but an organizing principle for control to the European, they have no feel for life but want to impose on it. In colorless sheltered Ivory towers like the Disney, for self importance, and class seperation.

You wnat to hear and feel tru rhytm? Listen to Elvin Jones on Coltrane's Crescent, Coltrane and A Love Supreme CDs, or Tony Williams on Miles, pretty much anything. Their drums interlace with the melody and texturized the harmonies, the colors of music. All are rhythm, where Euros ghettoized rhythm to retarded kettle drums from time to time, and time signatures to organize and give variety. Jazz does all this, and so sythesizes to grow and become more. Europeans musics are incapable, the concepts too far apart, like college kids and mature adults. Ya know,. Like naive artistes waving their newly bought MFAs and claiming 'look at me! I am an artiste!
LMAO. Sadly.

Save the Watts Towers(Nuestro Pueblor) the greatest work of creative Art in LA, tear down the sterile colorless Ivories.

[NaFoMS]

The comment above is an unnecessarily long illustration of a rather obvious fact: when one starts with a couple of twisted definitions and then adds a few erroneous statements, one inevitably and naturally arrives at a bunch of ridiculously ludicrous conclusions.

[Donald Frazell]

Demonstrating what i just explained, Euro types get an A+ for harmonic structure, a B- for melody, and liberally a D for rhythm.

[NaFoMS]

What you "explained" is nothing more than one person's opinion that is in this case based on your own incorrect definitions and most of all on your own personal taste. Fortunately for all "types" of music, neither one of them needs any approval from a self-appointed "evaluator" whose own grades in musical competency are very likely to be conveniently identical with his initials.

[Donald Frazell]

Um, try looking up definitions for rhythm, and you will see that Euros are retarded in the literal sense in its development. Some are so stuck in their own concepts of themselves, and shut off from the rest of the world, they get arrogant and effette. And so no longer art at all. Polyrhytms, cycles, and syncopation are beyond Europes ability, foreign to its birth.

A beat is not a reality, our hearts rhythm ebbs and flows with the emotions and physical movment, time signatures are artificial means to contain melody and harmony, not explore and participate in life. One cannot live with a steady 70 beat per minute heart rate, the pulse being the basis of true rhythm and life. Not the simplistic beat that changes only on mental command.

As a real history major, it's quite evident. As contemporary history is written by the victors, classical types think they are above all else and a continuation of a chain seperate and superior to all others. And so, inbred, and filled with incestuous thoughts. In otherwords, pretty mundane. Every culture and art has its strengths and weaknesses. To think Euro types, who are so arrogant as to always list their mental gymanstics without physicality and passion as "Music" to exclude all others, are the alpha and omega is hilariously absurd. And so Contempt.

art e musica academia delenda est

[NaFoMS]

Different forms of syncopation have been used in European-based music for several hundreds of years and poly-rhythmic structures have been quite prominent in "classical" compositions for well over a century now. You know, df, you really don't have to keep reminding everyone about your ignorance of this subject in every comment - it is already well established here.