An old idea… a new perspective

For a rather dramatic contrast to the Schnittke Concerto Grosso that I wrote about a few weeks ago, take the Ligeti Violin Concerto. Here is a piece that was written only a little more than a decade after the Schnittke, but represents pretty much all that is wrong with contemporary music in general.

One of the main concepts behind the work is altered tunings: the solo violin and a solo viola are tuned just slightly flat and the other orchestral instruments are asked to deliberately play out of tune at various times.

Wow, what a concept, right!? I suppose this is all very rigorous and academically sophisticated, but the end result of asking musicians to play out of tune is that the music sounds, well, bad. I know we could get into a whole debate about how the Western system of equal temperament is just an arbitrary set of rules that is not found anywhere else in the world. That’s all well and good, but it does happen to be what we’re used to, and a violin concerto that is played out of tune tends to sound a bit wrong.

I suppose one can’t deny that Ligeti’s concerto is extraordinarily well put-together, and that any ensemble that manages to perform it deserves congratulations for the technical feat. But as always I go back to my own rather subjective set of criteria: is the music enjoyable? The answer in this case is a hearty “no.” Even though it’s really not all that long of a concerto, I found myself bored through most of it. The only part that has any redeeming qualities is the rather lovely folksong-inspired second movement. Unfortunately even that gets out of hand a few minutes in, as a battery of screechingly mis-tuned ocarinas enter the fray.

Finally, I want to take issue with Ligeti’s absurd tempo indications. As is often the case with his music, fast passages are qualified with some totally inappropriate adjective: in the case of the first movement we have “Vivacissimo luminoso.” At first I was all set to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Luminous” sounds pleasant right? Unfortunately, the music is nothing of the kind. It’s grating, dissonant and chaotic, sure… but luminous?

In the end I’m always left wondering with this kind of music: how did it come to this? How did it get to the point that this is what passes for great concert music these days? I don’t think it will have any staying power in the long term, but I can’t account for the level of interest it receives from soloists and conductors. I also can’t figure out why anybody would write this sort of thing to begin with. I’m not just referring to Ligeti either: Stockhausen, Boulez, some Berio, Xenakis, Elliott Carter, Morton Feldman… the list goes on. I hope that we see 21st century composers move in a different direction, back towards what actual people find appealing to listen to, rather than what a small group of academics think is “good for us” or “important.”

I was amused this morning by the following passage from a book review in International Piano magazine:

Hamilton [the author of the book being reviewed] further complains about what he calls the current “obsession with urtext editions and urtext playing. Dare we say that the composer need not always have the final word?” Although pianist-composers like Rachmaninoff made recordings which strayed from their own published scores, in my view this hardly justifird [um, hello IP editors?] allowing all pianists license to follow suit. Generally speaking, the reason musicians follow the word of score is because composers should have the “final word.”

Of course there will never be any resolution to this debate, but it keeps on going and going anyway! The thing I found funny about the above is the author’s admission that Rachmaninov himself deviated from his own printed scores. What further proof does one need that the score isn’t the be-all and end-all?! I suppose the literalist argument would go that only Rachmaninov had the right to alter his scores, but isn’t the point that the printed score doesn’t represent the composer’s final intentions with complete, infallible accuracy?

And I love the author’s closing statement: (to paraphrase) “Some people argue that the printed score isn’t the composer’s ‘final word.’ Well, those people are wrong becuase it is!” A powerful argument! Case closed, right?

I recently read an article about a so-called “re-performance” of Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of the Goldberg Variations. A company called Zenph has developed a process whereby they claim to “precisely” recreate a musical performance from a recording. The details concerning exactly how they attempt this are a little sketchy, but I gather it has to do with translating the recorded audio into MIDI, and then having some people listen back to it and tailor the digitized version to match the original.

I’ve got several problems with this. First and foremost, I dislike the inherent dishonesty in marketing this as some sort of “lost” performance of Gould’s. It is emphatically not Glenn Gould playing on the Zenph recording. I might as well sit around at home with a MIDI sequencer and cobble together a performance that matches Gould’s articulation, tempos and phrasing, which is pretty much what Zenph is doing. What I get in the end is me copying Gould, not another version of something Gould did.

The second issue here is that the Zenph recording doesn’t sound very good at all. They allow you to download some MP3s from their site, so I compared what they did with the real Gould’s 1955 and 1981 recordings. The Zenph sound is inexplicably muted and there is zero life to the “interpretation.” As if that wasn’t bad enough, there are some messed-up, computery-sounding rough spots in Variation 11. Gould would have been incapable of playing something so unmusically!

So fine, this company wants to experiment with technology a little bit. They just need to keep two things in mind: they are not recreating anything remotely resembling a Gould performance, and what they have come up with is generally unmusical and lifeless. For anyone that wants to hear some real music making, and is bothered by the scratchy sound of Gould’s 1955 recording: go get the 1981 version. The sound quality is pristine and the interpretation is stunning! I would skip Zenph except as purely a curiosity.

ETA: The glowing reviews Zenph includes on their Glenn Gould page are all quoted from audiophile publications. Interesting to note that no music reviewers are recommending the recording!

ETA2: Here’s a good article about the experience of hearing a “re-performance” “live”: NY Times.

I’ve been listening to Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No. 1 over the last few days. I’ve always loved his Piano Concerto, but it’s taken me a bit longer to get into the Concerto Grosso. I admit it does get off to a slow start ~ the opening Preludio is very slow, abstract and serious. It’s brilliantly done, but it doesn’t necessarily grab one’s attention right away. That being said, the following Toccata is a work of genius. Schnittke perfectly blends neo-Baroque, tonal passages with other material that is completely avant-garde. The end result is very accessible modern music that remains enjoyable to listen to without compromising its late-20th century aesthetic.

Think that sounds good? Well, hang on, there’s more: the 5th movement Rondo. Here’s where the “mad genius” title comes in. I can’t think of a single other 20th century work that is as insanely original, as emotionally intense and as extraordinarily well-composed as this. The word I keep coming back to to describe it is, well… “demented.” I know that sounds bad, but if you hear the music you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. The recording I have is of the New Stockholm Chamber Orchestra, and I enjoy it very much ~ it’s a great performance of an extremely difficult work, and the sound quality is excellent.

A few weeks ago I found an incredibly useful site that houses a complete collection of all the first editions of Chopin’s music: www.cfeo.org.uk/apps/. Seeing the variations between editions is highly valuable, and many things that are confusing (or just plain wrong) about the ubiquitous Paderewski edition are nicely clarified. Two examples spring immediately to mind:

1. Paderewski (or his editorial board) for some reason reports that the original German printing of Op. 10/2 shows a metronome mark of 114. The first page clearly shows 144 though, in agreement with the other two editions.

2. In resounding support of Charles Rosen’s thesis about the first-movement repeat in the Sonata, Op. 35 (found in The Romantic Generation), two of the three first editions show that it clearly goes back to the Grave, not the doppio movemento. The repeat sign is most definitely a misprint in the German edition.

It’s all very fascinating ~ anybody interested in Chopin should check the site out!

My recording of Eric Moe’s Legend of the Sad Triad (winner of the 2007 music+culture Competition for Composers) is finally available! For now it’s just up on the music+culture site, but it will be coming to iTunes, eMusic and Amazon in the next few months. Check it out: www.musicandculture.org/media/.

Two nights ago I finished recording both Eric Moe’s Legend of the Sad Triad and the Five Sketches in Sepia by Bloch. I’m delighted with the sound I captured this time around ~ I’m very fortunate to have a resonant space to record in, wonderful equipment and of course one of the greatest pianos ever built!

I really love both the Moe and the Bloch. They’re pianistically expert and beautifully expressive and evocative. I plan on releasing the Moe online as a single in the coming weeks. It will be joined shortly by the rest of the repertoire I’ve been discussing in my last few blog posts, to make for a full CD. Stay tuned!

I just listened for the first time to the Busoni Violin Sonata, Op. 36a. What a stunning work! Even after only one listening, I wouldn’t hesitate to say that this is one of the greatest pieces of music ever written. The writing is serene, masterful and every moment possesses profound spiritual depth.

The sonata is about 30 minutes long, with 18 of those taken up by the 3rd (and final) movement, a set of variations on a Bach Chorale. Although over a quarter of an hour looks on paper to be awfully long for a slow final movement, I was riveted the entire time. The concluding few bars are unbelievably beautiful and follow perfectly from everything that came before.

The music is very German in feeling, although Busoni allows himself far more flexibility than Brahms ever did. In fact, I would say this sonata’s direct predecessors are Beethoven’s last piano sonatas, specifically Op. 109 and 111. One might think they would be an impossible model to follow, but Busoni somehow pulls it off!

After a few too many delays I’m finally ready to set a date for recording my next album: the Thanksgiving holiday! It’s been hard to find time recently to get in a few sessions, but I’ll have a nice break towards the end of November to focus on recording. The repertoire I’ll be playing remains the same: Copland, Krenek, Webern, Bloch and Moe. I’m feeling good about how all the music is sounding, and I’m also very fortunate to have the best piano in the world to record on! Stay tuned for more details coming up very soon…

I just learned that Amazon has opened up an MP3 download service! And when they say “MP3,” they mean it ~ the files they’re selling are totally unencumbered by digital rights management, unlike the offerings from either iTunes or Zune. It’s not a huge inconvenience to circumvent the DRM on files bought from those services, but if I can get them that way to begin with, so much the better! As it stands, the selection at Amazon doesn’t match iTunes as far as classical music, but I’m sure they’ll continue to add to their library over the coming months.

If I have the choice I will now always buy music from either Amazon or using iTunes Plus. I’m just one person out of millions of music fans, but I think it’s important to send the message to the media companies that audio without DRM is vastly preferable to the consumer.

The only possible question I can think to raise about the Amazon service is how they share revenue with the label/artist. iTunes is actually extraordinary fair, with the artist getting about 70% of the price of the album or track. I have a feeling Amazon will be offering similar terms, but I’d be interested to get confirmation.

So, check Amazon’s out classical section: http://www.amazon.com/b/ref=dm_hp_brg_lk7/002-7886745-1728055?ie=UTF8&node=195264011

On a side note, I have to take this opportunity to publicly shame subscription-based music services like Rhapsody and some of the MusicNet partners about their payment to artists. Every time somebody streams a track on one of these sites, the artist gets $0.01! One cent!! I guess you could say “Well, if the music is popular it will start adding up,” but that’s simply not realistic.

Let’s say 1000 people listen to one track or another from your album every single day, all year. That’s $3650, which isn’t bad I guess. But, what independent artist can claim that kind of listener base? My feeling is that it would be nearly impossible to maintain enough momentum to rely on that much consistent interest. Anyway, look at it this way: if one person buys one track from iTunes, that’s $0.70 for the artist. The only way to get the same income from the subscription services is to have 70 people listen to the same track (or 35 listen twice or whatever). You have to multiply your audience by a factor of 7000% to get the same amount of money! Ridiculous.

Anyway, to sum up: Amazon, good, subscription music services, bad!

This is going to be a two part post. Part one is another lovely quote from the Sketch of a New Aesthetic for Music:

But all arts, resources and forms ever aim at the one end, namely, the imitation of nature and the interpretation of human feelings.

Part two builds on this idea and is about Busoni’s monumental Piano Concerto, Op. 39. The work is becoming increasingly well-known these days, and it certainly gives people a lot to talk about. It’s over 70 minutes long, has men’s chorus at the end and is without a doubt one of the most technically difficult things ever written for piano. I’ve been studying it quite a bit recently and have now listened to four different recordings. What I discovered is very interesting, and it ties in with Busoni’s deeply held beliefs about the art of music.

The first recording I ever heard of the concerto was of David Lively and the SWF Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden conducted by Michael Gielen. Not particularly well-known names, but the performance is absolutely stunning. I return to their version again and again and I never tire of it. With this as the baseline that all other interpretations have to measure themselves against, I’ve compared Hamelin, Ohlsson and Ogdon to see if they offer any new insights.

Each pianist (and conductor of course) does their own thing with certain passages, and I’m certainly glad that people are experimenting and trying different approaches. However, what ends up happening in each case is that I, as a listener, become much too aware of the pianist and the physical feats they’re accomplishing. All three recordings are models of technical prowess (as of course is David Lively’s), especially given the fact that the concerto is extraordinarily difficult. However, one of the interesting things about Busoni’s music is that it has nothing to do with athleticism or technical brilliance. From beginning to end the concerto is a profoundly spiritual work, a deep evocation of, as Busoni said, “nature and human feeling.”

Hamelin, Ohlsson and Ogdon all hint at this, but each one is at various times led astray by just how well they play the piano. I think Hamelin is especially guilty in this regard, with so many little self-conscious tics that only serve to distract me from the overall architecture of the music.

I suppose that’s the ultimate irony of this concerto. It’s incredibly virtuosic and the piano part never lets up, but that isn’t what it’s about at all. The 4th movement in particular verges on the absurd in its piling on of difficulty after difficulty (and culminating with the choice of an “easy” cadenza or a “hard” one: no choice at all really, since no self-respecting pianist would take the easy way out so late in the game). However, despite all this, I don’t think it should ever be apparent that the pianist is doing anything remarkable or out of the ordinary. The musical, poetic and philosophical ideas must hold sway above all else. When they are correctly emphasized and allowed to take flight the music achieves its rightful place as one of the most brilliant works even conceived, in any medium. On the other hand (and this goes for Liszt too), if the mundane is allowed to take precedence over the poetic the whole thing comes crashing down and loses most of its essence in the process. In which case you have 65 minutes of tedium and maybe 5 minutes of nice melodies. It’s a risky endeavor and basically an all-or-nothing proposition!

I just read Busoni’s Sketch of a New Aesthetic for Music for the first time this morning. It’s just overflowing with beautiful ideas about music and creativity, but this passage in particular really stood out for me as conveying a powerful truth:

The audible presentation, the “performance,” of music, its emotional interpretation, derives from those free heights whence descended the Art itself. Where the art is threatened by earthliness, it is the part of interpretation to raise it and reendow it with its primordial essence.

Notation, the writing out of compositions, is primarily an ingenious expedient for catching an inspiration, with the purpose of exploiting it later. But notation is to improvisation as the portrait to the living model. It is for the interpreter to resolve the rigidity of the signs into the primitive emotion.

But the lawgivers require the interpreter to reproduce the rigidity of the signs; they consider his reproduction the nearer to perfection, the more closely it clings to the signs.

What the composer’s inspiration necessarily loses through notation, his interpreter should restore by his own.

To the lawgivers, the signs themselves are the most important matter, and are continually growing in their estimation; the new art of music is derived from the old signs - and these now stand for musical art itself.

If the lawgivers had their way, any given composition would always be reproduced in precisely the same tempo, whensoever, by whomsoever, and under whatsoever conditions it might be performed.

But it is not possible; the buoyant, expansive nature of the divine child rebels - it demands the opposite. Each day begins differently from the preceding, yet always with the flush of dawn. Great artists play their own works differently at each repetition, remodel them on the spur of the moment, accelerate and ritard, in a way which they could not indicate by signs - and always according to the given conditions of that “eternal harmony.”

And the lawgiver chafes, and refers the creator to his own handwriting. As matters stand today, the lawgiver has the best of the argument.

I just read an old article on Slate.com comparing Gould’s two recorded versions of the Goldberg Variations (read it here). I’m glad that the topic of classical music made an appearance in such a main-stream publication, but I’m also amazed that the author and I have ever listened to the same recording! Take this paragraph from the article:

Peter F. Ostwald’s book about Gould tells us that by the end of his life the pianist was a physical wreck, with many muscular and skeletal problems impeding his ability to perform. I don’t question it, but neither do I hear any evidence of it in his second recording of the Goldbergs. I do hear something else, though. I hear a brilliant musician who has become so reclusive, so sealed off from and frightened by human connection that he makes interpretive choices that stubbornly eschew sensuous appeal. An ascetic who would rather risk repelling listeners than risk inviting them in. A thinker who writes both sides of an interview because he can’t bear to subject himself to questioning, even when it’s sympathetic questioning from a knowledgeable admirer. The personal tragedy of Glenn Gould’s last years is embedded in this performance, encoded in every bar.

Yikes, here’s that tired, tired old line of thinking that Gould was some wreck of a human being whose every action serves mainly to showcase what a sad case he supposedly was. The funny thing is, when I listen to the 1981 version of the Goldbergs I hear nothing but sensuous appeal. Where this writer hears coldness and egoism I hear a brilliant mind lavishing incredible attention to every detail, attaining the highest form of art where technique and expression are seamlessly united.

I’m somewhat unfairly focusing on only one section of the article, so to rectify that I’ll say that the author isn’t quite so heavy-handed elsewhere. Still, it irks me no end that Gould has become such an attractive target for armchair psychologists. He was a brilliant thinker, an incredible pianist and contributed immeasurably to music. I doubt anyone disputes that, but I feel that shallow personal sniping at Gould has the sad side effect of cheapening his work.

All that aside, the main reason I wrote this is to get the word out: the idea that Gould’s 1981 Goldbergs is some sort of ascetic, icy, inapproachable monolith is purely subjective. Obviously people are free to react to it however they see fit, but for me the author of this article is totally off base. I can’t imagine a more human or meltingly beautiful interpretation of the work than Gould’s!

After quite a bit of practice and studying of scores, I’m finally ready to announce the program for my next recording! In no particular order:

Aaron Copland: Piano Fantasy
Ernst Krenek: 20 Miniatures, Op. 139
Eric Moe: Legend of the Sad Triad
Ernest Bloch: Five Sketches in Sepia
Anton Webern: Variations, Op. 27

A few posts ago I talked about including some Rameau too, but in the end I just couldn’t make it fit in with the 20th century stuff. I’d still love to do some Rameau, but it’s going to have to wait until next time.

This is going to be a very enjoyable project! There is a lot of great music here, although everything except the Webern (and maybe the Copland) is very infrequently heard and recorded. Eric Moe’s work is very special and appealing, as is the Bloch. The Krenek is in a highly abstract 12-tone style, but it still somehow manages to be accessible and beautiful despite that! The form of it is very clear, and I think that’s a large part of why it’s such a good work and so easy to listen to.

I expect I’ll get everything down by the end of the month, or maybe early September. I’ll post updates as things develop!

I was just listening to Cziffra playing Liszt’s Totentanz and thinking: it doesn’t get any better than this! As much as I love Horowitz’s Liszt (his second, 1970s-era recording of the B minor Sonata is unsurpassed), I’d say that there exists no greater interpreter of Liszt’s music than Cziffra. When I first heard him play the Totentanz I instantly knew that this was how the master himself must have played.

Liszt is a most complex of composers because he didn’t write “pure” music. Almost every note he wrote is inextricably linked with art, poetry, literature and culture in general. It’s never enough just to bang through his pieces with an invisible metronome ticking away, like it’s sometimes possible to do with Beethoven or similar such “classical” composers. After all, the Hammerklavier (for example) is just such an architectural monument that it’s very difficult to render it incoherent. Of course there are varying levels of interpretive success with Beethoven, but because the music is so solid it’s tough to do anything really detrimental to it.

Liszt is different in that just playing the notes as they appear on the page will almost inevitably end up producing music of almost zero interest. However, Liszt played well conjures an overwhelming and intense world of musical expression that is largely divorced from classical structural ideas about music. This is not to say that his music isn’t well crafted: it is! But it’s much, much different than Mozart, Beethoven or even Chopin.

The best way I can describe the way I view Liszt is as follows: the Totentanz or the Dante Sonata or Chasse niege aren’t “about” dances of death, Dante, or snow. Neither are these pieces about simply evoking apposite mental images, like you might find in Debussy. Rather, they are what they describe. The Totentanz isn’t about a 14th-century painting, nor is it a description of the characters contained within. It is, in musical form, the entire tradition of Faustian deals (and dances) with the devil. It’s the musical embodiment of this archetype; a transfiguring listening experience where the music, the description, becomes the reality.

It’s the same with the Dante Sonata. This is hardly a programmatic encapsulation of the Divine Comedy, chapter by chapter, character by character. Rather, it becomes the entire world that Dante’s writing evokes in the imagination, made real through music. Which fact I think is nicely indicated by Liszt’s real title for the work: Aprés une lecture du Dante, fantasia quasi sonata. Liszt takes the feeling, the fantasy invoked by Dante and makes it, via some magical transformation, into music, its essence still remarkably in tact. I also like the reversal of Beethoven’s “Sonata quasi una fantasia” designation. We know from Liszt’s phrase to expect the opposite of Beethoven! In other words, fantasy superseding and taking the place of architecture.

I was just thinking about James Joyce’s Ulysses and it made me want to look up one of my favorite passages:

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface towards the centre of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Maior) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes: of Orion with belt and sextuple sun theta and nebula in which 100 of our solar systems could be contained: of moribund and of nascent new stars such as Nova in 1901: of our system plunging towards the constellation of Hercules: of the parallax or parallactic drift of socalled fixed stars, in reality evermoving wanderers from immeasurably remote eons to infinitely remote futures in comparison with which the years, threescore and ten, of allotted human life formed a parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity.

So beautiful!

Plans are underway for my next CD, to be recorded in August! I’ve expanded my recording capabilities once again and am very excited about the sound I’m going to be able to get this time around. My goal has always been to be as authentic as possible, and to avoid entirely the heavily processed sound world found in many contemporary recordings. I think with my new setup I’ll be able to get away with doing almost no digital alteration after the fact. What goes into the microphones will be what comes out the speakers!

In the end, for me it boils down to being able to listen to a recording and feel like I’m there in the room. Sometimes when I hear more recent recordings I think to myself: well, I’ve never really heard a piano sound like that. But, when I listen to older recordings (Horowitz and Gould from the late 60s and 70s are my gold standard) I feel like I’m hearing the way those artists actually sounded. There’s an immediacy to the sound that translates into a much more involving experience.

This is not to say the sound on these older recordings hasn’t been edited and processed. It has, but somehow the recording methodology used back then (combined with the CD remastering process) was used in support of the “real” sound of the artist and the instrument rather than to create something that sounds as smooth (and as bland) as possible. Down with blandness, I say!

Anyway, going back to my upcoming plans… I haven’t decided once and for all what I want to record, but I’m looking at an eclectic mix of things. I’m definitely going to do three contemporary pieces: Eric Moe’s Legend of the Sad Triad (winner of the music+culture 2007 composition competition), Webern’s Variations, Op. 27 and Ernst Krenek’s Miniatures for Piano, Op. 139. I’m also looking at some of Rameau’s Suites (talk about a different style of music though!) and also my two recent transcriptions of Faure songs. Last but not least, I’m considering some Bloch, but I haven’t really looked at anything of his in detail yet…

I’m so much looking forward to this recording ~ the music is going to be great and I’m excited about how it’s all going to sound in the end! Stay tuned…

Clavier magazine just published a nice review of the sheet music for my transcription of the Adagio from Bruckner’s 7th Symphony. Here’s the full text, from their May/June 2007 issue:

This piano reduction captures the thick textures and the poignant lyricism of Bruckner’s original work. The arranger carefully indicates how the hands should divide between the widely spaced chords. The transcription, which has a multitude of double-sharps and advanced harmonies, requires excellent technical skills and note-reading abilities.

You can buy the score in either book or PDF format in the BrianHanke.com Store here!

I just got wind of the fact that the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium has wrapped up and this was the year for piano. The competition organizers are nice enough to offer online video for the whole competition: check it out here. I went ahead and watched the final round performance of the winner; I was immediately intrigued because she played the fabulous and infrequently-heard Prokofiev 2nd Concerto.

I’m 3/4 of the way through the concerto right now and I’m absolutely appalled. What a terrible performance from both the pianist and orchestra! It seems the music holds no meaning whatsoever for either of them. This is one of the most unique and brilliant concertos in the repertoire and all these folks can seem to muster is a bored and apathetic reading. I will say though, the pianist hits the right notes at the right time, which is of course hard to do, especially in the incredibly intense atmosphere of a competition. So I guess that’s why she won.

But just getting through to the end of a piece of music is emphatically not enough. Music has to live and breath and it has to mean something, and this performance fails on all counts. Gah!

I’m delighted to report that my most recent CD, Brian Hanke Plays Shostakovich, is now available in the Zune Marketplace!

You’ll have to download the Zune software to buy the tracks, but it’s worth it. Zune is what I use for listening to music; it’s basically Windows Media Player with some improvements. So, download the program today and check out some Shostakovich Symphonies on piano while you’re at it!