​We here at Rocks Off are fascinated not only with the end of the world, but with the people who are convinced that they're going to see it. We spend quite a bit of time playfully using the light-hearted headlines from Yahoo! News about the music industry as a springboard into the Book of Revelation, but, and don't tell anyone this, we don't really think that any kind of apocalypse is imminent.

Russian composer Alexander Scriabin did. Not only that, he wanted in on the ground floor, and he wanted to write the soundtrack.

Scriabin, who would be 140 today, is the poster child of the Russian Symbolist musical movement. He was big into Chopin, our favorite original goth nocturne master, and liked to link atonal qualities as well as mysticism and a theory of chords as colors into his poetic compositions.

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​Our day job is as a clerk in a sheet music store, and in general it is a pretty sweet gig. We like being around music students, teachers, and people who just want to play. It truly is an invigorating thing to see.

Then again... there are things in the store that are as awkward to sell as extra-small condoms. Some composers have names that may sound perfectly reasonable in their home country, but here are fine-worthy utterances. Others, involve outdated expressions, and a very poor choice of term for a woodwind.

The thing is, some of these pieces are necessary. Most of them are on the UIL contest list, or have otherwise been selected for state wide competitions. So we have to sell them, and there's always a lot of foot-shuffling when someone needs...

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​Today is the 337th birthday of composer and organist Jeremiah Clarke. You have heard his most famous work dozens of times in your life and never really thought about it. Clarke composed the "Prince of Denmark March," which is usually called "Trumpet Voluntary." Due to a mix up in a famous songbook, the piece is often misattributed to Henry Purcell, as is Clarke's second most famous work "Trumpet Tune." Either that or Henry Purcell was a time-traveler with nothing better to do than screw with poor Jerry's legacy.

Stephen Colbert uses "Trumpet Voluntary" for his Platinum Edition segment, but it's mostly played at weddings. For instance, they played it when Prince Charles married Diana Spencer.

Now, our day job is as a clerk in a sheet music store, and we get a lot of people coming in buying music for their weddings. Some of the choices brides make are truly bizarre, such as the woman marrying a man named Ben who wanted to play Michael Jackson's "Ben" for him. We didn't have the heart to tell her it was about a rat.

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Co Broerse

​Today is George Crumb's 82nd birthday. Crumb is an acclaimed contemporary classical composer famous for his experimentation. Still alive, kicking and composing today, he's been known to include such oddities in his scores as having the strings of a contrabass struck with a mallet, or notating that players should enter or leave the stage in the middle of a piece. He's also one of the few composers to specifically include amplified instruments in his compositions.

Another hallmark of Crumb's is writing out his sheet music in such a way that the scores themselves become a work of art. Below we've showcased five examples of Crumb's visual experimentation in his sheet music. Yes, this is exactly how it will appear if you order Crumb's books from your humble narrator at his day job as a sheet-music salesman.

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Pedro Sanchez

​Entrance music is important. Get the right tune and people will forever have a dual-sensory impression of your character. Most people like to craft original music to help fully embody the characters they create, but some people just lift classical themes to get the job done without all that pesky paying a composer. Characters like...

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​Back in 2008, Houston premier pop string quartet Two Star Symphony was tapped to provide the soundtrack for the Dominic Walsh Dance Theatre's ballet version of Shakespeare's most bloody work, Titus Andronicus. The play is pretty much Julius Caesar as conceived by Eli Roth, featuring mutilation, rape and cannibalism in addition to lots of regular murder. Three years later, Two Star Symphony is finally releasing the soundtrack to Titus Andronicus for their fans.

"Working with the ballet was a challenging experience," says violinist Jerry Ochoa, who dropped by Rocks Off's office to deliver the album and chat a bit about the work. "None of us are classically trained. We never went to music school. So we basically had to invent a code of where to stop and start when rehearsing with the dancers."

The album is a brilliant and thoroughly disturbing work. From the very beginning, the movements are bold and flowing, seamlessly easing into each other the way a good Tchaikovsky ballet does. That's where the comparison ends, however. There is little else to connect the graceful world of most classical ballet and Two Star Symphony's latest opus.

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Photos by Jessica Perry

​Ben Sollee, Thousands
Fitzgerald's
July 21, 2011

"I don't know anything about cello or classical arrangements but I like this stuff," Aftermath said to our classical-music teacher, great friend and sometime colleague Meghan Hendley, keyboardist for local group Tyagaraja. We were both upstairs at Fitzgerald's for the Ben Sollee gig.

And she still has not emailed us that glossary of classical terms we would need to know during the night so we wouldn't look like a stupid meathead in this review. For shame.

This was not the usual show where you will see Aftermath, at least not this one. Our natural habitat as of late has been the Toyota Center, covering the latest female popper or major touring rock act.

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Alex Steinweiss' first illustrated cover for Columbia, aka THE first illustrated album cover.

​Rocks Off likes to think of ourselves as the cultured sort; in other words, it's not all booze and boobs around here. We also enjoy literature, the cinema, sometimes even the theat-ah, but our favorite non-musical stimulus has always been the visual arts. Did you know that some museums have as many pictures of naked people as your finer mini-mart magazine racks?

Anyways, Wednesday evening we read in The New York Times (see?) that graphic artist Alex Steinweiss passed away this week at age 94. In case you're wondering exactly what this has to do with music, in 1939 Columbia Records hired Steinweiss to do some newspaper advertisements and such, and he hit on the brilliant idea that the albums might sell better if the covers were more interesting than the plain brown wrappers they more or less were at the time. Turns out they did.

Steinweiss went on to illustrate dozens of classical and jazz covers for Columbia, and left the label around the time rock and roll was on the rise. Still, "When you look at your music collection today on your iPod, you are looking at Alex Steinweiss's big idea," Paula Scher of the design firm Pentagram told the Times. Enjoy.

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​The Houston Symphony feat. Susan Calloway
Distant Worlds: Music From Final Fantasy
Jones Hall
July 16, 2011

Rocks Off scrambled like a mad bastard last year in order to catch Final Fantasy Distant Worlds at the Houston Symphony. This year, we were only marginally better prepared, but no less excited.

To be sure, much of the music promised to be the same, but there were enough significant differences planned that demanded our return to view them. In the negative category, unlike the first tour, legendary video-game composer and the mind responsible for most of Final Fantasy's stellar soundtrack, Nobuo Uematsu, was to be absent due to complications from the earthquakes. In his place, Final Fantasy XIII composer Masashi Hamauzu joined conductor Arnie Roth.

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The Great Kat on Facebook

For those about to rock, The Great Kat - in one of her tamer photos - salutes you.

​Rocks Off has collected some very, very off-the-wall people over the years in search of musical enjoyment. We thought Cory Sinclair of The Manichean was until we interviewed Tyagaraja and realized he might actually be a Jedi. We always thrilled to hear the psychotic scienctific ravings of Dr. Milo T. Pinkerton III of Consortium of Genius, but he was ultimately topped by the hallucination-inducing rhetoric of Tubby Chubcakes. And now... we come to The Great Kat.

Kat is a Julliard-trained violinist who traded in the sedate world of classical performance to dress like a road warrior and play the guitar just shy of the speed needed to go back in time. She sent along her latest CD, Beethoven Shreds, and being both the resident classical-music expert on staff as well as the only one who has had a restraining order filed against him by Lita Ford - Ed. Note: He wishes - Rocks Off felt that it was well within our capabilities to kill seven minutes and several thousand brain cells by listening to it.

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