QUOTE (Tony @ Jan 27 2010, 04:57 PM) 
Former 'Talking Head' David Byrne is really misguided in this rant.
Please elaborate.
Full Version: Classical Music Thread
Please elaborate.
QUOTE
I think maybe it’s time to stop, or more reasonably, curtail somewhat, state investment in the past — in a bunch of dead guys (and they are mostly guys, and mostly dead, when we look at opera halls) — and invest in our future.
[. . .]
Maybe the balance and perspective has to be redressed and restored just a little.
[. . .]
Maybe the balance and perspective has to be redressed and restored just a little.
Whoa, Mr. Byrne, take it easy.
Is this what you object to, Tony?
QUOTE
Support ongoing creativity in the arts, and not the ongoing glorification and rehashing of the work of those dead guys.
[. . .]
In my opinion, it’s more important that someone learn to make music, to draw, photograph, write or create in any form than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol or Bill Shakespeare — to say nothing of opry. In the long term it doesn’t matter if students become writers, artists or musicians — though a few might. It's more important that they are able to understand the process of creation, experimentation and discovery — which can then be applied to anything they do, as those processes, deep down, are all similar. It’s an investment in fluorescence.
[. . .]
In my opinion, it’s more important that someone learn to make music, to draw, photograph, write or create in any form than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol or Bill Shakespeare — to say nothing of opry. In the long term it doesn’t matter if students become writers, artists or musicians — though a few might. It's more important that they are able to understand the process of creation, experimentation and discovery — which can then be applied to anything they do, as those processes, deep down, are all similar. It’s an investment in fluorescence.
What's the point of supporting classical music performances if there's no one left who knows how to appreciate it?
QUOTE (Waylon @ Feb 2 2010, 03:00 PM)
Is this what you object to, Tony?
What's the point of supporting classical music performances if there's no one left who knows how to appreciate it?
QUOTE
Support ongoing creativity in the arts, and not the ongoing glorification and rehashing of the work of those dead guys.
[. . .]
In my opinion, it’s more important that someone learn to make music, to draw, photograph, write or create in any form than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol or Bill Shakespeare — to say nothing of opry. In the long term it doesn’t matter if students become writers, artists or musicians — though a few might. It's more important that they are able to understand the process of creation, experimentation and discovery — which can then be applied to anything they do, as those processes, deep down, are all similar. It’s an investment in fluorescence.
[. . .]
In my opinion, it’s more important that someone learn to make music, to draw, photograph, write or create in any form than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol or Bill Shakespeare — to say nothing of opry. In the long term it doesn’t matter if students become writers, artists or musicians — though a few might. It's more important that they are able to understand the process of creation, experimentation and discovery — which can then be applied to anything they do, as those processes, deep down, are all similar. It’s an investment in fluorescence.
What's the point of supporting classical music performances if there's no one left who knows how to appreciate it?
Primarily yes. Not everyone can be a great creative artist. Some people can be great interpretive artists; a great reader or listener. Also, I would think that absorbing the very best of the past would better enable you to engage with it and creative something new.
RE: Article posted above: This isn't really news. Concert and Opera halls still sell well all over the world. More people worldwide know who Bach is than all but a handful of pop figures.
Frederyk Chopin was born 200 years ago today
The composer with the highest batting average perhaps? Once he hit his stride just about everything he wrote is in the standard repertoire.
That most non-German of composers, the Poet of the Piano who created a sonority wholly suited for that instrument with an unconventional poetic logic that refers only to itself. A genius for melody which is divine on the piano but doesn't work on any other instrument (any attempts to transcribe Chopin are disastrous). That frail little man with an epic spirit who was still developing right to the end (late works like the last three nocturnes, the Barcarolle and the Polonaise Fantasie are among his greatest).
Give it up!
He could range from a Hell's on Fire piece like this
to a one of the shortest pieces in the pre 20th century repertiore (Chopin was a pioneer of music that adhered not form but to an impression)
To this epic masterpiece.
Burdened by ruinous health his entire life, Frederic Chopin often appeared like an apparition. But it is his music that is ghostlike. Two hundred years after his birth in 1810, more pianists and listeners than ever are chasing those ghosts, and loving every moment of it.
"Chopin's music came out of nowhere," says pianist Byron Janis, born in McKeesport and one of the world's authorities on the great Polish composer. "There is nothing that preceded it. He was truly unique. With Beethoven, you can hear it came out of Mozart. Not with Chopin."
Pauline Rovkah, head of the piano program at Chatham University, said Chopin's music possesses a seductive quality. "It's magical, irresistible -- it can transport listeners to another world."
"There is no doubt Chopin is more popular than ever," says Ian Hobson, who will give an all-Chopin recital this weekend presented by the Steinway Society of Western Pennsylvania.
Society board president Michael Cerveris went even further. "I doubt that any composer other than Chopin would likely carry an entire program, even if it weren't a celebratory year," he says. "Artists know that programming at least one Chopin work will please just about everyone in the house."
Chopin (Show-pan, or sometimes Show-panh) was born near Warsaw Feb. 22, although he later claimed March 1, and he quickly displayed a prodigious ability on the piano.
He played his first concert at age 8. In the 1830s, he departed Warsaw for Vienna, not realizing that he would never return to his beloved homeland again (the reason was political, not personal, as Poland was annexed by Russia).
Chopin found success in Vienna but opted to join his emigre friends in Paris, where he would live the rest of his life. It was there he met Franz Liszt and also the cross-dressing novelist George Sand, with whom he was romantically involved for years. Through his public recitals, salon concerts and publications, Chopin became a celebrity in Paris, but he would never overcome his frail constitution and reoccurring tuberculosis. He died in 1849 at only 39.
But in such a short life he made a remarkable impact. Chopin wrote only about 180 works -- almost all for the solo piano and many less than 10 minutes in length -- but he rarely struck out.
"His batting average was so high," says David Allen Wehr, who holds the Geltz Distinguished Piano Chair at Duquesne University's Mary Pappert School of Music. "He is top five among composers of all time in that percentage."
Touching hearts and souls
Most of Chopin's works -- nocturnes, preludes, waltzes, mazurkas, polonaises, ballades, scherzos and sonatas -- never left the concert repertoire, and they keep Chopin near the top of recording sales today.
His music also continues to appear in popular culture. There are older pop songs, such as Perry Como's "Till the End of Time" from 1945, based on Chopin's "Heroic" Polonaise, and Barry Manilow's "Could It Be Magic," based on the C-Minor Prelude of Op. 28. But recently Chopin's "Raindrop" Prelude was the dramatic backdrop for a commercial for the video game "Halo 3," and Alicia Keys' album "As I Am" opens with her playing an adaptation of his Nocturne No. 20 in C-sharp Minor.
"I have to believe that what makes Chopin's music endure is the same thing that makes all great composers' music endure: his precious ability to tell the truth on the page," says pianist Enrique Graf, artist lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Music. "This is a difficult if not impossible thing to analyze, but people always know it when they hear it."
Chopin's music has ineffable aspects, but there is one tangible quality that has buoyed its continued success: his exquisite, haunting and sometimes simply fun melodies. "They touch people's hearts and souls, and there is nothing that would make music more popular than that," Mr. Janis says.
"There is a darkness as an undercurrent in a lot of his music," Mr. Wehr adds. "There is no piece of Chopin that is pretty without having the undertow and mystery to it."
Much of these emotions stemmed from Chopin's profound homesickness, but Mr. Janis also thinks that the particular Polish word "zal" provides a window. "It means bittersweet melancholy, but it also has the paradoxical meaning of anger and rage," he says.
"Chopin's music has anger in it. He has cannons buried in flowers, said [Robert] Schumann," Mr. Janis says.
That undercurrent is heard in works such as his Ballade No. 1, the "Raindrop" and the C Minor Preludes of Op. 28, the "Funeral March" from Sonata No. 2, the "Revolutionary" Etude, and many more.
Chopin's role in "development" of music was often dismissed in the past, with the derogatory term "miniaturist" applied by a European society that had come to associate great with big. But Chopin had an enormous impact as a composer. He offered gorgeous realizations of Romantic concepts: writing preludes to nothing (that Op. 28 set), penning technical studies of such noble character that they became concert pieces (his Etudes sets, Op. 10 and 25) and in general infusing his music with poetry. He wrote music for its own sake -- the Romantic ideal.
And Chopin's contribution to harmony was monumental, despite the small size of his music.
"Chopin was so influential harmonically -- he leads straight into Wagner through Liszt -- he was so original," Mr. Wehr says.
"His harmonies for that time were so extraordinary that people were shocked by them," Mr. Janis says. Much of his music hides the key it is in, such as his ambiguous Prelude No. 2 in A Minor of Op. 28.
Poet of the piano
Chopin's influence on history and connection to listeners and audiences represent a major part of his enduring legacy. But just as significant is performers' and students' continuing adoration.
"Chopin is popular with pianists because it 'feels' so good," says Mr. Cerveris, the society board president. Chopin wrote music that fits well in the hand, as pianists like to say.
"His music has never fallen out of favor because he makes the piano sound so good," Mr. Wehr says. "The writing flatters the piano. Chopin was the first to overcome the fact that the piano is a percussion instrument." Strike a key and a hammer hits a set of strings, not conducive to the connective playing [legato] that a violinist's bow can provide.
"The best pianists are magicians, trying to cover up the fact that they are playing a piano," Mr. Wehr continues. "He was the first composer who really figured out how to use the pedal."
Mrs. Rovkah agrees. "He established a unique link between instrumental and vocal quality -- of getting the piano to 'sing' against its percussive nature," she says. "Chopin revolutionized the sound, concept of touch and approach to the piano. He first recognized that each finger has a distinct character and personality. That was totally new -- before him the concept was to equalize fingers."
His fingerings were totally unorthodox, says Mr. Janis, including the enhanced use of the thumb.
Chopin's pioneering efforts also led him to develop a favorite tool of pianists, rubato. For Chopin this flexible approach to tempo had a strict definition: "The left hand is like the conductor of an orchestra and the right hand is free," says Mr. Janis. But the elasticity that Chopin allowed, and the fact that he never played a piece the same way twice (sometimes performing the polar opposite dynamics), have led to a tradition of performance in which his entire works are interpreted with Romantic freedom.
A performance of a Chopin work can vary remarkably. Evgeny Kissin's straightforward performance of, say, the wispy waltz of Prelude No. 7 from his Op. 28, clocks in at nearly half the time of Ivo Pogorelich's: 34 seconds to 66. The art of interpretation becomes that of creation rather than re-creation when one plays Chopin; the performer is poet, rather than mechanical reproducer. Chopin doesn't have the monopoly on this, but imaginative readings flower more with his music today than any other composer.
"I almost always physically feel that his music touches my inner strings and moves me the way no other composer does," says Mrs. Rovkah. "As a performer, I know I will connect with the audience and will make them feel it, too. No other composer brought that much poetry into piano music."
Students, too, benefit from Chopin as a teacher.
"Students, who can master Chopin's works with all their complexity and extreme difficulty, can also develop creative imagination and sophisticated technique," she says.
"Chopin said that his calling was to appeal to the heart and soul," Mr. Janis says.
And he is still appealing, 200 years and counting.
The composer with the highest batting average perhaps? Once he hit his stride just about everything he wrote is in the standard repertoire.
That most non-German of composers, the Poet of the Piano who created a sonority wholly suited for that instrument with an unconventional poetic logic that refers only to itself. A genius for melody which is divine on the piano but doesn't work on any other instrument (any attempts to transcribe Chopin are disastrous). That frail little man with an epic spirit who was still developing right to the end (late works like the last three nocturnes, the Barcarolle and the Polonaise Fantasie are among his greatest).
Give it up!
He could range from a Hell's on Fire piece like this
to a one of the shortest pieces in the pre 20th century repertiore (Chopin was a pioneer of music that adhered not form but to an impression)
To this epic masterpiece.
Burdened by ruinous health his entire life, Frederic Chopin often appeared like an apparition. But it is his music that is ghostlike. Two hundred years after his birth in 1810, more pianists and listeners than ever are chasing those ghosts, and loving every moment of it.
"Chopin's music came out of nowhere," says pianist Byron Janis, born in McKeesport and one of the world's authorities on the great Polish composer. "There is nothing that preceded it. He was truly unique. With Beethoven, you can hear it came out of Mozart. Not with Chopin."
Pauline Rovkah, head of the piano program at Chatham University, said Chopin's music possesses a seductive quality. "It's magical, irresistible -- it can transport listeners to another world."
"There is no doubt Chopin is more popular than ever," says Ian Hobson, who will give an all-Chopin recital this weekend presented by the Steinway Society of Western Pennsylvania.
Society board president Michael Cerveris went even further. "I doubt that any composer other than Chopin would likely carry an entire program, even if it weren't a celebratory year," he says. "Artists know that programming at least one Chopin work will please just about everyone in the house."
Chopin (Show-pan, or sometimes Show-panh) was born near Warsaw Feb. 22, although he later claimed March 1, and he quickly displayed a prodigious ability on the piano.
He played his first concert at age 8. In the 1830s, he departed Warsaw for Vienna, not realizing that he would never return to his beloved homeland again (the reason was political, not personal, as Poland was annexed by Russia).
Chopin found success in Vienna but opted to join his emigre friends in Paris, where he would live the rest of his life. It was there he met Franz Liszt and also the cross-dressing novelist George Sand, with whom he was romantically involved for years. Through his public recitals, salon concerts and publications, Chopin became a celebrity in Paris, but he would never overcome his frail constitution and reoccurring tuberculosis. He died in 1849 at only 39.
But in such a short life he made a remarkable impact. Chopin wrote only about 180 works -- almost all for the solo piano and many less than 10 minutes in length -- but he rarely struck out.
"His batting average was so high," says David Allen Wehr, who holds the Geltz Distinguished Piano Chair at Duquesne University's Mary Pappert School of Music. "He is top five among composers of all time in that percentage."
Touching hearts and souls
Most of Chopin's works -- nocturnes, preludes, waltzes, mazurkas, polonaises, ballades, scherzos and sonatas -- never left the concert repertoire, and they keep Chopin near the top of recording sales today.
His music also continues to appear in popular culture. There are older pop songs, such as Perry Como's "Till the End of Time" from 1945, based on Chopin's "Heroic" Polonaise, and Barry Manilow's "Could It Be Magic," based on the C-Minor Prelude of Op. 28. But recently Chopin's "Raindrop" Prelude was the dramatic backdrop for a commercial for the video game "Halo 3," and Alicia Keys' album "As I Am" opens with her playing an adaptation of his Nocturne No. 20 in C-sharp Minor.
"I have to believe that what makes Chopin's music endure is the same thing that makes all great composers' music endure: his precious ability to tell the truth on the page," says pianist Enrique Graf, artist lecturer at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Music. "This is a difficult if not impossible thing to analyze, but people always know it when they hear it."
Chopin's music has ineffable aspects, but there is one tangible quality that has buoyed its continued success: his exquisite, haunting and sometimes simply fun melodies. "They touch people's hearts and souls, and there is nothing that would make music more popular than that," Mr. Janis says.
"There is a darkness as an undercurrent in a lot of his music," Mr. Wehr adds. "There is no piece of Chopin that is pretty without having the undertow and mystery to it."
Much of these emotions stemmed from Chopin's profound homesickness, but Mr. Janis also thinks that the particular Polish word "zal" provides a window. "It means bittersweet melancholy, but it also has the paradoxical meaning of anger and rage," he says.
"Chopin's music has anger in it. He has cannons buried in flowers, said [Robert] Schumann," Mr. Janis says.
That undercurrent is heard in works such as his Ballade No. 1, the "Raindrop" and the C Minor Preludes of Op. 28, the "Funeral March" from Sonata No. 2, the "Revolutionary" Etude, and many more.
Chopin's role in "development" of music was often dismissed in the past, with the derogatory term "miniaturist" applied by a European society that had come to associate great with big. But Chopin had an enormous impact as a composer. He offered gorgeous realizations of Romantic concepts: writing preludes to nothing (that Op. 28 set), penning technical studies of such noble character that they became concert pieces (his Etudes sets, Op. 10 and 25) and in general infusing his music with poetry. He wrote music for its own sake -- the Romantic ideal.
And Chopin's contribution to harmony was monumental, despite the small size of his music.
"Chopin was so influential harmonically -- he leads straight into Wagner through Liszt -- he was so original," Mr. Wehr says.
"His harmonies for that time were so extraordinary that people were shocked by them," Mr. Janis says. Much of his music hides the key it is in, such as his ambiguous Prelude No. 2 in A Minor of Op. 28.
Poet of the piano
Chopin's influence on history and connection to listeners and audiences represent a major part of his enduring legacy. But just as significant is performers' and students' continuing adoration.
"Chopin is popular with pianists because it 'feels' so good," says Mr. Cerveris, the society board president. Chopin wrote music that fits well in the hand, as pianists like to say.
"His music has never fallen out of favor because he makes the piano sound so good," Mr. Wehr says. "The writing flatters the piano. Chopin was the first to overcome the fact that the piano is a percussion instrument." Strike a key and a hammer hits a set of strings, not conducive to the connective playing [legato] that a violinist's bow can provide.
"The best pianists are magicians, trying to cover up the fact that they are playing a piano," Mr. Wehr continues. "He was the first composer who really figured out how to use the pedal."
Mrs. Rovkah agrees. "He established a unique link between instrumental and vocal quality -- of getting the piano to 'sing' against its percussive nature," she says. "Chopin revolutionized the sound, concept of touch and approach to the piano. He first recognized that each finger has a distinct character and personality. That was totally new -- before him the concept was to equalize fingers."
His fingerings were totally unorthodox, says Mr. Janis, including the enhanced use of the thumb.
Chopin's pioneering efforts also led him to develop a favorite tool of pianists, rubato. For Chopin this flexible approach to tempo had a strict definition: "The left hand is like the conductor of an orchestra and the right hand is free," says Mr. Janis. But the elasticity that Chopin allowed, and the fact that he never played a piece the same way twice (sometimes performing the polar opposite dynamics), have led to a tradition of performance in which his entire works are interpreted with Romantic freedom.
A performance of a Chopin work can vary remarkably. Evgeny Kissin's straightforward performance of, say, the wispy waltz of Prelude No. 7 from his Op. 28, clocks in at nearly half the time of Ivo Pogorelich's: 34 seconds to 66. The art of interpretation becomes that of creation rather than re-creation when one plays Chopin; the performer is poet, rather than mechanical reproducer. Chopin doesn't have the monopoly on this, but imaginative readings flower more with his music today than any other composer.
"I almost always physically feel that his music touches my inner strings and moves me the way no other composer does," says Mrs. Rovkah. "As a performer, I know I will connect with the audience and will make them feel it, too. No other composer brought that much poetry into piano music."
Students, too, benefit from Chopin as a teacher.
"Students, who can master Chopin's works with all their complexity and extreme difficulty, can also develop creative imagination and sophisticated technique," she says.
"Chopin said that his calling was to appeal to the heart and soul," Mr. Janis says.
And he is still appealing, 200 years and counting.
good post
QUOTE (plaid is rad @ Mar 1 2010, 10:20 AM)
good post
Thanks. WFMT is currently broadcasting the Warsaw celebration live.
American composer Samuel Barber was born 100 years ago today.
His most famous work is the 2nd movement of his String Quartet No. 1, Op. 11, composed in 1936. It's known by the alternate title 'Adagio for Strings'. Since being used in David Lynch's 'The Elephant Man' it has been used in countless films and sampled various times.
Here it is arranged for Pan Pipes...
His most famous work is the 2nd movement of his String Quartet No. 1, Op. 11, composed in 1936. It's known by the alternate title 'Adagio for Strings'. Since being used in David Lynch's 'The Elephant Man' it has been used in countless films and sampled various times.
Here it is arranged for Pan Pipes...
Composer Thomas Arne was born 300 years ago today. He remains best known for everyone's favorite ode to British Imperialism, 'Rule, Britannia!' (a setting of a James Thomson poem).
he looks like a bitch
sorry i thought that was funny when i typed it but now reading it it's not funny
sorry i thought that was funny when i typed it but now reading it it's not funny
QUOTE
It's known by the alternate title 'Adagio for Strings'.
This melody gets played all over the clubs in Europe so it's still being heard everywhere; William Orbit did a killer dance version of it, except the one you hear most is the Tiesto version, which is still good I suppose, especially when you're in whatever state.
Best I've ever heard it is Scott Bond mixing the beatless melodic version into a beautiful vocal trance tune called 'Another Day' on the Gatecrasher Discotech album, possibly my favorite listening moment ever when I heard that for the first time. They fit so well together.
Robert Schumann (1810-1856) was born 200 years ago today. The most Romantic of the early Romantics. His piano music was fragmented and impulsive. It sounded incoherent to contemporaries. As a critic he started out introducing Chopin to German audiences and ended by introducing Brahms. Good record. He was sexually promiscuous before marrying the famous pianist Clara Wieck so he eventually went mad from Syphilis. He spent his last years in an asylum. I heartily reccomend the Piano Concerto. It's quite famous and the Helene Grimaud recording from a few years back is awesome.
Andrew Patner had some choice words regarding the abominable job that Ravinia Admin is doing...
QUOTE
Wednesday night offered a rare chance to hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra onstage in an all-Wagner evening at Ravinia, something hearkening back to the golden era there of James Levine, as well as an opportunity to hear one of our finest Wagner sopranos, American-born Christine Brewer. The stalwart Cornish tenor John Treleaven was also on hand to sing Siegfried to Brewer's Brünnhilde. The night was beautiful. The moon was out. The air was just right.
But where were the people?
As the Ravinia administration continues its campaign to marginalize a great orchestra that was once its very reason for being, they could see the results of their handiwork all around them: a half-empty Pavilion and an essentially empty lawn on the same night that the Grant Park Music Festival drew 10,000 people to its Polish repertoire program -- and at the North Shore venue where, under Levine, you'd want to get your Pavilion tickets or your patch of lawn early for such a program.
The evidence of neglect is staggering: Posters and marketing materials all over the city that barely refer to the CSO or other classical concerts. A second-rate orchestral conductor who has no following here, elsewhere, or among the players. A former music director, also second-rate, who won't go away. The ditching of the Chicago Symphony Chorus. An "opening night" for the CSO on Monday, weeks into the Ravinia season, and featuring a reduced orchestra as mere accompaniment to two piano showpieces (with the CSO players even rushed off the stage after playing the national anthem so that the soloist could perform two piano pieces alone onstage).
And with the exception of this Wagner night and two Mozart operas with fine casts to be presented in the intimate Martin Theatre in August, poor and obvious programming that also pushed the contractual pops concert limit so far that a "video game symphony" evening had to be canceled to make way for more Sondheim and Annie Get Your Gun. If the CSO's own management tried these tactics itself, it could empty Orchestra Hall, too.
After Ravinia's board chair took the stage Monday night to emphasize that the board really, really does love the CSO, one veteran orchestra player posted on the Internet, "As the number of concerts we play at our summer 'home' has dwindled over the years, the amount of times I've heard us referred to as the 'Crown Jewel' of the festival has gone up exponentially -- the sort of endearments a guy who wants to continually step out on his wife but is fearful of having her leave him might offer up."
Be all this as it sadly is, the orchestra rose to the occasion Wednesday. Music director James Conlon is better in operatic repertoire than he is in the symphonic. Still, despite having just completed not one but three complete Ring cycles in Los Angeles, there was not a sense that this is a work of limitless depth and harmonic invention.
Is it too much to hope that the Ravinia board will come to its senses, recognize the jewel that exists here, and return the focus of the festival to the CSO, great conductors, and the best classical music? We don't need a tax-exempt showcase for the BoDeans, the B-52s, "The Music of ABBA" and Earth, Wind & Fire.
But where were the people?
As the Ravinia administration continues its campaign to marginalize a great orchestra that was once its very reason for being, they could see the results of their handiwork all around them: a half-empty Pavilion and an essentially empty lawn on the same night that the Grant Park Music Festival drew 10,000 people to its Polish repertoire program -- and at the North Shore venue where, under Levine, you'd want to get your Pavilion tickets or your patch of lawn early for such a program.
The evidence of neglect is staggering: Posters and marketing materials all over the city that barely refer to the CSO or other classical concerts. A second-rate orchestral conductor who has no following here, elsewhere, or among the players. A former music director, also second-rate, who won't go away. The ditching of the Chicago Symphony Chorus. An "opening night" for the CSO on Monday, weeks into the Ravinia season, and featuring a reduced orchestra as mere accompaniment to two piano showpieces (with the CSO players even rushed off the stage after playing the national anthem so that the soloist could perform two piano pieces alone onstage).
And with the exception of this Wagner night and two Mozart operas with fine casts to be presented in the intimate Martin Theatre in August, poor and obvious programming that also pushed the contractual pops concert limit so far that a "video game symphony" evening had to be canceled to make way for more Sondheim and Annie Get Your Gun. If the CSO's own management tried these tactics itself, it could empty Orchestra Hall, too.
After Ravinia's board chair took the stage Monday night to emphasize that the board really, really does love the CSO, one veteran orchestra player posted on the Internet, "As the number of concerts we play at our summer 'home' has dwindled over the years, the amount of times I've heard us referred to as the 'Crown Jewel' of the festival has gone up exponentially -- the sort of endearments a guy who wants to continually step out on his wife but is fearful of having her leave him might offer up."
Be all this as it sadly is, the orchestra rose to the occasion Wednesday. Music director James Conlon is better in operatic repertoire than he is in the symphonic. Still, despite having just completed not one but three complete Ring cycles in Los Angeles, there was not a sense that this is a work of limitless depth and harmonic invention.
Is it too much to hope that the Ravinia board will come to its senses, recognize the jewel that exists here, and return the focus of the festival to the CSO, great conductors, and the best classical music? We don't need a tax-exempt showcase for the BoDeans, the B-52s, "The Music of ABBA" and Earth, Wind & Fire.
On April 15, 1940, Stravinsky's unconventional major seventh chord in his arrangement of the Star-Spangled Banner led to his arrest by the Boston police for violating a federal law that prohibited the reharmonization of the National Anthem.
Wiki Answers - In Boston, Stravinsky conducted a performance of his arrangement of the American National Anthem, which he dedicated to the American people and allowed it to be used freely. Massachusetts had a law against the tampering of national property. They considered the anthem national property, and his genius arrangement "tampering." They seized his score and took him away. . . Luckily, he was released after he convinced authorities of his good intentions.
Vocal Version of Stravinsky's arrangement
http://dcmusicaviva.blogspot.com/2009/03/s...ky-mugshot.html
Gustav Mahler was born 150 years ago today. The first chink in the Wall of Sound that the Romantics had been building up. His was the 'first orchestra without a pedal' as Aaron Copland put it. A typically sardonic Mahlerian gambit was to take the folk tune 'Bruder Martin' (known as Frere Jacques in Anglophone countries) and present it in a glacially paced minor key arrangement for basses. This sort of thing struck the smug (and anti-semitic) Viennese of the day as vulgar and trivial. As late as 50 years ago he was only known to a smallish cult of conductors. Leonard Bernstein did a lot to mainstream his music in the 1960s. These days however he's seen as a harbigner of Schoenbergian modernism. Large chunks of the 9th symphony verge on atonality.
[quote name='Sid Hartha' post='966971' date='Jul 4 2010, 06:27 PM'On April 15, 1940, Stravinsky's unconventional major seventh chord in his arrangement of the Star-Spangled Banner led to his arrest by the Boston police for violating a federal law that prohibited the reharmonization of the National Anthem.[/quote]
Wow. I never heard about this, if it wasn't for the source I'd swear it was an Onion article.
Wow. I never heard about this, if it wasn't for the source I'd swear it was an Onion article.
Chopin's Small Miracles - Despite their brevity, the Preludes loom large musically
- David Dubal
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), whose 200th anniversary it is this year, is the overwhelming favorite composer for the piano. He possessed the most subtle intuitions and fathomed the mysteries of the world. Oscar Wilde once said of him, "After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own."
Most of the 24 Chopin Preludes were sketched out between 1837 and 1838. They are the ultimate miniatures. In an age when the symphony and sonata still held sway, writing these aphoristic Preludes was revolutionary. All except two contain a single musical idea, each boiled down to its essence. Never had brevity been so brief. Ten are under a minute in length; nine last just over a minute. Only the celebrated No. 15, the so-called "Raindrop Prelude," attains the length characteristic of a small piece, clocking in at 4˝ minutes.
Fourteen of the Preludes are full of light, gaiety, serenity and a kind of happiness. Seven contain anguish, rage and fury. Three are simply sorrowful. No matter how tiny, the Preludes loom large musically. Each one is a masterpiece of compressed emotion blended with an unequaled pianistic ingenuity and originality. Many of them are horribly difficult to play. When Robert Schumann read them, he proclaimed Chopin to be the "proudest poet soul of the age."
What was the inspiration? As a child in Warsaw, Chopin was nourished on the then practically unknown preludes and fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, composed in each of the major and minor keys and collectively known as "The Well-Tempered Clavier." Chopin was one of the rare pianists of his time who played most of them, and Bach remained his ideal. During the creation of the Preludes he was particularly obsessed with Bach, and took "The Well-Tempered Clavier" with him on a vacation to Majorca in November 1838, where the Preludes were refined and polished.
Bach's preludes, some of considerable length, need their fugues, but Romantic composers did not often use this musical form. Each of Chopin's Preludes is self-sufficient, but they were composed, like Bach's, with one for each major and minor key. Since nothing follows them, one may ask what these works are a prelude to—certainly to another Prelude or, poetically speaking, perhaps a prelude to the infinite. We don't know if Chopin intended them to be played as a cycle, although today's pianists usually perform them that way in recital.
The completion of the Preludes formed one of the most harrowing episodes in the composer's short life. When Chopin and his companion, the novelist George Sand, first got to Majorca he was ecstatic. But he soon became nervous, as the piano his friend Camille Pleyel, the music publisher and piano builder, had promised to send him had not yet arrived. By early December Chopin had become gravely ill and the Majorcans, terrified of what was known as consumption (tuberculosis today), made life very unpleasant for the group. To make matters worse, the piano was stuck at customs for weeks, forcing Chopin to rent a wretched replacement. Pleyel's piano was finally delivered in early January, and the Preludes were finished late that month.
In these tiny microcosms Chopin established the hegemony of the Romantic miniature. His Preludes would find progeny later in the preludes of Scriabin, Debussy, Rachmaninoff and others.
Space does not permit a detailed analysis of all 24, but mention of a few may give a sense of their character:
• No. 1 in C major : An exquisite example of Chopin's devotion to Bach. Pulsating and agitated, it is over in half a minute, leaving the listener yearning for more.
•No. 2 in A minor: A lugubrious melody seems to hang in the air. Ingmar Bergman made impressive use of the piece in his film "Autumn Sonata."
•No. 4 in E minor: A slender melody over rich, slow-moving chordal harmonies with the left hand. It, along with the B Minor (No. 6) and C Minor (No. 20) Preludes, was played on the organ at Chopin's funeral at the Church of La Madeleine in Paris on Oct. 30, 1849.
•No. 7 in A major: Sixteen bars of pure grace.
• No. 8 in F-sharp minor : A highly textured polyrhythmic piece, the melody of this feverish, throbbing vision is played entirely with the right thumb. One of the greatest of the Preludes.
•No. 19 in E-flat major: Pure azure contentment in triplets for both hands, marked "Vivace." To play it through unscathed is an achievement.
• No. 24 in D minor : Marked "Allegro appassionato," a tremendous discharge of despairing passion, concluding with three foreboding D's from the bowels of the piano.
Probably more people have come to great music through Chopin than from any other composer. In my case, growing up in Cleveland, I used to listen to a radio show whose theme music entranced me at first hearing but was never identified by the host. Although the show aired much past my usual bedtime, I would occasionally sneak down the stairs, turn the radio on at low volume and drink in the strains of this music, over so quickly that I listened with all my might. It was not until somewhat later, when I was taking piano lessons, that I found out that it was No. 7, the Prelude in A Major. Not too long after that I could play it myself, which was bliss! Only later did I find out that there were 23 more Preludes that I would love equally, and in later years would come to study and teach.
- David Dubal
Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), whose 200th anniversary it is this year, is the overwhelming favorite composer for the piano. He possessed the most subtle intuitions and fathomed the mysteries of the world. Oscar Wilde once said of him, "After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own."
Most of the 24 Chopin Preludes were sketched out between 1837 and 1838. They are the ultimate miniatures. In an age when the symphony and sonata still held sway, writing these aphoristic Preludes was revolutionary. All except two contain a single musical idea, each boiled down to its essence. Never had brevity been so brief. Ten are under a minute in length; nine last just over a minute. Only the celebrated No. 15, the so-called "Raindrop Prelude," attains the length characteristic of a small piece, clocking in at 4˝ minutes.
Fourteen of the Preludes are full of light, gaiety, serenity and a kind of happiness. Seven contain anguish, rage and fury. Three are simply sorrowful. No matter how tiny, the Preludes loom large musically. Each one is a masterpiece of compressed emotion blended with an unequaled pianistic ingenuity and originality. Many of them are horribly difficult to play. When Robert Schumann read them, he proclaimed Chopin to be the "proudest poet soul of the age."
What was the inspiration? As a child in Warsaw, Chopin was nourished on the then practically unknown preludes and fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, composed in each of the major and minor keys and collectively known as "The Well-Tempered Clavier." Chopin was one of the rare pianists of his time who played most of them, and Bach remained his ideal. During the creation of the Preludes he was particularly obsessed with Bach, and took "The Well-Tempered Clavier" with him on a vacation to Majorca in November 1838, where the Preludes were refined and polished.
Bach's preludes, some of considerable length, need their fugues, but Romantic composers did not often use this musical form. Each of Chopin's Preludes is self-sufficient, but they were composed, like Bach's, with one for each major and minor key. Since nothing follows them, one may ask what these works are a prelude to—certainly to another Prelude or, poetically speaking, perhaps a prelude to the infinite. We don't know if Chopin intended them to be played as a cycle, although today's pianists usually perform them that way in recital.
The completion of the Preludes formed one of the most harrowing episodes in the composer's short life. When Chopin and his companion, the novelist George Sand, first got to Majorca he was ecstatic. But he soon became nervous, as the piano his friend Camille Pleyel, the music publisher and piano builder, had promised to send him had not yet arrived. By early December Chopin had become gravely ill and the Majorcans, terrified of what was known as consumption (tuberculosis today), made life very unpleasant for the group. To make matters worse, the piano was stuck at customs for weeks, forcing Chopin to rent a wretched replacement. Pleyel's piano was finally delivered in early January, and the Preludes were finished late that month.
In these tiny microcosms Chopin established the hegemony of the Romantic miniature. His Preludes would find progeny later in the preludes of Scriabin, Debussy, Rachmaninoff and others.
Space does not permit a detailed analysis of all 24, but mention of a few may give a sense of their character:
• No. 1 in C major : An exquisite example of Chopin's devotion to Bach. Pulsating and agitated, it is over in half a minute, leaving the listener yearning for more.
•No. 2 in A minor: A lugubrious melody seems to hang in the air. Ingmar Bergman made impressive use of the piece in his film "Autumn Sonata."
•No. 4 in E minor: A slender melody over rich, slow-moving chordal harmonies with the left hand. It, along with the B Minor (No. 6) and C Minor (No. 20) Preludes, was played on the organ at Chopin's funeral at the Church of La Madeleine in Paris on Oct. 30, 1849.
•No. 7 in A major: Sixteen bars of pure grace.
• No. 8 in F-sharp minor : A highly textured polyrhythmic piece, the melody of this feverish, throbbing vision is played entirely with the right thumb. One of the greatest of the Preludes.
•No. 19 in E-flat major: Pure azure contentment in triplets for both hands, marked "Vivace." To play it through unscathed is an achievement.
• No. 24 in D minor : Marked "Allegro appassionato," a tremendous discharge of despairing passion, concluding with three foreboding D's from the bowels of the piano.
Probably more people have come to great music through Chopin than from any other composer. In my case, growing up in Cleveland, I used to listen to a radio show whose theme music entranced me at first hearing but was never identified by the host. Although the show aired much past my usual bedtime, I would occasionally sneak down the stairs, turn the radio on at low volume and drink in the strains of this music, over so quickly that I listened with all my might. It was not until somewhat later, when I was taking piano lessons, that I found out that it was No. 7, the Prelude in A Major. Not too long after that I could play it myself, which was bliss! Only later did I find out that there were 23 more Preludes that I would love equally, and in later years would come to study and teach.
Hands up who likes classical music
Gold star if anyone gets the reference.
I like Durufle's requiem, and some Polenc but otherwise don't listen to any classical music, except a bit of choral. What's some good new age choral stuff that I might like? (I like treble singers by the way, not grown men or women).
Gold star if anyone gets the reference.
I like Durufle's requiem, and some Polenc but otherwise don't listen to any classical music, except a bit of choral. What's some good new age choral stuff that I might like? (I like treble singers by the way, not grown men or women).
QUOTE (mike2511 @ Aug 30 2010, 03:04 PM)
Hands up who likes classical music
Gold star if anyone gets the reference.
I like Durufle's requiem, and some Polenc but otherwise don't listen to any classical music, except a bit of choral. What's some good new age choral stuff that I might like? (I like treble singers by the way, not grown men or women).
Gold star if anyone gets the reference.
I like Durufle's requiem, and some Polenc but otherwise don't listen to any classical music, except a bit of choral. What's some good new age choral stuff that I might like? (I like treble singers by the way, not grown men or women).
I can't tell you jack about 'New Age' anything.
someone want to make a classical thread where tony doesn't post?
QUOTE (pigfuck @ Sep 12 2010, 11:44 AM)
someone want to make a classical thread where tony doesn't post?
Huh?
Did anyone go to Millenium Park on Sunday afternoon for the Muti/CSO concert? They estimated some 25,000 people there...the most for any event in MP history.
I wonder if people will give Roger Ebert as much flack as I got for using the term 'serious music'...
Link
QUOTE
I'm probably like a lot of people. I love serious music but consider myself ignorant on the subject. We have a subscription to the Lyric Opera, we go to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and you can't be in London with me without being dragged along to Wigmore Hall, the Royal Albert, a concert on the green at Kenmore House, or a lunchtime recital in a church. At home I'm often tuned to WFMT or the BBC via internet.
That said, I hesitate to talk or write about music. And when I read about it, I often feel I don't have the education to understand the writer.
Alex Ross is an exception. When I read him in The New Yorker, I believe he is aware he's writing for an intelligent audience that may not be expert in his area. He avoids jargon, he explains, he writes in real language. He reminds me of my other favorite music critic, Bernard Shaw. I read Shaw's complete music criticism cover to cover (okay, it was bathroom reading) and understood what he was writing -- about people now long unheard and orchestras who had long since played their last note. I read for the pleasure and wit of the prose.
Alex had a great success with his The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century (2008), and now he's publishing a new book, Listen to This, containing many of his pieces for The New Yorker. Because he communicates so clearly, one way to appreciate him is when he speaks about music, which he does in these videos.
That said, I hesitate to talk or write about music. And when I read about it, I often feel I don't have the education to understand the writer.
Alex Ross is an exception. When I read him in The New Yorker, I believe he is aware he's writing for an intelligent audience that may not be expert in his area. He avoids jargon, he explains, he writes in real language. He reminds me of my other favorite music critic, Bernard Shaw. I read Shaw's complete music criticism cover to cover (okay, it was bathroom reading) and understood what he was writing -- about people now long unheard and orchestras who had long since played their last note. I read for the pleasure and wit of the prose.
Alex had a great success with his The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century (2008), and now he's publishing a new book, Listen to This, containing many of his pieces for The New Yorker. Because he communicates so clearly, one way to appreciate him is when he speaks about music, which he does in these videos.
Link
QUOTE (Tony @ Sep 20 2010, 10:25 PM)
Did anyone go to Millenium Park on Sunday afternoon for the Muti/CSO concert? They estimated some 25,000 people there...the most for any event in MP history.
Really, really wanted to go.
Not big into classical music at all. But when I do listen, I dig minor chord stuff: dark, brooding, intense.
These are my jams:
Emotionally crushing. Heavy, heavy, heavy.
Love the massive organ in this particular video. Makes the piece sound HUGE.
These are my jams:
Emotionally crushing. Heavy, heavy, heavy.
Love the massive organ in this particular video. Makes the piece sound HUGE.
QUOTE (lostbikes @ Oct 2 2010, 10:47 PM)
Not big into classical music at all. But when I do listen, I dig minor chord stuff: dark, brooding, intense.
These are my jams:
Emotionally crushing. Heavy, heavy, heavy.
These are my jams:
Emotionally crushing. Heavy, heavy, heavy.
I always get furtive glances when I'm driving with someone as a passenger and the Chopin 2nd piano sonata is on. People don't seem to get that the funeral march is part of the larger whole and just think I'm morbid.
On Thursday, I heard the CSO do a program of Tchaikovsky rarities. There was the deadly-dull hodgepodge known as 'Mozartiana' but there was also the the Concert Fantasy and the 2nd piano concerto. The former hadn't been played at their official concerts since 1892! Stephen Hough displayed astounding virtuosity in these pieces. Afterwards I got in backstage via a mutual friend and chatted with Mr. Hough who is as affable as they come. Awesome.
Franz Liszt was the Justin Bieber of 1830s Europe
It wasn’t the Beatles or Elvis Presley who first caused young women to lose their marbles. That honour belongs to Franz Liszt, a dashing Hungarian pianist with long, flowing hair who could make his audiences swoon before he had played a single note.
Liszt was the Justin Bieber of 1830s Europe; the Elvis Presley of the 1840s; the Mick Jagger of the 1850s and the Frank Sinatra of the 1860s and ’70s. In fact, he remained a god of the musical world right until his death in 1886.
His power over women was so absolute that the resulting hysteria was even given a name — Lisztomania — and treated as a disease. It was also the title of a 1975’s psychedelically over-the-top Ken Russell film featuring Roger Daltrey as the Romantic piano star, and, more recently, the title of a hit song by French rockers Phoenix.
The mania begins anew this month, with concerts celebrating the 200th anniversary of Liszt’s birth, hot on the heels of a year of concerts celebrating the 200th anniversary of Liszt’s best friend — and fellow pianist-composer — Frédéric Chopin.
“If Chopin was the pianist’s pianist, Franz Liszt was the public’s pianist — the showman, the hero, the one who made inarticulate apes of his audiences,” wrote Harold Schonberg in Lives of the Great Composers. “He had everything in his favour — good looks, magnetism, power, a colossal technique, an unprecedented sonority, and the kind of opportunism (at least in his early years) that could cater to the public in the most cynical manner. He had an aura.”
Liszt could very well have been one of the first musical artists to straddle highbrow and lowbrow entertainment. He helped invent the modern solo piano recital. He experimented with new ways to translate Romantic emotional expression in music. And he improvised or transcribed all of the great operatic themes and arias of his day into popular music for the piano.
“What seems to us to be peculiar juxtapositions of serious and trivial pieces in a variety of genres was less an indicator of appalling insensitivity than an attempt to provide something for everyone,” writes Kenneth Hamilton in his recent book on 19th century pianism, After the Golden Age.
In a letter to his friend Liszt included in his Memoirs, French composer Hector Berlioz sums up the pianist’s magical appeal:
“You can confidently say, adapting Louis XIV: ‘I am the orchestra! I am the chorus and the conductor as well. My piano sings, broods, flashes, thunders. It rivals the keenest bows in swiftness; it has its own brazen harmonies and can conjure on the evening air its veiled enchantment of insubstantial chords and fairy melodies, just as the orchestra can and without all the paraphernalia. . . ’”
In a sneak peek at what would become accepted rockstar behaviour in a later century, the youthful Liszt left a trail of broken hearts and tabloid-style scandal wherever he went.
Born in Hungary, Liszt was a child prodigy who was writing and performing music before his 10th birthday. He perfected his art in Vienna and, after his stage-struck father died, ran off to Paris at age 19 to seek fame and fortune.
It didn’t take long for him to hook up with a married woman, the Comtesse d’Agoult, who helped him learn the ways of the aristocracy — and bore him three children. In 1847, Liszt traded the Parisian countess for a cigar-smoking Eastern European princess. He persuaded the separated-but-not-divorced minor royal to come live with him in Weimar, Germany, touching off a new round of gossip and scandal.
But Liszt pretended he was above it all. Unlike most of his peers and all of his predecessors, Liszt was no one’s servant, demanding to be treated with the deference normally reserved for royals and aristocrats.
Such was the power of his personality — and the quality of his art — that Liszt usually got exactly what he wanted.
Along the way, the man blossomed as a composer and orchestrator. While living in Weimar in middle age, Liszt also became a teacher, nurturing the talents of an entire school of extravagantly Romantic pianists who would go on to enthrall audiences in Europe and North American well into the 20th century.
“Look at him one way, and he was a genius. Look at him another, and he was a poseur. But one had to look and decide personally,” Schonberg wrote. “From the moment Liszt broke upon the world, he could not be ignored.”
With the man and his disciples long gone, all we have left is the music, of which there will be plenty to savour this year.
It wasn’t the Beatles or Elvis Presley who first caused young women to lose their marbles. That honour belongs to Franz Liszt, a dashing Hungarian pianist with long, flowing hair who could make his audiences swoon before he had played a single note.
Liszt was the Justin Bieber of 1830s Europe; the Elvis Presley of the 1840s; the Mick Jagger of the 1850s and the Frank Sinatra of the 1860s and ’70s. In fact, he remained a god of the musical world right until his death in 1886.
His power over women was so absolute that the resulting hysteria was even given a name — Lisztomania — and treated as a disease. It was also the title of a 1975’s psychedelically over-the-top Ken Russell film featuring Roger Daltrey as the Romantic piano star, and, more recently, the title of a hit song by French rockers Phoenix.
The mania begins anew this month, with concerts celebrating the 200th anniversary of Liszt’s birth, hot on the heels of a year of concerts celebrating the 200th anniversary of Liszt’s best friend — and fellow pianist-composer — Frédéric Chopin.
“If Chopin was the pianist’s pianist, Franz Liszt was the public’s pianist — the showman, the hero, the one who made inarticulate apes of his audiences,” wrote Harold Schonberg in Lives of the Great Composers. “He had everything in his favour — good looks, magnetism, power, a colossal technique, an unprecedented sonority, and the kind of opportunism (at least in his early years) that could cater to the public in the most cynical manner. He had an aura.”
Liszt could very well have been one of the first musical artists to straddle highbrow and lowbrow entertainment. He helped invent the modern solo piano recital. He experimented with new ways to translate Romantic emotional expression in music. And he improvised or transcribed all of the great operatic themes and arias of his day into popular music for the piano.
“What seems to us to be peculiar juxtapositions of serious and trivial pieces in a variety of genres was less an indicator of appalling insensitivity than an attempt to provide something for everyone,” writes Kenneth Hamilton in his recent book on 19th century pianism, After the Golden Age.
In a letter to his friend Liszt included in his Memoirs, French composer Hector Berlioz sums up the pianist’s magical appeal:
“You can confidently say, adapting Louis XIV: ‘I am the orchestra! I am the chorus and the conductor as well. My piano sings, broods, flashes, thunders. It rivals the keenest bows in swiftness; it has its own brazen harmonies and can conjure on the evening air its veiled enchantment of insubstantial chords and fairy melodies, just as the orchestra can and without all the paraphernalia. . . ’”
In a sneak peek at what would become accepted rockstar behaviour in a later century, the youthful Liszt left a trail of broken hearts and tabloid-style scandal wherever he went.
Born in Hungary, Liszt was a child prodigy who was writing and performing music before his 10th birthday. He perfected his art in Vienna and, after his stage-struck father died, ran off to Paris at age 19 to seek fame and fortune.
It didn’t take long for him to hook up with a married woman, the Comtesse d’Agoult, who helped him learn the ways of the aristocracy — and bore him three children. In 1847, Liszt traded the Parisian countess for a cigar-smoking Eastern European princess. He persuaded the separated-but-not-divorced minor royal to come live with him in Weimar, Germany, touching off a new round of gossip and scandal.
But Liszt pretended he was above it all. Unlike most of his peers and all of his predecessors, Liszt was no one’s servant, demanding to be treated with the deference normally reserved for royals and aristocrats.
Such was the power of his personality — and the quality of his art — that Liszt usually got exactly what he wanted.
Along the way, the man blossomed as a composer and orchestrator. While living in Weimar in middle age, Liszt also became a teacher, nurturing the talents of an entire school of extravagantly Romantic pianists who would go on to enthrall audiences in Europe and North American well into the 20th century.
“Look at him one way, and he was a genius. Look at him another, and he was a poseur. But one had to look and decide personally,” Schonberg wrote. “From the moment Liszt broke upon the world, he could not be ignored.”
With the man and his disciples long gone, all we have left is the music, of which there will be plenty to savour this year.
I've had a pretty strong aversion to Liszt in the past. not my style. I'm sure I'll give him another chance in the future.
at the top of the page: Schumann - I'm a fan. his music is the epitome of the Romantic era, I think. the human struggle. I listen to the concerto for piano and I feel like I'm living his life, back then in the 1800s. I see snow and horses. and misery.
at the top of the page: Schumann - I'm a fan. his music is the epitome of the Romantic era, I think. the human struggle. I listen to the concerto for piano and I feel like I'm living his life, back then in the 1800s. I see snow and horses. and misery.
QUOTE (~The Future of Taste~ @ Jan 10 2011, 09:26 PM)
I've had a pretty strong aversion to Liszt in the past. not my style. I'm sure I'll give him another chance in the future.
at the top of the page: Schumann - I'm a fan. his music is the epitome of the Romantic era, I think. the human struggle. I listen to the concerto for piano and I feel like I'm living his life, back then in the 1800s. I see snow and horses. and misery.
at the top of the page: Schumann - I'm a fan. his music is the epitome of the Romantic era, I think. the human struggle. I listen to the concerto for piano and I feel like I'm living his life, back then in the 1800s. I see snow and horses. and misery.
Liszt is at his best in the solo piano music. Any other instruments make him seem thin.
Frank Zappa also did very stunning symphony music.
QUOTE (FrankChurch @ Jan 13 2011, 01:11 PM)
Frank Zappa also did very stunning symphony music.
Pierre Boulez thought Zappa had compositional talent.
You just can't make up stuff like this...
In the Mayfair section of London is the Handel House Museum, dedicated to the German born composer who lived in England. Jimi Hendrix moved into a nearby apartment in 1968 and lived there for a year. When told that Handel had lived right next door, Hendrix bought some Handel recordings to check out the music, including the “Messiah.” To add extra exhibition space, the Handel House Museum has taken over the rooms Hendrix once lived in. In one you can see both Hendrix and Handel memorabilia.
In the Mayfair section of London is the Handel House Museum, dedicated to the German born composer who lived in England. Jimi Hendrix moved into a nearby apartment in 1968 and lived there for a year. When told that Handel had lived right next door, Hendrix bought some Handel recordings to check out the music, including the “Messiah.” To add extra exhibition space, the Handel House Museum has taken over the rooms Hendrix once lived in. In one you can see both Hendrix and Handel memorabilia.
what the FUCK
what the FUCK
how does this not make news. Milton Babbitt died January 29, 2011. didn't hear a single thing about it.
what the FUCK
how does this not make news. Milton Babbitt died January 29, 2011. didn't hear a single thing about it.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/book...able-man-1.html
anyway, anger is a little ridiculous. sorry. rip.
anyway, anger is a little ridiculous. sorry. rip.
QUOTE (bad character @ Feb 20 2011, 04:36 PM)
what the FUCK
what the FUCK
how does this not make news. Milton Babbitt died January 29, 2011. didn't hear a single thing about it.
what the FUCK
how does this not make news. Milton Babbitt died January 29, 2011. didn't hear a single thing about it.
Ahem
QUOTE (Tony @ Jun 8 2011, 10:22 AM)
That was pretty good. I think 'cellos must be the symphonic designate for shredding.
Bernard Herrman was born 100 years ago today. He may have been the greatest of all film composers - starting with Citizien Kane and ending with Taxi Driver with a bunch of classic scores in between including a historic ten year run with Hitchcock. The WSJ has a good article.
QUOTE (Sid Hartha @ Jun 8 2011, 06:47 PM)
QUOTE (Tony @ Jun 8 2011, 10:22 AM)
That was pretty good. I think 'cellos must be the symphonic designate for shredding.
I like this one by the same duo even more.
http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=qGIdSHeGsEM
Good 1999 article by Richard Taruskin from the NY Times...
They probably didn't plan it that way, but San Francisco's leading classical-music organizations will come into an interesting collision this week. At the War Memorial Opera House, the San Francisco Opera will stir up pagan ecstasy with several complete cycles of Richard Wagner's ''Ring of the Nibelung,'' beginning on Wednesday. Meanwhile, beginning on Thursday across the street at Davies Symphony Hall, and in a couple of other spots around town (including a Roman Catholic church), Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony will celebrate the life and times of Igor Stravinsky, who loved to bill himself as Wagner's Antichrist, and for whom the ''Ring,'' with its ''miasmic vapors'' and its labyrinth of leitmotifs, amounted to nothing more than ''a sort of vast musical city directory.''
That last bit was a typical anti-Wagnerian wisecrack of a kind everybody makes, Wagnerians included. (Stravinsky attributed it to Debussy.) Everybody feels oppressed during a Wagner performance. That is part of its appeal. Having endured martyrdom, we are cleansed -- or we are just irritated. ''Before, music strove to delight people,'' groused another Russian, Tchaikovsky, after sitting through a ''Ring.'' ''Now they are tormented and exhausted.'' But even the irritated -- no, especially the irritated -- know that the experience they have suffered was art-transcending and religious (or at least religiose), and therefore threatening to all who would prefer to take their religion, or their art, straight.
A third Russian, Leo Tolstoy, was probably the all-time champion Wagner hater. Late in life, after he had given up literature in favor of full-time Christian moralizing, Tolstoy produced a tract called ''What Is Art?'' in which good art was distinguished from bad solely on the basis of ''message.'' The prime exhibit of ''counterfeit art'' was, of course, the ''Ring.'' It is subjected to more than a dozen pages of hilarious abuse, including a plot summary even funnier than Anna Russell's but almost unbearable to read because of the blood-red hatred that drips from every word.
A sample: ''Having finished this conversation, Siegfried seizes one of the pieces of what is meant to represent the broken sword, saws it up, puts it on what is meant to represent the forge, melts it, and then forges it and sings: 'Heiho! heiho! heiho! Ho! ho! Aha! oho! aha! Heiaho! heiaho! heiaho! Ho! ho! Hahei! hoho! hahei!' and Act I finishes.''
Another sample, still about ''Siegfried,'' a little less funny because the deadpan wavers, but more pointed: ''The dragon is represented by two men: it is dressed in a green scale skin and waves a tail at one end while at the other it opens a kind of crocodile's jaw that is fastened on and from which flames appear. This dragon (who is meant to be dreadful and may seem so to 5-year-old children) utters some words in a terribly bass voice. This is all so stupid, so like what is done in a booth at a fair, that it is surprising that people over 7 years of age can witness it seriously; yet thousands of quasi-cultured people sit and attentively hear and see it, and are delighted.''
And finally, the coup de grace, a description not of a performance but of a rehearsal. After recounting a tirade administered to the cast by the exasperated conductor, Tolstoy muses: ''I have seen one workman abuse another for not supporting the weight piled upon him when goods were being unloaded, or at haystacking, the village Elder scold a peasant for not making the rick right, and the man submitted in silence. And however unpleasant it was to witness the scene, the unpleasantness was lessened by the consciousness that the business in hand was necessary and important, and the fault for which the Elder scolded the laborer was one which might spoil a necessary undertaking. But what was being done here? For what, and for whom?''
Tolstoy's was the anti-Wagnerianism of the truly religious, expressed at a time when Wagner was taken seriously as a religious thinker. It was a protest against the overvaluing of art. At the end of a century during which the overvaluing of art has come close to destroying it, one looks back and shudders.
Stravinsky's was the anti-Wagnerianism of the purely esthetic, expressed at a time when artists were in revolt against adulteration of their product, especially if adulteration came by way of social or humane concerns. The main thing Stravinsky held against Wagner was the Synthesis of the Arts, his term for what Wagnerians (even when speaking other languages than German) call the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. It mixed music with such message-mongering media as the visual and (especially) the literary.
''I do not merely condemn it for its lack of tradition, its nouveau riche smugness,'' Stravinsky told a Harvard audience in 1939. ''What makes its case much worse is the fact that the application of its theories has inflicted a terrible blow upon music itself.'' The Wagnerian system, ''far from having raised the level of musical culture, has never ceased to undermine it and finally to debase it.'' And the reason for the debasement was the fruitless denial of music's essential nature as ''a purely sensual delight.''
Against Wagner, Stravinsky offered Chabrier, Gounod, Delibes, Bizet, exactly the counterbid Tchaikovsky had endorsed 60 years before, updated by a fresh pair of names: Andre Messager, a composer of operettas, and Henri Sauguet, the youngest composer in Sergei Diaghilev's stable. (Stravinsky probably didn't know that Messager had been famous in his youth as a Wagner conductor.) But don't expect any Messager or Sauguet festivals in San Francisco, or anywhere else, anytime soon. Wagner, on one side of the balance, easily outweighs everybody Stravinsky placed on the other side. But then so does Stravinsky himself. Was the composer of ''The Rite of Spring'' really a Gounod fan?
PROBABLY not, really. But between the world wars, and especially during the anxious days of German rearmament when Stravinsky (then a French citizen) delivered his Harvard lectures, it seemed to him, as it did to many, terribly important to tout everything French over everything ''Boche.'' From having been a surrogate Kaiser, the aggressively Germanic Wagner was already becoming a surrogate Hitler. And so he has remained for the many who can never rid their minds of all the horrific subtexts that have accrued to Wagner's works since they left his hands: not his fault, perhaps, but definitely our problem.
Stravinsky's anti-Wagner problem was different. (In anti-Semitism he could easily vie for honors with his bete noire, although nothing prevented either of them from having Jewish friends or attracting Jewish advocates like Maestro Thomas.) Like any composer's anti-Wagnerianism, Stravinsky's was not only political but also personal, and it crystallized a little -- albeit very little -- before World War I.
In his earliest days, as the son of an opera singer, Stravinsky actually wallowed in the very miasma he later deplored. New Year's (and new century's) greetings that an admiring critic sent Stravinsky pere on Dec. 28, 1900, ended with felicitations ''to your lovely son, the Wagnerite musician,'' then an 18-year-old who had composed nothing.
Stravinsky's period of study with Rimsky-Korsakov, contrary to legend, did nothing to lessen his Wagner worship. In the winter and spring of 1908, the last year of Rimsky's life, teacher and pupil attended a ''Ring'' cycle together. Rimsky's Boswell, a banker named Vasily Yastrebtsev, bumped into Stravinsky during the first intermission at ''Siegfried.'' In his diary he noted that ''Igor Fyodorovich and I shared our delight in the first act of that opera, a work of genius.'' You know, ''Ho! ho! Hahei! hoho! hahei!''
Virgil Thomson once tried to write off Stravinsky's ''Russian'' ballets as just the ''Wagnerian theater symphony'' updated, and as usual he was mean but right. The leitmotif-laden ''Firebird'' was as much a musical city directory as any Wagnerian spectacle, and ''The Rite'' was as much a pagan ecstasy. ''Petrouchka,'' as an embodiment of Russian Symbolism, was especially Wagnerian in its heritage, and it was lauded by its co-creator Alexandre Benois as the ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork that actually managed to beat the wizard of Bayreuth at his own game.
What finally turned Stravinsky against Wagner was another collision between them, eerily akin to the one about to take place in San Francisco. First, in May 1913, there was the riotous premiere of ''The Rite of Spring'' at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris. Despite the myth that you will read in any music history textbook, Stravinsky experienced it as a depressing fiasco. The ballet was redeemed the next spring, when Pierre Monteux gave it a pair of concert performances that Stravinsky remembered for the rest of his life as the triumph of his career.
But a scant five weeks later, on June 3, 1914, ''Parsifal'' had its Paris premiere in the same theater as ''The Rite'' the year before. It ran alongside the whole Diaghilev season of 1914 (which included the premiere of Stravinsky's ''Nightingale'') and put it in the shade. Reviewers who had just hailed ''The Rite'' in concert now called it ephemeral, a trifle, next to Wagner's eternal genius. All the Russians, but particularly Stravinsky, were mortified. He swore revenge.
The main chance came two decades later, when he published his autobiography, ''Chronicles of My Life.'' One of the few richly detailed passages in that notoriously tight-lipped little book was a description of a (possibly apocryphal) visit to Bayreuth in the summer of 1912 to hear ''Parsifal.'' It joined Tolstoy's description of ''Siegfried'' in the annals of immortal Wagner-spite.
A SAMPLE: ''The very atmosphere of the theater, its design and its setting, seemed lugubrious. It was like a crematorium, and a very old-fashioned one at that, and one expected to see the gentleman in black who had been entrusted with the task of singing the praises of the departed. The order to devote oneself to contemplation was given by a blast of trumpets. I sat humble and motionless, but at the end of a quarter of an hour I could bear no more. My limbs were numb, and I had to change my position. Crack! Now I had done it! My chair had made a noise which drew down on me the furious scowls of a hundred pairs of eyes. Once more I withdrew into myself, but I could think of only one thing, and that was the end of the act, which would put an end to my martyrdom.''
Like Tolstoy, Stravinsky reached for a chilling peroration. To mix art and religion ''is to give proof of a complete lack of discernment, and certainly of bad taste,'' he railed. ''But is it at all surprising that such confusion should arise at a time like the present, when the openly irreligious masses in their degradation of spiritual values and debasement of human thought necessarily lead us to utter brutalization?'' William Bennett, Gary Bauer, eat your hearts out. Stravinsky said it all before, better than you.
Reconcilaition with Wagner came after World War II, when it suddenly became important to Stravinsky to forge retrospective links with Wagner's self-styled heirs. He was responding to the panic he felt on returning to Europe and seeing that young composers, belatedly discovering the 12-tone music of Schoenberg and the New Vienna School, now thought his music passe. Not only did he take up 12-tone composition himself, Stravinsky also accepted, hook, line and sinker, the historiographical myths that supported the Schoenbergian claim to musical supremacy.
Typical of the newly suppliant Stravinsky were self-pitying pronouncements like this one, made shortly after his 80th birthday: ''I relate only from an angle to the German stem (Bach-Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven-Schubert-Brahms-Wagner-Mahler-Schoenberg).'' But look again at that list of composers. It is out of order. And Wagner is the telling anachronism. Only 16 years younger than Schubert, he was old enough to be Brahms's father.
Stravinsky's asserted mainstream was a fiction, constructed by historians (Schoenberg and Webern moonlighting among them) who replayed in forward motion a lineage that had been traced backward to justify atonal and 12-tone music as the inevitable outcome of the ''crisis of tonality'' Wagner had supposedly set in motion. Putting Brahms ahead of Wagner got rid of a pesky bump in the road of progress.
According to Carl Dahlhaus, the most influential German music historian of recent times, ''the assertion that Schoenberg's atonality represents a consequence of the chromaticism of 'Tristan' has long been a commonplace (and remains difficult to challenge).'' But it is not difficult at all to challenge -- indeed, to refute. Wagner used the chromaticism of ''Tristan und Isolde'' to delay to the point of torture the harmonic resolution that would symbolize the slaking of sexual desire. That harmonic tension not only conveyed the dramatic situation with a force no other art could equal but was the mainspring that controlled the syntax of what we now call ''tonal'' music.
Did the delays caused by Wagner's chromaticism attenuate that harmonic tension? Don't be silly. They only magnified it, vastly so. Wagner's chromaticism gave tonality a new source of strength and expressivity. The consequences Schoenberg drew from Wagner's musical style were entirely idiosyncratic and ahistorical, inevitable only in eyes blinded by ''dialectic.'' To say the very least, they had nothing to do with Wagner's creative aims, least of all in ''Tristan.''
So the Wagnerian ''crisis of tonality'' was not Wagnerian at all. It was read back into Wagner by Schoenberg's apologists, eventually including the intimidated Stravinsky.
Well, all that is behind us now. Perhaps everything is behind us now. How else explain the ease with which, at century's end, we swallow down smorgasbords, like simultaneous Wagner and Stravinsky festivals, on which our ancestors would have gagged?
THAT eclecticism of taste -- the universal tolerance that finds nothing incompatible with anything -- is now touted as a bounty of post-modernism. The rejection of ''meta-narratives,'' post-modernists call it, meaning the rejection of universal truth claims. But do we therefore reject all truth claims? Could our failure to take sides, or even to see that sides might be taken, be masking an apathy that knoweth not its name?
Karol Berger, a Stanford musicologist, seems to hint as much when he reminds us of the comfy middle-class assumptions on which the latest cultural revolution rests. ''The vision of a plurality of equally valid co-existing life forms may be compelling,'' he writes, ''only to those whose outlook is underpinned by one more meta-narrative, that of a continuous and rapid global growth of prosperity.'' And he suggests, wickedly, that ''the post-modern vision remains plausible only so long as we imagine that the only dilemmas we shall ever face are on the order of 'Shall I get a cappuccino or a caffe latte, buy a Volvo or a BMW?' '' Ouch. Those are Bay Area questions, all right.
Here's another: Has Mr. Berger identified the only terms on which one can now debate Stravinsky contra Wagner -- as rival emblems of conspicuous culture-consumption? When a San Francisco critic can tout the ''Ring'' as ''Star Wars'' for the wealthy (while conceding that Wagner's music is, after all, ''considerably richer, bolder and more nuanced'' than John Williams's), Tolstoy's frightening old question -- What is being done here, and for whom? -- comes roaring back to life.
They probably didn't plan it that way, but San Francisco's leading classical-music organizations will come into an interesting collision this week. At the War Memorial Opera House, the San Francisco Opera will stir up pagan ecstasy with several complete cycles of Richard Wagner's ''Ring of the Nibelung,'' beginning on Wednesday. Meanwhile, beginning on Thursday across the street at Davies Symphony Hall, and in a couple of other spots around town (including a Roman Catholic church), Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony will celebrate the life and times of Igor Stravinsky, who loved to bill himself as Wagner's Antichrist, and for whom the ''Ring,'' with its ''miasmic vapors'' and its labyrinth of leitmotifs, amounted to nothing more than ''a sort of vast musical city directory.''
That last bit was a typical anti-Wagnerian wisecrack of a kind everybody makes, Wagnerians included. (Stravinsky attributed it to Debussy.) Everybody feels oppressed during a Wagner performance. That is part of its appeal. Having endured martyrdom, we are cleansed -- or we are just irritated. ''Before, music strove to delight people,'' groused another Russian, Tchaikovsky, after sitting through a ''Ring.'' ''Now they are tormented and exhausted.'' But even the irritated -- no, especially the irritated -- know that the experience they have suffered was art-transcending and religious (or at least religiose), and therefore threatening to all who would prefer to take their religion, or their art, straight.
A third Russian, Leo Tolstoy, was probably the all-time champion Wagner hater. Late in life, after he had given up literature in favor of full-time Christian moralizing, Tolstoy produced a tract called ''What Is Art?'' in which good art was distinguished from bad solely on the basis of ''message.'' The prime exhibit of ''counterfeit art'' was, of course, the ''Ring.'' It is subjected to more than a dozen pages of hilarious abuse, including a plot summary even funnier than Anna Russell's but almost unbearable to read because of the blood-red hatred that drips from every word.
A sample: ''Having finished this conversation, Siegfried seizes one of the pieces of what is meant to represent the broken sword, saws it up, puts it on what is meant to represent the forge, melts it, and then forges it and sings: 'Heiho! heiho! heiho! Ho! ho! Aha! oho! aha! Heiaho! heiaho! heiaho! Ho! ho! Hahei! hoho! hahei!' and Act I finishes.''
Another sample, still about ''Siegfried,'' a little less funny because the deadpan wavers, but more pointed: ''The dragon is represented by two men: it is dressed in a green scale skin and waves a tail at one end while at the other it opens a kind of crocodile's jaw that is fastened on and from which flames appear. This dragon (who is meant to be dreadful and may seem so to 5-year-old children) utters some words in a terribly bass voice. This is all so stupid, so like what is done in a booth at a fair, that it is surprising that people over 7 years of age can witness it seriously; yet thousands of quasi-cultured people sit and attentively hear and see it, and are delighted.''
And finally, the coup de grace, a description not of a performance but of a rehearsal. After recounting a tirade administered to the cast by the exasperated conductor, Tolstoy muses: ''I have seen one workman abuse another for not supporting the weight piled upon him when goods were being unloaded, or at haystacking, the village Elder scold a peasant for not making the rick right, and the man submitted in silence. And however unpleasant it was to witness the scene, the unpleasantness was lessened by the consciousness that the business in hand was necessary and important, and the fault for which the Elder scolded the laborer was one which might spoil a necessary undertaking. But what was being done here? For what, and for whom?''
Tolstoy's was the anti-Wagnerianism of the truly religious, expressed at a time when Wagner was taken seriously as a religious thinker. It was a protest against the overvaluing of art. At the end of a century during which the overvaluing of art has come close to destroying it, one looks back and shudders.
Stravinsky's was the anti-Wagnerianism of the purely esthetic, expressed at a time when artists were in revolt against adulteration of their product, especially if adulteration came by way of social or humane concerns. The main thing Stravinsky held against Wagner was the Synthesis of the Arts, his term for what Wagnerians (even when speaking other languages than German) call the Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art. It mixed music with such message-mongering media as the visual and (especially) the literary.
''I do not merely condemn it for its lack of tradition, its nouveau riche smugness,'' Stravinsky told a Harvard audience in 1939. ''What makes its case much worse is the fact that the application of its theories has inflicted a terrible blow upon music itself.'' The Wagnerian system, ''far from having raised the level of musical culture, has never ceased to undermine it and finally to debase it.'' And the reason for the debasement was the fruitless denial of music's essential nature as ''a purely sensual delight.''
Against Wagner, Stravinsky offered Chabrier, Gounod, Delibes, Bizet, exactly the counterbid Tchaikovsky had endorsed 60 years before, updated by a fresh pair of names: Andre Messager, a composer of operettas, and Henri Sauguet, the youngest composer in Sergei Diaghilev's stable. (Stravinsky probably didn't know that Messager had been famous in his youth as a Wagner conductor.) But don't expect any Messager or Sauguet festivals in San Francisco, or anywhere else, anytime soon. Wagner, on one side of the balance, easily outweighs everybody Stravinsky placed on the other side. But then so does Stravinsky himself. Was the composer of ''The Rite of Spring'' really a Gounod fan?
PROBABLY not, really. But between the world wars, and especially during the anxious days of German rearmament when Stravinsky (then a French citizen) delivered his Harvard lectures, it seemed to him, as it did to many, terribly important to tout everything French over everything ''Boche.'' From having been a surrogate Kaiser, the aggressively Germanic Wagner was already becoming a surrogate Hitler. And so he has remained for the many who can never rid their minds of all the horrific subtexts that have accrued to Wagner's works since they left his hands: not his fault, perhaps, but definitely our problem.
Stravinsky's anti-Wagner problem was different. (In anti-Semitism he could easily vie for honors with his bete noire, although nothing prevented either of them from having Jewish friends or attracting Jewish advocates like Maestro Thomas.) Like any composer's anti-Wagnerianism, Stravinsky's was not only political but also personal, and it crystallized a little -- albeit very little -- before World War I.
In his earliest days, as the son of an opera singer, Stravinsky actually wallowed in the very miasma he later deplored. New Year's (and new century's) greetings that an admiring critic sent Stravinsky pere on Dec. 28, 1900, ended with felicitations ''to your lovely son, the Wagnerite musician,'' then an 18-year-old who had composed nothing.
Stravinsky's period of study with Rimsky-Korsakov, contrary to legend, did nothing to lessen his Wagner worship. In the winter and spring of 1908, the last year of Rimsky's life, teacher and pupil attended a ''Ring'' cycle together. Rimsky's Boswell, a banker named Vasily Yastrebtsev, bumped into Stravinsky during the first intermission at ''Siegfried.'' In his diary he noted that ''Igor Fyodorovich and I shared our delight in the first act of that opera, a work of genius.'' You know, ''Ho! ho! Hahei! hoho! hahei!''
Virgil Thomson once tried to write off Stravinsky's ''Russian'' ballets as just the ''Wagnerian theater symphony'' updated, and as usual he was mean but right. The leitmotif-laden ''Firebird'' was as much a musical city directory as any Wagnerian spectacle, and ''The Rite'' was as much a pagan ecstasy. ''Petrouchka,'' as an embodiment of Russian Symbolism, was especially Wagnerian in its heritage, and it was lauded by its co-creator Alexandre Benois as the ultimate Gesamtkunstwerk, a total artwork that actually managed to beat the wizard of Bayreuth at his own game.
What finally turned Stravinsky against Wagner was another collision between them, eerily akin to the one about to take place in San Francisco. First, in May 1913, there was the riotous premiere of ''The Rite of Spring'' at the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris. Despite the myth that you will read in any music history textbook, Stravinsky experienced it as a depressing fiasco. The ballet was redeemed the next spring, when Pierre Monteux gave it a pair of concert performances that Stravinsky remembered for the rest of his life as the triumph of his career.
But a scant five weeks later, on June 3, 1914, ''Parsifal'' had its Paris premiere in the same theater as ''The Rite'' the year before. It ran alongside the whole Diaghilev season of 1914 (which included the premiere of Stravinsky's ''Nightingale'') and put it in the shade. Reviewers who had just hailed ''The Rite'' in concert now called it ephemeral, a trifle, next to Wagner's eternal genius. All the Russians, but particularly Stravinsky, were mortified. He swore revenge.
The main chance came two decades later, when he published his autobiography, ''Chronicles of My Life.'' One of the few richly detailed passages in that notoriously tight-lipped little book was a description of a (possibly apocryphal) visit to Bayreuth in the summer of 1912 to hear ''Parsifal.'' It joined Tolstoy's description of ''Siegfried'' in the annals of immortal Wagner-spite.
A SAMPLE: ''The very atmosphere of the theater, its design and its setting, seemed lugubrious. It was like a crematorium, and a very old-fashioned one at that, and one expected to see the gentleman in black who had been entrusted with the task of singing the praises of the departed. The order to devote oneself to contemplation was given by a blast of trumpets. I sat humble and motionless, but at the end of a quarter of an hour I could bear no more. My limbs were numb, and I had to change my position. Crack! Now I had done it! My chair had made a noise which drew down on me the furious scowls of a hundred pairs of eyes. Once more I withdrew into myself, but I could think of only one thing, and that was the end of the act, which would put an end to my martyrdom.''
Like Tolstoy, Stravinsky reached for a chilling peroration. To mix art and religion ''is to give proof of a complete lack of discernment, and certainly of bad taste,'' he railed. ''But is it at all surprising that such confusion should arise at a time like the present, when the openly irreligious masses in their degradation of spiritual values and debasement of human thought necessarily lead us to utter brutalization?'' William Bennett, Gary Bauer, eat your hearts out. Stravinsky said it all before, better than you.
Reconcilaition with Wagner came after World War II, when it suddenly became important to Stravinsky to forge retrospective links with Wagner's self-styled heirs. He was responding to the panic he felt on returning to Europe and seeing that young composers, belatedly discovering the 12-tone music of Schoenberg and the New Vienna School, now thought his music passe. Not only did he take up 12-tone composition himself, Stravinsky also accepted, hook, line and sinker, the historiographical myths that supported the Schoenbergian claim to musical supremacy.
Typical of the newly suppliant Stravinsky were self-pitying pronouncements like this one, made shortly after his 80th birthday: ''I relate only from an angle to the German stem (Bach-Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven-Schubert-Brahms-Wagner-Mahler-Schoenberg).'' But look again at that list of composers. It is out of order. And Wagner is the telling anachronism. Only 16 years younger than Schubert, he was old enough to be Brahms's father.
Stravinsky's asserted mainstream was a fiction, constructed by historians (Schoenberg and Webern moonlighting among them) who replayed in forward motion a lineage that had been traced backward to justify atonal and 12-tone music as the inevitable outcome of the ''crisis of tonality'' Wagner had supposedly set in motion. Putting Brahms ahead of Wagner got rid of a pesky bump in the road of progress.
According to Carl Dahlhaus, the most influential German music historian of recent times, ''the assertion that Schoenberg's atonality represents a consequence of the chromaticism of 'Tristan' has long been a commonplace (and remains difficult to challenge).'' But it is not difficult at all to challenge -- indeed, to refute. Wagner used the chromaticism of ''Tristan und Isolde'' to delay to the point of torture the harmonic resolution that would symbolize the slaking of sexual desire. That harmonic tension not only conveyed the dramatic situation with a force no other art could equal but was the mainspring that controlled the syntax of what we now call ''tonal'' music.
Did the delays caused by Wagner's chromaticism attenuate that harmonic tension? Don't be silly. They only magnified it, vastly so. Wagner's chromaticism gave tonality a new source of strength and expressivity. The consequences Schoenberg drew from Wagner's musical style were entirely idiosyncratic and ahistorical, inevitable only in eyes blinded by ''dialectic.'' To say the very least, they had nothing to do with Wagner's creative aims, least of all in ''Tristan.''
So the Wagnerian ''crisis of tonality'' was not Wagnerian at all. It was read back into Wagner by Schoenberg's apologists, eventually including the intimidated Stravinsky.
Well, all that is behind us now. Perhaps everything is behind us now. How else explain the ease with which, at century's end, we swallow down smorgasbords, like simultaneous Wagner and Stravinsky festivals, on which our ancestors would have gagged?
THAT eclecticism of taste -- the universal tolerance that finds nothing incompatible with anything -- is now touted as a bounty of post-modernism. The rejection of ''meta-narratives,'' post-modernists call it, meaning the rejection of universal truth claims. But do we therefore reject all truth claims? Could our failure to take sides, or even to see that sides might be taken, be masking an apathy that knoweth not its name?
Karol Berger, a Stanford musicologist, seems to hint as much when he reminds us of the comfy middle-class assumptions on which the latest cultural revolution rests. ''The vision of a plurality of equally valid co-existing life forms may be compelling,'' he writes, ''only to those whose outlook is underpinned by one more meta-narrative, that of a continuous and rapid global growth of prosperity.'' And he suggests, wickedly, that ''the post-modern vision remains plausible only so long as we imagine that the only dilemmas we shall ever face are on the order of 'Shall I get a cappuccino or a caffe latte, buy a Volvo or a BMW?' '' Ouch. Those are Bay Area questions, all right.
Here's another: Has Mr. Berger identified the only terms on which one can now debate Stravinsky contra Wagner -- as rival emblems of conspicuous culture-consumption? When a San Francisco critic can tout the ''Ring'' as ''Star Wars'' for the wealthy (while conceding that Wagner's music is, after all, ''considerably richer, bolder and more nuanced'' than John Williams's), Tolstoy's frightening old question -- What is being done here, and for whom? -- comes roaring back to life.
So i've been really digging the Fantasia OST its with leopold stokowski and the philly orchestra
where should i go from here as far as classical music is concerned?
where should i go from here as far as classical music is concerned?
QUOTE (Tony @ Aug 17 2011, 06:40 PM)
"Audio has been disabled..." : WTF? Did the poster sync Metallica on it, or is WMG claiming copyright on AMBIENT SOUND?
QUOTE (stackcheese @ Aug 18 2011, 02:01 AM)
So i've been really digging the Fantasia OST its with leopold stokowski and the philly orchestra
where should i go from here as far as classical music is concerned?
where should i go from here as far as classical music is concerned?
This thread at Rateyourmusic.com should be helpful.
QUOTE (stackcheese @ Aug 18 2011, 02:01 AM)
So i've been really digging the Fantasia OST its with leopold stokowski and the philly orchestra
where should i go from here as far as classical music is concerned?
where should i go from here as far as classical music is concerned?
How about full recordings of those pieces? Rite of Spring, Night on Bald Mountain, Beethoven's 6th symphony...
QUOTE (Angrimorfee @ Aug 18 2011, 05:54 AM)
"Audio has been disabled..." : WTF? Did the poster sync Metallica on it, or is WMG claiming copyright on AMBIENT SOUND?
I'm assuming that pic is a joke. Could be real though I guess.
How Franz Liszt Became The World's First Rock Star
When you think of rock n' roll, Franz Liszt might not be the first name that comes to mind. But the classical pianist, born 200 years ago today, was in many ways the first rock star of all time.
In the mid-19th century, Liszt was tearing up the polite salons and concert halls of Europe with his virtuoso performances. Women would literally attack him: tear bits of his clothing, fight over broken piano strings and locks of his shoulder-length hair. Europe had never seen anything like it. It was a phenomenon the great German poet Heinrich Heine dubbed "Lisztomania."
"We hear about women throwing their clothes onto the stage and taking his cigar butts and placing them in their cleavages," says Stephen Hough, a world-renowned concert pianist.
Like many contemporary classical pianists, Hough is obsessed with Liszt — not only because he was really good, but also because he revolutionized the art of performance.
"Liszt was a very dynamic personality," Hough says. "He was someone who seduced people — not just in a sexual way, but in a dramatic way. He was someone who, like a great speaker, was able to capture an audience."
Before Franz Liszt, no one thought a solo pianist could hold anyone's attention, let alone captivate an audience. Liszt set out across Europe in 1839 to prove the conventional wisdom wrong. As part of that mission, he made a radical decision to never bring his scores onstage.
"Before Liszt, it was considered almost in bad taste to play from memory," Hough explains. "Chopin once chided a student: It looked almost arrogant, as if you were pretending that the piece you were playing was by you. Liszt saw that playing the piano, especially for a whole evening in front of an audience, it was a theatrical event that needed not just musical things happening but physical things on the stage."
Liszt deliberately placed the piano in profile to the audience so they could see his face. He'd whip his head around while he played, his long hair flying, beads of sweat shooting into the crowd. He was the first performer to stride out from the wings of the concert hall to take his seat at the piano. Everything we recognize about the modern piano recital — think Keith Jarrett, Glenn Gould, Tori Amos or Elton John — Liszt did first. Even the name "recital" was his invention.
But although his life was the kind many musicians dream of, Liszt walked away from it all in his 30s.
"He wasn't someone who thought life just consisted of food, drink and all the pleasure you could wring out of it. He was someone who was always searching," Hough says. "I mean, he even considered the priesthood in his teens. So, he was never going to be satisfied just with pleasing the countesses. I think he also realized how superficial a lot of audiences' appreciation might be, and he wanted to retire and to do something more meaningful."
Later on in his life, Liszt became interested in conducting, and he re-defined that role as well: He started to work with individual musicians to help them shape the sounds that he was after.
"Before Liszt, a conductor was someone who just facilitated the performance, who would keep people together or beat the time, indicate the entries," Hough says. "After Liszt, that was no longer the case; a conductor was someone who shaped the music in an intense musical way, who played the orchestra as an instrument."
And, of course, Liszt would go on to compose around 1,400 works. He died in 1886, but all through the 20th century, his influence could be heard — in the works of fellow Hungarian composers Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, as well as in the writing of his son-in-law, Richard Wagner.
The cultural impact of Lisztomania continues to take various forms today. In 1975, Ken Russell directed a film called Lisztomania, starring The Who's Roger Daltrey as Franz Liszt. (It was a bit over the top, anachronistically adding pyrotechnics and gunplay to Liszt's already-flamboyant stage show.) Then, just a couple years ago, modern rock fans fell in love with the song "Lisztomania" by the French band Phoenix.
"I love classical piano, so I have to love Liszt," says Thomas Mars, Phoenix's lead singer. Mars says he wanted to write an homage to Liszt; the band even recorded the video for the song outside Liszt's home in Bayreuth, Germany.
"He was exotic, he was different, he was pure in a way," says Mars. "It seemed that everyone wanted to get something out of him, so when people go ecstatic ... he's totally embracing that.
Tonight, on the 200th anniversary of Franz Liszt's birth, the Philadelphia Orchestra is performing his First Symphony. The orchestra will have a very special guest: Lang Lang, another world-renowned pianist and perhaps the closest thing we have today to a classical rock star.
Lang Lang's love of Liszt is well-known — in fact, his newest album is called Liszt: My Piano Hero. Weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz spoke with Lang Lang earlier in the week, between rehearsals in Philadelphia. The pianist said he first heard Liszt's music as a 2-year-old.
"I was watching Tom and Jerry, and they were playing Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2," Lang Lang says. "And I was fascinated."
When you think of rock n' roll, Franz Liszt might not be the first name that comes to mind. But the classical pianist, born 200 years ago today, was in many ways the first rock star of all time.
In the mid-19th century, Liszt was tearing up the polite salons and concert halls of Europe with his virtuoso performances. Women would literally attack him: tear bits of his clothing, fight over broken piano strings and locks of his shoulder-length hair. Europe had never seen anything like it. It was a phenomenon the great German poet Heinrich Heine dubbed "Lisztomania."
"We hear about women throwing their clothes onto the stage and taking his cigar butts and placing them in their cleavages," says Stephen Hough, a world-renowned concert pianist.
Like many contemporary classical pianists, Hough is obsessed with Liszt — not only because he was really good, but also because he revolutionized the art of performance.
"Liszt was a very dynamic personality," Hough says. "He was someone who seduced people — not just in a sexual way, but in a dramatic way. He was someone who, like a great speaker, was able to capture an audience."
Before Franz Liszt, no one thought a solo pianist could hold anyone's attention, let alone captivate an audience. Liszt set out across Europe in 1839 to prove the conventional wisdom wrong. As part of that mission, he made a radical decision to never bring his scores onstage.
"Before Liszt, it was considered almost in bad taste to play from memory," Hough explains. "Chopin once chided a student: It looked almost arrogant, as if you were pretending that the piece you were playing was by you. Liszt saw that playing the piano, especially for a whole evening in front of an audience, it was a theatrical event that needed not just musical things happening but physical things on the stage."
Liszt deliberately placed the piano in profile to the audience so they could see his face. He'd whip his head around while he played, his long hair flying, beads of sweat shooting into the crowd. He was the first performer to stride out from the wings of the concert hall to take his seat at the piano. Everything we recognize about the modern piano recital — think Keith Jarrett, Glenn Gould, Tori Amos or Elton John — Liszt did first. Even the name "recital" was his invention.
But although his life was the kind many musicians dream of, Liszt walked away from it all in his 30s.
"He wasn't someone who thought life just consisted of food, drink and all the pleasure you could wring out of it. He was someone who was always searching," Hough says. "I mean, he even considered the priesthood in his teens. So, he was never going to be satisfied just with pleasing the countesses. I think he also realized how superficial a lot of audiences' appreciation might be, and he wanted to retire and to do something more meaningful."
Later on in his life, Liszt became interested in conducting, and he re-defined that role as well: He started to work with individual musicians to help them shape the sounds that he was after.
"Before Liszt, a conductor was someone who just facilitated the performance, who would keep people together or beat the time, indicate the entries," Hough says. "After Liszt, that was no longer the case; a conductor was someone who shaped the music in an intense musical way, who played the orchestra as an instrument."
And, of course, Liszt would go on to compose around 1,400 works. He died in 1886, but all through the 20th century, his influence could be heard — in the works of fellow Hungarian composers Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, as well as in the writing of his son-in-law, Richard Wagner.
The cultural impact of Lisztomania continues to take various forms today. In 1975, Ken Russell directed a film called Lisztomania, starring The Who's Roger Daltrey as Franz Liszt. (It was a bit over the top, anachronistically adding pyrotechnics and gunplay to Liszt's already-flamboyant stage show.) Then, just a couple years ago, modern rock fans fell in love with the song "Lisztomania" by the French band Phoenix.
"I love classical piano, so I have to love Liszt," says Thomas Mars, Phoenix's lead singer. Mars says he wanted to write an homage to Liszt; the band even recorded the video for the song outside Liszt's home in Bayreuth, Germany.
"He was exotic, he was different, he was pure in a way," says Mars. "It seemed that everyone wanted to get something out of him, so when people go ecstatic ... he's totally embracing that.
Tonight, on the 200th anniversary of Franz Liszt's birth, the Philadelphia Orchestra is performing his First Symphony. The orchestra will have a very special guest: Lang Lang, another world-renowned pianist and perhaps the closest thing we have today to a classical rock star.
Lang Lang's love of Liszt is well-known — in fact, his newest album is called Liszt: My Piano Hero. Weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz spoke with Lang Lang earlier in the week, between rehearsals in Philadelphia. The pianist said he first heard Liszt's music as a 2-year-old.
"I was watching Tom and Jerry, and they were playing Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2," Lang Lang says. "And I was fascinated."
QUOTE (Tony @ Oct 22 2011, 02:31 PM)
caught this yesterday, really have to listen to him since i only really listen to schubert
QUOTE (b*derty @ Oct 23 2011, 12:56 PM)
QUOTE (Tony @ Oct 22 2011, 02:31 PM)
caught this yesterday, really have to listen to him since i only really listen to schubert
The most famous Liszt of all.
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