I do kind of wish I'd saved classical for when I'm a bit older, though.

Petrouchka is THE SHIT. I never tire of it.

I maintain that if you don't have a knowledge of music history and the origins of the Art and how high it's been then you can't call yourself a music lover.

Can you imagine someone calling themselves an Art Lover and then saying they don't give a shit about Michaelangelo and Titian and all those 'old paintings'?

Okay, I was just backing up that you're not playing Rachmaninov unless you're shit hot. Which I'm sure you'd agree with, if you were 12 years worth of good and still couldn't play all his stuff. My grandad can just about play some and he's been playing the thing for years and he's one of those people that takes everything to ridiculous levels of seriousness. When you think the dude was composing stuff that hard to play, it's mind boggling.

Try Petrouchka. Nothing 'old' about it.

Rachmanniov had a huge span...from pinky to thumb to he could go almost two octaves.

I don't mean in that respect. I love classical, have heard shitloads of it. I just think that when I'm in my 50's I'll likely tire of this electric stuff and will want to listen to classical or jazz. If I hadn't heard too much Rachmaninov or Mussorgsky already, that could have been a whole new world.

To clarify here, I love classical music. I just don't like people insulting modern music by saying classical music is the superior form. I can say personally that Talk Talk is superior musically to Bach (yes, it's just my opinion, but who's to say what's better written, it was a different time period.)

Jazz music is not "serious" music? That definition leaves a lot to be desired. And the idea that there's no room for interpretation when performing written music is pretty silly.

But in the spirit of the thread, Tony, could you give us a top 10 list of favorite pieces/recordings?

What are your criteria for great music? Bach virtually invented the modern tonal system and some would say exhausted its possibilities. A lot of Bach actually sounds downright atonal. He's been called the supreme Artistic genius of Western Civizlization. And you;re comparing him to...Talk Talk? This is what I meant by sense of proportion. I love ABBA and showtunes but come on.

That'll be the universe imploding...

The best entry pieces, I would say would be Holst's Planets and Vivaldi's Four seasons. Great stuff that you'll recognise large chunks of anyway.

Oc course there is room for interpreation. How many different ways are there to play Hamlet? Jazz is more about the performer than the composer or the composition. The composer is probably less important than the arranger in Jazz.

Haha, yeah I mean, especially with the romantics like Chopin in piano, how can you recreate the feelings exactly like chopin wanted them when he's been dead for over 100 years. You have to take your own interpretation of the music when performing it makes it impossible to make your performance felt by the audience.

STOCKHAUSEN - "GESANG DER JUENGLINGE (1955-56)"



THE REAL SHIT.

some of my favorite pieces:

ligeti - atmospheres
messiaen - quartet for the end of time
bartok - concerto for orchestra
gorecki - symphony no. 3
part - tabula rasa
penderecki - canticum canticorum salomonis

and yea, xenakis is the shit. i keep xenakis's music for strings cd in my car, and i swear it freaks people out more than merzbow or boredoms or whatever jap noise band.

Petrouchka is actually a great enty point. Stravinsky used various circus, folk and pop tunes and amalgamated them into a poly-tonal stew of dazzling orchestral color. It's all about a puppet who falls in love but you don't really have to know the story to enjoy it.

Everyone talks about the famous first mvt of the 'Moonlight' Sonata (stupid nickname which came after Beethoven died) but try the last movement. Some of the ferocious music ever written that must have shattered the pianos of the day.


Bartko's 'Music for Percussion, Celesta and Strings' is great. Kubrick used it to great effect in The Shining.

I look for emotional content in music more than anything else, I much prefer the romantic period composers, to Bach et al for that reason (classical music, outside of performing it, has never brought me the emotional feelings that more modern artists/composers have.

Emotional content is subjective though. Some people are emotionally stirred by formal ideas and are made uncomfortable by overt emotional content (Wagner, Tchaikovsky).

There is no classical music better than ABBA. Fact.

Funny how interpretations of the music can vary from orchestra to orchestra or player to player, sometimes for me to the point of disliking the performance...yes, they perform the piece masterfully, but the phrasings and the tempo(tempi) may jar my favorite "version" of the piece.

Here's my main man, Yo-Yo Ma, whipping it out like no one else can on Bach's Cello Suite No.1. (I've played this, and it is a bitch to do well)
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scarymuppet ftw.

thread needs fish. just sayin.

I'll prove myself an internet ignoramus and ask what fish means.

The beauty of classical is that most of it is in the public domain now. Classic cat has loads and loads of free shit.

Wow, you pretty much never leave Etcetera.

"in some electronic way, upload a digital, not-necessarily legal, recording of a certain song or album onto this web site for my personal use, via a service such as yousendit.com"

You didn't hear that from me, BTW.

When I was in high school, my older brother signed me up for a subscription to the International Preview Society - sort of a classical record-of-the-month club for audiophiles.

Once a month I would receive a new record in the mail. That's how I got this:


...which started my obsession with Beethoven Symphonies. Very heavy, bombastic stuff - best if played LOUD.

.


With the nine Beethoven symphonies forget the first two and stick with the odd numbered ones 3,5,7,9.

Not that 4,6,8 are bad but the others are better intros.

In a great performance the 7th is one of the most exciting events in music. The neurotic 2nd mvt was used in the French film Irreversible.

Excellent, thank you!

Karajan is pretty rock n' roll for a conductor, isn't he? My copy of the 9th has him standing next to his airplane on the back cover, on another recording he's sitting in a sports car.

I've always enjoyed classical but steered clear of getting too involved so as to avoid being hooked into starting yet another genre to collect.

I find it similar to scotch, in that, a taste grows for it with age.

And now that I've been given a 300 LP collection of it in mint condition...well, I'm reveling in it. Just not knowledgeable enough to be passing off my insights as important.

As well as the Sean Connery sci-fi flick Zardoz.

Shortly after getting the 7th, I picked this up after Stereo Review gave it a "best of the month":



This version was noteworthy because it spanned two disks - with no additional material - making it the loudest available version of the 9th. I just knew it was the one I wanted.

From what I understand, he pretty much built his reputation interpreting Beethoven.

He was that. He also got his start thanks to Goerring. The Nazi affiliations dogged him all of his life. But he was one of the pioneers of digital recording...doing some of the earliest CDs.

There's a long standing joke that Von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein were at a banquet sitting at opposite ends of the same long table and Bernstein said "Last night God came to me in a dream and said 'Lenny, you are the world's greatest conductor'" Von Karajan banged his fist on the table and yelled "I said no such thing!"


RE Beethoven's 9th....part of the reason early CDs were about 73 minutes long is so that it could fit on one CD. They say that was Karajan's idea.

i happen to know, for a fact, that bernstein was called 'maestro' in social situations

He wore a cape in social situations. Hey the man may have been the single most talented musician in American history.

no argument here. even west side story is an insane piece of work

Put someone up against him?

Composer of genius, virtuoso pianist, conductor of genius and educator of genius.

He was also fluent in quite a few languages and capabable delivering scholarly lectures connecting musical grammar with Chomskyan linguistics at Harvard (which he did in 1973).

And that makes his compositions any better? He wrote pop music. I'll have to think about most talented musician in american history, but I'll get back you.

He wrote both pop and serious music. Three symphonies, a Mass, operas and such. And 'West Side Story' is probably the best musical of all time.

THE ONLY "CLASSICAL MUSIC" THAT MATTERS.

oxymoron

I have a problem still with your definition of serious music, it's just ridiculous, I'm not trying to derail the thread, it's just there's a lot of modern music that could be considered serious that's not at all fitting within any definition you gave, you limit it to the most obvious music and there's a lot of music out there it sounds like you haven't heard. I'm still thinking about american musicians, but I'm sure I'll think of one that I really think is the greatest.

I loved his reorchestration of WSW --keep forgetting to buy that set
(...it was a bitch for the Hispanic Carreras to sing like an American and be not in the best of health either, proof here:)
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I also love Bernstein & the NY Philharmonic's 'Peter & the Wolf' and 'Carnival of the Animals'...Bernstein narrates the Prokofiev piece with flair, and gives a great lecture about the history and source music used in "Carnival" in between the various segments. (i can't fish, sorry...)

No definition works 100% of the time. You can find exceptions to anything. The one I gave works most of the time. Even classical pieces have improvisational elements in them (cadenzas). And then there is John Cage with Aleatory music - based on indeterminancy (compositions for 12 radios tuned to 12 different stations). These are fringe exceptions.

As a classical music lover, getting the 'art music' reference, I was so on your side when you said this.

But then you lost me in the next sentence:

Tony, you're old guard classical. Be new guard. (You can even wear dressed up denim to CSO now!)

Carreras couldn't keep his accent out of it. He sounded like he was in the wrong gang.




I wear jeans to concerts all the time.

Very little pisses me off more than the idea of "serious music" and people thinking that the more stuffy music is, the more edge it has over "feeble pop music" or whatever.

GodWeenSatan: The Oneness is not automatically worse than Kind of Blue.

Jay Reatard's songs are not automatically less poignant than the Arcade Fire's.

Ys is by no means automatically a greater achievement than It's Only Right & Natural.

"I Am The Walrus" is not automatically a better song than "This Boy."

People are shallow. They're afraid to let themselves go and embrace their animalistic instincts. They fancy themselves so in touch with the cerebral that they forget that it's only the visceral that really matters in this post-WWI society.

But hey, this is a classical music thread. HOW ABOUT SOME FUCKING PLAYER PIANO STUDIES???????

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This is seriously the real shit.

I dug this out from the Stockhausen thread. The fish should still be fresh:

<a href="http://www.divshare.com/download/2254713-059" target="_blank">

Karlheinz Stockhausen - "Trans" (2 versions)</a>

This is my vinyl rip of DGG catalog# 2530 726, released 1976.

side 1:
Symphony Orchestra of the Southwest German Radio, Ernest Bour [cond.], Karlheinz Stockhausen [sound projection] (Donaueschingen world premier October 16th 1971)
side 2:
The Orchestra of the Saarland Radio, Hans Zender [cond.], Karlheinz Stockhausen [sound projection] (Studio recording 1973)


<a href="http://www.divshare.com/download/2315911-0e2" target="_blank">

Stockhausen: Helicopter Quartet</a>

Yep, it's a string quartet performed in four separate helicopters.

wikipedia:
The Helikopter-Streichquartett is one of Karlheinz Stockhausen's best-known pieces from recent years, and one of the most complex to perform. It involves a string quartet, four helicopters with pilots, as well as audio and video equipment and technicians. It was first performed and recorded in 1996. Although performable as a self-sufficient piece, it also forms the third scene of the opera Mittwoch aus Licht