Classical Music, Poetry and stuff

[Stavros]

Thankfully it took, and I've learned and experimented with music and literature that was new to me as a result, although I draw the line at Stavros' championing Bela Tarr's seven-hour Hungarian epic about farming...

The decline of a collective farm -think about it, RobertLouis, its the decline of a way of life that dominated a large part of Europe and the USSR -what Satantango does is expose the willingness of people to submit to a crushing system out of some mistaken belief that it will be worth it, one day...by subjecting the audience to, for example, a one-hour sequence in which a doctor does more or less nothing except drink plum brandy and write observations of his neighbours in a scrap book, he is presenting you with the tedium of everyday life; and yet through this challenge to sustainability in cinema, there is an accumulation of knowledge through fine details that by the conclusion is devastating; you wonder how anyone put up with communism for so long, while realising, oddly, how easy it was. The english translation of the book is out soon I think.

If Satantango is too much of a challenge, try Werckmeister Harmonies.

[robertlouis]

Thankfully it took, and I've learned and experimented with music and literature that was new to me as a result, although I draw the line at Stavros' championing Bela Tarr's seven-hour Hungarian epic about farming...

The decline of a collective farm -think about it, RobertLouis, its the decline of a way of life that dominated a large part of Europe and the USSR -what Satantango does is expose the willingness of people to submit to a crushing system out of some mistaken belief that it will be worth it, one day...by subjecting the audience to, for example, a one-hour sequence in which a doctor does more or less nothing except drink plum brandy and write observations of his neighbours in a scrap book, he is presenting you with the tedium of everyday life; and yet through this challenge to sustainability in cinema, there is an accumulation of knowledge through fine details that by the conclusion is devastating; you wonder how anyone put up with communism for so long, while realising, oddly, how easy it was. The english translation of the book is out soon I think.

If Satantango is too much of a challenge, try Werckmeister Harmonies.

I was joking, Stavros. I certainly enjoyed the Werckmeister Harmonies and Damnation, which I have on the two disc DVD set.

While no director can be said to be entirely unique, Tarr explores the possibilities of the camera in a unique way and yes, you do find yourself challenging long-held beliefs and prejudices as his films wash over you.

[Stavros]

You kept that a secret all this time? I am waiting for the Turin Horse to come out. But yes, an acquired taste -

I forgot to mention that Finlandia is one of my favourite Sibelius pieces, it is surely even more rousing than the 5th...?

[robertlouis]

You kept that a secret all this time? I am waiting for the Turin Horse to come out. But yes, an acquired taste -

I forgot to mention that Finlandia is one of my favourite Sibelius pieces, it is surely even more rousing than the 5th...?

I can't remember life without both Finlandia and the Karelia Suite, always there from my childhood, but I only came upon the symphonies in my 30s, via arguably the most immediately accessible, the 2nd. The 5th, however, with the first rumblings of assonance between the strings and the brass and the triumphal congregation of the third and final movement surpasses anything else in his oeuvre for me.

If you'll forgive me, the two pieces mentioned earlier demand relatively direct appeals to the emotions. All the symphonies, on the other hand, lack that immediacy and require a degree of dedication and effort from the listener; the single-movement 7th also has a special place in my heart, especially as conducted by Ashkenazy, but the 5th remains the pinnacle.

He's hardly overlooked as a symphonist, but he's certainly not as well-known as his work deserves. The sheer variety on display and the adventurous and daring approach for me prefigure the work of those who followed him into the rest of the 20th century. And because they are challenging rather than wilfully difficult, I simply love his work.

[Prospero]

I've had a DVD of The Turin Horse at home for a couple of weeks. It's shortlisted for a European Film Academy Award. Not watched it yet but hadn't realised it was the same director that Stavros has been lauding so it's now on the viewing list for this weekend.

[Stavros]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011...-changed-music

The BBC is going to broadcast a series of programmes on the Symphony, but I am puzzled by the selection. I am not sure what the criteria are but I would have assumed the work of Johann Christian Bach was as important as Haydn whose work has to be in any programme on the symphony even though I find Haydn relentlessly boring.

I only agree with the Eroica on the BBC list, if it was me, and it was about selecting the symphony which I think had an impact on the form maybe on music more widely, the list would have only three works:

Beethoven Symphony No 3, Eroica: the 3rd is hugely important because of the tonal development of the first subject, which subverts the conventional form that had existed up until then, just through the sudden conclusion of the line when it falls into a minor chord. This opened up new possibilities in the expansion of the relatively simple musical subjects perfected by Mozart, and above all introduced complexity into music.

Beethoven Symphony No 9: if the 3rd marked the onset of a tonal revolution in music, the 9th split form asunder, the radical 4th movement almost sounds as if it is indeed falling apart from its outset -not just the use of a chorus as an addition to the orchestral writing, but the way in which the use of variations, which Beethoven had also used in the last movement of the 3rd, give the symphony a completely new perspective on music -hardly surprising that it opens the Bayreuth festival every year and that Wagner idolised LvB.

Berlioz, Symphony Fantastique. I think this was the first 'programmatic' symphony in which each part of the work was given a specific story; most of Berlioz's music sounds to me like hysterical slop, but this is a work of genius, and one of the most thrilling experiences when heard live. The key point is that each movement does sound like its theme/story, which is another reason why it works, and also because it doesn't become a patronising exercise by a composer desperate to impress his audience.

I think that once Beethoven and Berlioz had shown what a symphony could do, what happened after took these existing formats, in some cases it repeated them, in other cases it stretched them but never offered something completely new: in effect, the Symphony, like the Concerto, has become a dead form: literally in the case of Stravinsky's Symphony in C, in which the vacuous, insipid, pseudo-musical junk notes concocted by this occasional fraud die as soon as they are played. None of this should diminish the work of Brahms, Bruckner, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky or Mahler- but in the context of the history of the symphony I don't know what it is that is original about them. Mahler, after all, followed Beethoven by introducing choral movements in his symphonies. Some may want to put Shostakovich in the context of his times, fair enough, but the format of the symphony, even the 13th and 14th, was taken over from pre-existing examples (Mahler's 4th, Zemlinsky's Lyrisches Symphonie).

[Prospero]

Waiting for the Barbarians

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are to arrive today.

Why such inaction in the Senate?
Why do the Senators sit and pass no laws?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
What laws can the Senators pass any more?
When the barbarians come they will make the laws.

Why did our emperor wake up so early,
and sits at the greatest gate of the city,
on the throne, solemn, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today.
And the emperor waits to receive
their chief. Indeed he has prepared
to give him a scroll. Therein he inscribed
many titles and names of honor.

Why have our two consuls and the praetors come out
today in their red, embroidered togas;
why do they wear amethyst-studded bracelets,
and rings with brilliant, glittering emeralds;
why are they carrying costly canes today,
wonderfully carved with silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today,
and such things dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't the worthy orators come as always
to make their speeches, to have their say?

Because the barbarians are to arrive today;
and they get bored with eloquence and orations.

Why all of a sudden this unrest
and confusion. (How solemn the faces have become).
Why are the streets and squares clearing quickly,
and all return to their homes, so deep in thought?

Because night is here but the barbarians have not come.
And some people arrived from the borders,
and said that there are no longer any barbarians.

And now what shall become of us without any barbarians?
Those people were some kind of solution.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1904)

[Stavros]

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

[Stavros]

I have managed to read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell (2004). I wanted to read this book before seeing the film which opens in the UK at the end of February.

Cloud Atlas is made up of six episodes/narratives, five are in two parts, with one central section. The episodes/narratives begin in the 19th century and work their way through 1,500 years at the central section, before returning in sequence to the 19th century at the end. The book was inspired by the piano work, Cloud Atlas by the Japanese composer Toshi Ichiyanagi (see link below) and thus may be thought of as a Theme and Variations novel: there are themes such as -depending on your point of view- the nightmare/myth of Nietzsche's Eternal Return- or the simple/naive view that human nature does not change and that we are doomed to repeat our mistakes from one millenium to another. The variations come in the literary form of each episode/narrative, which is a pastiche of an existing form: thus the fist narrative is derived from Melville's Benito Cereno; the second the 'confessional' novel which tends to use the diary or letters as a vehicle; the third is pulp fiction; the fourth a possibly deliberately badly written pastiche of the drivel one associates with Hunter S. Thompson and Martin Amis; the fifth derived from sci-fi futurist novels and films of which 1984, Brave New World, and Blade Runner are the most obvious. At the heart of the book is the far off future, written in pidgin English in which a Margaret Mead-style anthropologist explains to the Hawaiian native that her ancestors believed their people had survived 'the fall' but all they ever found on their travels was dead-rubble cities, jungle-choked cities, plague-rotted cities...half the world/most of the world? has been destroyed by nuclear radiation in the previous section set approx 500 years before, and here we end up in the distant future with a collapsed world and Hawaiian society riven by greed and brutality. Indeed, this is but the repetition of the fate visited on Adam Ewing in the 19th centry who saves the life of a stowaway (read: savage)who ultimately turns against him, with the central message of this novel:
He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!

Cloud Atlas is a hymn to nihilism, a belief that however hard you try to change things, everything remains the same. So why bother? In each of the episodes birth-marks, music, books, images recur, because we are doomed to repeat ourselves. As with other examples of nihilism in art -notably the films of Antonionio and Stanley Kubrick- there is no room in this human experience for love or laughter, love has no healing or liberating properties, indeed it does not appear to exist at all.

The book is twice as long as it needs to be, and is written with a verve which belies its essentially pessimistic message. The author acknowledges the grants he received to conduct research on Melville and Delius, a confession of his lack of imagination. When the blind composer accepts an interloper into his house as an amanuensis, and you discover his wife is called Jocasta, you know what will follow, as it does a few pages later. The local music shop is called Flagstad, rather than say, Nilsson's or Schwarzkop's; just as in other parts of the novel Mitchell refers to his own brilliance as a writer, citing the letters from the amanuensis as examples of 'vivid' writing. This narcissistic rubbish has been encountered before, Nabokov does it in Pale Fire and Rushdie does it in The Satanic Verses.
In sum, the film might be worth watching, the novel is garbage.

The link to an excerpt from the original Cloud Atlas:

[runningdownthatdream]

I enjoyed this thread in the past so thought I'd resurrect to give Stavros, Prospero, Robert, et al the chance to post more goodness.

Not sure whether the performance below would be considered classical. It's an interpretation of a medieval Norse song that I like a lot with Sax by Jan Garbarek and vocals by a traditional norse singer by the name of Agnes Buen Garnas. If you like to escape from modern music a bit, give it a listen.