You Care About What I'm Reading/Watching/Listening To At the Moment (I)
(Also Stravinsky's beautiful and priggish Cantata has been making the rounds a lot. No CD available as it's from my Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky boxset. So shut up.)
(Also Stravinsky's beautiful and priggish Cantata has been making the rounds a lot. No CD available as it's from my Stravinsky Conducts Stravinsky boxset. So shut up.)
posted by PWS at 1:37 PM
5 Comments:
i was speaking of their chamber music. (The strokes have 2-3 good songs, though, daresay i'd prefer to listen to that?) Brahms 2-3 good symphonies and i appreciate schubert symphonies as well. I prefer schubert's piano music to brahms'. In fact, in general i find brahms to be the charles dickens of music. Boring, verbose and overrated, whereas schubert has that flowing lyricism and a sincerity (which i dont hear as often in brahms)
and that, my friend, is my destructive and authoratative fist of judgment wrought upon brahms. i am without mercy, i am without sympathy.
but to be honest i wouldnt trade the sublime 2nd, 3rd or 4th for anything.
...except maybe more debussy. (But thats it!)
And i am interested in what you're listening to. hows the joquin and monteverdi?
m. keiser
Do you know the Brahms Horn Trio? Do me a favor, and try it out before you give up on him altogether. If you like the Horn trio, then move to the chamber music with clarinet. Great pieces.
PWS
I just finished Straus's "Stravinsky's Late Music". It's neither as much fun or as personal a view as the Andriessen/Schönberger "The Apollonian Clockwork", and some of the mysteries of Stravinsky (rhythm, orchestration) are left mysterious, but I was impressed by it on the whole.
A very odd book is Griffiths' biography of Barraque "The Sea on Fire". The book is addressed to Barraque and I found it difficult to keep going.
Finally, I'm reading Ossi's "Diving the Oracle" about Monteverdi's Seconda Prattica. I'm now composing something on the Orpheus theme, and revisiting Monteverdi seems like a good place to begin.
I love both Brahms and Schubert but they have really only been favorites fairly recently. I always thought they were boring and dull and all the rest. But one day I opened my ears and they really hit me. This wasn't in the same day of course, but that makes it more dramatic.
One problem with growing up in the contemporary climate with music is that after you've heard "Rite of Spring" and Xenakis and all the rest, Brahms seems pretty tame and like an old stale saltine. But once you look deeper and forget your spoiled need for lots of time signature changes and flashy orchestration, you see just how amazing the music truly is.
But that's just me.
Danny Boy (can I call you that? No? Okay.), I have not read Stravinsky's late music, but have read the Apollonian Clockwork, which is one of the inspirations for my writing I think. It's a book I absolutely love, if not all the time agree with.
The poetic and personal view is so neccessary for great music along with the bone dry analytical stuff. The modern era, or the era following Wagner and especially after Schoenberg, abounds in the latter and is afraid of the former. Adorno's books on Berg and Mahler are the last big ones I can think of.
As for Griffith's Barraque book, it sounds interesting, and I have always been tempted to pick up the complete Barraque (which fits on 3 cds). His association with post-modern Marxism and how it informed his music repels me, but one must understand his boyfriend was Foucault. Do you mean the book is actually Griffith writing TO Barraque (as in, 'Dear Jean...')? Strange.
What do you think of Barraque's music? Is it worth picking up that CPO disc?
One composer often grouped with Barraque, Leibowitz and Boulez that I DO love (other than Boulez), is Bruno Maderna. A fascinating and important composer.
Tell me what you think of the Monteverdi book and keep us up to date on the new piece.
I'd like to point out I sat next to Paul Griffiths a couple months ago at a little lecture at my school and he was wearing a brightly colored sweater from the Bill Cosby collection.
PWS --
The Griffiths book is really that strange. Barraque wrote one really good -- and never definitively finished and/or edited --, the Sonata. The ensemble pieces have orchestration problems, so they don't quite come off right. Barraque's little book about Debussy is quite good, if totally wrong and mean-spirited about Satie. (I have it in German -- has it even been translated into English?).
The Ossi book had lots of interesting details, as the transition to the Second Practice was quite complex. But I've now moved on to another, Carter's "Monteverdi's Musical Theatre". (I'm working on -- or thinking about working on -- an "Orpheus" project, and trying to figure out how Monteverdi did what he did is part of the project).
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