Kick Ass Stuff

[parmalee]

I do agree about the "bombast" in a fair bit of Romantic era music, especially Germanic. It turns me off too. The composer seems to be saying "Look at me, the great Artist, and my important ideas". People like Mahler, Bruckner and Wagner who often seem to use enormous orchestral forces to produce shouty music that seems to have a sort of muddy, unclear texture, or else to convey a kind of emotional wallowing. It all seems a bit pompous and self-indulgent to me.

But there are c.19th pieces I like, e.g. Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, some Verdi operas and some Schubert (the latter two really knew how to write tunes).

I've always wondered how much of this is psychoacoustics, and how much of it is conditioning. Mozart, Beethoven, et al, were essentially the pop stars or rock stars of their day and this has always informed by appraisal of their work. I like composers who weren't celebrated during their lifetime (paraphrasing Trump on John McCain and POWs). That said, I think I would feel the same way without this knowledge, but that doesn't necessarily preclude a conditioning aspect. Still, it's eternally fascinating how we all take away something different from music.

Stockhausen once remarked that he avoided periodicity in all of his work because it reminded him too much of the preludes to Nazi radio broadcasts. The same Stockhausen also occasionally remarked that he considered Black American music to be "primitive", and he did not mean that in a flattering way. Conversely, Cornelius Cardew (Scratch Orchestra, early AMM) entitled his collection of essays on Stockhausen and John Cage, Stockhausen Serves Imperialism; yet when he later abandoned the avant garde--because it was "pretentious" or "elitist" or something--for his work in the Communist Party, he was prone to serving us the occasional patronizing little ditty like this one:

I still love Cardew and Brecht/Weill/Eisler, et al, but, goddamn, that is awful. And I really don't need to be condescended to by a guy named Cornelius.

I don't know why, really, but I've never really cared for Italian opera. I much prefer German opera--but think more Schoenberg rather than Wagner. (Wagner should have done more stuff like The Prelude to Das Rheingold, but I'm partial to drone pieces.) Even better is American opera, like Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach:

Here's a playlist for the full piece: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lIB1Za0mJ0vRmIbL6gv9IonJ2fawvmEKI

That's the original, of course. The only version on YouTube which is not broken up into separate parts is a contemporary performance, using newer organs. it works much better with pre-TOG (top octave generator ics) combo organs with unstable tunings.

 

[Write4U]

For an out of world experience. I guarantee you have never heard anything like it..