Re: The Classical Chat Thread

[jochanaan]

...(where Bruckner, Wagner, Mahler the case was the lie of "grand style", because of life-denying romantic music)...

I have to challenge that assertion.  I don't feel that those particular composers are life-denying at all.  Bruckner's music in particular seems to affirm life and its orders and our place in the cosmos.  Not even Tchaikovsky's music can be dismissed as "life-denying."

Other comments?

[Moderators, feel free to move this to its own thread.]

[Karl Henning]

For those who may have missed out:

Karl's Anthology of Alternative Literature

• Elgar's Enema Variations
• Janáček's Catalytic Mass
• Britten's Rejoice in the Clam
• Ives plays Fenway—Three Bases in New England (courtesy of Joe Barron)
• Puccini's tender Madame Butterball
• Debussy's hesitant Prelude to an Afternoon on the Phone (courtesy of Barry Coleman)
• Puccini's La Spatula del West
• Joh. Strauss Jr.'s toe-tapping Beautiful Blue Banjo
• Haydn's illuming The Cremation
• Mozart's probiotic Don Chobani
• Wagner's Tristan und Ebola
• Messiaen's primal Ourangoutangalîla
• Boulez's immovable Le marteau sans Métro
• Bartók's refined Miraculous Margarine
• Reich's Music for Eighteen Beauticians
• Glass's mesmerizing Coin-Operated Chotchkie
• Cage's well-planned Sonatas & Interludes for Prepaid Piano
• Copland's devotional Oblation Spring
• Jn Adams's fishery-conscious On the Transmigration of Sole
• A truly different train—Pärt's Caboose in memoriam Benjamin Britten

[North Star]

For those who may have missed out:

Karl's Anthology of Alternative Literature

• Elgar's Enema Variations
• Janáček's Catalytic Mass
• Britten's Rejoice in the Clam
• Ives plays Fenway—Three Bases in New England (courtesy of Joe Barron)
• Puccini's tender Madame Butterball
• Debussy's hesitant Prelude to an Afternoon on the Phone (courtesy of Barry Coleman)
• Puccini's La Spatula del West
• Joh. Strauss Jr.'s toe-tapping Beautiful Blue Banjo
• Haydn's illuming The Cremation
• Mozart's probiotic Don Chobani
• Wagner's Tristan und Ebola
• Messiaen's primal Ourangoutangalîla
• Boulez's immovable Le marteau sans Métro
• Bartók's refined Miraculous Margarine
• Reich's Music for Eighteen Beauticians
• Glass's mesmerizing Coin-Operated Chotchkie
• Cage's well-planned Sonatas & Interludes for Prepaid Piano
• Copland's devotional Oblation Spring
• Jn Adams's fishery-conscious On the Transmigration of Sole
• A truly different train—Pärt's Caboose in memoriam Benjamin Britten

Missing from the list:

Sibelius' Valse tryst
Vaughan Williams' Undone Symphony, tribute to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony
Prokofiev's A Brothel in a Monastery
Biber's Grocery Sonatas

[Karl Henning]

Missing from the list:

Sibelius' Valse tryst
Vaughan Williams' Undone Symphony, tribute to Schubert's Unfinished Symphony
Prokofiev's A Brothel in a Monastery
Biber's Grocery Sonatas

Nice!

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

[listener]

following the current path...
a university record catalog offered Smetana's The Battered Bride
and an old favourite: Kodaly's Buttocks-Pressing Song

[Monsieur Croche]

late-romantic music: lack of rhythm.

Bump.

This ^^^ was highly inarticulate, and perhaps a limping toward trying to say, "Late Romanticism saw an interest in obliterating an audible sense of both the bar line and the pulse."  Because that is the nut of the matter. 

[The definition of rhythm has nothing to do with being metric, regular, or on or with the bar-lines or emphasizing beat or pulse.]  The late romantic is not 'arhythmic,' nor does it lack pulse.  Along with length of form, phrase, ideas, came these technical rhythmic aspects that allowed a broader shaping, or 'sculpting,' of the sound.

Those rhythmic aspects can, and do, annoy some listeners, I suppose because they feel a bit a sea without those 'signposts' of a more audible bar-line and pulse.  I tend to think that typically, by the end of any era, an excess of 'one can really not take that/this much further,' or even a feeling of decay are often fairly inevitable 'conclusions.'  (A strong and deeply running river's mission, long-term geological scale, is its self-destruction and total demise, after all:-)  The tendency became strong / prominent enough that when Stravinsky emerged with L'oiseau de feu, and especially Petrushka, he became later known in music history textbooks as the composer "who aggressively reinstated a strong sense of pulse to music."

The rhythmic aspects in some of that late romantic music where there is a seemingly absent bar line or pulse was exactly suited to the purpose of whichever composers were deploying those tactics... to me that means it fits the music and its intent pretty damned perfectly, and has 'just the right affect,' -- not that I would want all music to follow that aesthetic any more than I would want all music to have the sense of pulse and bar line one usually finds so prominent in baroque era Allegro movements.  (Thank our lucky stars there are so many eras and such a variety from all of them, huh?)

[North Star]

You mean to say you hear a pulse in the schmaltzy Late Romantic music such as the works below? Absurd!

https://www.youtube.com/v/ZdEpkMOlzHw    https://www.youtube.com/v/KXFaUbo4j7Q

https://www.youtube.com/v/IT22BZ5gGbU     https://www.youtube.com/v/ztY-Z1Mhp4A

[Karl Henning]

(* chortle *)

[Karl Henning]

I still do not really care for Berio's Sinfonia.

Not saying it's bad.  I just don't care for it.  (Yet? I'll try again in another 5-10 years.)

[JBS]

This seemed to be as good a thread as any to post this:
Alfred Brendel's London debut programme, 11 January 1958.
Source: Wigmore Hall's Twitter account

[Karl Henning]

This seemed to be as good a thread as any to post this:
Alfred Brendel's London debut programme, 11 January 1958.
Source: Wigmore Hall's Twitter account

A stunner, and fearless!

[JBS]

While browsing Presto's clearance listings, I discovered that the Quartertone Accordion exists.

Just needed to share that information.