Unpopular Opinions

[Todd]

Gents,

While it is the point of this thread to point out unpopular opinions which you may hold, I must request that you refrain from characterizing others' likes or dislikes (and by inference, them) as, boring, innocuous, insipid, stale, tedious, uninspiring, banal, bland, colorless, dead, driveling, flavorless, inane, jejune, least, lifeless, limp, milk-and-water, Milquetoast, nothing, nowhere, tame, tasteless, tiresome, unimaginative, uninteresting, unpalatable, vacant, vacuous, vapid, watery, weak or wishy-washy.

If you please.
Thank you.
Gurn 

How are we to discuss Satie then?

[Dancing Divertimentian]

MASTODON WASTEDON SESAME STREET, film at eleven.

[(poco) Sforzando]

How are we to discuss Satie then?

You could call him an Ultimate Faker, but that's been taken already.

[Gurn Blanston]

You could call him an Ultimate Faker, but that's been taken already.

Penultimate, perhaps? 

[Sergeant Rock]

You could call him an Ultimate Faker, but that's been taken already.

Penultimate, perhaps? 

Sarge

[knight66]

How are we to discuss Satie then?

Surely a good 'meh' would do....so far not on Gurn's list of proscribed words; I suspect he does not know it, yet.

Mike

[Sergeant Rock]

I suspect he does not know it, yet.

Probably not...he's stuck in the 18th century 

Sarge

[Gurn Blanston]

Probably not...he's stuck in the 18th century 

Sarge

Meh I? 

Although with antibiotics and CD's...

[knight66]

Probably not...he's stuck in the 18th century 

Sarge

Yes, Gurn is likely to be discombobulated by the neology.

Mike

[Florestan]

discombobulated

I will certainly keep this in mind for further use. 

[Monsieur Croche]

Penultimate, perhaps? 

Ultimate Faker Ordinaire would make for a snappy acronym....

[Monsieur Croche]

How are we to discuss Satie then?

In the usual and conventionally civil best Dadaist manner, naturellement.

[jochanaan]

In the usual and conventionally civil best Dadaist manner, naturellement.

"O Dada, Where Are Thou?"

[Gurn Blanston]

Ultimate Faker Ordinaire would make for a snappy acronym....

  And somehow ideal at the same time. Thus, in answer to Todd's question, the thread should be titled "Erik Satie - UFO" 

[jochanaan]

Shall we listen to Michael Daugherty's UFO for solo percussion and orchestra?  Preferably with Evelyn Glennie on percussion?

[Madiel]

Judging by a large sample of liner notes and books, it is apparently an unpopular opinion amongst French speakers that a quotation in French ought to be translated when presented within an English text.

It drives me mad. I've never seen this attitude for, say, German language composers, but read about Debussy, Ravel or Faure and you're virtually bound to get at least some phrases of French put in quotes and left hanging in the air, as if the French is inherently sophisticated and bothering to translate it would be demeaning.

[ritter]

Judging by a large sample of liner notes and books, it is apparently an unpopular opinion amongst French speakers that a quotation in French ought to be translated when presented within an English text.

It drives me mad. I've never seen this attitude for, say, German language composers, but read about Debussy, Ravel or Faure and you're virtually bound to get at least some phrases of French put in quotes and left hanging in the air, as if the French is inherently sophisticated and bothering to translate it would be demeaning.

Mon cher ami, I do not see où est le problème...

[Monsieur Croche]

  And somehow ideal at the same time. Thus, in answer to Todd's question, the thread should be titled "Erik Satie - UFO"

Indeedy, it is a simpler explanation and easier to accept that is where Satie came from.

Playing and composing popular salon pieces of the day with his stepmother in his childhood and early teens is hardly an acceptable background and an even less satisfactory explanation of what came from him later.

I mean, composing and privately publishing the Gymnpedies at the height of the near universal hegemony of Germanic romanticism only five years after the death of Wagner [1888] does make one wonder what air other than ours Satie did breath....

[Monsieur Croche]

"O Dada, Where Are Thou?"

Isn't "O DaDa" the title of the Welsh translation of the children's book, "My Two Dads" ?

[Jo498]

I never realized it with liner notes.
But many have been the reminders in somewhat older books (including fiction) that French used to be very common as lingua franca (at least for someone educated enough to read such a book at all) until WW II or so (when English took over) and I found it very annoying as well. As I recall it, Tolstoy's War and Peace starts with a dialogue partly in French! Because French was commonly spoken among the Russian upper classes in the 19th century. And older German translations, still commonly reprinted, often do not bother to translate them.
The most notorious example I know is Thomas Mann's "Der Zauberberg" which has a section of several pages (a not at all explicit erotic scene) completely in French and there are editions without a translation as appendix.

Scholarly books until recently often assume that the reader can read at least French and Latin (depending on the subject, of course, but I do not mean English books on French literature, rather e.g. German ones on philosophy) and do not bother with translations of extensive quotations.

German was not unimportant until the 1920s because German speaking scientists and scholars were leading in many fields and publishing in German, also it was still lingua franca in the states that had formerly belonged to the Austrian Empire, but it was never an international language like French, so knowledge of it would not be pre-supposed unless one was reading in certain scholarly fields.