How do people know....

[Karl Henning]

There are three qualities in this world that can work together only two of them at the same time: honest, intelligent and communist. 

(the latter being actually no quality at all...  )

Reminds me of something I feel sure I've mentioned before . . . a fellow I worked with long since, at the Kinko's which was then on Mt Hope Avenue in Rochester, NY, had worked at a print shop where they displayed the sign:

Quick
Cheap
Good

Choose any two

[Florestan]

I have always thought that the finale of Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony is a sly protest, unconscious or otherwise, against the murderous dictatorship of Stalin.

Can I prove that empirically?  No, but I can say: listen to it in the context of the late 1940's in the Soviet Union!

It might very well be. But, as someone who has lived during real, actual dictatorship, I say: the only true protest against a dictatorship is to stand up and say it loud and clear: this is a dictatorship that enslaves and murders people and brings them misery. Shostakovich and Prokofiev, for all their "protests", survived Stalin (well, not Prokofiev ) --- while Mandelstam did not and Solzhenitsyn was sent to Gulag. One doesn't really fight Stalin with G minor or C-sharp major, but with calling him publicly a murderer. 

[Florestan]

Reminds me of something I feel sure I've mentioned before . . . a fellow I worked with long since, at the Kinko's which was then on Mt Hope Avenue in Rochester, NY, had worked at a print shop where they displayed the sign:

Quick
Cheap
Good

Choose any two

That's the idea. 

[Karl Henning]

My other favorite sign was in the Music Dept office in Charlottesville:

Lack of preparation on your part
does not constitute an emergency on our part

[Opus106]

Not even the most imaginative Romanian composer could have mimic Ceausescu's speeches, trust me... 

His laughter, perhaps? (Just an example. Apart from the guess that he was a communist top-dog in Romania, I have no idea who he was or how he laughed.)

Yes but then again you'd need the programme to figure it out, if and only if it escaped censorship (a very unlikely hypothesis)

That's pure rhetoric, nobody is very good at that... 

Well, you didn't say anything about the practicality of conveying the meaning across.

[Opus106]

If a composer mocks a dictator in his music and no one has the notes, does the music really make sense?

[Gurn Blanston]

Oh, no, no, no, Gurn — not all that seven and a half minutes is in g minor! : )

...and related keys.....   0:)

[Cato]

Quote from: karlhenning on Today at 06:40:01 AM

   

Oh, no, no, no, Gurn — not all that seven and a half minutes is in g minor! : )

...and related keys.....   0:)

I almost thought you were talking about Seven, They are Seven by Prokofiev! 

About whose Sixth Symphony Florestan wrote:

It might very well be. But, as someone who has lived during real, actual dictatorship, I say: the only true protest against a dictatorship is to stand up and say it loud and clear: this is a dictatorship that enslaves and murders people and brings them misery. Shostakovich and Prokofiev, for all their "protests", survived Stalin (well, not Prokofiev ) --- while Mandelstam did not and Solzhenitsyn was sent to Gulag. One doesn't really fight Stalin with G minor or C-sharp major, but with calling him publicly a murderer. 

Agreed, but with this caveat:

Following Cato's Rule of History #1, the first one to stand up and say "NO!" is the first one to be shot!   

[Karl Henning]

...and related keys.....   0:)

Well, but . . . the start of the Development famously slides off to f# minor, which is a key quite some distance from g minor! And then there is a sequence which makes its way to e minor . . . closer than f# minor, but still, not among the closely-related keys which are (were?) traditionally associated with the sonata-allegro rhetorical scheme.

[Karl Henning]

Cato's Rule of History #1, the first one to stand up and say "NO!" is the first one to be shot!   

Do you by chance know that scene in Yellowbeard when James Mason (as Captain of the Lady Edith) addresses the pressees with, I'm honor bound to ask this question: Is there anyone here who does not wish to be a member of Her Majesty's Navy? ; )

[Gurn Blanston]

Well, but . . . the start of the Development famously slides off to f# minor, which is a key quite some distance from g minor! And then there is a sequence which makes its way to e minor . . . closer than f# minor, but still, not among the closely-related keys which are (were?) traditionally associated with the sonata-allegro rhetorical scheme.

They all have notes, that makes them related...   

[Karl Henning]

Dude, there's a bevy of fuming musicologists in the next room would be glad of a word wi' ye . . . . ; )

[Wakefield]

It might very well be. But, as someone who has lived during real, actual dictatorship, I say: the only true protest against a dictatorship is to stand up and say it loud and clear: this is a dictatorship that enslaves and murders people and brings them misery. Shostakovich and Prokofiev, for all their "protests", survived Stalin (well, not Prokofiev ) --- while Mandelstam did not and Solzhenitsyn was sent to Gulag. One doesn't really fight Stalin with G minor or C-sharp major, but with calling him publicly a murderer. 

I don't know if that statement would exactly fit with the Chilean dictatorship, quite successful in economic matter. Problematic, isn't it? 

[jochanaan]

I don't know if that statement would exactly fit with the Chilean dictatorship, quite successful in economic matter. Problematic, isn't it?

"Nobody could talk, but the trains ran on time."  (Probably heard on the streets in every major dictatorship since the development of railroads.)

For the last hundred years or so, musicians have tended to get rather impatient with discussions of meaning; or if we do discuss it, it's in very callous-sounding terms such as Toscanini's "For me it is simply allegro con brio" (about Beethoven's Eroica).  Mahler himself distrusted the programs he himself had drawn up for the Second and Third Symphonies, calling them "a crutch for a cripple;" my sense is that he felt them too limiting.  Stravinsky's infamous description of his music as "objective" is a natural reaction to the endless discussions of, say, the Schumanns, Wagner, and even Brahms about the meaning of their music.

My own sense is that for most of us, music's "meaning" simply cannot be described in words; it is beyond, below, or alongside the languages' purview, unless the composer him/herself includes a description or an analysis, as Berlioz did with the Symphonie Fantastique and Vivaldi did with The Seasons.

[Florestan]

I don't know if that statement would exactly fit with the Chilean dictatorship, quite successful in economic matter. Problematic, isn't it?

Well, you're right. I would have rather lived in Pinochet's Chile than in Ceausescu's Romania. 

[Florestan]

"Nobody could talk, but the trains ran on time."  (Probably heard on the streets in every major dictatorship since the development of railroads.)

I hereby testify that, to the best of my knowledge, trains in communist Romania ran on time once in a blue moon. 

My own sense is that for most of us, music's "meaning" simply cannot be described in words; it is beyond, below, or alongside the languages' purview, unless the composer him/herself includes a description or an analysis, as Berlioz did with the Symphonie Fantastique and Vivaldi did with The Seasons.

Well, I ask for the umpteenth time: suppose one listen to the Symphonie Fantastique or The Seasons without knowing their programme and are asked: what is this music about? What are the chances they have it right? 

[Wakefield]

Well, you're right. I would have rather lived in Pinochet's Chile than in Ceausescu's Romania. 

Run, run, Andrei! Gurn a Que aren't enjoying this conversation.   

[North Star]

Well, you're right. I would have rather lived in Pinochet's Chile than in Ceausescu's Romania. 

Thankfully, there are some books written by for his lovely wife (on polymer chemistry) in our university library.   

[Wakefield]

Run, run, Andrei! Gurn a Que aren't enjoying this conversation.   

BTW, Andrei, for some strange and quite unexplainable reason, this is the definition of the Evil's Dictionary that I recall more vividly:

ABRUPT, adj. Sudden, without ceremony, like the arrival of a cannon- shot and the departure of the soldier whose interests are most affected by it. Dr. Samuel Johnson beautifully said of another author's ideas that they were "concatenated without abruption."

[Florestan]

Thankfully, there are some books written by for his lovely wife (on polymer chemistry) in our university library.   

Hah hah! There were a lot of (untranslatable) jokes about "her" chemistry books. Trust me, she couldn't even write down the chemical formula of water...