The Great Mahler Debate

Started by Greta, April 21, 2007, 08:06:00 AM

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MishaK

Quote from: 71 dB on May 02, 2007, 10:01:00 AM
I haven't paid attention because I was watching TV.

That may cause chronic damage preventing careful understanding of Mahler.

karlhenning

Quote from: 71 dB on May 02, 2007, 10:01:00 AM
I haven't paid attention because I was watching TV.

That explains so very much.

PerfectWagnerite

I don't watch TV. To me there is nothing more boring than TV.

karlhenning

Quote from: PerfectWagnerite on May 02, 2007, 10:06:25 AM
I don't watch TV. To me there is nothing more boring than TV.

Oh, but it's actually so very complex, you see . . . .

71 dB

Quote from: PerfectWagnerite on May 02, 2007, 10:06:25 AM
I don't watch TV. To me there is nothing more boring than TV.

Reality shows are usually very boring and crappy but I was watching a Finnish scientific quiz "Einstein". Later this evening I will watch The Mythbusters.
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MishaK

Quote from: 71 dB on May 02, 2007, 08:15:37 AM
You can't have surprises without expectations. Note D surprises if you anticipated C. Another things is that I don't think every note should surprise. Who wants 100 surprises every minute? Maybe bigger blocks and structures should be surprising. A surprising melody perhaps? The retrospective aspect is very important. Surprises that sound inevitable in retrospect are very satisfying.

But again, you realize we are talking about performance style, not compositional structure?

Quote from: 71 dB on May 02, 2007, 08:15:37 AM
I don't have scores, that's why I can't study them. Buying them is way beyond my financial possibities.

They're often cheaper than the CDs you buy, so I doubt that.

Quote from: 71 dB on May 02, 2007, 08:15:37 AM
Composers weight different dimensions. They use subspaces or limited spaces of the real space. That's not a big problem as long as they manage their selected dimensions well.

If only any of this made any sense. Absent any useable definitions of the terms you use, this remains gobbledygook. What is "real space" now?

Quote from: 71 dB on May 02, 2007, 08:15:37 AM
Prelude No.1 from Book 1 of the Well Tempered Clavier is not simple in the form of vibrational fields.

Please explain.

Steve

Quote from: karlhenning on May 02, 2007, 10:07:22 AM
Oh, but it's actually so very complex, you see . . . .

No, I'm afraid not sir. All TV consists of variations of the same tales. You want originality, go see Sophocles at the Goodman.  :)

mahlertitan

Quote from: 71 dB on May 02, 2007, 10:10:49 AM
Later this evening I will watch The Mythbusters.

I only watch these programs on tv/laptop:
Mythbusters
Colbert Report
Family Guy
PBS - "Great Performances"
Baseball


greg

Quote from: Greta on May 01, 2007, 05:52:52 AM
His music can run very deep. But for me, I find it kind of comes up and hits me when I'm not looking! I think you have to be in the right mood for him to really speak to you. On the surface his music is obviously pretty stuff, but I think, like with any composer, some people just connect with the deep ideas he tried to express and others don't. There are certainly many composers I don't "get" that a lot of other people do!
yep, that's the way it works; it has to be somewhat spontaneous, and you can't be judgemental if you're going to try to enjoy it.
actually, I have a memory about that same Adagio movement you were talking about- once in English class last year, the thing just popped into my head spontaneously, and I was so overwhelmed that when it came time for the whole class to work quietly on an assignment, I just couldn't. Instead, I savored the moment, enjoying the music....  0:)

but if you go about thinking, "okay, here comes the adagio movement, it's supposed to be soft and stuff", it actually can ruin it if you think about it that way rather than just enjoying the music. It's using the wrong part (rational, analyzing) of the brain while listening.

Don

Quote from: PerfectWagnerite on May 02, 2007, 10:06:25 AM
I don't watch TV. To me there is nothing more boring than TV.

What did Mahler think of watching TV shows?

greg

Quote from: zamyrabyrd on May 01, 2007, 06:27:13 AM
I think the best way to describe the "spectrum of events" in music is to use language as an example. Cross culturally, languages as a rule have one outstanding aspect of complexity. English has orthographic stumbling blocks; Chinese is relatively simple grammatically but has a few thousand characters; German has all those confounding endings, and so on.  Western tonal music has harmony and melody. "Events" are not necessarily measured in notes but underground even techtonic changes. (This is really such a large subject that I fain from even trying to describe it...)
This is a totally different subject, but I have to comment on this since this is the stuff that really interests me.  ;D

The more I think about it, it seems to me that every language is equally difficult to learn, if you plan to be able to speak AND write it. It seems for everything easy that there is for a language, there's also something hard.

I've read about Chinese grammar. To put it simply, there's not much to read, lol. There's no articles and no inflections to indicate tense (just one word, which means there is no such thing as an "irregular verb"  :o ). Simplest grammar of any language I've ever known about. However...... it has tones, which make conversation very hard, and also there's what, 5 or 6 thousand characters you need to know? The good news is that they usually have only 1 or 2 readings, unlike Japanese, which can be a real pain (and yeah, that's one of the very few things that is hard about Japanese).

English, as you said, is totally messed up when it comes to spelling- you know it's messed up when you see grownups making spelling mistakes all the time, and hearing people pronounce "often" as "often" instead of "offen". What's easy about English is that it's hardly inflected at all, and there's no "gender" rule or irregular plurals, except for stuff like "sheep" and "sheep", "ox" and "oxen", etc. which comes from old German, i think.

Spanish is possibly the easiest language to in the world when it comes to writing, or at least the easiest I know. But it makes up for it by a lot harder to speak than you'd think (almost every sentence feels like a tongue twister), and it has a bunch of dumb verb endings, genders, stuff like that that most Romance or European languages have, and the grammar isn't that easy.

Just weird, I've thought, how the difficulty sorta balances out...


The Mad Hatter

Quote from: O Mensch on May 02, 2007, 10:22:28 AM

They're often cheaper than the CDs you buy, so I doubt that.


Um...Mahler's 8th Symphony: CD €10, score €25. Just comparing one CD I own with the lowest price I could find for the score.

Sheet music is expensive...

karlhenning

Quote from: The Mad Hatter on May 02, 2007, 12:13:39 PM
Um...Mahler's 8th Symphony: CD €10, score €25. Just comparing one CD I own with the lowest price I could find for the score.

That's the lowest price you could scare up?

http://store.doverpublications.com/by-subject-music.html

Symphony No. 8, $10.95

At that price, I don't know that you could find a CD cheaper  8)

greg

Quote from: Don on May 02, 2007, 11:36:29 AM
What did Mahler think of watching TV shows?
he liked Heroes, Everybody Hates Chris, Smallville, anime shows, George Lopez, King of Queens, and HATED 7th Heaven. His favorite show growing up was Digimon, and still thinks it's cool.
our souls are connected in the universe  0:)

karlhenning

Greg, I've got news for you, and I hope you're sitting down.

Mahler's favorite show is Three's Company.

Florestan

Quote from: karlhenning on May 02, 2007, 12:29:27 PM
Greg, I've got news for you, and I hope you're sitting down.

Mahler's favorite show is Three's Company.

And I guess Wagner would have loved Desperate Wives...  ;D
Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind. — Rossini

greg

Quote from: karlhenning on May 02, 2007, 12:29:27 PM
Greg, I've got news for you, and I hope you're sitting down.

Mahler's favorite show is Three's Company.
I don't even remember that show.... have I even watched it?

Steve

Quote from: greg on May 02, 2007, 12:44:55 PM
I don't even remember that show.... have I even watched it?

Don't  :)

Sergeant Rock

#398
Quote from: karlhenning on May 02, 2007, 12:29:27 PM
Greg, I've got news for you, and I hope you're sitting down.

Mahler's favorite show is Three's Company.

That's true, Greg. Like many Jewish men, Mahler was hopelessly attracted to blonde Schiksas



Sarge
the phone rings and somebody says,
"hey, they made a movie about
Mahler, you ought to go see it.
he was as f*cked-up as you are."
                               --Charles Bukowski, "Mahler"

greg

Quote from: Sergeant Rock on May 02, 2007, 12:49:48 PM
That's true, Greg. Like many Jewish men, Mahler was hopelessly attracted to blonde Schiksas.

Sarge
but i don't think he cared for blondes..... he married a brunette