音乐 - Cheryl on Diigo

10 Apr 08

Mahler 马勒 -《第7交响曲"夜曲"》(Symphony No. 7 in E minor)Horenstein, NPO, BBCL, 1969[APE] | 经典音乐 . 音乐 | VeryCD → 下载

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音乐

在马勒完成了他最阴暗，最具悲剧性和罪恶感的第六交响曲之后，最先完成的音乐就是第七交响曲的第二乐章了。我认为可以把这一乐章当作是一副解毒剂，用来消马勒除第六交响曲中的恐惧，痛苦和灾难对于心理带来的负面影响
马勒中期所有的交响曲都有一个明确的主题，这部第七交响曲也不例外，它的主题便是“夜”以及心灵对夜的反应。
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- 第四乐章里表现了“爱情的夜晚”
- 终乐章中所表现出的喧嚣和骚动

24 Jan 08

【艺术歌曲】Hyperion舒伯特艺术歌曲全集——世纪末力挽狂澜的钜作 - 爱乐之门 - 熊猫音乐论坛 - Powered by Discuz!

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音乐

喜欢艺术歌曲就像喜欢室内乐，多数人听古典一般从施特劳斯、肖邦开始，这是一道坎，过了必然是贝多芬、莫扎特等人的大作品，这是第二道坎，然后兵分两路，一路是巴赫、泰勒曼、维瓦尔第，一路是瓦格纳、布鲁特纳、马勒，再然后回过头来，发现勃拉姆斯、舒伯特、舒曼等人的室内乐、艺术歌曲原来如此精彩，这是最后一道坎。真正喜欢古典音乐的人到后来一般只固定的听一些作品

17 Jan 08

Arno Widmann: Julia Fischer: Virtuosissima!!! - signandsight

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julia_fischer 音乐

First there were the devilishly difficult runs at the end of the First Movement, which she handled so masterfully that some members of the audience had to restrain themselves from leaping to their feet and shouting "Brava, brava!" as if at the opera. And then, in the Adagio, the tranquil unfolding of each individual note – which, taken together, must form an arc – was so lovely one was reluctant to breathe.

But no fear: there were no casualties. There was only enthusiasm and, to borrow theatre parlance, five curtain calls for the virtuoso.
Pintscher and orchestra could have been the best in the word; all eyes and ears would still have been glued to Julia Fischer. In the Great Hall, the audience's excitement was palpable. It was patently clear to all that they were either about to witness the disgrace of one of the greatest living violinists, or that they would be present at the triumphant birth of a new piano virtuoso By no later than the beginning of the Adagio in the Grieg, it was evident to everyone in the hall that they were witnessing Julia Fischer's overwhelming triumph.
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- January 1, 2008 at the Frankfurt Old Opera House may just possibly go down in music history as the day in which not only Julia Fischer was reborn, but also the kind of virtuosity which is not just about mastery of one instrument, but the ability to do anything. That sort of virtuosity was long frowned upon, then forgotten – and now it is back again. That too is a joy.

05 Jan 08

古代文人心中的琴

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中国古典美音乐

至于文人士大夫的心理状态及审美情趣犷在整个琴史中，尽管也有表现斗争精神的琴曲如《广陵散》，表现民族气节的《苏武思君》、体现愤世嫉俗佯狂以明志的《酒狂》，但大多数都是自然风光、山水花乌、离别愁思的描写：或《高山》《流水》《渔歌词》那般山水淡远；或《渔樵问答》《黄莺吟》那种闲情逸致；或《阳关三叠》《秋风词》那布满淡淡的愁絮，或如《离骚》《昭君怨》带些悲愁交加、短吁长叹。总之，情趣高雅成为大多数琴曲的格测“清、微、淡、远”、“中、和、古、淡”为文人琴家所刻意追求的审美标准，这其中体现着儒家音乐思想的“大乐必易”与道家“大音希声”的精神，琴更为地抑制了铿锵有力的精神、风格与气质，更多注重“空”、“灵”的艺术境界，这一切都符合传统儒家与道家之绘合的审美理想。

25 Dec 07

古典殿堂 - 新浪BLOG

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歌剧音乐

阿蓝尼亚属于美男一族，形象佳，素质好，有活力，有中气，又精通意、法语一幅明星相，这都是他的优越之处。因之，出道以来他偏重饰唱些沉重的歌剧角色，似乎过早了些。这些年来他为了追求戏剧性的激情，继续饰唱些更大号的歌剧作品。他经常演唱威尔第充满男性的英雄气慨的曲目。从演唱技巧上来说，要表达出威尔第的威力、魅力和热力，非采用辉煌唱法不可，这是阿蓝尼亚擅长的。

　　阿蓝尼亚的辉煌唱法有以下特点：1、硬起音果敢、有力。2、胸声厚重、充实。力度刚劲、雄壮。关闭唱集中、挺拔。哭腔运用适度、适体。连贯唱法平滑、流畅。阿蓝尼亚结合法式优雅和意大利热情的演唱，线条稳健，圆滑唱法真实道地，内在火花绽放，新鲜且洋溢男子气慨。
阿蓝尼亚从未接受过正规声乐训练，青春期念的是会计，周末则在巴黎的酒店驻唱流行歌曲，后来有酒店听众里的内行人建议他应朝歌剧发展。于是他就利用朋友所提供的大量前辈名歌的唱片自我学习--方法是：录悉了每个伟大歌者的唱法曲节，并提炼出跟他们全然没不同的独特声音，此所以阿蓝尼亚宣称，他的老师就是他自己。

当红实力派歌剧名伶安吉拉·乔治乌（图文）-tigerhead06的blog-搜狐博客

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歌剧视频音乐

La Scena Musicale - The Lebrecht Weekly

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歌剧音乐

That both possess star quality is beyond question. Alagna
may even be right about his wife outshining Callas. What they
lack is the redeeming gift of humility, an urge to be at the
service of art. When I ask Alagna for an artistic credo, he laughs.
"An artistic credo means nothing," he says "It
means getting up in the morning, seeing if the voice is fresh
and deciding if you are going to sing."
His naïvety is as charming as her public mien is forbidding.
She is all wary control, while he frolics in search of new sensations.
He used to sing in a Paris café, seven nights a week.
She went straight from a Bucharest academy to the stage of the
ROH. What they have in common is a driving ambition and an impregnable
fortress that can shut out the world and all its barbs. "I
do my career," says Gheorghiu. "I give my best. I always
want to give pleasure. And the stories are . . . just stories."
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- It also enables him to see Gheorghiu in an unnatural light.
  "It's wonderful to live with a woman who has the same occupation
  as you," he marvels. "It's not your wife that you see
  but something else, a combination. You fall in love with her
  all over again. If you have had a little dispute at home, the
  moment you go on stage it vanishes. I don't know what it is,
  the magic of the music, or the voice, but it's a new love. I'd
  recommend it to every couple."
- Back at Covent Garden this month for a revival of their trademark
  Roméo et Juliette, both have been shaped, if not softened,
  by cruel fate. They now bring up Alagna's daughter, Ornella,
  alongside Gheorghiu's niece, Uana, whose mother was killed in
  an accident. Gounod's opera has become the route map of their
  lives. "Roméo is a role that is so complete, so rich,
  I always find new aspects,' says Alagna. "The character
  evolves with me."
- The Alagnas are not exactly defenceless, yet they like to
  appear embattled. Their fear of criticism has become so great
  that neither can bear to read a newspaper. 'It's because we are
  sensitive,' explains Alagna. "Why should I let it make me
  feel bad? I'm not sado-maso. It can destroy you."
- "We are never apart longer than 10 days, that's our golden
  rule," insists Alagna. "We never want to be apart."
- He is the most expressive of romantic tenors, she the most
  dramatic of current sopranos; together, they make an explosive
  package.

15 Dec 07

Wolfgang Schneider: Mann and his musical demons - signandsight

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mann 文学跨学科音乐

he did not particularly like listening to twelve-tone music, but he did appreciate its aesthetic challenge, its intellectual attraction – and its literary usefulness. Thus he allowed himself to be prompted by Adorno, who gives some passages in the novel a strong shove in the direction of "negative dialectic," otherwise rather foreign to Mann's understanding of music. The Kretzschmar chapter on Beethoven's Piano Sonata Opus 111 was the first that was influenced by Adorno, and Joachim Kaiser – otherwise impressed by Mann's talent for describing music - charged him with making factual errors. The sanity of his "Secret Council" must have seemed somewhat questionable to Mann himself. One could infer as much from the way he finally includes Adorno in his novel as the embodiment of the devil himself, "an intellectual who himself composes, as long as his thinking allows him to do so." A malicious formulation, that hit a nerve: Adorno's musical compositions never met his own expectations.
Music, more than any other art form, served the cultural image of the Nazis. The Bayreuth Festival was a showcase for the Third Reich. Concerts by Wilhelm Furtwängler reached listeners all over the world. Even Thomas Mann the emigrant clung to his radio although not without qualms: "we shouldn't have listened, shouldn't have loaned our ears to the swindle," he wrote in his journal after a broadcast of "Lohengrin" in 1936. For him, Wilhelm Furtwängler was the most powerful example of an artist who thought he could maintain his culture in a political vacuum.
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- Nazism used the dominant Wagnerian culture as a gateway into the educated bourgeois classes.
- Thomas Mann specialists love the chapter on music in "The Magic Mountain." The modern world doesn't play much of a role in most of Mann's work – no democratic masses, no big city hustle and bustle. But then the record player! Throughout his life, Thomas Mann felt the need to verify his understanding of music with experts and he surrounded himself with musical mentors. Possibly his only real friend, his neighbour in Munich, Bruno Walter, was one of the great conductor of the day. When the General Music Director was picked up in the royal carriage, the writer often sat next to him. The seats in the opera reserved for the Director were often made available to Mann and his family. His glorious childhood dreams of becoming a "conductor" (the conductor fantasy is presented with humour in the novella "Der Najazzo") had almost come true. Being around Bruno Walter, he could almost take part in the conductor's "joy of creation."
- Throughout his life, he went regularly to concerts and operas and he spent many hours of solitary reflection with his record player. James Meisel, his secretary at Princeton, described the look of musical devotion on the writer's face: "It's quite something to behold how he listens to 'Tristan' and 'Götterdämmerung'. His face, normally so controlled, gradually lets go and becomes soft, mild, full of pain and joy."
- Visits to the opera are also described as social rituals in the works of Flaubert, Tolstoy and Henry James, which deal less with the music than with marriageable young women and demonstrating arrival in society. Social signals are studied with the opera glass. This is also true of Mann's descriptions of the opera. But with Mann there is a movement in the other direction, toward inwardness: Thomas Mann continually swore by his "hours of deep, solitary happiness in the midst of the opera crowd."
- Thomas Mann adopted this compositional procedure, and this above all comprises the "musicality" of his narrative style. He saw Wagner's orchestral language as a school of ambivalence and deeper meaning. In addition to formal elements, many of Mann's stories have explicit references to Wagner in their content.
- He makes "as much music as one can justifiably make without making music," he said one time. His ambition was to create "good scores." Wagner's use of leitmotif was a model for him in doing so. As static and stereotypical as the leitmotif may seem as a means of external characterisation, the Wagnerian interweaving of references allows a more dynamic experience of time by continually referring to and incorporating elements of the future and the past, pointing beyond the figures' present consciousness. The passages of reflection and bundling of motifs are - in the neat phrase of Ernst Bloch - "plot-driving stopovers" in the musical-dramatic course of events.
- when Wagner is played, more often than not paralysis of the will, disintegration and the end are near at hand.
  
  "Can shorten life expectancy and reactivate suppressed feelings." Warnings of this kind should consequently appear on every "Tristan" ticket.
- Imperialistic consciousness needs culture to justify its hegemonic claim. Nothing was as fitting for this as the so-called "triumphant procession" of German music through the entire world. In this domain, Germany truly occupied a superior position and this was a source of patriotic pride to even the most non-musical of Germans. In addition to idealism, German musical life – from the most modest hobby musician to the singing clubs and the men's choir movement to music studies - was infused with a "potentially aggressive mentality."
- Thomas Mann, however, had always differentiated between Wagner's stage theatrics and the actual inner drama. For him, this introspective side was "the real Wagner" whom one "had for oneself after all." The internalisation of the narrative, which characterised the development of modern literature, was radically inspired by these qualities of Wagner's oeuvre – reaching its climax in the technique of inner dialogue in the Wagnerian James Joyce. So there are plenty of progressive links. As Nietzsche said, "Wagner sums up modernity. There is no way out, one must first become a Wagnerian."
- Vaget traces how music has sat at the top of the arts in Germany since around 1800. It was part of the nation's high culture. Being German meant belonging to the same people as Bach, Beethoven and Richard Wagner. At the same time, since Romanticism, the notion has prevailed that German music was the best expression of the "German soul."
- Thomas Mann is considered the most music-obsessed author in the history of literature. His powers of description were at their best when he was writing about music.

Stefan Schickhaus: After the throw-away opera - signandsight

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二十世纪音乐

Your cerebrum, presumably, harbours no more operas, since you've sworn off the genre. Have you also renounced composing for a large orchestra? Are you focusing your musical powers on chamber music?

Opera is unworkable under these conditions. After the premiere, the whole thing ends up in a drawer, it just doesn't pay. In terms of content, there exists in my work a clear concentration, and essentially, my credo can be found in my string quartets, I am able to communicate best in that form. I no longer need large masses in order to make music. On the contrary: the smaller the forces, the more intense the music becomes.

Volker Hagedorn: Beethoven, is that you? - signandsight

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四重奏音乐

The memorial concert in Vienna for the viola player brought together the creme de la creme of the music world. Claudio Abbado conducted, Simon Rattle played the piano, Thomas Quasthoff sang. Irvine Arditti, the leader of the world's other best quartet, played in the orchestra. And the Alban Berg Quartet played in the orchestra too. What is more, there was not a single string quartet on the programme.
Pichler gets really angry when he talks about how soloists are trained, about teachers who hone the talents of the highly gifted for competitions telling them to "play as neutrally and with as few mistakes as possible!" By comparison, the art of string quartet playing seems almost like a blessed isle, where musicians are still willing to take lots of risks in front of packed halls. A practice to which the Alban Berg Quartet has contributed a lot.
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- After this one wonders how the most relentless of all movements ever written for string quartet will sound, a movement which so upset the audience at the first performance that Beethoven later wrote an alternative for the final movement. In its cumbersome counterpoint, the great fugue – in fact a series of fugues – breaks away both from tonality and from the character of the instruments, allowing only the occasional passage of "intimacy," as Pichler calls it. Igor Stravinsky said: "This is modern music and will always be modern music."
- A great chance to find out a lot about Valentin Erben, the cellist, comes when the cello's A-string breaks at the beginning of a performance of Beethoven's opus 130 in the Hamburg Laeiszhalle. You hear a ping between the notes, but the Allegro continues for another two or three bars without any sign of alarm on the stage. You wonder whether something has actually happened after all. Then Erben leans forward giving a polite little nod, as if telling his dinner guests he needs to make a brief phone call, and leaves the stage. This mixture of calm decisiveness and modesty are also hallmarks of his playing. Even Erben's soli are never big entries but rather a precise balance of character and abstraction. With a new string on the cello opus 130 turns into quite an experience. The fast movements sound witty and at the same time sharply illuminated, so that a certain tension keeps you on edge – like, for instance, when they play the accents in the middle of the bars in the Presto.
- "Make rules," he said, "otherwise I feel nervous!" So that is what they did. Rule No. 1: Everyone is allowed to try playing a passage three times. If after that it's still not right, he has to go away and practice in "isolation." Rule No. 2: If someone wants to end an argument, the argument has to end – as in "Shut up…" Another rule was introduced by cellist Valentin Erben: "Please don't criticize me until I can play it!" You don't need other people to tell you about the mistakes you notice yourself. And if it isn't clear where the problem is, "you don't have to figure it out right away," says Pichler. Everyone should first try to find out: "Is it my fault? Whose is the dominant voice? Who blends in? Even if two violins play absolutely perfectly, if they don't blend together well it doesn't sound right."
- Rihm's commemorative music is uncertain in the best sense of the word: arresting, lingering.
- Many of them studied and learned the art of quartet playing with the Alban Berg Quartet. It's not that the four Austrians actually invented the combination of analysis and expression, of precision and emotion that mark their playing. But they have developed a new kind of sound, a voice, a warmth derived from intelligence, which placed the genre in a new light and which established the intimate, unspectacular yet refined quality of four string voices as a musical language among a broader public and inspired many composers.
- By going this way they stop at a high level while the string quartet scene is still in its heyday. In Europe there are "more concerts than ever before," he says. And in Germany the concert halls are full, even in the provinces. "Take Uelzen, for instance! Amazing!" In the last fifteen years the great quartets of the 1970s and 1980s, which, alongside the ABQ, included names like the Arditti, Kronos and Emerson quartets, have been joined by some excellent new formations: the Artemis, the Belcea, the Carmina, the Hagen, the Leipzig String Quartet, the Mandelring, the Mosaïques, the Petersen, the Rasumowsky, the Rosamunde…

the Second Viennese School - internet Public Library: Music History 102

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20世纪音乐

He was accidentally shot and killed after the war while outside during curfew by an American military policeman. His entire musical output lasts a total of some three hours.
These works contain no musical rhetoric, no development. There exists only a new structure of thinking: pure tonal organization.
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- For the next several years, Webern continually refined his compositional style, his music becoming more and more compact and brief. During the 1920s, Webern's compositions had become so concentrated that many last only a few minutes in length, while some scarcely last even a minute.
- With musical roots in the old German traditions, Berg was constantly working in old Baroque and Classical forms. The most outwardly romantic of the three composers of the Second Viennese School, his music is the most suggestive of the post-romanticism of Wagner and Mahler.

Pierre Boulez, Jörg Königsdorf: Mahler and me - signandsight

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boulez mahler 音乐

Mahler was a great fan of the voice, and he orchestrated the songs with a lighter touch and greater refinement than the symphonies.

Claus Spahn, Thomas Assheuer, Wolfgang Rihm: "Despair is something vast" - signandsight

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indecision 创作绝望音乐

Do you ever experience despair in your work?

Despair is something vast. You don’t despair because your shoelace comes untied, but because self-doubt interferes with your productive interaction. Then doubt turns into despair. In relation to perpetual demands we find ourselves unable to fulfil, we speak instead, I think, of irritation and helplessness. There are days when everything seems to go wrong, from the very start. There is a wrong number, or someone asks: "How long is it going to be? We need the piece." I can't deal with that.

13 Dec 07

György Kurtag: Kylwyria - Kálvária - signandsight

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ligeti 语言音乐

Kylwyria, his imaginary country, which he built up between the ages of five and thirteen. He drew colourful orohydrographic maps which could pass for Miro paintings, invented the Kylwyrian language and grammar, geography and history, describing in naive Utopian terms Kylwyria's legal and social systems.

Out of Kylwyria come his "Aventures" and "Nouvelles Aventures" (1962 - 1965). They articulate his second fundamental musical typology: abundant humour, dramatic twists and turns, unexpected tremorous flashes and equally unexpected moments of pause, aggression and apprehension. The three singers develop very human relationships on the basis of non-existent phonetic (Super-Kylwyrian?!) linguistic material. His intention was to unite the two "Aventures" in a single opera entitled "Kylwyria". Happily, "Le Grand Macabre" was born instead!
A recollection written by neurobiologist Gerhard Neuweiler, Ligeti's closest friend during the last six years of his life:

"He began asking me what I was doing at the moment... He questioned, and I answered, he probed, and I responded, he bored deeper and deeper..., he was like a volcano, always spewing new ideas, stimulations, doubts, questions... He forced me to reflect and inquire more closely, and through his inquisitorial curiosity he led me into new and unexpected aspects of my own discipline."

In my own private mythology I ascribe this kind of probing to the Socrates-Ligeti.
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- "You had to hear him speak, if possible see him," writes Wolfgang Sandner (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 17.06.06), referring to Ligeti's lively, expressive gestures. "He was a master of the rare art of linguistic polyphony. Anyone lucky enough to experience his wonderful way of expressing himself could understand his music far better afterwards. Because his language bore a striking congruence to his scores. The same lively, bustling sound configurations, the richness of associations, the far-fetched lightness of touch that nevertheless grew in some magical way into a complex linguistic architecture. Ligeti was a gesamtkunstwerk."

11 Dec 07

Thursday interlude: Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise

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写作音乐

If twenty-first-century composition appears to have a split personality — sometimes intent on embracing everything, sometimes longing to be lost to the world — its ambivalence is nothing new. The debate over the merits of engagement and withdrawal has gone on for centuries. In the fourteenth century, Ars Nova composers engendered controversy by inserting secular tunes into the Mass Ordinary. Around 1600, Monteverdi’s forcefully melodic style sounded crude and libertine to adherents of rule-bound Renaissance polyphony. In nineteenth-century Vienna, the extroverted brilliance of Rossini’s comic operas was judged against the inward enigmas of Beethoven’s late quartets. Composition only gains power from failing to decide the eternal dispute. In a decentered culture, it has the chance to play a kind of godfather role, able to assimilate anything new because it has assimilated everything in the past.
One possible destination for twenty-first-century music is a final “great fusion”: intelligent pop artists and extroverted composers speaking more or less the same language.
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- At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the impulse to pit classical music against pop culture no longer makes intellectual or emotional sense. Young composers have grown up with pop music ringing in their ears, and they make use of it or ignore it as the occasion demands. They are seeking the middle group between the life of the mind and the noise of the street.
- this is what good writers do: they go over their arguments until the effort doesn’t show.

01 Nov 07

Placing the 20th century's sounds with its actions - Los Angeles Times

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访谈音乐

"Is there a way we can go back to the more familiar tonal chords without it being an exercise in nostalgia, without being haunted by the past?" It was solved in California, with Minimalism. It was the last great revolution in the 20th century, and in a way it was a spectacular revolution, because it turned into a popular phenomenon.
It was in Northern California that Minimalism begins, with La Monte Young elongating tones and then Terry Riley takes them and pushes them toward tonality and then starts a regular rhythm going and that becomes "In C," the first Minimalist piece.
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- And yet he had a really interesting career as a teacher and had an effect on composers like John Cage and Lou Harrison, who went off in totally different directions but were inspired by the purity of his spirit and the integrity of his character. He was such a remarkable man he sort of singed everyone who brushed against him.
- Stravinsky was the great assimilator and adapter, who absorbed all these strains of music around him, while Schoenberg remained the same man he'd always been despite some rather pathetic attempt to write film scores in Hollywood and other kinds of popular pieces. His aesthetic was too pure to be put across to the American mainstream.
- And a lot of the Minimalists' music, in its relentless way, can be really beautiful: It takes the fundamentals of harmony, the building blocks, and makes them new and contemporary and American, in the case of Steve Reich and Philip Glass -- opens up this whole new world of beauty. It's a century of extreme beauty as well as of extreme noise.
- That's kind of a long-standing American disease, this need to define high art as not only something distinct from popular culture but as the opposite of it, the antithesis of it, the overcoming of it.

Placing the 20th century's sounds with its actions - Los Angeles Times

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访谈音乐

But a really important thing I want to get across is that the 20th century isn't a century of dissonance and difficulty from end to end. I talk about that music and find it exciting in a lot of ways, but the 20th century also produced some of the more sheerly, purely beautiful music that's been written in all of musical history, beginning with the late Romantics, Strauss and Rachmaninoff, but also wartime postwar music, like the "Quartet for the End of Time" by Messiaen. I think you can take anyone off the street and play them the final movement and their jaw will drop and they'll go into a trance. It's just overpoweringly beautiful music.
Is it fair to say that 19th century music is essentially narrative and 20th century music is trying to do something else, or to reflect the fragmented narratives we get in Modernist literature?
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- Once you see the music in the context of the incredibly dramatic historical circumstances, it begins to make a lot more sense.
- But these effects are very familiar in other contexts: What may cause bewilderment in the concert hall makes perfect sense in the movie theater behind a horror film or science-fiction film, in movies that have grossed hundreds of millions of dollars. Once you find the right psychological context for these sounds, they no longer have the same alienating effect. And of course Stanley Kubrick helped himself to some of the finest works of Ligeti in "2001," "The Shining" and "Eyes Wide Shut."
- A lot of 19th century music is about "the adventures of a theme." You recognize a theme, and then you start to hear its transformation; a second theme comes along, they start to interact, and you hear a story unfolding. Twentieth century music, a lot of it is about music as landscape, music as texture, sonic events one after the other. In a lot of it, rhythm comes into play, as opposed to melody.
- Why does classical music from the last 100 or so years -- unlike the visual art from the same period -- remain what you call "this obscure pandemonium on the outskirts of culture"?
  
  It's had a struggle to find an audience, especially compared to other art forms. The first blasts of Modernism in painting and literature and so on all caused scandals: Audiences rebelled at first, but they quickly caught on, and Picasso and Jackson Pollock sell for $100 million a canvas. The esoteric has become popular in these other art forms, and that hasn't really happened in classical music.
- And dissonance simply has a stronger effect on the psyche than abstraction in painting or stream of consciousness in literature, because sound is a physical phenomenon, it shakes the air and enters your body. I

Conversational Reading: The Rest Is Noise

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Another thing I like is how Ross has situated each chapter around certain groupings and/or oppositions of composers. Some of these groupings are fairly obvious (e.g. Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg), but even the obvious ones are helping me to get a grip on the overall picture. For instance, knowing that Strauss and Mahler had a difficult relationship, and that Schoenberg looked up to Strauss while also having a difficult relationship with Mahler helps me develop an overall idea of how all the music fits together. Instead of remembering five separate composers, I can put them into two "schools" as a simple mnemonic.
composers are reaching out to more atonal sounds to create greater contrasts fit to embody the greater extremes that are being found in society
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- The book is his account of what's been going on in classical for the last 100 years, a period that is often thought of as a more or less dead time for classical music.

28 Oct 07

Beethoven’s Evolution, From Playful to Grand - New York Times

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If your yardstick is whether a work is well known, chronological surveys of Beethoven’s piano sonatas move slowly at first: It isn’t until the Sonata No. 8 in C minor (Op. 13) that the first nickname (“Pathétique”) appears. Yet the “Pathétique” was composed in 1798, still early in the story; it was another six years before the “Eroica” made Beethoven a bona fide symphonic revolutionary.
One thing Andras Schiff is showing in his Carnegie Hall traversal of the sonatas, played in the order Beethoven composed them, is that a handful of relatively small but decisive steps lead from the Haydnesque playfulness and Mozartean elegance of the earliest works to the grand proclamations — sometimes elevated, sometimes brash — of the mature ones.
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- Mr. Schiff was generous to a fault in his encore. He played Bach’s Partita in C minor (BWV 826), complete and with all the sectional repeats.
- Mr. Schiff, oddly, did not stop between this work and the Sonata No. 6 in F (Op. 10, No. 2), which moves the narrative further by setting graceful themes against dark, brooding accompaniments. But he did pause for a bow before the Sonata No. 7 in D (Op. 10, No. 3), the black sheep of this trilogy and the most dramatic: Some of its rumbling figuration seems almost to nip at the heels of the “Pathétique,” composed a few months later. In Mr. Schiff’s reading, the Seventh Sonata looked ahead in other ways too. He played the Menuetto, for example, with a fluidity that made it sound, if only for an instant, like Chopin.

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century - Alex Ross - Books - Review - New York Times

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Who could have imagined that, as a “surreal” consequence of the rise of fascism, many of the giants of European classical music — Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Rachmaninov and Otto Klemperer (to say nothing of Mann and Adorno) — would end up living on each others’ doorsteps in Los Angeles?
Schoenberg and Stravinsky both did their best to squeeze huge fees from sympathetic Hollywood studios. Thereafter, scoring music for films became one of the principal ways in which new orchestral music maintained a viable position in the cultural marketplace.
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- “The Rest Is Noise” is a work of immense scope and ambition. The idea is not simply to conduct a survey of 20th-century classical composition but to come up with a history of that century as refracted through its music.

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Thursday interlude: Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise

Placing the 20th century's sounds with its actions - Los Angeles Times

Placing the 20th century's sounds with its actions - Los Angeles Times

Conversational Reading: The Rest Is Noise

Beethoven’s Evolution, From Playful to Grand - New York Times

The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century - Alex Ross - Books - Review - New York Times

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