Zompist Bboard Again

Cantiga de Santa Maria 193: Sobelos fondos do mar

-----

I will admit I'm not too familiar with most of RVW's work beyond the classics, with one exception - the Tuba Concerto, now that's a delightful little gem.

I think also one might be tempted to put Britten into that same category, although he appears to have been more consistently aligned with the avant-garde throughout his life, whereas RVW and DSCH only seem to have drifted there in their later years.

today's the first day in forever that I listened to new music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEUy99_ ... 86BmmBiFaH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHnSfNR ... 86BmmBiFaH

Frislander wrote: ↑Mon Mar 11, 2019 7:42 pm Cantiga de Santa Maria 193: Sobelos fondos do mar

-----

I will admit I'm not too familiar with most of RVW's work beyond the classics, with one exception - the Tuba Concerto, now that's a delightful little gem.

I think also one might be tempted to put Britten into that same category, although he appears to have been more consistently aligned with the avant-garde throughout his life, whereas RVW and DSCH only seem to have drifted there in their later years.

I don't know the tuba concerto...

I would put Britten in a different category, yes.

Interestingly, DSCH was actually a keen avant-gardist all his life - I think more so early on than late on, actually. Unfortunately for him, he was denounced by Pravda on the personal command of Stalin, who had attended Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District and had not enjoyed his evening. He was forced to recant his 'formalist' impulses, and withdrew his 4th symphony from performance, while Lady Macbeth was effectively banned. The same year, most of his friends and family, and many of his colleagues, were either exiled to labour camps in Siberia or simply shot, so he had good reasons for obeying the national guidelines on compositional style. He was again denounced by Zhdanov after the war. Much of his published music becomes less listenable to in his later years, because Stalin had died and the Terror was over (indeed, some of the works published later had been written in secret earlier on).

It's a great historical irony, really. As an avantgardist, he'd have been just another among many. It's the edge between academia and popularism, and the satirical-political purposes to which he employed the ambiguities of this liminal area, that define the Shostakovich we know. The fourth symphony, that at least at the time he considered his masterpiece, is now rarely played at all, whereas the fifth symphony, written grudgingly to secure public and official approval, is considered one of the greatest symphonies of the century...

A Persian bhajan by Amir Khusrow:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnCVHYOcKlQ

My best attempt at making out the lyrics seems to be:

!شوخی هندو ببین! بودن ببرد از خاص و عام
."رام من هرغزنه شد هر چند گفتم "رام رام

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Mon Mar 11, 2019 2:02 pm Well, all classical composers are heavily underrated these days. But yes, RVW particularly. He's known in this country for a couple of major crowd-pleasers - mostly The lark ascending and Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis; if you're lucky, maybe also English folk song suite and/or Fantasia on Greensleeves - but most of his work is relatively little known or played, relative to his brilliance.

I think he falls into a similar trap as Shostakovich. "The masses" don't know them well, because they're classical composers but scarily recent in time, not to be taken seriously compared to the great masters of the past. And they're also too serious to be loved by the public - yes, both composers wrote some eye-catching money-spinning pieces, but behind them there's this mass of very long symphonies and operas and whatnot. But the "elite" don't respect them either, because they're "populists" and, worst of all, "sentimentalists" - they wrote music with tunes, that provoke emotions - the two cardinal sins of music in the minds of Serious People. They're too obviously (multi-)talented to simply scrub from history like most sentimentalists of the 20th century, so they're paid lip-service, but I agree that they're not given sufficient attention.

Also, of course, it's easily to emulate the modernist composers, as that requires no actual talent, just study; it's much hard to try to emulate a RVW or a DSCH, so fewer people do.

There's a certain...charming campiness to a lot of his more obscure works. They're extremely well-done, beautiful pieces, of course. But, as you say, he composes to evoke emotions, and it's done very strongly and entirely and earnest.

As an example of what I mean, one of my favorite obscure RVW works is A Cotswold Romance. And then there's Heroic Elegy and Triumphal Epilogue, which is very obscure, as far as I can tell, and deserves to be better known.

RVW is excellent. An avid classical listener friend of mine said he thought RVW was hopelessly boring, but I disagree entirely. I love RVW's incorporation of English folk music into his melodies. I just bought a box set of his 9 symphonies conducted by Adrian Boult. I'm in for some good listening

A Polish Romani song, performed for non-Roma, by two sisters named Zosia and Czesia Rajfer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L27TGpd ... r_embedded

A Serbian guy (who's more familiar with Balkan Romani) and I (more familiar with Vlax) have recently tried puzzling out the lyrics, and neither of us gets much of it. Together, we seem to have gotten this:

Naštik te bistrav Tut (I can't forget you)
[No idea what the second line says, despite his suggestion]
Kaj me te harakhav Tut (Where shall I find you)
T'avav me paša Tut (To be near you)? [This was his suggestion, which makes a lot more sense than whatever the hell I could come up with]
Te šaj bistres mange (If you can forget me),
[Probably some term of endearment here formed using a nominalization marker ]
[Something about baxt, which very roughly translated means 'good luck' or 'auspiciousness']
[Something about kethane' 'together']
Me dikhav (I see)
Ke kames (That you want/That you'd like)
Te bistres (To forget)
So ame kerden (What we did).
Na isi sar Tu kame' (It is not as you wish)
[Both of us have suggestions for what the last two lines say, and neither of them make any sense]

dhok wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2019 2:13 pm

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Mon Mar 11, 2019 2:02 pm Well, all classical composers are heavily underrated these days. But yes, RVW particularly. He's known in this country for a couple of major crowd-pleasers - mostly The lark ascending and Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis; if you're lucky, maybe also English folk song suite and/or Fantasia on Greensleeves - but most of his work is relatively little known or played, relative to his brilliance.

I think he falls into a similar trap as Shostakovich. "The masses" don't know them well, because they're classical composers but scarily recent in time, not to be taken seriously compared to the great masters of the past. And they're also too serious to be loved by the public - yes, both composers wrote some eye-catching money-spinning pieces, but behind them there's this mass of very long symphonies and operas and whatnot. But the "elite" don't respect them either, because they're "populists" and, worst of all, "sentimentalists" - they wrote music with tunes, that provoke emotions - the two cardinal sins of music in the minds of Serious People. They're too obviously (multi-)talented to simply scrub from history like most sentimentalists of the 20th century, so they're paid lip-service, but I agree that they're not given sufficient attention.

Also, of course, it's easily to emulate the modernist composers, as that requires no actual talent, just study; it's much hard to try to emulate a RVW or a DSCH, so fewer people do.

There's a certain...charming campiness to a lot of his more obscure works. They're extremely well-done, beautiful pieces, of course. But, as you say, he composes to evoke emotions, and it's done very strongly and entirely and earnest.

As an example of what I mean, one of my favorite obscure RVW works is A Cotswold Romance. And then there's Heroic Elegy and Triumphal Epilogue, which is very obscure, as far as I can tell, and deserves to be better known.

I wouldn't say "camp" - as you say, he's very sincere, which to me is the opposite of camp.

It was pointed out to me recently another reason why RVW is underplayed these days: the unions. His music is still in copyright, and therefore at least in the UK he's owned by the PRS, who charge very high fees to be allowed to perform his music. Apparently this makes it economically inadvisable for large orchestras to perform him, rather than a non-copyright composer, and effectively impossible for most small and local orchestras.

[The PRS is a monopoly that in effect owns All The Music. You need a license from them to perform or play any of their music, which by extension means that if you want your music performed or played you need to join the PRS (because otherwise anyone wanting to play your music will need your license as well, when they're already buying the PRS one, and since the PRS controls 99% of music, they'll stick with the PRS one). But when you join the PRS, you have to sign over all your copyright rights to the PRS. And they are very, very zealous. "Listening to the radio where passers-by might overhear it" and "humming to yourself in your place of work" are examples of the sort of thing they prosecute you over. Anyway, in the case of someone like RVW an orchestra has to pay the PRS twice over - once just to be allowed to perform anything (as an annual license) and then again per use of copyright music.]

Thus, music that should probably be a mainstay of local ensembles up and down the UK is instead very rarely heard...

In other news, one (probably last) Veronica Mars update: season 4 is apparently coming out sometime in July.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tqAD7-aaMs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdCU75EMqh4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IXFjlege_0

"Rahguzar," a Tajik song by Nigina Amonkulova:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QG1qt3W7nLQ
Lyrics (in Cyrillic and Roman scripts) and translations into English and Russian: https://lyricstranslate.com/en/rahguzar ... guzar.html

I've just seen Death in Venice by Luchino Visconti. As far as I'm concerned, the title could have been Bored to Death in Venice.

Ryusenshi wrote: ↑Sun Mar 31, 2019 6:43 am I've just seen Death in Venice by Luchino Visconti. As far as I'm concerned, the title could have been Bored to Death in Venice.

It's got a great allegretto, though.

Salmoneus wrote: ↑Sun Mar 31, 2019 11:21 amIt's got a great allegretto, though.

That was the reason I watched this movie in the first place! Amadeus helped me appreciate Mozart's Requiem. I wondered if Visconti's movie would do the same trick for Mahler's fifth symphony, but nope.

Watched Castlevania over the weekend and I think it's the first genuinely good videogame adaptation to come out of Western entertainment. (Japan's managed some decent ones, but I can't think of another actually good Western one... by "actually good" I mean something that a non-gamer could watch and enjoy)

Here's some listens I'm into right now:

Podcasts:
The Weeds (public policy)
The Ezra Klein Show (politics and culture)
The Talk Show (John Gruber's podcast companion to daringfireball.net)
Accidental Tech Podcast (more Apple stuff)
Invisibilia (sociology/psychology)
Lexicon Valley (English linguistics)
Micromobility (the rise of small electric non-car personal vehicles)

Audiobooks:
The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss (fantasy)
Less by Andrew Sean Greer (last year Pulitzer winner, contemporary queer literature)
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond (you all know this one, finally getting round to it)

Kind of unusual for me, but a Hungarian pop song called "Szokeresz" by Loretta:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCtkrTwwQBA

It has a bunch of Romani (loan?)words in it.

"Dutsiri ăn minti," apparently a pop cover of a Megleno-Romanian folk song sung by Romanian artist Adena. The title apparently means 'thoughts of the past'. The lyrics may be found with a translation into Romanian in the video description.

Currently listening to Philosophy of the World by the Shaggs. If you've never heard them, here's My Pal Foot-Foot. Selected comments: " I tried to dance to this and I hurt my foot", " I'm listening to this drunk and it still sounds wrong".

See, while lots of pop musicians are self-taught, they still learned by listening to other music, trying to reproduce songs they heard, and so on, eventually getting a sense of harmony and rhythm. Not the Shaggs: their father forced them to write songs and rehearse without ever learning anything. So their music sounds extremely weird: there are melodies, but no harmony; the chords are off; there is some rhythm, but no discernable time signature; the lyrics don't seem to have a coherent meter. Joe Gore compared them to medieval music.