Classical Music

[madupont]

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/people,,putins-pal-lends-a-hand,41252

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/45147,features,georgias-troubled-history

[madupont]

http://www.opus3artists.com/artists/joyce-yang

Performance at Longwood, Route One
Sunday, May 3, 1:00 pm

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Performing Arts: #452

[oilcanbody]

When does popular become classical?  Maybe here....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My1j7qzwKQA

[barton]

Mr. Oil -- I'm not certain you can preserve your troll status, if you start posting hyperlinks like that.

Seriously....that's a great single-guitar version, hadn't heard that.  Looks like a little reunion thing, at a concert billed as just Stills. 

I still like the Woodstock recording, where the guitar licks have a more sitar-like sound (and with what  sounds like a tabla doing percussion)....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzF_MoXOU1E

[madupont]

Gintaras, or anybody curious from Obama admin.forum White House

http://artofthestates.org/cgi-bin/piece.pl?pid=260

[madupont]

Pasquinade is described as the fore-runner of ragtime and jazz. If you recognize a particular motif, that is because it is better known to the public as the duet Jack Nicholson sings in Reds to Diane Keaton. Every child knows it, in the generations up until now.

[Beppo]

Been listening to a condensed version of Wagner's Ring Cycle conducted by Solti, which as I understand it, is up there with the best. I have the complete version but not managed to escape the vortex of the diminutive version, simply for its ease of access and all too quick ipod 'walking to work' accessibility.

A half hour walk to work every day has various signposted timelines for arriving into the work environment at a highpoint of a piece of music.

This is good to get into work on a high:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpzwvlEVLgM

[Lhoffman]

If you've got Solti, is it Brigitte Nilsson?   

I've got two DVDs of the cycle.   Levine and the Met, Boulez at Beyreuth Festival.   Love them both.   Levine takes an approach that emphasized the mythological; Boulez goes more for the industrial Germanic aspect.   

Powerful work.   Wagner = Genius!

[Beppo]

Yes, I believe so...

Current listening is Rachmaninov's Vespers - St Petersburg Chamber Choir.

These 15 canticles were composed in a couple of weeks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyOXlbaYSCY&feature=related

[Lhoffman]

Yes, I believe so...

Current listening is Rachmaninov's Vespers - St Petersburg Chamber Choir.

These 15 canticles were composed in a couple of weeks.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyOXlbaYSCY&feature=related

I've pictured Rachmaninov attending those all night vigils,  the singing or listening to the singing of the great vespers, struggling to focus on the worship but all the while rewriting those settings somewhere in the back of his mind.  

The composition falls into an interesting historical slot, too.    Rachmaninov felt that a composer should express his nationality and his religion through his work.   At the time he was working on the Vespers, Orthodoxy had a strong influence on Russian culture...both are reflected in this work.   Then within two years of its composition came the Revolution, and the blending of religion and nationalism was no longer acceptable.  

[weezo]

Not sure if Classical music is the right venue for historic martial music. Just added a music book with arrangements for the various marches popular in 1812, and a long piece of the music played and narrated by Randy Cabell. (lng d/load to hear it).

http://www.educationalsynthesis.org/art/index-Music.html

[johnr60]

"the blending of religion and nationalism was no longer acceptable.

That wakes me up-- a little anyway.  How do we tell these things in music?  Do we hear them? feel them? think them ( some how with the progression of notes)? or do we just believe what we are told?   

[Lhoffman]

Hello Johnr...how've you been?

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In the specific case at hand, Rachmaninov's Vespers, these are religious and nationalistic in nature because Rachmaninov based them on chant he had taken from the music of Russian Orthodoxy. 

Generally, Nationalism in music refers to writing that is evocative of a particular culture...based on the folk tunes, stories, history or popular music of that culture.   Very often there are also distinctive rhythmic patterns and harmonies.

In American Nationalist music, you might hear snippets of jazz, hymns, folk songs.  Aaron Copland wrote Appalachian Spring, which makes use of a Shaker tune called Simple Gifts.   He wrote a tribute to Abraham Lincoln, and celebrated the American West in the composition of his Billy the Kid and Rodeo. 

Another American composer, Charles Ives, wrote a piece called Central Park in the Dark which incorporates themes from ragtime (Hello My Baby), from a march (Sousa's Washington Post March) and from popular music of his day (The Campbell's Are Comin').   The piece is subtitled "In the Good Old Summertime."     Ives' first piano sonata takes borrowings from  American hymnody.  His second  Sonata (Concord) is a celebration of American transcendentalism and has four movements, each named after an American writer.   (First movement, Emerson; second, Hawthorne; third, Alcott; fourth, Thoreau.)

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Here's a bit of Copland: 

Hoedown, from Rodeo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsReWx9XdNs


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Simple Gifts from Appalachian Spring:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiLTwtuBi-o&feature=related

[johnr60]

Sorry I'm late.  Ballgames and such.

Thank you for the links and short dissertation.  I'm very familiar with the pieces you quote.

"evocative of a particular culture"

That notion is closer to my problem.  I presume Nationalistic music instills some sort of patriotic zeal in its hearers of the same culture.  Else why would they be condemned by established authority?  But  the really good ones:  Sibelius, Shostakovitch, Mendelsohn, etc.    accomplish it across cultures.  Just quoting the folk songs won't do it.  I doubt that Ives,  Copeland, or even Stravinsky can do that.

Is there something intrinsically in the music that produces zealotry?

Berstein has a piece somewhere describing the blues and why the music itself produces a sadness.  I can feel it and it certainly has nothing to do with my heritage. 

[Lhoffman]

I haven't seen that Berstein piece...is it an essay?

I think the negative connotation of nationalism as related to patriotic zealotry may have come about during the rise of Hitler and in the years following WWII.   

Copland, for example, felt that the nationalism found in his music was related to the expression of a spirit of optimism and to his use of harmonies that represented a sense of openness as related to space, and perhaps also to what he considered a unique aspect of the American character.

Glinka is credited with the rise of Russian Nationalism.   His idea was to write music based on Russian culture because the Russian people (around 1830) were exposed primarily to French and Italian music.    (Interesting story here.  Glinka spent a lot of time traveling through Europe…Italy, Austria, Switzerland.   The plan was to return to Russia and write music based on Russian themes.   Then as part of his European tour, he went to Germany where he fell in love with an opera singer.  He tossed aside the idea of returning to Russia and made plans to settle with the opera singer in Berlin…Would have done so except for a snafu in his paperwork.)

Authorities may fear the ideas presented in music and in art because even the most plebian understand the power of art and music to move people and to inspire change.   Sometimes the change may be directly related.   I’m picturing the scene in Les Miserables where the people are storming the ramparts with the anthem in the background (perhaps not historical, but illustrative).   In his 13th  Symphony, Shostakovich uses Baba Yar to make a statement on anti-Semitism, whether it is practiced under the Nazi regime or elsewhere…his elsewhere being the Soviet State.   A less direct example would be found in the opera Nabucco by Verdi as related to Italians who drew a connection between the plight of the Jews in the Babylonian exile and their own desire for liberty and unification during the Risorgimento.  (Of course more directly related to artistic nationalism, Verdi had a point to make here about the superiority of Italian opera.)