Classical Convert

Opera Used to Sound Stupid

Never, ever did I ever reckon that vocal classical stuff - operary type pieces - would ever seem appealing. For years it sounded pretentious, too throaty and rich to have any depth. The timbres and stereotypes masked the fact that maybe Real Stuff - or stuff at hand for me, a burrower in the muck - was there to see. I don’t know exactly what that sentence means. I guess the real big pithy point to it was that, well, opera was women in horns singing about people dying, or about themselves dying: “opera is where people get killed and sing instead of keeling over”.

This changed… when did it change? Perhaps when I really heard some of the stories behind the Ring? I know that a big step was when I discovered Wagner’s through-composing: he doesn’t do this recitative - aria - ensemble business, it’s one continuous sweep. That was a step but it doesn’t feel complete, that didn’t convince me all the way. Perhaps being forced to see a recreated, rediscovered Italian opera for my music class last year did it. I saw that the singers moved with humor, and the lines were clever, funny, relaxed. That helped.

The two pieces which capped it off, drove the nail right through my head (in a good way, not the usual negative way that nails go into heads) were Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13, Op. 113, and Romances on verses by Alexander Blok, Op. 127. The latter gets extra enthusiasm due to being immediately after the Second Cello Concerto, one of my ultra tip-top favorites. We saw the Alex Blok performed at Ithaca College and it was heart… winding. That’s better than claiming heart-breaking - it’s more accurate. The audience was stunned at the end: it’s dazzling in a scary, dangerous kind of way. Coming out of it I felt like I had just missed hitting a person in my car, I had glimpsed a deep fear and realized the seriousness and danger of the situation I had previously taken for granted.

Listening to these sung poems make me feel sick and on edge, like life is a dangling walk along a precipice edge. It makes me look down and see the drop. That fear is heady, but enriching and fascinating.

At dawn there appear blue chimeras, reflected in the bright skies.

Why I Am Not Qualified

I have no qualifications. None to write-on about music in the blabbing way that this site makes me do, anyway. I had piano lessons when I was just a wee young whippersnapper of a lad, maybe thirteen years old (oh those glory years only the masochist in me misses) but those were not classical, oh no oh no. Those were jazzy. Those were songs we ripped together out of my mum’s old Beatles songbook and were jazzed up with sevenths and incidentals and stuff. I can still play a decent rendition of Strawberry Fields Forever. Aside from that, and (in hindsight a pretty abortive) attempt to take classical guitar lessons when I really was a young kid, that’s almost all of the musical experience I have.

I didn’t even really listen to classical music until fairly recently. Interestingly, my fantastic and glorious renaissance (it was a world changing event for pretty much everyone in the world I’m sure) wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for my mum buying me a three-for-fifteen-quid deal on HMV brand classical CD’s one time when she visited in Bristol. I chose Saint-Saens (because I remembered liking “Carnival of the Animals” as a kid), Gorecki (because there was a track on an album by Lamb called that) and Mozart (because the keyboard I learned piano on had Symphony 40 as a demo song). I recall not really listening to them much. Except for the end of the Saint-Saens Organ Symphony, with the melody they used in Babe (I remember clearly it was playing when Alys brought over Champagne to store in our hallway-fridge before the final exam in Bristol, that’s almost prescient).

When it really hit was in the spring of my first year at Cornell, when the same CD was playing. Probably because I wanted some background music. It was the Saint-Saens piano concerto no. 2 which hit me first. That was the first piece of classical music that made sense. I wish I could pin down the day, or even month. It’s a date well worthy of recognition and celebration! Maybe I can check my Amazon orders for when I ordered the set of the Saint-Saens piano concertos…

…well look at that! March 5th, 2003. That was a Wednesday. I seem to remember discovering it while being on my computer in the middle of the day, which places it around the 1st or 2nd of March. Almost three years ago. And surprisingly soon after my horrible breakup that year. Wow… this could go on much longer. I’d like to keep pushing through my Amazon orders and see what comes back to me.

The Grosse Fuge Grows On Me

I take back what so casually a declamation I made in the last post. It was something about my initial listenings to the huge pile of birthday music sitting on the frontlefthand side of my desk right now at the current mo. Specifically I said that the Beethoven quartets sounded good, but lacked the biting dissonances that grab my throat like the twentieth century boys’ stuff. Well, today I listened to the Grosse Fugue, op 133 and that has changed up my mind.

It’s plenty dissonant, in both tonal and rhythmic manners. It’s quite a shocker actually. Usually it is only, say, Prokofiev at his most mechanical (Symphony No. 2, say) or some extra avant gardey young fella like Schnittke who can really bemuse me on the first listen with a piece. This is absolutely definitely the first time Beethoven (or… pretty much anyone before 1900) has made me scrunch up my ears trying to pick out what the hell is going on.

The real killer so far is the first section of the piece, about 5 minutes in, where it sounds as though there are multiple metres going on. It’s spiky. It’s all spiky and angular. Later there are what sound like semitonal trills, (perhaps this is a big influence on Shostakovich’s late period trills) this isn’t straightforward stuff in the slightest. I like it a lot. Apparently Schoenberg was caught by this opus as well… but now I can’t bloody find the quote from him.

This really has a lot of promise to me right now.

A haul-load of music

Today (actually right bang on now, 11:15am) is my birthday. I’m an ancient and decaying 26 years old now, pretty much ready for the chopping block and glue factory. At least there’s a bit of moderation involved in the aging process with the whole old gift giving and receiving routine. These days or years all my presents are pretty specifically specified, which maybe makes it a little less exciting, but ultimately a bucketload more satisfying. This year, from me dad and stepmum I got:

• Beethoven, the late string quartets - I finally feel ready to taken on Beethoven’s quartets after exposing myself to Shostakovich and Bartok’s, and sliding my way into old Ludwig’s symphonies and piano sonatas. Initial listenings sound complex and subtler (I hate that word, bad, bad me. I’ll let me off though, since it is my birthday) than the dissonances and experimentation I find so attractive in the 20th century dudes.
• Prokofiev, string quartets and Cello sonata - I don’t think I have any of Prokofiev chamber music (except for three of the piano sonatas) which is a sad lacking coz he’s such a well up there favourite of mine. Initally they sound surprisingly… classical. Less avant-garde than I am used to from Sergei P.
• Shostakovich, piano quintet - The last missing piece of Shostakovich’s chamber music in my collection! It also has yet another recording of Schnittke’s piano quintet on it. Since it’s Naxos’ copy it’s probably even the same performance as I already have. Ah well.

I have tonnes of listening ahead of me, how glorious. They are all ripped and ready already. Prokofiev is playing as I type.

Wordpress 2.1 Upgrade

Yay I have the shiny new version 2.1 of Wordpress staring out at me instead of scummy old version 2.05 or whatever. Things went a bit crazy for a short time because it now has built in support for static front pages, which sort of messed things up. The is_home command stopped claiming that the front page really was the front page because it was static, it only returns true on the front page of the blog, so I had to rewrite my is_home() statements into is_page(’Home’) after setting that page as the front one.

This new version seems really nice after my initial frustrations. It means that I don’t have to hack it around so much to use it as a CMS (content management system), and my blog can actually be at classicalconvert.com/blog instead of classicalconvert.com/category/blog which looked kind of retarded. The new editor is cool as well, it’s got ever so trendy Web 2.0 style tabs on it.

Sorry for this post being so unmusical, but I need to geek out every now and then.