Lessons in Listening
July 9th, 2007 Posted in classical music, prokofiev, shostakovich, theory
Ooo I kind of like this. These two musicians have decided to run “lessons in listening” out of their home: they pump you full of light refreshments and then play classical music at you. Well sort of. The idea is to experience classical music without the snobbery, but with a pretty expert guide leading the way a bit. Now if they could stick some of their classes up online it’d be pretty great and I’d gush over it.
And if that isn’t an incentive I can’t possibly conceive of what is.
Admittedly their webpages could do with a little tad of touching up – the text is all overlapping everything when I view it in Firefox, but that doesn’t really detract much from the niceness of the concept. I hope it’s successful. Also, The Green Hornist is a pretty cunning name.
You can read a bit more about their aims an, errr, stuff where I read about ‘em originally, on Kenneth Wood’s blog here and here.
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On a completely unrelated note – I just listened to Prokofiev’s violin sonata no. 1 for the first time and it kicks arse. I think it has certain standard Prokofievy elements to it (there’s something frequently common in the scales he uses, and of course there are the omnipresent slow-fast changeups) but instead of sounding all “Ahh yes, Sergei’s at it again. How cute.” it’s a little more biting, a little sharper. It has a mouth packed full with a little more teeth.
When my new headphones get here tomorrow I’ll be able to listen to it a lot more, they bloody died by accidentally getting crushed into a knot in my hand luggage on my recent Trip of Doom and Despair.