Classical Convert

Saturday Night’s All Rite

I’ve been ill, still am, somewhat. So instead of the usual Saturday night hijinks, me and g stayed in and ended up dumped in front of the arts broadcast on our local public station featuring, amongst other shorts, a really creepy animation about a lost puppet from 1933. Primarily, however there were snippets from operas and ballets, which lead us to discuss such matters and further, into the caverns of youtube where we found this performance of the Rite of Spring which attempts to recreate the original costumes and choreography:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Quite a change after having just seen a bit from Swan Lake! We definitely preferred the primality of this over the prettiness of the other.

Faerie’s Aire and Death Waltz

Part 1, click for big:

Part 2 (probably):

Composed and copyrighted by John Stump, who is a huge enigma, according to google. Apparently you can buy the scores here, and Stump was alive but recovering from serious illness a few years back.

Wordpress Upgrade Issues

Eagle eyed ones might’ve noticed that for a bit back there, errors were all over the place up in this blog spouting out such tidbits as:

Warning: array_key_exists() [function.array-key-exists]:

The first argument should be either a string or an integer in /home/classif5/public_html/wp-includes/category-template.php on line 176

Which happened after upgrading to Wordpress 2.3.2. To fix this problem I changed:

<?php if ( in_category($AsideId) && !is_single() ) : ?>

To:

<?php if ( $AsideID != '' && in_category($AsideId) && !is_single() ) : ?>

In the main index template, and tada! All working again. Hopefully this will help anyone else having the same problem. If anybody sees anything else gone awry, let please me know!

Hot Monday Linkage

Tooooooo tired to type properly. It might be MLK day, but as a lowly grad student, that doesn’t exist in terms of not working. My weekend was filled with hockey games, and sake bombs, and Delta Gamma singing songs about what they would rather do than fight. To negatively cap all the fun stuff off with, today is the start of the new semester, and with utmost dismay and misery I am yet again forced to do a class at 08:40 in the morning.

However, between all of the happenings and hijinx, I managed to bookmark a couple of quality, music-based links which I shall humbly lay at your feet and/or floor. Firstly, there is Ravinia U featuring a very nicely put together introductory guide to classical music. Secondly, there is musictheory.net, which has a bunch of flash based tutorials on basic musical theory, perfect for ignorati such as myself.

PS, The Mahler is better and better.

More On Mahler

Last time in the fresh saga of me converting into a Mahler fan, everybody seemed exceptionally pleased I was going for it — that post has the greatest number of comments of any I have written so far! Having all those nice comments has definitely inspired me to keep up at it.

The piece I have chosen for my plunge into the darkest depths of Gustav is his symphony no. 6, the “Tragic” (after a suggestion, I have also flirted with No. 9, but only very briefly). This bad-boy is long. The first movement is over twenty minutes, the middle two about fifteen, and the last almost thirty. Eeek. So far I’ve probably listened to it all the way though twice, and listened to the first two movements about five or six times.

The first movement starts off with an aggressive, percussive, depressive march, this is definitely my kind of thing:

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I love how the brass rudely drops off at the end.

But I get sidetracked by the romanticness of the second theme:

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I have a hard time with the lushness of the romantics, my temperament is more acclimatized to the mechanical 20th century, and this kind of stuff grits my teeth. Can’t help it, sorry. I’m hoping that if I keep listening it’ll become more enjoyable, which’d be great as it would also open up certain other late 19th century avenues. Anyway, for now it’s not enough to stop me. Incidentally, I switched to a performance by Gielen instead of Bernstein after one of the previous commentors suggested that the latter plays up the romantic aspects, and I do like this version better.

Listening to this reminds me very much of how it felt when I first started with to classical music. It’s overwhelming. Small sections make sense: I can feel the themes mirrored all over the place, but there are huge glaciers of notes in between the in-place paragraphs, the ones that work with my head. Skeletal connections are shining below the surface, but the metaphorical water is making my eyes sting.

One thing I really like are the very quiet sections with pizzicato strings and wobbly tonality:

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Actually there are lots of bits I like, far too many to cut out samples for each. Hopefully they will all seem far more connected after some more listening, instead of lying isolated, as they are now. There is a long way to go yet!