““the white racial frame”……has the special power of being invisible.”

And weightless, odorless and inaudible. Yet, paradoxically, it occupies space and endures through time. It has weight, impact. It can affect social relations, intervene in historical processes. It is as though the hand of God were at work. Or the Devil. Incarnate themselves but able to manipulate the corporeal realm.

And, as Descartes argued, being God, and God being All, then he would not deceive us, inasmuch as He is All and not a part of All and the Truth is the Whole and not a Part, therefore, “the white racial frame” must be of that which is not of God, i.e. the Devil.

Destroying the Devil is God’s work. So for blacks to labor to eliminate “the white racial frame” is to do God’s work here on Earth. Blacks are Noble Warriors serving the highest cause.

He called Beethoven an “above-average composer” who has been “propped up by the white-male frame, both consciously and subconsciously, with descriptors such as genius, master, and masterwork.

We almost could have had Kanye, but he went decidedly un-woke on the way toward being in-sane, or at least that’s how the Commissars have it.

The Met has yet to present an opera by a Black composer, though a production of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” is planned for a future season….

There’s always Porgy and Bess which, despite having been composed by a Jewish guy, stands right up there with the very best Black Music ever.

I’m glad I attended more than my share of spectacular classical-music concerts in my time. I’ve a feeling that’s going to be all over, even if concerts are one day permitted again.

obsessive worship of the past

Whoa, do the dwellers in the glass houses of Emmet Till, Redlining, and Muh Legacy of Slavery really want to throw that stone?

from West African talking drums to Indonesian gamelan, fall outside that system

If only the fascist, white supremacist state would cease barging into Mr. Ross’s upper Manhattan apartment and imposing its musical apartheid to prevent him listening to those talking drums and gamelan recordings.

Oh wait, nothing is stopping him. Meanwhile, the most musically talented Africans and Indonesians are running in the opposite direction: toward European classical music … until they meet Mr. Ross standing athwart the path, telling them they should stick to their own kind, that is.

I enjoy classical music, be it ever so white.

I also enjoy classical jazz – the jazz of the 20s and 30s, as played by negroes, creoles (the distinction apparently mattered in New Orleans), and whites. Partly it was based on ragtime, of which the great master was Scott Joplin (black). Partly it was based on the blues, of which the first great performer was Bessie Smith, also black. Partly it was based on popular and vaudeville music, marching music, and even operetta, of white origin.

I suppose I should cancel the black players for cultural appropriation of so much of white music, even the instruments they played.

But it seems much wiser just to ignore all the crap and say that I enjoy the music of Sid Bechet, Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, and company. I’d enjoy it even if they had been not black but polka-dotted. I enjoy Bix Beiderbecke, the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, Adrian Rollini and so on – all white.

Christ, I’m fed up of the Politicisation of Everything.

While great composers are overwhelmingly white, they are also overwhelmingly of earlier eras.

Despite having Beethoven as an example to learn from, there is no worthy successor to Beethoven walking among us.

White people ain’t what they used to be.

“Christ, I’m fed up of[with] the Politicisation of Everything.”

Welcome to the brave new world brought to you by cultural Marxism.

(Here’s hoping that when the counter revolution comes, it’s a really brutal one.)

When the virus hit, we were in the midst of the so-called Beethoven Year—a gratuitously excessive celebration of the two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday of a composer who hardly needs any extra publicity.

Isn’t there a gratuitously excessive Black Culture Month, followed by six month of Black Lives Matter celebrations every year? Do they really need extra publicity outside of SBPDL blog?

“The Met has yet to present an opera by a Black composer”
If that is true then they have never put on Treemonisha, which does seem like an oversight, particularly given all the 2oth century monstrosities they do perform.

The OperaBase list of performance frequency is rather interesting, and I wonder if it includes performances in Russia. I suspect not, Russians love their Opera, and especially their Russian Operas. I am also surprised to see so many French composers so far down the list. I get that Berlioz is not easy to put on, but a lot of French language operas are popular enough that they should be performed more often. I suspect that there is a real language barrier – it is expected that every singer and Opera Troupe does Italian and German, but French, and especially Russian, present some obstacles.

Unfortunately, the ugly reality of CoronaFraud is threatening the livelihoods of Musicians just as much as it is Restaurateurs and Gym owners. Every music venue has a pressing need to worry about surviving as a business, which would, I think, dwarf all other concerns.

Speaking of Creoles, I do think Gottschalk deserves wider attention. I like his stuff.

Being from a New Orleans Creole mother makes him at most a quarter black and probably less but more than 1/1024th

This kind of anti-Whitism is actually not that dangerous to Whites. It leads to more racial polarization and that’s a good thing. Plus, it exposes the vile nature of their motivations.

Sure, it may hurt the feelings of “elite” Whites, but who cares? They always wanted to have their own separate peace, assuming that only the “proles” would pay the price. Golly, did they outsmart themselves?

Three Germans are the Holy Trinity of music. Bach (The Father)- Beethoven (The Son)- Mozart (The Holy Ghost).

Opera…I’m not much into it. But when you listen even to the oldtimers who are virtually 1000 years removed from us & without organ, piano, violin… nothing to add.

Blacks? I like Black- Irish combo…

As for post-modern music torturers, I’d mow them down with WW1 Vickers. White, black, yellow….don’t care.

Once the CCP consolidates it’s power they can dispense with Ross but they will continue to encourage their ten year olds to master Beethoven.

Within ‘Classical’ music you have the same basic issue with that which is more popular being lesser than much, or most, or the vast majority, of what is less popular. I’ll take Vivldi, Bach and Haydn over any of the top opera composers, except Mozart.

White Liberals have spent so many decades telling blacks that they are MUCH better than they are, in almost everything, and that they are better in every way than the white trash, that blacks now almost universally believe it. And are ready to sucker punch you to make the point.

Only a racist would think that Beethoven is better than Michael Jackson. Only a Neanderthal, a retarded racist Neanderthal, would think that Hank Williams is superior to R. Kelly.

All future articles at The New Yorker, until it goes broke: Everything Whites Have Accomplished Is Garbage.

They are not allowed to be.

It began with their own rebellions, but over time it became clear that those who are the Elites of the world formed out of the horrors 0f the 19th century and World War 1 demand that the vast majority of whites who are not rich be suppressed to enable the non-whites to replace them in many, or most, ways.

You cannot have geniuses in Country Music like Hank Williams or Johnny Cash feted because to be heard today they must please those who own and control the business – and those owners are not the sons of farmers and small town business owners, small town cops and firemen. Those who own Country Music are Globalists.

George Steiner owns you, Steve. The quote from his “Tolstoy or Dostoevsky” (with my observation- Steiner confused The Princess Casamassima with The Ambassadors, the first one being a political novel, unlike the 2nd).

We can speak in one breath of the Iliad and War and Peace, of King Lear and The Brothers Karamazov. It is as simple and as complex as that. But I say again that such a statement is not subject to rational proof. There is no conceivable way of demonstrating that someone who places Madame Bovary above Anna Karenina or considers The Ambassadors comparable in authority and magnitude to The Possessed is mistaken—that he has no “ear” for certain essential tonalities. But such “tone-deafness” can never be overcome by consequent argument (who could have persuaded Nietzsche, one of the keenest minds ever to deal with music, that he was perversely in error when he regarded Bizet as superior to Wagner?). There is, moreover, no use lamenting the “non-demonstrability” of critical judgments. Perhaps because they have made life difficult for artists, critics are destined to share something of the fate of Cassandra. Even when they see most clearly, they have no way of proving that they are right and they may not be believed. But Cassandra was right.

How long before we get a Jay-Z and Bey-Bey mashup with the NY Philharmonic or, better still, Boston Pops? Sort of an urban André Rieu.

I mean, there’s plenty of White-folk orchestras appropriating the black culture, but I don’t see many PoCs representing….

Attacking a white European musical tradition for being predominantly white and European is obviously stupid, but so is this remark:

But of course Western classical music is the master language of music. For example, gamelan music, while cute, isn’t exactly Beethoven or Wagner. We have the judgment both of highly cultured East Asians and of the world’s movie fans, who expect film scores based on the 19th Century Romantic tradition.

Actually, no, many foreign film industries heavily feature scores from their local musical traditions. Iran is a particular standout in that regard.

The modal, microtonal, polyrhythmic musical systems found in other parts of the world cannot be fully reduced to the language of traditional western music theory.

And while you are citing “highly cultured East Asians” on the superiority of western classical music, you might want to notice how many classical trained western composers took inspiration from, and borrowed from, non-western music, including gamelan music (which I wouldn’t call “cute”) in the 20th Century.

Like a lot of pundits on the right, you tend to be at your worst when talking about the arts and aesthetics (“This painting doesn’t have any representational content! How can it be beautiful!”), and in your case that’s particularly true when you talk about music.

Nevertheless, it’s good to know I can be some sort of a rebel by embracing the whiteness of classical music. I just wish I liked more of it.

Weren’t they just trying to tell us the other day that Beethoven was black? Make up your minds!

The public schools celebrate January as MLK month. It begins the first week of January. Then comes February Black history month. It doesn’t end till the second week of March.

More than 2 months of blackety blackety black.

Scott Joplin learned piano from, and received the bulk of his music education-5 years worth, from a highly accomplished German-Jewish piano teacher, Julius Weiss.

This was in Texas in the 1870s-1880s by the way.

Schubert’s many song settings don’t get him on the list I guess, but I’m a fan. Anyway, he died really young too.

By, the way… Carmen always reminds of Fun with Dick and Jane, 1977, with Segal losing his welfare check due to his antics during Carmen chorus.

I wonder if there’s some sort of spiritual energy in life with these young people who die leaving a vast artistic legacy and everyone speculates what they may have achieved. Keats, Shelley, Mozart. The mathematician Patrick Ramsey. Wordsworth and T.S. Eliot simply stopped writing after a certain age. Maybe they burn up their life force and god claims them. They burnt their candles too fast.

Beethoven wrote incidental music for the Goethe play Egmont.

The overture to Egmont is played very very often, but I don’t recall the whole play with the rest of the music ever being staged, or produced on radio, in London, or even when I lived in West Germany.

So a work by Beethoven AND Goethe can be relegated to relative obscurity.

The Met has yet to present an opera by a Black composer

Their reasons can be discerned by answering two questions.

1. Would blacks and other minorities buy large numbers of tickets for an opera by a black composer?
2. Would the usual opera-goers prefer to see an opera by one of the top 100 composers?

They composed for the educated, sophisticated minority of Europe. Modern music is dumbed down to satisfy the tastes of the superficially educated Unwashed Masses who wouldn’t know the difference among Baroque music (Bach/Vivaldi), “classical” (Mozart, Haydn), and Romantic (Beethoven, Wagner, Tchaikovsky)–in other words the real “98 Percenters.”

Look, why not just be happy with jazz? It’s a stunning, and black, contribution to the world’s music. Whites even invented a pale imitation: swing.

No they weren’t! “Copernicus was a woman!” 😉

But seriously, the Sexmission movie got it right. When you can;t deny white males achievements, you just deny they were white (or male, as in Sexmission). It’s not that improbable that in the future popular culture will have many white composers or other heroes as people of color, even if this won’t be officially sanctioned truth. The historians and those who will want to know, will know the truth, but the popular image could be possibly so altered, so anyone who will find out about truth will be surprised. It’s like with the average brain sizes. It’s not denied in a science. But in popular culture of course everyone knows it’s false!

Regarding the OperaBase performance list, many symphony orchestras around the country canceled Beethoven tribute concerts this year due to Covid. I wonder if they hadn’t been performing Beethoven the last couple of years in anticipation of doing multiple performances of him in 2020. Handel seems kind of low considering there are hundreds of performances of Messiah every year. I wonder what percentage of his total is from Messiah compared to his other works?

White Scholars should Confront Black Supremacy in African Music.

And when will Black “Scholars” Confront Arab Supremacy in Arabic Music, Persian Supremacy in Iranian Music, Chinese Supremacy in Classical Chinese Music, Indian Supremacy in Indian Music?

The Pearl Fishers, Bizet’s not quiet completed opera, has been revived as in a first rate work. So, yea, if Bizet hadn’t died young. Also Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Bellini, Purcell, Gershwin. There are a lot of composers who didn’t make it to age 40.

People who ignore French music are missing Saint-Saens, Offenbach, Gounod, Massenet, and possibly the most underrated composer of all time, Boieldieu. Just for starters. It isn’t just Bizet and Berlioz.

The field must acknowledge a history of systemic racism while also giving new weight to Black composers, musicians, and listeners.

The “field,” in the sense of academics, can do whatever it wants. But classical music is a business, and what is performed, in the end, will be what audience members buy tickets for. And that’s not some unknown black composer.

I think the Left’s hatred for Beethoven has less to do with him being white and more to do with him not being Jewish.

At bottom, the entire music-education system rests upon the Schenkerian assumption that the Western tonality, with its major-minor harmony and its equal-tempered scale, is the master language.

I don’t even know what the fuck Schenkerian means. The tonality of Western music evolved over 1000 years and produced over a hundred tuning systems. What is forgotten in the age of the modern piano is that equal temperament is a relatively recent thing (Early 19th C). In Europe, tonality evolved for deep and complex mathematical, emotional, and religious reasons which are heavily documented. In the rest of the world, music didn’t evolve at all. Only when Africans in America were exposed to the music of the Irish did they come up with a Blues style. Only when Scott Joplin was exposed to Beethoven did he come up with Ragtime. In other words, black music is improvisational but highly suggested by Western folk and classical idioms. Blacks contributed nothing to music theory. Compared to the western canon, other music traditions are thin gruel. At its heart, all attacks on Western art tradition are an attack on the ideal of beauty itself.

Vast tracts of the world’s music, from West African talking drums to Indonesian gamelan, fall outside that system, and African-American traditions have played in its interstices.

Funny, my (early 80’s) musical education included both talking drums and gamelan.

While great composers are overwhelmingly white, they are also overwhelmingly of earlier eras.

Despite having Beethoven as an example to learn from, there is no worthy successor to Beethoven walking among us.

White people ain’t what they used to be.

How would you know, living as we do in twisted anti-White societies?

Tune in tomorrow boys and girls for another never ending episode of,

WHITE SUPREMACY VS melanin mediocrity. Small case intended.

the voices in the peanuts beethoven video are terrible. Not that I know how they could be more interesting or compelling. Just a bit surprised there are not more intelligent people in the TV business. Even back in the day.
Listen to Sherwood Schwartz talking about how scripts that were going to be used in My Favorite Martian were poorly thought out.

Who was Various? He’s about two-thirds of the way up the list, so he must be pretty good. I feel like I’ve heard of him, but I can’t name any particular opera. I assume his name is pronounced “var-ee-oos” because he’s white and European.

I have always resented how, when a Guatemalan tries to listen to Fasch or St Colombe, the sound waves stop in the air.

Aha! I think you’ve found the answer to all of our problems!

We’ll just agree that “White” people died out sometime in the nineteenth or early twentieth century. They were giants! Their achievements were astonishing in so many fields!

But alas they are gone now, and all the people left are just regular people. You know, like Steve says, maybe AA ball quality, but that’s about it. Not like any of them are about to whip out a new Aida or Marriage of Figaro.

And they were bad. Very Bad people, with very bad unwoke tendencies. Very bad. But, they’re gone now! Just like the Neanderthals.

Here’s a list of paint colors to choose from to describe today’s white people.

https://www.elledecor.com/design-decorate/color/advice/a3448/the-right-white-a-70889/

I like “crisp linen’ and “swiss coffee” (which would complement BLM black nicely). There’s also “historic white” for people who are really good, in a classical kind of way.

How many people know the Swedish composer Tor Aulin? Yet his Master Olof: The Matron and the Child composition is far more beautiful than 99 percent of all classical compositions. It would be an Oscar contending film score if composed today.

The adaptation of “Carmen” into “Carmen Jones” was another example, like P &B, of white music performed by a black cast. In the ‘40’s Oscar Hammerstein II adapted Bizet, setting the opera in a WWII army camp. The performers were minimally trained with almost no stage experience. The lyrics, to my mind, were brilliant in updating the libretto to the environment of a black world, without condescension. The movie version is shown on TCM occasionally (so far), with Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte (both dubbed) and Pearl Bailey.
There’s an interposed high note at the end of Michaela’s song that I haven’t heard in any performance of the aria, and it’s tremendously appealing.

Regarding the example of thinking of the best athlete you knew when younger, I guess I’m an outlier, since I went to the same school as Reggie Jackson, whose talent was so extraordinary that he was scouted for 2 sports in 8th grade.

Wait until they realize that the very popularity of symphonic metal in Europe oppresses Negroes and is literally another holocaust etc.
But kidding aside, symphonic metal should aggressively be promoted to kids as a “lowbrow” way of maintaining a connection to their cultural heritage through a pop music filter. It’s vastly easier evolve to Vivaldi when starting from Rhapsody of Fire as opposed to starting from the Grammy brainrot shit.

I take solace in the certainty that White Western art music will be preserved because our future East Asian overlords appreciate it even more than we do.

Classical music was certain musical stylisms that came from a certain time and place. Outside those parameters, it’s not classical music. You can’t play atonal music today on a gamelan and call it classical music. It may be experimental, it may be folk music, but it can never be called European classical music. It didn’t come from that time and place.

The main problem with blacks and classical music is that you have to be able to read and write music if you want to be a composer. Most black musicians can’t read music. They do everything by ear.

I’m extremely dubious about the value of any art that hasn’t been already incorporated into the Western Canon, because westerners are pretty good at assimilating anything of any value. People of foreign countries tend to overrate what they produce. I was reading a description by Harold Acton about Chinese opera, and it struck me as being more closely related to vaudeville than anything else, which is why it never spread over here. It was just awfully darn silly stuff.

Yet such activity goes only so far in challenging an obsessive worship of the past. These works remain largely within the boundaries of the Western European tradition: … Furthermore, this programming leaves intact the assumption that musical greatness resides in a bygone golden age. White Europeans remain in the majority, with Beethoven retaining pride of place in the lightly renovated, diversified pantheon. …

At bottom, the entire music-education system rests upon the Schenkerian assumption that the Western tonality, with its major-minor harmony and its equal-tempered scale, is the master language. Vast tracts of the world’s music, from West African talking drums to Indonesian gamelan, fall outside that system, and African-American traditions have played in its interstices.

Folks starting to get the logical necessity of my separationism?

The basic decency required for civilized life–“Oh you got something nice going on over there, great. Good luck with it”–is beyond these people.

Minoritarianism *must* wreck everything. It’s the “you must let me in” ideology of the barbarian, the robber, the rapist. Breaking into–and hence wrecking–everything is what the basic logic of minoritarianism demands. That is it’s purpose. Destruction is what minoritarianism is.

Anything that Western Christian civilization–i.e. the white man–has produced, must be “opened up” and given to minorities–jobs and industries, schools and country clubs, music and movies, math and science, law and order, logic and reason, truth and beauty, neighborhoods and nations.

Either we stand up and simply say, “No. No, this is our stuff–we built it, we like it, it belongs to us … you are free to go build your own stuff.” … or Western Civilization, Western man is destroyed.

I can never think of Porgy and Bess or even Gershwin without thinking of Jim Bouton’s Ball Four tale of an unnamed teammate boarding the team bus and singing “Summertime, and your mother is easy” as he walked to his seat.

But of course Western classical music is the master language of music. For example, gamelan music, while cute, isn’t exactly Beethoven or Wagner. We have the judgment both of highly cultured East Asians and of the world’s movie fans, who expect film scores based on the 19th Century Romantic tradition.

Holst’s MARS, BRINGER OF WAR

Holst, JUPITER

Conan the Barbarian , Basil Poledouris

John Boorman’s use of Wagner in EXCALIBUR:

Not sure how your athlete analogy works. My grandfather played pro ball, my mom competed nationally in two sports and my son fought in international competitions.

Went to school with two Olympic athletes one who got gold.

Maybe my experience was skewed because I had a pro athlete for a grandfather.

On the other hand only one of those people got the gold and she’s still on tv commentating last time I saw tv.

There was a time when afrocentrists claimed that Beethoven and Mozart were black. I guess the party line has changed.

Kevin Volans is my favorite African composer:

Does the left not realize that they are engaging in the EXACT SAME RACISM (AND SEXISM) they’ve decried for the past century? Apparently It’s ok to be Racist and sexist towards the one sub group who built the modern world.

Think how many of JS Bach’s own babies he had to bury? But apparently he deserves cancellation cause of his skin color. Nice

I’ve long felt that African-Americans feel that they, rather than the Gershwin and Dubose heirs, deserve royalty checks for ‘Summertime’.”

Right. In the same way, they’ve claimed “Amazing Grace”, belting it out as if it’s a Top 40 hit praising their blackness instead of what it is, a hymn of gratitude for being saved by God’s grace composed by a former captain of slave ships.

Not surprisingly, the inherent narcissistic tendency of blacks prevents them from understanding and appreciating classical music. Its forms are complex and abstract and it’s both individualistic and universal, rather than tribal.

View post on imgur.com

“Schubert’s many song settings don’t get him on the list I guess, but I’m a fan. Anyway, he died really young too.”

I adore Schubert and often listen to his Lieder. He is mein Geliebte. Yes, he died young, too young.

Hans Hotter is my favorite interpreter of Schubert’s Lieder. I like to listen to this on New Year’s Day to start the year out right:

It is as though the hand of God were at work.

Indeed. If it is

weightless, odorless and inaudible. Yet, paradoxically, it occupies space and endures through time. It has weight, impact. It can affect social relations, intervene in historical processes.

Doesn’t that mean that it must be of God? For, like God, it seeks no deception. White doesn’t pretend not to be white. Rather, it is Ross, Ewell, Feagin, and fellow travelers who seek perpetually to deceive, and so must be … of the devil.

In reality, for every worthy black composer of classical music there are probably, say, 1,000 even better white composers who are almost completely forgotten today.

You are so right, Steve, the big names – Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, etc. – represent the very highest peaks of the rich and varied landscape that is European art music. If you start from the Renaissance moving forward to the early 20th century, and make study of each period and country and genre and explore the contemporaries of the great names, you will discover that the White Male Composer bench was very, very deep. The so-called “Black Mozarts” just don’t measure up to even the third-tier forgotten contemporaries of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.

But of course Western classical music is the master language of music. For example, gamelan music, while cute, isn’t exactly Beethoven or Wagner. We have the judgment both of highly cultured East Asians and of the world’s movie fans, who expect film scores based on the 19th Century Romantic tradition.

Noted East Asia scholar Edwin O. Reischauer once commented that the Japanese were always willing to acknowledge the supremacy of the Western symphonic tradition.

Vast tracts of the world’s music, from West African talking drums to Indonesian gamelan, fall outside that system, and African-American traditions have played in its interstices.

Amy Chua has a fun section in her Tiger Mother book where she slams the gamelan when her White Jewish mother-in-law suggests that Chua’s daughters should learn it:

Maybe the reason I can’t appreciate gamelan music , which I heard when we visited Indonesia in 1992, is that I fetishize difficulty and accomplishment [……]Gamelan music is mesmerizing because it is simple, unstructured, and repetitious. By contrast, Debussy’s brilliant compositions reflect complexity, ambition, ingenuity, design, conscious harmonic exploration-and, yes, gamelan influences, at least in some of his works. It’s like the difference between a bamboo hut, which has its charm, and the Palace of Versailles.

Speaking of Amy Chua, I always love her de haut en bas dismissal of lesser breeds of Asian (“I’m Chinese. Don’t confuse me with jungle-dwelling savages like the Filipinos”), and her need to emphasize that her husband isn’t some pathetic loser who can only get ugly Asian chicks.

Personally, I think that Debussy [a noted fan of the gamelan] was just going through a phase, fetishizing the exotic.The same thing happened to Debussy’s fellow Frenchmen Henri Rousseau and Paul Gauguin, who started painting Polynesian natives all the time. A particularly disgusting variation of the phenomenon can be found in modern-day California: men with Yellow Fever, who only date Asian women-sometimes dozens in a row-no matter how ugly or which kind of Asian. For the record, Jed did not date any Asian women before me.

A.D. – very spot on comment. Pretty much distills and sums up the entire discussion, simplifies what appears to be complex but is not.

Alex Ross has a traditional background for a classical music critic. You wouldn’t think he’d give a damn about the microscopic contribution of blacks to classical music, if there’s even any to be found. But he’s gay and married to Jonathan Lisecki, a Jewish guy who does something or other, and then Ross starts spouting blithering SJW nonsense. Not a surprise. Ross is just a puppet with that nauseating reptile Lisecki pulling his strings.

https://twitter.com/jonnynyc?lang=en

Sondheim on the power of simplicity:

Oscar dealt in very plain language. He often used simple rhymes like day and May, and a lot of identities like “Younger than springtime am I / Gayer than laughter am I.” If you look at “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’! / Oh, what a beautiful day!” it doesn’t seem like much on paper, but he understood what happens when music is applied to words—the words explode. They have their own rainbows, their own magic. But not on the printed page. Some lyrics read well because they’re conversational lyrics. Oscar’s do not read very well because they’re colloquial but not conversational. Without music, they sound simplistic and written. Yet it’s precisely the hypersimplicity of the language that gives them such force. If you listen to “What’s the Use of Wond’rin’ ” from Carousel, you’ll see what I mean.

And here we also see Sondheim explaining the nature of his appeal. Hammerstein wrote lyrics that function superbly within the reality of the performance but wilt under literary analysis. Hence, the lack of intellectual appeal. No one in a Lit department wants to sit down and analyze “Oh, what a beautiful mornin’! / Oh, what a beautiful day!” It’s meant to be experienced, not read.

Sondheim, though, is different. You can sit down and find tertiary layers of meaning in the words themselves. Indeed, Sondheim’s lyrics (unlike Hammerstein’s) almost seem to function better when they are seen on the page, as opposed to being heard in performance.

For a highbrow comparison, one might note the example of Wagner, whose librettos are usually seen as great literary works in their own right….which is not something that can be said for a lot of operatic librettos

Those dang White people!

Spike’s movies may have dropped in quality since firing his father, but Blanchard has put out some good stuff. On par with Beethoven? Eh, different genre.

The Chinese are the Jews of Asia.

I’m very proud of my kinfolk’s, the Spanish and Cuban composers, even if they haven’t made the list. The music composed by Spanish Baroque masters is sadly underrated, as is the Italian born, French composer, Lully.

Perhaps I’ve just tired of the same old and I simply crave something new, even if the “new” is more ancient than the “old.”

I’m grateful to youtube. Not only has it allowed me to listen to as much classical music as I want, but it has also introduced me to many composers, as well as little known pieces of more well-known composers, that I didn’t know existed. Handel’s “Sweet Bird,” for example, I will never hear in my local classical music station. But it is still one of the most beautiful pieces of music I’ve ever head.

“Destroying the Devil is God’s work.”

The Gnostics are right: the god of this world is the devil.

Either we stand up and simply say, “No. No, this is our stuff–we built it, we like it, it belongs to us … you are free to go build your own stuff.” … or Western Civilization, Western man is destroyed.

The root of the problem is the universalizing drive that white men themselves have. We have been the ones who for thousands of years have tried to force our culture on the world. We are the problem and we have to change. We need to become more like other peoples. White inventions and knowledge should be kept secret from other races. We have to become tribal people.

It’s sad to see so many of the “race realist” commenters here don’t get it. They have the opposite response that we need to do more to “civilize” other races that are being aggressive and hostile to us. That the problem is not enough contact rather than too much.

The desire to help or “fix” other races is cause of white self hatred. There is a very thin line between the missionary, the colonialist, the empire builder and the modern self hating white man. Self hatred is simply what white men do when the first round of helping and fixing doesn’t work. White men blame their own race for the failure to assimilate others, blame their own people for not being welcoming enough.

No doubt, this comment thread will be filled with idiotic posts where white male race realists debate the best way to help or fix blacks.

In this brave new world we are slouching towards, the African talking drums will be as loud as the martial drumbeat in “Mars” by Holst.

You forgot that fucking ubiquitous Carmina Burana. (I sure am a dumb negro.)

Beethoven was as great as it gets, but no greater then predecessors like Bach and Mozart and successors like Wagner. Anybody saying ‘Beethoven was an above-average composer’ makes me wonder what the fuck planet this is anymore. They were all WHITE, so blacks don’t play them. I’m been a classical pianist and musician all my life–and I’m not talking about an ‘unknown musician’, but this talk is enough to make anyone sick. That’s not even including Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and in the 20th c. (where the emphasis can finally be a little on black composers like Ellington, but not classical ones of great importance) Xenakis, Boulez, Schoenberg, and before them Debussy and Ravel and Faure. I haven’t read anything that’s made me think people are this stupid since the books that had ‘nigger’ in the fucking dialogues banned. Black people have JAZZ and blues and Ella and Dionne, but they do NOT have Bach or Ravel.

” Prevents them from understanding and appreciating classical music”

Dead wrong as black musical geniuses starting with Charlie Parker most certainly “understood “Classical” music namely their own classical music otherwise known as : Jazz, and Bird was quite well known as a profound fan of the white classical masters.

Parkers breathtaking improvisational excursions are every bit a match for the greatest of the white classical masters. Just listen to his short solo on Summertime recorded with strings. This stroke of genius still makes me shiver after fifty-plus years of contemplation thereof.

I must add however that there is an element of white influence regarding the black Jazz masters with such historical figures as Bix, Trumbauer, Venuti/Lang, J Dorsey etc, these white innovators having been a model for such jazz greats as Prez, and others.

AJM, “Mensa” qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro Jazz artist.

Haha – Amy Chua is sassy – I need to read more of her, I think.

And even the Soviets weren’t stupid enough to cancel classical ballet, and not just Petipa/Tchaikowsky either.

Alex Ross has just published a book on Wagner. After reading one of his recent New Yorker articles on the German composer – How Wagner Shaped Hollywood – I’m hesitant to purchase his book even though I do enjoy reading about Wagner. Ross writes about the controversial composer, his music and his influence as if they are modern problems we must come to grips with if we are ever to walk again in the sun.

Lana and Lilly Wachowski’s “Matrix” trilogy (1999-2003) brushes against “Parsifal,” Wagner’s mystical final opera, with its themes of initiation and enlightenment. In the first film, the young computer hacker Neo is drawn into an underground movement led by a man named Morpheus, who divulges that the everyday world is an illusion manufactured by a master race of machines. Morpheus’s summary of the Matrix—“It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth”—invokes the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, who had an immense influence on Wagner’s later work. As Žižek points out, Morpheus’s concept of the “desert of the real” is equivalent to the wasteland that lies behind Klingsor’s seductive magic garden in “Parsifal.” Morpheus is like the sage old Gurnemanz in the opera, leading an adept into secret knowledge. The science-fiction commentator Andrew May pinpoints the apparent clincher: at the climax of the film, Neo stops bullets in midair, reënacting Parsifal’s feat of arresting Klingsor’s spear mid-flight.

Democratic mass culture prefers to consider itself exempt from the forces that made Wagner vulnerable to exploitation by the Nazis. Fantasy artists like to believe that they are creating allegories of liberal good versus reactionary evil. A scene in the 2011 Marvel Studios film “Captain America: The First Avenger” explicitly inserts Wagner into that binary opposition. Johann Schmidt, a Nazi operative turned global terrorist known as the Red Skull, is working away in his mountain laboratory, with bits of the “Ring” playing on a Victrola. As at Hitler’s Bavarian retreat, alpine peaks are visible through massive windows. Captain America, a scrawny kid who has been scientifically beefed up to superhero proportions, hunts down the Red Skull, laying waste to his laboratory. Wagner is a monster from the European past who must be ejected, but only after the sound designers have obtained a thrill or two from the roar of the “Ring” orchestra—much the same trick that Capra pulled in “Why We Fight.”

Any myth is vulnerable to ideological simplification and distortion, as the political scientist Herfried Münkler has argued. Superhero narratives in which unheralded individuals acquire exceptional abilities can speak for marginalized communities, but they may also encourage the sort of grandiose self-projection that the Wagner operas inculcated in the hordes of fin-de-siècle youth who daydreamed about fulfilling Lohengrin, Siegfried, or Brünnhilde roles. In “The Matrix,” the newly enlightened Neo is given a choice between two pills: a red pill, which will make his knowledge permanent, and a blue pill, which will restore the veil of illusion. Members of the American far right, who have a few Wagnerites in their midst, have made that fable their own: their “red-pill moment” is when they cast aside multicultural liberalism.

Well, okay.

“Scott Joplin was pretty awesome”

Agreed. He was also an anomaly.

You guys making these vague pronunciamentatoes about the nature of lyrics have no clue about the wit and sophisticated wordplay and mastery of intricate and bizarre rhyming of the Great American Songbook (which has no Sondheim in it). Try “Lush Life” or “Let’s Do It,” or “The Lady is a Tramp,” (Hart kicks Hammerstein’s ass), or “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” or “Makin’ Whoopee,” or “I Get a Kick Out of You,” just for starters.

–you realize Bach is at the bottom of the opera list because opera as such was barely getting developed, with Handel doing the lion’s share of the beginnings, and I’m not big fan of his stilted things. With Mozart you get the first really great operas, and on from there. Beethoven wrote only the one opera, and it’s not nearly as popular as any of Mozart’s great ones, but that hardly makes him a merely ‘above-average composer’, which you know, of course. You probably also knew that about Bach, but others might not. There IS no greater composer than Bach. Also, if ‘gamelan is cute’, some of the South Indian music danced to by Bharatya Natyam is pretty great, but I’m not going to say it’s up there with Palestrina or Monteverdi, much less Haydn and Schubert.

“Debussy … gamelan … fetishizing the exotic”

Debussy used Western tones and instruments to conjure “exotic” soundscapes. His interest in Indonesian music was a variation of his theme.

“Those who are really convinced that they have made progress in science would not demand freedom for the new views to continue side by side with the old, but the substitution of the new views for the old.”

Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, “Dogmatism And ‘Freedom of Criticism’” (1901)

I suspect Wagner will eventually be cancelled, with future performances only taking place in Japan, China, or Hungary, maybe Russia. Although Wagner had negative thoughts about Jews, he worked with Jewish associates and colleagues all his life. He compartmentalized. Isn’t that what we want? It’s the only way civilization can function.

Cancel warriors want to control thoughts, not just actions.

Schubert wrote Ave Maria, IMHO, the most beautiful piece of music ever written. Take that, BIPOCs!

I really do not care what the composer looks like. My only concern is the music. I love classical. I hate all rap. I’m a big fan of soul, blues, and jazz. I really like country and ole time rockn’roll, but I’m not much of a fan of bluegrass. I say I love most music, even show tunes. I say my tastes tell you nothing about my race or the race of the people whose music I love.

But they are so twisted by ressentiment that they just can’t help themselves.

Taking into consideration black behavior over the years, and the black psychological profile e.g. highest degree of self-esteem among all groups, overinflated egos and self-confidence, extreme extraversion, etc., it may be that another Nietzschean oncept, namely the Will to Power, is driving this, rather than ressentiment.

Ressentiment presumes a degree of self-reflection and self-awareness that seems wholly lacking blacks. Having imposed their Will to Power on popular culture and dominating its musical scene, blacks with their extreme self-esteem really seem to believe that they are musically and artistically supreme. They simply can’t imagine other genres, corridors of society not being dominated by blacks. This Will to Power is now spilling over from pop culture into higher culture and other parts of society like academia, journalism, and politics.

Some great use of classical music in Hollywood movies. Here are some others.

Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune at the end of the The Right Stuff.

Franz Schubert’s Trio in E flat major at the end of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.

Kubrick, of course, has used classical music extensively in all his movies I’ve seen. Here are a few other examples.

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2 at the opening of Eyes Wide Shut. (NSFW if you don’t want to see Nicole Kidman’s glorious ass.)

Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (Dream of a Witches Sabbath) at the opening of The Shining

You can ever hear Berlioz’s music in a creepy Julia Roberts’ movie (forgive the annoying video).

The movie is Sleeping with the Enemy.

Hannibal Lector would of course love Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

For the record, Jed did not date any Asian women before me.

Key word there: “before”.

This Ewell bozo gets cut down to size in several articles here…
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dTOWwlIsuiwsgAa4f1N99AlvG3-ngnmG/view
Especially Timothy Jackson’s.

Of course Wagner’s always been cancelled in Israel, although I think Daniel Barenboim managed to slip one in about 15 years ago.

Bach is barely 1% as popular as Verdi. </blockquote

It's puzzling why Bach is on the list at all, since he didn't compose any operas. So what's he doing there?

Did somebody mount a staged performance of one of the Passions? Could you even get away with that, these days, what with all the stuff about Die Jüden?

Some others:

Radetzky’s March by Strauss I, and then the Emperor Waltz by Strauss II, in Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence as Newland Archer takes in Beaufort’s Ball.

The great scene with Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken in True Romance has Delibes’ Flower Duet from Lakmé playing in the background.

Some use of classical music in the movies is surprising. Even the light comedy hit Trading Places starts off with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.

Bill Murray uses eternity to learn how to play Rachmaninoff – or a variation thereof – by the end of Groundhog Day.

The library scene from Se7en has Bach’s Suite 3, Air on G String playing in the background (video is taken from the French version of the movie, but the music is also in the English version).

Dmitri Shostakovich’s Waltz No. 2 at the opening of Eyes Wide Shut. (NSFW if you don’t want to see Nicole Kidman’s glorious ass.)

I’ve long theorized that the real reason why Kubrick made Eyes Wide Shut (easily his worst film) is because he wanted to capture Kidman’s backside at its absolute peak.

While great composers are overwhelmingly white, they are also overwhelmingly of earlier eras.

Can you name any great composers who were non-white. Also, there are no great composers around now, at all.
The last major classical composer – indeed the last classical composer ever – was Joaquin Rodrigo ( 1901-99 ). Famous for his guitar concerti, he also produced excellent concerti for harp, flute, cello and piano and choral work. He was still producing high quality works into the 1980s!
However, nearly all classical composition had stopped by the 1930s – when Rodrigo was just beginning ! The Great Tradition had died. What we got thereafter was post-classicism and ultimately the likes of Messiaen and Stockhausen. This is classical music in name only.
Yes, you’re right: White people ain’t what they used to be.

“But that when implies: “I have been doing some thinking about summertime and here are my conclusions on the subject of summertime,” which is a lot less engaging than “Summertime, and the living is easy,” which implies that you are just expressing your feelings as they occur to you in this moment:”

Perhaps. But perhaps Jew Gershwin was influenced by Hebrew, a surprisingly primitive language which makes do with “and” rather than the elaborate subordinate structure of say, Greek.

Each ‘and’ has to be construed in some way when translating into, say, English: so, therefore, because, when, etc. Same with beginning sentences with “And”: Hebrew does so in order to use “and” to switch the tense of verbs from past to present. The attempt of the King James translators to be as literal as possible resulted in the fiction of “Biblical English” as exploited by Hemingway.

So “Summertime and” likely means “Summertime when”.

English proverbs are so old they come from a similarly primitive period, which is why no one understands them anymore:

Spare the rod and (thus) spoil the child
Feed a cold and (then you will) starve a fever (You will waste all your food fueling your cold)
Have your cake and eat it too: NO, it’s “(IF) you eat your cake (then) you will not have it, will you?

Has anyone else noticed that Schroeder is both German-named and, not only white, but blond?

So is Schulz telling us that high culture and the Nordic race go hand in hand?

Well, if he didn’t, he should have.

“If that is true then they have never put on Treemonisha, which does seem like an oversight, particularly given all the 2oth century monstrosities they do perform.”

A good point. There’s no possible way these unknown operas by blacks are in any way worse than the atonal and general modernist crap that the Met and others routinely program. I must say these blackety-black folks do have a point. As Saul Bellow said 30 years ago, when this whole mess started, “I’m all for multiculturalism. Is there an African Proust? Great, show him to me, that’s something I want to read!” [Paraphrase from memory]

Of course, as so often, these “white” composers are Phoenicians, so it all becomes clear. White audiences would rather hear Scott Joplin than Schoenberg, but they get Schoenberg, whose work, according to fellow Phoenician Adorno, is not only more sophisticated than black music, but more sophisticated than Beethoven et. al. as well. Same as Rothko is more “advanced” than Sargent.

Karajan once cut short a Berlin PO rehearsal because he was going to hear Louis Armstrong. Someone muttered about this, and Karajan replied “Gentlemen, when I hear Armstrong, at least he is in tune!”

Is the world of Mexican music in urgent need of being diversified with, say, lots of Asians? Does the world of hiphop need more Peruvians in it? Is Indian raga music racist for not having a bunch of West Virginia hillbillies taking part? Why, among all the world’s musics, is it only Western classical music that needs to confront its racism, feel guilty for being exclusive, make big outreach efforts, etc?

I think this point can be made well even without the “Western classical music is the world’s best!” rationalization. Western classical music is the classical music of Euro and Euro-descended people. Why shouldn’t we feel attached to it and proud of it, and want to educate ourselves (and our neighbors and friends) in it, the same way other peoples and cultures feel attached to and enthusiastic about their own music? After all, Western classical music isn’t preventing other peoples (or just people generally who don’t care for it) from producing, enjoying and distributing their own music. Last I checked the black music, Hispanic music and Indian music worlds are huge and thriving. The world of music is already a big, hyper-diverse one. Since we’ve already got (and can enjoy) immense diversity, what’s really the complaint? And why does only this one particular music-world deserve to be subjected to having a crisis about race?

I say all this as someone who’s gotten a lot out of exploring non-Western — we used to call it “world” — music, btw.

If we’re playing the game of designing a sensible curriculum, I’d suggest a semester’s intro to the musics of the world (classical, popular and folk), followed by a semester’s intro to the musics of the U.S. (classical, popular and folk). Then I’d let people who want to explore further delve deeper into whatever appeals to them: Western classical, jazz, ragas, rhythms of Africa, Latino music, etc. But I’m someone who tends to get a lot out of an anthropological approach to subjects. YMMV, and even if they took my sage advice academics would ruin things somehow anyway.

A political conundrum in the U.S. has to do with public funding. Although our basic cultural/political framework is white/Euro, it’s just a fact that Native Americans, blacks and Hispanics have been a standard part of our nation from the start, and that we’ve invited an awful lot of Asians to the party too. If someone out there in our motley country wants to argue that public funding shouldn’t go only to supporting Western Classical music and that some of our public funds should go to recognizing and promoting our other kinds of music too, I think they’ve got a legit point. On the other hand, maybe that’s an argument for not supporting music with public funds at all. On the third hand, if we do that, most opera houses and symphonies wouldn’t survive …

The late black intellectual and novelist Albert Murray is worth looking into. He (and his buddy Ralph Ellison) made the argument that jazz is the classical music of black Americans, he was the mind behind the Wynton Marsalis-driven neoclassical revival of jazz back in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and his ideas informed the creation of Jazz at Lincoln Center. Don’t tear down the glories of Western Civ. Benefit from them and add to them.

“Stomping the Blues” is the book of Murray’s to start with. (I knew Mr. Murray — and you called him Mr. Murray, not Albert — a little and have stolen a lot of ideas and attitudes from him.) Mr. Murray was by no means an HBD kinda guy and politically he was probably a center-lib, but he was very earthy and realistic about what black people and white people are like, and he took a refreshingly upbeat view of these differences.

I just read the NYer article. And Ross compares Ewell’s assessment of Beethoven to Debussy’s, who had real creds, including for also idolizing and then turning on Wagner. Although who really cares what whiny Ned Rorem says? He spent half his life trying to crucify Pierre Boulez, who was the infinitely more important composer. You’ve heard Rorem, you’ve heard them all. I used to play his Second Piano Sonata, because it was amusing that the 3rd movement sounds straight out of a Lana Turner soaper form the 40s, but one was enough. But Ewell being compared even to Rorem for saying such insipid and ill-informed nonsense is what the culture IS now. Rorem’s remark about the 9th Symphony I hadn’t heard, but we hadn’t heard, but we heard all about his sodomy as far bad as The Paris Diary, and it was not that much of a turn-on. Still, better than Ewell. But Debussy is MAJOR, not some little nobody who managed a job at Hunter College.

Alex Ross is a spineless, white-ally writer, just as is Anthony Tomassini, but Ross is much worse. The article could not have been sillier.

Great works of music are not creations, so much as they are discoveries. Calling classical music white music is like calling the Theory of General Relativity Jewish science.

…he called Beethoven an “above-average composer” who has been “propped up by the white-male frame, both consciously and subconsciously, with descriptors such as genius, master, and masterwork…

OK. Let me see if I have this straight.

–Blacks on average underperform in society on almost every measure, not because of their inherent shortcomings, but because of systemic racism.

–Beethoven, Wagner, Bach, Mozart, Schubert, all white, are all valued above black composers because of systemic racism.

Doesn’t the obvious silliness of the second statement expose the silliness of the first? Put another way, aren’t the SJWs taking this insanity way too far.

I have never cared for opera as such, but I like the music. Carmen is great. So is L’arlesienne. On the strength of those two works alone, Bizet belongs in the pantheon.

Bizet, Saint-Saens, Debussy, Ravel – I’d put french music up against that of any other european nation.

“This was in Texas in the 1870s-1880s by the way.”

Is that supposed to be ironic, a black kid getting musical instruction from a German in Texas in the 1880s? Neither part is unusual, really. Texas had/has a surprisingly large German population; they even have their own German dialect.

Educationally, Phil Schaap on his Charlie Parker broadcasts on WKCR-FM always points out that while music education programs are constantly being cut back today, they were quite robust in the real “good old days,” and even segregated schools had programs that could only be dreamed of today.

Carmen is a great opera along the lines of other very popular ones like La Boheme, Tosca, Don Carlo, Aida. Not that I don’t love them all (esp. Tosca–almost more than any other), but I think Mozart’s Don Giovanni, Marriage of Figaro, Wagner’s Die Meistersinger and The Ring Cycle and Parsifal may be the very top objectively. Lots of people don’t know Pelleas et Melisande, Debussy’s one, strange beautiful opera. It takes some patience.

But as for tunes, Carmen can’t be beat, and Leontyne Price did them better than anybody.

So well said. Thank you.

It’s not unreasonable to guess that if he’d lived into his 40s and 50s that Bizet would have composed the greatest operas of all time. “Carmen,” which Bizet composed in his mid-30s just before dropping dead, is pretty close to the greatest opera ever (the 1983 movie is the single best intro to opera), and he was just reaching his prime.

“Carmen” isn’t “close” to the greatest opera ever – it is the greatest opera ever. And it’s hard to imagine that Bizet could ever have surpassed it, no matter how long he might have lived. It’s the work he was born to create – and, having created it, he died.

Not only is it great in itself, it was the cause that greatness is in other men. It was the stimulus for Nietzsche’s most brilliant & polished work: Nietzsche Contra Wagner.

Schubert wrote some operas, but none of them are well-known. Schumann wrote one Genoveva, which I’ve never heard either.

“I don’t even know what the fuck Schenkerian means.”

No a good way to start a disquisition on tonality.

You make a good point about equal temperament being a recent innovation and by no means equivalent to “Western music” as such. But that somewhat relativizes your disdain for non-Western traditions.

The “thin gruel” of non-Western traditions preserves musical traditions more like our own, pre-equal temperament tradition, which can be accessed for renewal (archeofuturism); hence the interest of Bartok in Hungarian folk music, Debussy in Japanese (or was it Javanese?)

In the same way, you make a good point about African-American music being a reaction to Western genres. But the appeal of that music to Whites (so that it is now the dominant “popular” music) lies in its very reaction: the attempt to assimilate equal tempered music to their own, more natural systems: the famous “blue” notes of jazz are attempts to locate microtones, for example, and are perceived as “more emotional” than equal tempered music.

The real strength of Western culture is less in its “essential” nature but rather in its ability to use and re-use other traditions, likely due to our unique ability to be conscious of ourselves (see Richardo Duquesne)

He had a very creative relationship with his librettist, Anon.

Decades after I first heard it, Schubert’s “Ellens dritter Gesang”, better known as “Ave Maria”, still astonishes me with its beauty.

That’s not the original text, though. Here’s Barbara Bonney singing the complete Lied with the original German text:

The Chinese are the Jews of Asia.

Do you mean that they are good at moving to a new place and making money, but occasionally have to flee a murderous mob with a small bag of diamonds wedged between their lower cheeks?

The root of the problem is the universalizing drive that white men themselves have. We have been the ones who for thousands of years have tried to force our culture on the world.

TAKE up the White Man’s burden –
Send forth the best ye breed –
Go bind your sons to exile
To serve your captives’ need;
To wait in heavy harness
On fluttered folk and wild –
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.

Take up the White Man’s burden –
In patience to abide
To veil the threat of terror
And check the show of pride;
By open speech and simple,
An hundred times made plain,
To seek another’s profit,
And work another’s gain.

We IZ Kangz and sheeeit! The Black Ego. Something like copulati, ergo sum.

But it is useful to think of a multiracial society as several unrelated male egotists and their families trying to live in the same house.

None wants to be second banana. They will all want to make it their home and will rewrite, reshape and renovate as necessary to make it so. Conflict ensues.

We need to build a dome of our own. White Wakanda!

I’ve been professional musician for several decades. My most treasured music is European Art Music from the 16th-19th century – Haydn is my favorite composer of all, and no one is more “classical” than Haydn.

But I have always had a curiosity for different musics of the world. Fortunately, growing up, my public library had a huge number of Naxos World Music LPs. Naxos was renowned for recording every type of music from every people in every location on the globe. I checked out several records each week and took daily exotic musical trips around the planet.

All regions of Europe, Japan, China, Korea, Indonesia, India, the Middle East, and many other places all have rich musical traditions in both art and folk music. The various ethnic/geographic populations of Europe produced a staggering and varied amount of folk music traditions.

Sub-Saharan Africa? Not so much. Just grab any Naxos recording (YouTube?) of Sub-Saharan traditional music from any tribe or region and be astonished by how primitive it sounds, compared to any of the countries and regions listed above.

As in technology, philosophy, literature, and mathematics, and much more, the African contribution to world musical culture, rounded to the nearest whole number, is Zero.

(Before someone brings up Scott Joplin, Ellington, or jazz, or that mediocre Black Mozart character – I would ascribe their achievements to their proximity to Whites and their music – no Black Debussy sprung up in the Congo in the late 19th Century – and no Joplin or Ellington either.)

Bizet, Saint-Saens, Debussy, Ravel – I’d put french music up against that of any other european nation.

Agreed. I had long been underestimating the French, as against the Germans, until I spent some time deeply exploring French music. I’m converted.

So many words, just to say “We won the war so our interpretations rule, yours are dismissed without discussion because evil, OK?”

But with much better buffets!

Well, he’s right, at least descriptively. Not many Lamarckians in biology departments. I believe it was Galbraith who said Keynesianism took over solely by old professors dying off.

Unfortunately for the Culture Commissars, you can’t cancel music. If Western institutions substitute Mozart for Maya Angelou: The Musical, then Asians will preserve the tradition of European classical music.

The thing about opera is that, at least as an interim step, you can keep the music but “implicitly critique” it via the production; hence all the Wagner operas set in Nazi Germany, Wall St., Southern plantations, Trump’s White House, etc. Since these productions are lousy anyway, it’s also a way to sh*t on great art whose very existence is a rebuke to your petty self.

“I’m very proud of my kinfolk’s, the Spanish and Cuban composers, even if they haven’t made the list.”

As well you should be. Spanish and Cuban composers have much magnificent music to offer and should be much better known than they are. (I have no Spanish or Cuban blood.)

Do you know in which of his books Duquense touched upon this? I’d love to read more about that subject

Alex Ross:

At bottom, the entire music-education system rests upon the Schenkerian assumption that the Western tonality, with its major-minor harmony and its equal-tempered scale, is the master language.

Ross doesn’t get it that classical music is like anything else known as classical. That is, it’s based on certain traditions and styles — assumptions, if you want — that have prevailed over many generations. No classical art pretends anything is everything and everything is anything, despite the efforts of many poseurs. One characteristic of decadent minds is the urge to wipe out all limits or rules: playing tennis without a net and with a mortar to launch a volley.

Interestingly, modern audiences (who are on the whole exceedingly open-minded and have embraced groundbreaking composers like Mahler, Shostakovich, and Bartók) don’t fall for it despite having had their ears boxed constantly demanding that they embrace the avant-garde. Producers need to place new music as the first item in a concert; if it were last, most of the seats would be empty for it. I say this as a listener who enjoys some contemporary “out there” music, like Rautavaara. But most of the rest could be used as an anti-personnel weapon.

Alex Ross can’t seem to stand the idea that different people have different tastes. Many would rather hear rap or acid jazz or salsa than classical, and while society should try at least to see to it that youngsters are exposed to classical, that’s as far as it should go. Whatever anyone feels about a genre, it has its own place. There’s nothing to be gained and much to be lost by trying to inject every other genre into classical, which is what insisting on a quota of minorities amounts to.

Oh, and Alex? Your phrases “the Schenkerian assumption” and “played in its interstices” make you a front runner for inhabiting this week’s Intellectual Pseuds Corner.

Blacks are Noble Warriors serving the highest cause.

I predict an irony-free reading of your entire comment, culminating in the above.

Given we know they like to troll TUR in general and Steve in particular, please, don’t encourage them.

Ummm…first I thought you wrote nonsense, but it seems you’re onto something….

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/wasbachjewish

Was Bach Jewish?

Bach was quintessentially Jewish. And in seeking to break free from these laws, Beethoven was the true Christian. Might the gulf between Bach and Beethoven mirror that between Judaism and Christianity?

I’m surprised that Franz Lehár was so high on the list. I had never heard of him.

Beethoven was Black. Keep repeating that, and his music might not get canceled.

“Black Scholar.”

With rare exception there’s still a lot of oxymoron in that one.

Oh, and cultural appropriation too.

The “thin gruel” of non-Western traditions preserves musical traditions more like our own, pre-equal temperament tradition, which can be accessed for renewal (archeofuturism); hence the interest of Bartok in Hungarian folk music, Debussy in Japanese (or was it Javanese?)

I’m not sure Debussy or Bartok played any role in renewing Western pre-equal temperament traditions. There is a widespread early music community in the US and Europe who have been resurrecting and reintroducing old western tonal traditions since the late fifties. Amateur (white male) harpsichord builders and modern spectrum analysis techniques for tuning instruments probably sparked this revival.

The Great Tradition had died. What we got thereafter was post-classicism and ultimately the likes of Messiaen and Stockhausen. This is classical music in name only.
Yes, you’re right: White people ain’t what they used to be.

That’s total garbage. Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis were great composers, as was Messiaen and numerous others. You don’t know what you’re talking about. Period.

I consider Nozze De Figaro, Die Zauberflote, Carmen, Boris Godunov, and La Traviata to be equals.

Don Giovanni surpasses them all.

And don’t forget Granados and De Falla. There must be many more.

Unfortunately, we’ll never know.

If Beethoven had died shortly after composing the 5th, people might be saying the same thing about him.

I’m in awe of Bizet.

No, it’s like La Boheme, great but also the two most popular. There are operas by Verdi and Wagner that are objectively greater, and certainly Mozart’s Don Giovanni. I love Carmen, except she turns out to not be a terribly sympathetic heroine. Prefer Tosca.

Dowland is pretty underrated, too.

“Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be happy to read them.”

― Saul Bellow

The Chinese are the Jews of Asia.

I’m not sure I get your point.

I would say more like the Germans of Asia (Germanic peoples). Far more numerous than other Asia ethnics. Maybe more Han Chinese than most of the others combined.

“Jews” however defined are a small minority other than in Israel, their “homeland” from which they all left millennia ago. Not at all like Germans, who not only never left, but took big chunks of other parts of Europe and tried to make them “German.”

Generally very smart, though other than German Jews, not very funny.

There are a large number of “German Americans” of ancestry, many in high leadership positions or very successful in other ways. Somewhat like Jews, only more of them here.

Few complain about the “German American” influence, controlling the banks, media, etc. though I would suspect a thorough accounting would find more influence than numbers alone would suggest.

Of course “German” isn’t a religion or quasi religious clan cult. Only for a brief time a while back, only in Germany. Didn’t last. Many Chinese do believe in their racial superiority.

Like Germans, Han Chinese aren’t known for their comedy. But they study, work hard and generally try to take over their neighbors (at times past, not now).

And Rossini is an all-time top half-dozen opera composer… *

Between now and Beethoven’s 250th birthday in December…

Steve will celebrate his 62nd birthday in December. In contrast, we only celebrated Rossini’s 55th back in February. Along with Jimmy Dorsey’s 29th (his “golden”) and Dinah Shore’s 26th.

Of course, Texas has a large German population-duh. What’s your point? The Pacific Ocean is big and wet, did you know that? I’m part German and I’ve lived in Texas. Plenty of Czechs, Poles, etc too. Why do you think the tacobreaths make music that sounds like polkas, or brew beer, or make sausages?

I was being a bit sarcastic at the fact that a kneegarow boy in Texas in the 1870s/1880s was able to afford private piano lessons (Weiss wasn’t his schoolteacher). I thought blacks were being crucified back then 24/7-y’know, like Auschwitz with suntans. Of course Duke Ellington and Miles Davis came from rich families and had years of private lessons as well.

Like Germans, Han Chinese aren’t known for their comedy. But they study, work hard and generally try to take over their neighbors (at times past, not now).

Beethoven only wrote one opera. Don’t know about oratorios etc.

And even the Soviets weren’t stupid enough to cancel classical ballet, and not just Petipa/Tchaikowsky either.

Quite the contrary. They promoted ballet, classical music, opera, etc.

Most of the early Soviet leadership and nomenklatura elites were extremely well read in the classical literature of Russia and Europe. They were, aside from religion, great fans of the products and art of Western civilization. You had to be that to be considered an intellectual. Artists and the like were usually exempt from the usual demands for ruthless obedience to Party dogma. (You just had to keep quiet about it.)

Not at all fans of modern art or music.

Even now Russia is more hospitable to legacy and classic Western art, music, literature.

Perhaps another reason why the crazed Woke/prog left hates Russia so much. It’s not just Putin.

To pick a nit, that’s really the Dies Irae in The Shining, although distorted electronically the way Berlioz did (somewhat) in SF.

Kubrick apparently thought “classical” meant that the composer was dead or at least the music was public domain, and was surprised to be sued by G. Ligeti for “distorting” recordings of his work for 2001. They reached an amiable settlement. Kubrick used Ligeti again in The Shining (when Scatman talks to Danny) and in Eyes Wide Shut.

“Messiaen … is classical music in name only.”

Dude, that is old school harsh.

The Proust of the Papuans?

Madeleines are tastier than long pig. Or so I’m told.

“Is the world of Mexican music in urgent need of being diversified…..”

Uh, it WAS diversified. By Central European settlers in Texas and Mexico, which is why norteno and Tejano music is essentially polka music with the same instruments.

I’ve read Stomping the Blues and other things by Murray. He was smarter and somewhat less full of schitt than most blacks, which is a low bar. I love the homoerotic cuckifying: “You called him Mister Tibbs-er, I mean Murray” Jesus, dude, get a grip. LOL.

Since iSteve’s topic is music, just two brief thoughts.

1) While black contributions to American music are undeniable (Blacks!) and positive, the latest popular trend is quite sad in my view.

Rap isn’t actual music. Yes, heavy and varied beats, but mainly spoken word “poetry.” I’m no expert because I don’t listen or follow it, but it seems a retrograde development. Like sea chanteys or prison gang work songs (or older, railroad gang chants/songs.)

Some “hip hop” or rap does have sung music, but a lot doesn’t. Subject matter is banal at best, IQ lowering at worst. So is this what we are now going to have to listen to? “Rise Up” the BLM anthem is music, not rap. So worse may be coming.

2) Speaking of worse, “Arabic music” with the very strange tonality, etc. is painful to Western ears. I used to have to listen to it (mostly female singers) in various taxis while working in the Middle East. Though eventually, while “sing-song” and lyrically impossible for me to understand (my problem, not the music’s) sometimes it did grow on me. To the point I didn’t hate it.

Still, be thankful you don’t hear that on your kid’s music stream. That might drive you to start going to church again.

A band was going to play a jazz piece. One of the musicians didn’t realize that the score was printed on both sides of the paper. He played every other sheet; nobody noticed.

I thought it a bit weird that Gershwin died of a brain tumor at 36. Was his brain somehow constructed so thst it could create great music but something about that construction made him vulnerable to a tumor?

Genoveva is actually quite good. If you are interested, there is a creditable recording of it done some years ago, with Eda Moser very good in the title role, also with Fischer-Dieskau and Peter Schreier.

Wagner will always be played in Israel.

The Chinese are the Jews of Asia.

Especially the Hakka.

Who is/was the iSteve commenter who used to be an opera singer? Is he still around?

I would say classical music & opera are safe. Apart from psychically conflicted biracial intellectuals from upper-mid-class affluent Black backgrounds, no Blacks care about it. Of the NAMs, Hispanics don’t hate it (or actually enjoy passionate/overweening dramatic singing about how you’re going to go stab your wife’s secret trysting lover in the courtyard at midnight).

People into classical are today like rock-collecting buffs or baseball stat addicts– they aren’t happy from the dilettantes streaming into their niche hobby to rhapsodize about social justice. It’s the GamerGate thing writ small.

One thing many Blacks tend to enjoy, along with tons of whites of course, is gladiatorial sportsball mass-entertainment, and *THAT* pastime is in trouble: https://ibb.co/MgyLkbk

Mr. Ross seems quite worried whether next month he’ll still have enough food to put on the table. Alternatively, he might just be a mediocrity.

Okay, I assume Wagner really had unfriendly thoughts about Jews, as everybody says. So, what about it? Perhaps some Poles of his times had unfriendly thoughts about the Russians, or the Lithuanians, or, heaven forbid, the Germans? Maybe some Italians didn’t like the French, or some Iranians didn’t appreciate Turkmens too much? It’s not entirely unheard of that Fulani didn’t like Igbo either.

Is everybody under an obligation to like each other, all the time? Rumor even has it that’s still not the case today, even though I have a hard time believing it.

As long as Wagner didn’t call for repression of the Jews, let alone outright for violence against them, why should it have been verboten for him to lack fondness for them as a group?

As a side note, the person who did the scores for Kubrick’s The Shining and A Clockwork Orange was an M-to-F trans:

Wendy Carlos (born Walter Carlos; November 14, 1939) is an American musician and composer best known for her electronic music and film scores. Born and raised in Rhode Island, Carlos studied physics and music at Brown University before moving to New York City in 1962 to study music composition at Columbia University.

Carlos came to prominence with Switched-On Bach (1968), an album of music by Johann Sebastian Bach performed on a Moog synthesizer, which helped popularize its use in the 1970s and won her three Grammy Awards. Its commercial success led to several more albums, including further synthesized classical music adaptations, and experimental and ambient music. She composed the score to two Stanley Kubrick films – A Clockwork Orange (1971) and The Shining (1980) – and also Tron (1982) for Walt Disney Productions.

In 1979, Carlos was one of the first public figures to disclose having undergone sex reassignment surgery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Carlos

Here’s Carlos’ adaptation of Purcell’s Funeral Sentences and Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary:

Here, via OperaBase, are most performed composers from 2004-2019 of classical vocal works (operas, operettas, oratorios, etc.):

I’m not woke. I’m Baroque.

This is so pathetic. While the black composer, Terence Blanchard, wrote an opera about himself, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the supposedly Eurocentrics like Puccini we’re composing operas set in Japan, China, America, and Gershwin and Stephen Foster imagined into their music the lives of black people. Irving Berlin wrote a Christmas song and an Easter song!

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is played in the Menuhin violin competition by a Chinese boy who grew up in Germany!

The great music belongs to everyone who has ears and sensibility to hear and understand it. It has no color.

Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez” and “Fantasia para un Gentilhomme” are two of my favorites. My father loved those two and Manuel de Falla’s “Three Cornered Hat”.

Exactly.Which is why we hear the same old stuff over and over again in live concerts on the radio. Beethoven’s sixth, Bruch’s violin concerto, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, etcetera. I much prefer something a bit more modern and exciting like Janacek or Scriabin or Lutoslawski or Messiaen. If they play Bartok its always the bloody Concerto for Orchestra. Someone told me once its all about bums on seats, and if prospective concert goers see “Beethoven” or “Mozart” on the bill they know what to expect.

Its funny how I know that Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, are the greatest composers but I never listen to them.

At least we British can take pride in having the world’s worst composers. Vaughan Williams, Bax, Havergal Brian.

Because he’s “black”, Beethoven is all they’ll play on their flights once Boeing gets the pyramids flying again, with all the new black engineers they’re going to hire.

Turangalîla: 1) a symphony by Messiaen; 2) the lead female character in “Futurama,” a Matt Groening cartoon.

A good thing a music director might do is plan the concert to have some standards that people know and love, and maybe a piece or two that is less frequently played. That way everybody gets some of what they want, and the audience might even be pleasantly surprised. Unless the experimental piece is by John Cage – then they’re still out of luck.

Although another way to look at it is to say that radio is the place for playing everything and for people to get some exposure to music they’re unfamiliar with. But when they’re paying top dollar for it in a concert hall, they should get to hear what they like but in live performance.

At least we British can take pride in having the world’s worst composers. Vaughan Williams, Bax, Havergal Brian.

Elgar, Holst, and Sullivan more than make up for them.

A modern classic which has about 150 million views on youtube entitled “White Ass P*ssy” or WAP. The median age of the USA is ~38 years old. Let that sink in, if you have the guts to watch WAP.

“With Mozart you get the first really great operas…”

No, there are many really great operas prior to Mozart. And funny you mention Monteverdi, for certainly his towering achievement is The Coronation of Poppea, arguably the first “really great” opera. Many of the Handel operas are top tier masterworks. I would most especially recommend Alcina, Rodelinda, Giulio Cesare, and Serse. Happily, Rameau is enjoying a renaissance these days. He a great composer, nearly equal to Bach and Handel, and certainly superior to Vivaldi. Check out in particular his operas Hippolyte et Aricie and Castor et Pollux. Then to Gluck… Orpheo ed Euridice, Alceste, Iphigenia en Tauride — great operas. Check out in particular the Alceste recording with Jessye Norman. She was never better, except maybe with the R. Strauss Late Songs. No one who loves Mozart could fail to enjoy this.

As a side note, the person who did the scores for Kubrick’s The Shining and A Clockwork Orange was an M-to-F trans:

Interesting.

And yeah I can see it.

*****

Of course, if Mozart had lived another 35 years …

He might have matched Haydn, but probably not.

Charles St. Charles, #118, gets it. Now you can too.

Haydn Symphony #39
Orquesta Sinfónica de Radio Televisión Española
Carlos Kalmar, director

To pick a nit, that’s really the Dies Irae in The Shining, although distorted electronically the way Berlioz did (somewhat) in SF.

Yeah, you’re right, but there are so many versions of Dies Irae that I don’t really think of that particular version as Dies Irae. I think of it as Berlioz

For what it’s worth, The Shining soundtrack identifies it as “Based on “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath” from Symphonie fantastique by Hector Berlioz and traditional requiem “Dies Irae””

Kubrick apparently thought “classical” meant that the composer was dead or at least the music was public domain, and was surprised to be sued by G. Ligeti for “distorting” recordings of his work for 2001. They reached an amiable settlement. Kubrick used Ligeti again in The Shining (when Scatman talks to Danny) and in Eyes Wide Shut.

I was surprised to see Kubrick’s “mistake” cost him so little. Just a few thousand dollars.

I read someday, something like this:
If you want meat and potatoes listen German classical music. If you want a delicious dessert, listen French classical music. I think the analogy fits very well. Furthermore, meat and potatoes are good, but you can’t eat in any part of the day. That’s different from a dessert, that you can eat anytime.

Mozart was Austrian.

Wow, Schroeder really was an alpha, to use manosphere parlance. He shows nothing but contempt for Lucy and that brown-haired girl, caring for nothing but his art. And the girls luuuuv it. Contrast with Charlie Brown, who only earns the ladies’ contempt.

Because he’s “black”, Beethoven is all they’ll play on their flights once Boeing gets the pyramids flying again, with all the new black engineers they’re going to hire.

And if that doesn’t work, Henry Louis Gates Jr. will discover that the Wright brothers have Black roots. That’s why they’re called brothers.

Lots of people are piping in with their preferences, so, okay, I can’t resist…
Favorites of:
Mozart: Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte
Verdi: Don Carlo, Ballo en Mascara, Macbeth
Wagner: Tristan und Isolde, Die Walkure, Lohengrin
Tchaikovsky: Queen of Spades
Puccini: Madame Butterfly
R. Strauss: Ariadne auf Naxos, Die Frau Ohne Schatten, Arabella, Die Liebe der Danae

What’s that last one? A truly great neglected masterpiece for which a worthy recording is available on youtube: Choose the 1952 Vienna State Opera recording with Annelies Kupper and Paul Schoffler. (Alas, no transcript. A fair understanding of German needed.)

Opera, such an expensive entertainment, is riddled with habit. The same old operas — La Boheme is the epitome — are done to death. Then opera companies add a bit of fashionable spice, some newly commissioned work that is, of course, very costly junk. And many great works are left neglected and unheard.

One of the greatest operas ever written is Cherubini’s Medea. (Don’t believe me? Then please refer to Brahms.) It’s not performed enough, and I imagine its association with Callas has not helped. I have sought out numerous performances on audio and video; all of them are flawed in some way, but in composite — What a fantastic, brilliant work of art. Cherubini wrote many other operas. When will these get rediscovered? — just as the bel canto repertoire (Donizetti, Bellini, etc.) was rediscovered in the 50’s, and then Handel operas were resurrected, and then Rameau…

Beethoven greatly admired Cherubini. Riccardo Muti has done much to help revive the several great masses and requiems by Cherubini. Cherubini’s string quartets are wonderful, a worthy succession to Haydn and Beethoven. (On youtube, creditable performances by Quartetto Savinio; Quartetto David was best, but now not available.)

Elly Ameling’s not bad:

That being said, there are two major works of Berlioz that straddle or transcend the genre of opera with which many may be unfamiliar, but which I heartily commend; these works are Romeo and Juliet, and The Damnation of Faust. The first of these drew its inspiration from Shakespeare, and the second from Goethe. They are a mix of pure orchestral music, vocal/orchestral, and choral/orchestral. Le Damnation du Faust is particularly brilliant in its overall design, as well as in its constituent parts. For full comprehension, it were best to have the libretto to hand.

Classical music is enjoyed by not only “the Elite” but by an audience set apart through taste, refinement, intelligence, and all that jazz (so to speak). This despite some of it being immensely popular. Mostly grand Romantic music in that latter category.

Higher culture keeps it in performance. Higher culture is of course corrupt these days. The classical music audience is just the sort of crowd to bend over for Dieversity. And it already has, to an extent. They play puffed-up black composers in concert. It’s just that these pieces are sandwiched between Beethovens and Tchaikovskys. I.e. things people want to hear.

Ifsoever the stuff people actually want to hear gets pushed aside, the museums known as concert halls will die. Even if they’re funded to the crack of Doom, they’ll proceed as zombies.

Classical music fandom would go underground. It didn’t survive 500+ years by accepting mediocrity, and it won’t now.

One should not forget the great composers of the more distant past such as John Dunstable, John Browne, Thomas Tallis, Orlando Gibbons, William Byrd, John Dowland, and Henry Purcell, please, as well as the somewhat lesser lights from these times.

I like some black composers. Joplin, Ellington, Jimmy Europe. But c’mon.

Know who was awesome? Johann Christian Bach.

Daddy Bach and C.P.E. Bach get all the press, but I am a J.C. partisan.

W.F. was pretty good, and so was W.F.E. from the next generation.

If you’re counting, that’s 5 white guys named Bach I’d put ahead of any black composer I’ve heard.

Out of curiosity I started watching operas from the early days. Just to see how the genre came about. And lemme tell you, I am not a big Renaissance or Baroque guy. My heart belongs to the mid-18th century on.

But holy Euterpe, Monteverdi blew my hair back. Loved Purcell. Vivaldi too.

Later, Gluck, Weber, yes, Cherubini…so much I never would’ve bumped into if I hadn’t gone out of my way.

Now I’m kinda lopsided, lacking detailed knowledge of more popular opera composers like Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, etc.

Yes, I have heard some of his works on the Music Choice tier of music channels that is included in our Comcast cable level of subscription, specifically on the “Light Classical” channel, and they are quite striking, indeed.

He would have been more correct if he’d said the Chinese are the Jews of Singapore.

I’ve sampled widely in the music of the various cultures, and the only one that can compare in complexity and subtlety is High Indian exemplified by Ravi Shankar (Nora Jones’ baby daddy.)

Of course the people who brought ragas to India are Aryan so they get defenestrated too.

As to “hillbillies” mixing in with sitar players, how about Ry Cooder, an oft-times banjo player from LA, who had worked with Bill Monroe, playing with V. M. Blatt on “A Meeting by the River” on the Water Lily label?

One of my favorite classical music experiences was hearing Borodin’s String Quartet #2 at the Seoul Art Center and discussing Beethoven’s string quartets with a Korean gentleman afterwards – he was a fan of the late period which I can’t fathom. Our conversation impressed my date though!

As to programming of the major symphonies, I’ve long noticed that the San Francisco Symphony always had a crowd-pleaser as headliner but stick some unlistenable “eat your vegetables” stuff in the middle of the program.

“Elly Ameling’s not bad”

Lol! I should have said Hans Hotter is my favorite male interpreter of Schubert’s Lieder. Elly Ameling is my favorite female interpreter. Her voice floats!

LOL. Good for you, mining those hidden gems. The great jewels on display you’ll get to soon enough.

It’s a steep pyramid with tough competition: e.g. Bach is barely 1% as popular as Verdi.

That’s probably only because Bach composed oratorios, not operas, and we live in a much more secular than religious era. Also oratorios are usually performed in churches, operas in theatres. But musically, I think Bach is the greatest of them all. Although I like Verdi, Rossini, Donizetti, etc etc.

There’s a lot more to Beethoven than the symphonies. Have you listened to the quartets, op 59? Really beautiful.

As they might say in their broken English–Egg-zachery.

Handel in Barry Lyndon

Maybe you are onto something. Think the Mahler phenomenon.

https://floridaorchestra.org/why-would-anyone-mess-beethoven/
So, why would anyone in their right mind mess with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3, the famed Eroica, one of the supreme creations of Western art, a work that simultaneously summarized a passing era and launched a new one? Why would someone tamper with such an iconic score?

Well, somebody did, and The Florida Orchestra’s latest Masterworks program offers a seldom-performed version of the symphony by Gustav Mahler, the brilliant composer and conductor who died in 1911 in Vienna. Mahler believed Beethoven could use a little help from a friend, so he “retouched’’ not only the Third, but the Fifth, Seven and Ninth symphonies and the Coriolan Overture. But why fix what isn’t broken?

Let’s look into Mahler’s logic. From the early 19th century, when Beethoven composed these works, to the dawn of the 20th century, lots had changed. Instruments improved, orchestras grew in size, and concert halls expanded to accommodate more people. Beethoven’s music, Mahler believed, needed to catch up with the times.

In his own defense, Mahler explained that “this is in no way a case of re-instrumentation or alteration, let alone improvement of the work of Beethoven.’’ He said his views were less about arbitrary change than playing the music as Beethoven would have wanted had he lived 75 or 100 years later – with the formidable Vienna Philharmonic (or TFO) at his disposal.

Why Has Mahler Become a Cultural Icon?
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2010/02/14/kevin-macdonald-why-is-mahler-so-popular/

“The Mahler symphonies … get me out of here. I keep surreptitiously cheering Kingsley Amis’s verdict “Mahler lacks talent even more spectacularly than he lacks genius.” …”

You mean “whites”, or White Americans? The distinction is important, for American whites are some of the dumbest and most unaware whites, among all the whites else where in the world. It was not always so. Whites have been victims of a slow and steady agenda to dumb them down. This was accomplished by Hollywood movies, U.S. major newspapers, television and the public school system, entities which left whites with more doubts then certainty about their whole identity and place in the very country that their various tribes created. Today, other whites in the Western Nations they created share their state of ignorance with American whites.. It’s tragic, that cultures with so many things in common, should wind up so uncertain and riddled with so many doubts about their place in the world and all of the things they have achieved. Has any race fallen so low from the heights they once occupied??

It may be harsh, but it’s true.

You’re in a very,very small minority. This is not the view of concertgoers, like myself, music graduates or the musicians themselves. Any serious historian would dismiss your ignorant assertions.
It is revealing that you consider Boulez to be a great composer. He was a minor composer who used his control of the French State Subsidy machine to promote himself and his works. Since his death, his works have been almost entirely forgotten.

Ja, some early Rush always struck me as akin to tone poems in the Lisztian/Straussian mold, although not as worked out as those models. The boys aspired, and in their own terms, succeeded, as much as the music industry would permit them to do so. They somewhat obliquely comment on that aspect in their song, The Spirit of Radio.

Neil Peart, RIP.

The support for modern jazz by universities and foundations is quite extensive, Many consider this to be African American classical music, but the phenomenon doesn’t fit into the Times’ argument so they ignore it.

Nah. Bizet had one idea, but the totality of what he left behind lacked much of interest. Some of his symphonies are too boring to listen to. Can’t say that of Bach or Mozart. Bizet was not a first class composer, and I doubt he would have had more such hits as Carmen.

The last major classical composer – indeed the last classical composer ever – was Joaquin Rodrigo ( 1901-99 )…
However, nearly all classical composition had stopped by the 1930s…
White people ain’t what they used to be.

I think it’s likely that society was uniquely arranged to allow people with great potential as composers to thrive up until modern education began to supplant the ad hoc systems of the past. The creation of an education system that was meant to raise up average people and at the same time create rounded educations probably destroyed the freedom for the musically gifted to pursue music that was needed for great composers.

@118 Charles St. Charles: This. I have never been a big Beethovan/romantic music afficionado, but I adore early European music – which is far more than Gregorian chants, lovely as they are. Listen to the Kynge’s Music, court music played on original instruments. I think the hackbutt is terrific. Henry the VIII wrote some nice songs. Early chamber music. Mozart sonnets for lute and harpsichord.

Blacks are wrongly credited with jazz, when its inspiration was the folk songs of the Scotts-Irish they lived amongst and all of the instruments used were created by Whites. Even drums – the Africans never moved past the basics. Their music is as primitive as everything else about them.

NO. Just no. And no to Barbra singing “Auf dem Wasser zu singen” or any other Schubert. Ditto Jessye Norman.

It’s not enough to have an (arguably) “good voice”. Schubert’s Lieder–all Lieder, really–have very specific vocal requirements. Voices suited to other genres, from pop to folk to opera, are not usually suited to Lieder. I wish they’d just stop.

After 200 comments, I’m late to this party, but the best athlete in my high school was Rick Sutcliffe. Starting Quarterback on the football team, Center on the Basketball team, and Number 1 pitcher on the baseball team.

I’m not sure I agree that there are no great composers around now, but I am familiar with the argument.

One of the most heated discussions I ever had with my late ex-Mother-In-Law (much nicer than her spawn) was whether Philip Glass was a great composer. I’m definitely in the yes category. She wasn’t. It went downhill from there.

Never heard of Lehar? Well, you’ve a treat in store: one of the allerbeste tunesmiths.

Start with The Land of Smiles.

I don’t think I knew that. Thanks: I’ll look into them.

Yeah, that’s great. Thanks.

I really love Cheryl Studer’s interpretation of Im Frühling. Sorry, I don’t seem to be able to get this to start at the beginning, but it’s the first one on this record:

Very nice! Like Hans Hotter, she avoids the mistake so many singers with powerful voices make–failing to pull back enough. I always feel less is more in Lieder singing.

By the way, I found this as a single video on the “liederoperagreats” channel. This person posts a marvelous selection of works.

” Mozart was Austrian”

Nope he was indeed German, and quoted as refering to himself a an “Armer Teutscher”.

At the time of his birth Austria did not exist per se’, and Germany was nothing but a conglomerate of minor kingdoms of which Salzburg being one of them.

AJM

we hear the same old stuff over and over again in live concerts

Our local concert hall has a wonderful pipe organ … which probably cost a zillion dollars and ends up being only used for Bach performances. One night, during a concert organized by the local music conservatory, the organ instructor came out and played Serenade by Derek Bourgeois. Here’s a pipe organ performance of it by another guy on YouTube:

Wow! That really woke me up. What a crazy song. Parts of it sound like mistakes that the organist then recovers from, but that’s because of the nutty time signature, which I believe alternates between 11/8 and 13/8.

“Decomposing Composers”

Onkl Adi’s favorite. More than Wagner.

“Black people have JAZZ and blues and Ella and Dionne, but they do not have Bach or Ravel”

Sir or Madame, I will not go into a diatribe regarding your tin ears, however be advised of this FACT:

Bird’s (Charlie Parker’s) lines, when scrutanized and disected, aside from the aestethic value inherent, most certainly match and equal the melodic inventions of one JSB, WAM, LVB, Ravel, period.

AJM “Mensa” qualified since 1973, airborne trained US Army vet, and pro Jazz performer of fifty years plus.

Vaughan Williams was a somewhat on-again, off-again composer but his best work (such as Symphonies 3 and 5) is deeply moving.

How can you be British and not appreciate Bax? Are you one of those new “British” from Africa?

Havergal Brian, for all his eccentricity, wrote much that is interesting.

You are right on the money regarding Scotts-Irish music and Jazz, however the claim that their creations are primative is absurd which reveals that you are not familiar with ANY of the black musical innovators : Parker, Coltrane,Wes, Miles, etc, who’s contributions to musical history are far from primative.
AJM

Funnily enough I decided just today to once again listen through the complete set of string quartets that I’ve got on vinyl by the Italian Quartet and have played number one already. I am familiar with them but I don’t think the Grosse Fugue works and they should play the movement that Beethoven replaced it with.

Alex Ross’ piece in The New Yorker is a perfect example of the socialist worldview. All individuals and groups are equal in capacity, so if some do better than others it can only be because of oppression.

Doing something great thereby becomes “proof” that you are an oppressor.

This worldview was simply created to excuse mass theft to bribe the voters. But while it worked on some illiterate peasants coming to the cities to work in the factories, workers increasingly turned against it. It worked on the criminals and those who want a lifetime of welfare parasitism, but their votes aren’t enough.

And so the Left had to import immigrants, and create new groups of voters, like feminists and homosexuals.

The normal worldview is of course the conservative, nationalist, fascist one: That success is a sign of your hard work and good genes. Whether we are talking about individuals or groups.

People love to come up with new “-isms” and “third ways in politics”, but in reality there are only these two ideologies. Normalcy and the attack on normalcy.

Jazz, won’t work for me. Affects me like a neurotoxin, I absolutely hate it. Even the name. Rap is more tolerable.

No offense intended, Authentic Jazzman–truly.

Indian music can be really good. It is the only art music that I can listen to apart from Western Classical music. Chinese music is awful. The Indians have therefore not really taken much interest in Western music, but unsurprisingly the Chinese have.

(It starts a bit slow.)

I hope this isn’t presumptuous butting in, but I want to say…

Forget the Schubert operas and explore other song composers. If opera doesn’t appeal to you, that’s fine. But anyone who loves Schubert lieder really deserves to reward himself with much Schumann lieder as well. And also Brahms. And then to earlier songwriting. Wolfgang Holzmair has put out a really wonderful album of songs by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

Good thing is anyone can, if she wishes, listen to whatever she likes. And explore things. For instance, that’s what is thought to be ancient Greek music- however different it may sound:

Or, jump to the last great figure of classical Antiquity …

On the other hand, when I want something different:

or, preferably:

I didn’t say they didn’t ‘match or equal’, you idiot. I said Bach and Ravel, etc,. are WHITE and Ella and Dionne, etc., are BLACK. Although it’s not pertinent, the two lady singers happen to be my favourite black female singers, so it’s your fucking READING COMPREHENSION that needs work. I’m not going to waste another word on someone so half-literate.

I am NOT. Musicians like ME know Boulez, and how dare you call those ‘ignorant assertions’. I played the Boulez 2nd Piano Sonata at the Juilliard Contemporary Music Festival in the 80s. There is no way he’s a minor composer. You just don’t know shit. I’m sure you’ve never heard any Xenakis. Please don’t–it might damage the music. ‘Pithoprakta’ was choreographed by George Balanchine for Suzanne Farell. Ever hear of those ‘obscure names’?

Dear 3 Cranes,

You rely on Descartes, but jam in Mr.Ewell/Mr. Feagin/Mr. Ross’s idea of a window frame floating in the ether AND then introduce the very concept of the Devil (Which is neither the focus of Descartes “Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animæ immortalitas demonstratur” ). I do not enjoy or logically agree with these conclusions of yours.

In fact, my interpretation of the article written by Steve Sailer is a critique of other articles paired with an excellent historical background of composers & topped off with some statistics. In fact one particular part of the article struck me : “They cannot help themselves”, just as I cannot restraint myself from replying to your comment.

Yes, it’s ‘little old lady’ talk.

Seoul Symphony Orchestra in April, keeping Beethoven alive, even during the China Flu.

No chance of “black scholars” challenging the inherent “White Supremacy” of classical music in Seoul. Other than those temporarily assigned there with US Forces, there are virtually no blacks in Korea.

Drunken, rude, violent off-duty black serviceman remind the Koreans regularly that they are just fine without blacks. From this past 4th of July, during the China Flu:

Way to represent, Fellas.

There is a 2014 production of The Merry Widow with Renee Fleming and Nathan Gunn that is quite good. I am hoping it comes back on the Met’s weekly streams.

Who played clarinet?

I prefer to put it differently: Adolf Hiter was a quintessential Austrian, and for that side of his character, Lehar was the perfect accompaniment for relaxation and Viennese schwärmerei.

But he was also, from the age of twelve, a committed and deeply knowledgeable member of the Wagner cult. He know his Wagner backwards and forwards (consult Winifred Wagner’s reminiscences if you doubt me) and turned to him in moments of deep emotion, as, for example, when returning from the Rhineland after successfully wresting it from the French in 1936. On that occasion only Parsifal would do.

A long time classical music radio programmer, a man I know, says anybody can do it. Just (1) select for the instrument instead of the composer; (2) vary the instruments. The orchestra is an instrument, as is the voice, the ensemble. Tend for as few instruments as possible for more musical experience through the usual speakers, and for wider receptiveness among inexperienced listeners; the virtuosity of the instrumentalist communicates directly. He likes to sequence in order of time, allowing development to explain itself. For languages, if you can’t pronounce it, don’t, or keep a straight face. Do the shift and save the world as best you can; the composers never knew they were writing for people jumping in and out of automobiles.

I assume Wagner really had unfriendly thoughts about Jews…

Like any reasonably intelligent and observant gentile, Wagner had complicated – dare I even say, nuanced – views about The Chosen People. On the one hand, he was friendly with, and promoted the careers of, various Jewish performers whose talent he recognized and admired. On the other hand, he could veer into frank anti-Semitism in ways that shocked and alienated his young friend Friedrich Nietzsche.

His notorious essay “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (“Jewishness in Music”) is actually kind of interesting to read – far from the looney rant that one might expect. Unfortunately, the only easily available English translation, by a certain William Ashton Ellis, is all but unreadable.