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*radio click on*
"... César Franck, and we've just heard his Third Symphony."
!!?!
"Ah, I mean the third movement of his Symphony in D Minor."
Oh well, one can dream.
This is the station that plays individual movements from longer works, probably because 12 minutes or so is as long as the announcers can bear to shut up.
For more elevated talk about music, I recommend an excellent article from a couple weeks ago by the NY Times' Anthony Tommasini. He brings up aspects of classical music that are central to my enjoyment of it but are rarely discussed as sources of aesthetic pleasure: its structure and its scale. I also like his attitude towards classical's relation to other music: it's not necessarily better, but it is different, and needs to be judged by different criteria. "Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony is no more profound than Eleanor Rigby," he says. "But it’s a whole lot longer."
I like that. And not just because Eleanor Rigby is one of my favorite Beatles songs while I can, frankly, live without Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. Part of what drew me to classical initially was the scale. Pop songs could be nice, but they just weren't big enough to be satisfying, even cumulatively. A symphony could be. And structure is what keeps me listening. Tommasini says listeners may not always grasp the structure in a large piece but they can perceive that it's there. This is exactly right.
( more reading )
"... César Franck, and we've just heard his Third Symphony."
!!?!
"Ah, I mean the third movement of his Symphony in D Minor."
Oh well, one can dream.
This is the station that plays individual movements from longer works, probably because 12 minutes or so is as long as the announcers can bear to shut up.
For more elevated talk about music, I recommend an excellent article from a couple weeks ago by the NY Times' Anthony Tommasini. He brings up aspects of classical music that are central to my enjoyment of it but are rarely discussed as sources of aesthetic pleasure: its structure and its scale. I also like his attitude towards classical's relation to other music: it's not necessarily better, but it is different, and needs to be judged by different criteria. "Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony is no more profound than Eleanor Rigby," he says. "But it’s a whole lot longer."
I like that. And not just because Eleanor Rigby is one of my favorite Beatles songs while I can, frankly, live without Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. Part of what drew me to classical initially was the scale. Pop songs could be nice, but they just weren't big enough to be satisfying, even cumulatively. A symphony could be. And structure is what keeps me listening. Tommasini says listeners may not always grasp the structure in a large piece but they can perceive that it's there. This is exactly right.
( more reading )
