music appreciation from another planet

[calimac]

From a San Francisco Symphony e-mailing:

Continuing the Mahler cycle, MTT and the Orchestra will bring to life the Fifth Symphony at the concerts of September 28 though October 2. The Fifth is a breakthrough work for Mahler, in which he moved away from the song- and fairy tale-inspired music he had been writing in his first four symphonies, into the territory of raw drama communicated with new concision and force.

Concision??!? I do not think that word means what you think it means.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Oh, there's concision. Lots of it. One concise thing after another after another after another. Whole hours of nothing but cavalcades of concision.

I went to a concert with one of those symphonies on it. Considering how completely it bored me, despite what were clearly good sections, I'd have been much better off waiting in the hall or out in the car, even if I'd had to get up and walk out while it was playing to do so.

Mark Twain's anecdote about the revival preacher (he was good, but went on too long) kept coming (at first, he resolves to put all the money in his pockets in the collection tray) to mind (eventually he ended up taking fifty cents out of it, just for spite). When it finally ended, I sat in my chair and glared at the stage.

Of course, the whole thing made me feel guilty of philistinism, so since then I've made an effort to find Mahler music that I liked, and I have succeeded to some extent. Songs, mostly.

[holyoutlaw.livejournal.com]

Your first paragraph cracks me up. "Whole hours of nothing but cavalcades of concision." Hah!