The first conductor I played this with would tell the little story of each movement before we rehearsed it. When it came to this part, he intoned the phrase "a rich jew and a poor jew" with such a heavy, portentous tone that I really expected a little digression on the Protocols.
Mussorgsky, though, is great. He was responsible for all kinds of innovations and was an enormous resource for the French composers (Satie, Ravel, and Debussy, followed by Stravinsky -- who was a Parisian by then) who liberated music from the German Seriousness which was ultimately responsible for the rise of Hitler.
Khovanshchina is an imperfect opera, but it's the only opera whose plot line is based the absolutist centralization of power in the State. With the help of foreign mercenaries, Peter the Great (offstage) successively destroys the military police (too autonomous), the old aristocracy, the westernized intelligentsia, and the religious devout.
Mussorgsky got shit for not having female leads in his operas, so he put in a German lady who one of the princes pursues all through the opera, without catching her. She's like a cartoon figure, with no connection to anything in the plot.
Not everyone will like this opera.
Verdi actually wanted to write patriotic national operas, but the Austrian censor made him do shit melodramas.
Interesting, Emerson. When I'm trolling classical musicians I say that Mussgorsky is the only composer I like between Bach and Satie.
One thing I like about Boris Godunov is that the only time the characters sing the same line over and over is when they're actually singing a song, or when a crowd is doing a "Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Little father, pity our condition!" type chant.
Ravel's orchestration is fantastic, so if you like the piece you want both the orchestral and the piano versions.
Mussorgsky was the least prolific of the major composers. He's got 2 operas, 1 piano suite, one orchestral piece, and 2 song cycles in the standard repertoie, and that's stretching it. Excluding art songs, short piano pieces, and unfinished pieces, he's got maybe ten pieces in all.
Is Mussorgsky the one whose friends, on learning of his death, descend on his apartment looking for music, as told in Rimsky-Korsikoff's autobiography?
Who listens to art songs? I love Mussorgsky and Satie, and I'm steeling myself to listen to their art songs out of a sense of duty.
There was a certain milieu where the art song flourished (small groups of people intensely involved both in poetry and music). It's pretty foreign to most of us.
The famous (trumpet gets the promenade) orchestration is Ravel's, though Stokowski's is still played sometimes (violins--boring!-- get the promenade theme).
B, I mean something like this: you know those works that are good to like when you're young, and good to sort of grow out of? "Pictures" is in that category for me. It's cool, it has lots of neat stuff going on, but it's not...substantial.
23 -- a better response might be, "I'm not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven, but as he represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where all notes get an equal hearing. Beethoven was one of the architects of musical freedom—he submitted to the demands of history, despite his deafness. While Rossini was retiring at the age of 36, womanizing and getting fat, Beethoven was living a life filled with tragedy and grandeur."
Pictures at an Exhibition is substantial, though. German Seriousness tends to condemn composers who are colorful or melodic, even Germans like Schubert or Schumann, but that's wrong. You end up with ..... Wagner and Bruckner, and so on. Mussorgsky did all kinds of innovative stuff with harmony, meter, etc.
FL, maybe. I do think "Pictures" was one of my first favorite pieces. But I don't know that I follow you on "good to grow out of"--why must something be "substantial" (whatever that means) to work for someone as an adult?
Then again, I'm really not a music person, so maybe I'm just kinda dumb on this subject.
Well, as long as we're talking music, I'm going to lower the high-brow tone of this thread and nominate "Do You Take It?" by the Wet Spots as the official theme song of the Mineshaft.
You'll probably want to view this when you're not at work, IYKWIM.
Well, my way of putting it wasn't helpful. I have nothing against "Pictures," really, other than this sense that its endearing qualities are on the surface.
Not so familiar with Varese. He's not major to me but I haven't paid enough attention.
I may be the only person in the world who ranks Mussorgsky in the top twenty composers of the last 300 years. (Pre-baroque music screws up these kinds of lists).
I do like Mahler, but he's only debatably before Satie -- Satie starts in the mid-1880s, and the first piece you've heard of (Gymnopedies) is from 1888 -- around when Mahler's First Symphony is from. As for Mozart and Beethoven, remember I'm trolling but: "dum-deedle-deedle-deedle-deedle-deedle" and "dum dum da fucking DUM already, we get the point," respectively. (And don't get me started on Beethoven's Violin Concerto.) I like Mike Westbrook's album of Rossini arrangements (a lot like Uri Caine's Mahler album for those who've heard that, Wolfson).
Definitely I recognize that these musicians have a lot of genius etc. etc. but I usually wouldn't listen to them for my own pleasure and I get a little annoyed that they're put forth as The Greatest Stuff Ever That Everyone Should Bow Down Before when people feel free to turn their noses at Louis Armstrong. So I troll.
BP, why do you have to quibble about a perfectly nice rant?
Was Beethoven, too, responsible for the Holocaust? Adorno doesn't think so. Emerson and Wolfson say -- maybe yes. Debate at 8:00, Pat Buchanan moderating.
I'm curious about how Emerson-and-Wolfson, or anybody else, assimilates, or even learns about the existence, of music not already familiar to them.
Here in Chicago we have WFMT, which means you can learn a lot if you can pay attention, just by leaving it on in the office. But you have to be in a susceptable mood even so, and program guide, notes and as much knowledge as you can pull together enormously enhance your experience. Sometimes the announcers give you some of what helps you learn, and I've picked up a lot this way over the years, but often they don't.
Away from Chicago, this may not be so easy. The local stations of Wisconsin Public Radio play classical during the day, and I think programs, etc. are available. For Michigan there's a station in Berrien Springs, and there are probably more North and East, but I just don't know.
One thing I've done is go to Amazon, punch in the names of composers or artists I've heard of in the appropriate search (e.g. "Classical CD), and buy th cheapest. They even have a "show cheapest first" display. A lot of CDs go for $5-7 or so including shipping.
Anti-semite.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 9:00 AM
You know, that just occurred to me. It is the best bit, though, if you aren't listening to the canonical version.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 9:02 AM
The first conductor I played this with would tell the little story of each movement before we rehearsed it. When it came to this part, he intoned the phrase "a rich jew and a poor jew" with such a heavy, portentous tone that I really expected a little digression on the Protocols.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 9:10 AM
ELP is a sore point with the family.
Mussorgsky, though, is great. He was responsible for all kinds of innovations and was an enormous resource for the French composers (Satie, Ravel, and Debussy, followed by Stravinsky -- who was a Parisian by then) who liberated music from the German Seriousness which was ultimately responsible for the rise of Hitler.
Khovanshchina is an imperfect opera, but it's the only opera whose plot line is based the absolutist centralization of power in the State. With the help of foreign mercenaries, Peter the Great (offstage) successively destroys the military police (too autonomous), the old aristocracy, the westernized intelligentsia, and the religious devout.
Mussorgsky got shit for not having female leads in his operas, so he put in a German lady who one of the princes pursues all through the opera, without catching her. She's like a cartoon figure, with no connection to anything in the plot.
Not everyone will like this opera.
Verdi actually wanted to write patriotic national operas, but the Austrian censor made him do shit melodramas.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 9:11 AM
Interesting, Emerson. When I'm trolling classical musicians I say that Mussgorsky is the only composer I like between Bach and Satie.
One thing I like about Boris Godunov is that the only time the characters sing the same line over and over is when they're actually singing a song, or when a crowd is doing a "Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Little father, pity our condition!" type chant.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 9:24 AM
In high school, we played an arrangement of Pictures for our band, and the saxophones all went crazy on the Hut of Baba Yaga piece.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 9:36 AM
My favorite recording of Ravel's orchestration is by Sergiu Celibidache with the Munich Philharmonic. Truly astounding.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 10:12 AM
I just got the old Fritz Reiner/Chicago recording. I can't tell much through the laptop speakers, though.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 10:25 AM
Tacky? I love Mussorgsky. *Such* fun.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 10:26 AM
I know I could look this up easily, but wasn't this work originally for piano? So that the orchestrations are all interpretations, in a sense?
Posted by John Tingley | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 10:32 AM
10: Yes.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 10:43 AM
Ravel's orchestration is fantastic, so if you like the piece you want both the orchestral and the piano versions.
Mussorgsky was the least prolific of the major composers. He's got 2 operas, 1 piano suite, one orchestral piece, and 2 song cycles in the standard repertoie, and that's stretching it. Excluding art songs, short piano pieces, and unfinished pieces, he's got maybe ten pieces in all.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 10:52 AM
Why would you exclude art songs?
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 10:56 AM
Is Mussorgsky the one whose friends, on learning of his death, descend on his apartment looking for music, as told in Rimsky-Korsikoff's autobiography?
Posted by Anonymous | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 10:59 AM
Who listens to art songs? I love Mussorgsky and Satie, and I'm steeling myself to listen to their art songs out of a sense of duty.
There was a certain milieu where the art song flourished (small groups of people intensely involved both in poetry and music). It's pretty foreign to most of us.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:07 AM
It might have been Satie. Only one or two people ever saw the place where Satie lived during his last decade, and they weren't from the music world.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:08 AM
I've looked it up; it was Borodin who died in that story.
Posted by John Tingley | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:13 AM
Borodin was also a chemist of some importance who did work in aldehydes and discovered the Borodin reaction (duh).
The composer Cui was an expert on military fortification. A number of Russian composers were military men at some point in their lifetime.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:27 AM
Does Winterreise not count?
The famous (trumpet gets the promenade) orchestration is Ravel's, though Stokowski's is still played sometimes (violins--boring!-- get the promenade theme).
B, I mean something like this: you know those works that are good to like when you're young, and good to sort of grow out of? "Pictures" is in that category for me. It's cool, it has lots of neat stuff going on, but it's not...substantial.
Maybe we agree, because we agree that it's fun.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:31 AM
Yeah, I sort of feel Weiner in his 19th Century hatred, but he's wrong to not make the following exceptions between Bach and Satie (?!?!):
(1) Beethoven
(2) Mozart
(3) Schubert
(4) Stravinsky
Hut on Hen's Legs is fun.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:37 AM
Also, I'll grant (5) Debussy.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:39 AM
20 -- What about Rossini?
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:39 AM
Not feeling it, Osner.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:40 AM
(6) Mahler is open for debate.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:41 AM
23 -- a better response might be, "I'm not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven, but as he represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where all notes get an equal hearing. Beethoven was one of the architects of musical freedom—he submitted to the demands of history, despite his deafness. While Rossini was retiring at the age of 36, womanizing and getting fat, Beethoven was living a life filled with tragedy and grandeur."
Posted by Jeremy Osner | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:48 AM
Wait, do we have to start appending every statement here with "YMMV"? I thought that was understood.
Sheesh. What is Unfogged, if not a place to offer subjective opinion as objective fact?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:49 AM
Oi. I second 23.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:50 AM
Stravinsky came after Satie, so he's cool.
Pictures at an Exhibition is substantial, though. German Seriousness tends to condemn composers who are colorful or melodic, even Germans like Schubert or Schumann, but that's wrong. You end up with ..... Wagner and Bruckner, and so on. Mussorgsky did all kinds of innovative stuff with harmony, meter, etc.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:55 AM
Stravinsky came after Satie, so he's cool.
Right you are. In my mind he was a contemporary of Ravel's, but Wikipedia tells me he was not.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:58 AM
Jews, shmews. Isn't it the law that Unfogged has to link to all Tom Cruise gossip?
Posted by Gary Farber | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 12:26 PM
FL, maybe. I do think "Pictures" was one of my first favorite pieces. But I don't know that I follow you on "good to grow out of"--why must something be "substantial" (whatever that means) to work for someone as an adult?
Then again, I'm really not a music person, so maybe I'm just kinda dumb on this subject.
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 12:32 PM
Well, as long as we're talking music, I'm going to lower the high-brow tone of this thread and nominate "Do You Take It?" by the Wet Spots as the official theme song of the Mineshaft.
You'll probably want to view this when you're not at work, IYKWIM.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 12:33 PM
Well, my way of putting it wasn't helpful. I have nothing against "Pictures," really, other than this sense that its endearing qualities are on the surface.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 2:17 PM
I bet you don't like Baroque architecture, either. ;)
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 2:33 PM
How right you are.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 2:42 PM
There's nothing wrong with being a Wagnerian Nazi. Don't get me wrong.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 2:48 PM
32: I second the nomination.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 7:21 PM
Mussorgsky was the least prolific of the major composers.
What about Varèse?
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-17-06 11:55 PM
Not so familiar with Varese. He's not major to me but I haven't paid enough attention.
I may be the only person in the world who ranks Mussorgsky in the top twenty composers of the last 300 years. (Pre-baroque music screws up these kinds of lists).
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 02-18-06 6:13 AM
I do like Mahler, but he's only debatably before Satie -- Satie starts in the mid-1880s, and the first piece you've heard of (Gymnopedies) is from 1888 -- around when Mahler's First Symphony is from. As for Mozart and Beethoven, remember I'm trolling but: "dum-deedle-deedle-deedle-deedle-deedle" and "dum dum da fucking DUM already, we get the point," respectively. (And don't get me started on Beethoven's Violin Concerto.) I like Mike Westbrook's album of Rossini arrangements (a lot like Uri Caine's Mahler album for those who've heard that, Wolfson).
Definitely I recognize that these musicians have a lot of genius etc. etc. but I usually wouldn't listen to them for my own pleasure and I get a little annoyed that they're put forth as The Greatest Stuff Ever That Everyone Should Bow Down Before when people feel free to turn their noses at Louis Armstrong. So I troll.
(Farber: Sweet.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 02-18-06 4:27 PM
Probably a good thing you never met Adorno.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 02-18-06 5:03 PM
#40: Can't one like both?
Posted by bitchphd | Link to this comment | 02-18-06 5:43 PM
BP, why do you have to quibble about a perfectly nice rant?
Was Beethoven, too, responsible for the Holocaust? Adorno doesn't think so. Emerson and Wolfson say -- maybe yes. Debate at 8:00, Pat Buchanan moderating.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 02-18-06 6:30 PM
I'm pretty sure that I have not publicly said "maybe yes", or anything else, to that question.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-19-06 1:06 AM
Also, I've never heard Caine's Mahler album, but I have seen it. On Winter & Winter, if I'm not mistaken—they have very distinctive CD cases.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 02-19-06 1:09 AM
The collective "Emerson and Wolfson" says "maybe yes" in the sense of "maybe says yes" in the sense of "maybe one of them says yes".
Talk radio logic has yet to be formalized properly.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 02-19-06 6:40 AM
I'm curious about how Emerson-and-Wolfson, or anybody else, assimilates, or even learns about the existence, of music not already familiar to them.
Here in Chicago we have WFMT, which means you can learn a lot if you can pay attention, just by leaving it on in the office. But you have to be in a susceptable mood even so, and program guide, notes and as much knowledge as you can pull together enormously enhance your experience. Sometimes the announcers give you some of what helps you learn, and I've picked up a lot this way over the years, but often they don't.
Away from Chicago, this may not be so easy. The local stations of Wisconsin Public Radio play classical during the day, and I think programs, etc. are available. For Michigan there's a station in Berrien Springs, and there are probably more North and East, but I just don't know.
Posted by John Tingley | Link to this comment | 02-19-06 8:02 AM
One thing I've done is go to Amazon, punch in the names of composers or artists I've heard of in the appropriate search (e.g. "Classical CD), and buy th cheapest. They even have a "show cheapest first" display. A lot of CDs go for $5-7 or so including shipping.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 02-19-06 10:28 AM