'C L A S S I C A L'

That is sad. I hardly listen to music that’s on my computer anymore. It’s either the occasional physical album or YT. YT has actually become probably the most important website ever for me just because it’s such a rich and enormous mine for music, to a significantly greater extent than stuff like Pandora or Spotify.

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i’m pretty content listening to old pre-album tunes all day but you had to go and make me feel some kinda way about it, dang it DIPLO

Oop

you have to listen to the whole thing, honestly

but you should probably listen to phaze i and ii first

edit june 17 2019: the above link is broken, so here’s a complete playlist of Frank Zappa’s Civilzation Phaze III

was going through some old music I had purchased before and found this:

non-live version split into sections:

more edits:

I have no idea how I stumbled on albeniz – I think I had a big impressionist phase when I was performing piano in high school after playing debussy’s arabesque no. 1 and wanted to ONLY PLAY IMPRESSIONIST MUSIC, but apparently I bought alicia de larrocha’s recording of it and never looked back so who knows

I think I became a fan just because of my unfamiliarity with spanish styles of classical music; I was mostly performing the “mainstream” bach/beethoven/chopin stuff until my teacher and I got to debussy to fill out my romantic period repertoire which started me on less “canon” stuff

I’m really big into russian romantic composers too but that’s an easier sell; really like rachmaninoff concerto 2 and 3, I played tchaikovsky’s dumka which I really enjoyed too

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I’m just here to say Shostakovich and then wander away again.


Basically a piece about his paranoia that the Soviets would knock his door down and kill or arrest him at any moment, despite his delicate social protection, as happened to many people he knew. That repeating figure is his initials, in… some other style of notation.

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Preferred performance of a part of Handel’s Messiah where the selected text and its musical affectations have a particularly pathetic resonance that other parts do not. Conducted in a period manner – and the scale is nice when put against many other recordings of Messiah that feel instrumentally overladen, as if there is a race to have the Most Spectacular Messiah Ever.

A church nearby will host a performance of this in about a month and I’m going to do everything in my power to get that day off from work. Forty minutes, yeah, so not likely that anyone here is going to bother listening, so just take my word for it that this is the requiem to end all requiems.

Introduced to Whitacre’s music a few years ago at a vespers program where his Lux Aurumque was sung and made a huge, very emotional impression on me. Anyway, a friend was looking for sob-invoking choral music last night, so I shared this and became a weeping mess myself.

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Eric Whitacre is a big concert band composer, I’ve played a few of his pieces. Peep dis:

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yeah i know the big whitty

Made a YT playlist for pipe organ pieces

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There was a time when I was obsessed with Zappa. That said, I think you have to really like Zappa to be into his classical outings (they’re not very good). I think Zappa tends to attract a particular kind of obsessive.

The ditty I was trying to recall turned out to be the SOTC theme so… who doesn’t like Debussy? I do; I got into him through Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

Also Dvorak, loved listening to this with headphones on my old ipod

Look at those hotties! That’s got to be one of the better looking ensembles around

And the girl with linen hair:

this version makes me feel uncomfortable, he’s enjoying it too much. I want the music to be my pleasure, I don’t want to share The Girl With The Linen Hair with him! It’s like a gross threesome.
I guess this is a pop mentality?

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i don’t agree with that at all! if you’d like to elaborate on what you’re referring to and on what metric you’re seeing it as not good…

Yeah it’s completely subjective. It just doesn’t do anything for me. Uncle Meat and Burnt Weeny Sandwich on the other hand I love

well, if you still wanted to point to what you’re talking about specifically (uncle meat’s definitely got some classical-leaning stuff on it)

Uhhh I’d say it’s the opposite of pop mentality. Isn’t the draw of shows like American Idol, besides the thetricized drama, the physical presence of the singers? It’s not Real Music unless it has singing, and it’s all the more Real when you can see the person in a music video emotionally emitting the musculature of the lyrics; and the musician isn’t a real musician unless you can see them squinting under the lights, in a virtuosic trance, and dripping with sweat.

Pop music is all about the presence of the singer/musician and how played up that presence is. I think this was anticipated in the west with performing virtuosos like Paganini, and it’s only been further codified by developments like the music video (fuck music videos) which more or less demand the Artist to be Present and spectacular.

EDIT: It’s possible I misread your question when I assumed you were asking it of yourself. oop

My introduction to Debussy was as a child and through this album, which is full of good performances and arrangements, despite the silly GREATEST HITS designation (check out the embedded video below)

It came as a surprise to later on find out that he was a pianist first and foremost. I still prefer most of his piano music to be sensitively set to an orchestral format, though. It feels like its lush indulgences are better fed there

I agree! But then back in the day it was all about the live show… I guess I’m saying that in some cases with classical music too, it’s more about the performance than the composition, especially in these modern times when the classics have been recorded many times, and a new composition isn’t going to create much of a spectacle
I bought my parents tickets to this last year, wish I could have gone. Hopefully I can next time it’s on. It’s an interesting idea, sort of like a ballet mixing classical and contemporary compositions

Always worth bringing up Isao Tomita’s analog arrangements when talking about classical music

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Hey, this one’s way better than the Tomita Holst Planets I’ve listened to. Is this later? He’s got a lot more textures he’s playing with.

The Wendy Carlos Bach stuff is more fun than I anticipated, too.

You’ve been really into analog synths lately. I am really into you being really into analog synths.