'C L A S S I C A L'

I don’t think this is true. Plenty of music videos, including incredibly popular ones, are essentially short films that use the song as a soundtrack.

The elevation of performer and performance over composer and composition reached its peak with jazz, which coincided with the technology of recording, when individual performances could be preserved in the same way sheet music allowed compositions to be preserved. Pop is different - it’s about the merging of the performer and composer into a unitary being, the singer-songwriter. Pop strives to maintain this illusion even when it’s patently false (cf. Dr Luke et al).

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It maybe isn’t – it definitely isn’t always true – but it’s been a trend in my viewing experience, especially when the pop act is a singer and the draw is their voice

yo everyone can we talk about how EDM has basically done this even though dance music as a popular form is supposed to be a super populist thing

to the point where the way to portray producers on screen is to literally have them on stage doing nothing ala david guetta “performing” a song on saturday night live or whatever

I want to remove performers from performing spaces and see what happens

edit: I mean this in a kind of “I wonder if spaces themselves can ‘perform’” way, not an “I hate all performers” way

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Two more pieces by Rautavaara. Highly recommended, if you have the time.

This made a little more sense when not everything was condensed into a laptop.

Listening to this again tonight. It’s interesting to hear how it anticipates so much film music, right up to relatively recent scores by Williams and other composers who use(d) melodic, sweet, broad, and colorful musical language.

Well, this was amazing.

OK. Other stuff.

Sugiyama’s string quartet arrangements of his Monopoly score for the Super Famicom are about as good as Beethoven’s opus 18 string quartets, and really just as “learned” as anything Haydn might’ve written, imo. Not all that fresh or moving, and Sugiyama has written much better stuff elsewhere, but it’s perfectly pleasant instrumental music that fits into the classical idiom without a hint of struggle.

Kind of starts out like a stockier relative to Bartok’s Romanian folk dances. If the first movement doesn’t grab you – and I think it’s the least impressive part of the piece – try sticking around for, or skipping to, the rest. The last fugal movement, featuring a determined, accessible, and dynamically evolving melody, stands out to me as the highlight. This is the only piece of Bloch’s I’m familiar with.

Corelli played at an extremely sedate tempo. If nothing else, it’s… interesting.

Haas’ stuff is new to me. On the second movement now and it’s been pretty good so far.

I found another bizarrely slow performance of a Corelli work. It’s interesting at first, especially the climbing introduction’s ornamentation, but the further along it goes the more mismatched it sounds. Corelli’s music works best when it’s played at nimble tempos and with minimal vibrato. Taking it slow, even with the lush resonances afforded by this modern ensemble, makes the material in action sound kind of boring.

Absolutely incredible cantata by J. S. Bach. This is Bach’s harmonic craft at its best.

A very good performance of what I think is one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written. Makes me cry every time. Also worth checking out this interpretation for pipe organ by Peter Sykes.

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blood for holst

cool thread! I know nothing about music, let alone classical, but here’s a couple things I enjoy:

this wasn’t on youtube for some reason so I uploaded a couple pieces together:

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also having a good time with these:

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Blocked :frowning:

Pretty piece. I haven’t heard a harpsichord that has the harp-like sound in its upper octaves like this one does. It reveals a composition that seems rather suited for a stringed instrument with how fluttery and lilting its melodies are.

Representing that underrepresented instrument with some more Hindemith.

Another bunch of lute suites by Weiss. I’m surprised I’d never run across his music before this year. It can stand toe to toe with any comparable stuff by Dowland.

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Perplexingly, this plays at the end of a theatrical performance of Bach’s comical “Coffee Cantata” and I hadn’t known what the piece was – in the other video it was constrained to the final ritornello of the aria movement here – until recently. Very similar in certain ways to BWV 21 (linked above). The part writing for the bass is just incredible. Nestled among all of the other baroque music I’ve been exploring it alone declares the exceptional quality of Bach’s work in general. So much baroque music, no matter the region or composer, sounds to me like various reconfigurations of codified passages leading towards major or minor resolutions (this trend, this obsession with cadence/certainty, would be picked up right again after Bach), but Bach’s music has so many structural irregularities and continuous flows that a lot of the time it only feels comparable to other concurrent music on the broadest level.

That drive for resolution does happen in Bach’s music, but it’s used selectively. The codifying is personal and connected to the text’s emphases. If you bother to listen to this cantata you’ll notice that that quality only comes up during the third and last movement, and it’s especially pertinent to the last movement where Bach yields to a traditional hymnal structure (the melody in fact was penned eighty years prior by another German composer).

O T H E R S T U F F

Good first two movements, some lite-quirky melodies and atypical turns, third movement is pretty forgettable standard baroque. Tbh I’d always figured, without checking for attribution while listening to other albums, that the adagio was by Bach. Doesn’t feel as bad being wrong knowing that Bach himself vouched for this concerto’s quality

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What an adorable instrument :o

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I’d forgotten that Tomita died last year

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Not a whole lot to say here, just some stuff I’ve been listening to by chance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHv4eVW3zTg

Oh, yeah, this is really good

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wow, the ecstasy in the back of Movement IIIb