plebeian classical(+ish) music appreciation thread

Tachyon · 2014-05-29 13:06:49

a thread where Beethoven and Wagner can rub shoulders with John Philip Sousa and Hans Zimmer

post classical/classical-influenced/cinematic/orchestral music you like, talk about it too, intelligent and informed opinions welcome but not required

glennmagusharvey · 2014-05-29 13:14:48

i know it's early on in the thread, and maybe i should have given it some time to get somewhere before posting this, but there's something that bugs me about the implication of this thread -- that classical is somehow separate from the other genres.

perhaps this is me speaking because i want to see more integration between the genres.

in the meantime, enjoy some ravel

Tachyon · 2014-05-29 13:23:12

Well, I was hoping this thread could be about music that's normally appreciated as 'art' music as opposed to dance/pop/rock, but this is supposed to just be an informal thing, and I certainly wasn't trying to codify any distinction that isn't already made or imply that genres are set in stone.

The Ravel is very nice.

glennmagusharvey · 2014-05-29 13:28:29

fair enough

personally i approach "art music" and "non-art music" roughly the same way, so yeah

Yarrun XIX · 2014-05-29 13:36:24

Tachyon · 2014-05-29 15:13:12

I always liked Pictures at an Exhibition.

The Hut of Baba-Yaga used to scare me as a kid; now I think it sounds like boss music.

Yarrun XIX · 2014-05-29 17:01:29

My favorite's always been Bydlo. Nice and dramatic.

You should look up Emerson Lake and Palmer's Baba Yaga

Sredni Vashtar · 2014-05-29 17:14:58

I like the opening choice of Satie here. The man was a marvel at melodies at once simple, elegant and subtly strange, generally tonal but not major or minor. I greatly appreciate that set of qualities, particularly in piano music.

My posting Arthur Lourié is basically mandatory here. He is a really underrated composer of wonderfully emotive, spooky piano works, briefly appointed as the head of a Soviet arts initiative that fostered high modernism and all channels open experimentation before Stalin's big crackdown.

Odradek · 2014-05-29 17:25:19

Indeed I did, Naney

Obā-san · 2014-05-29 17:29:57

i think you meant to post that in the other music thread

Salix Babylonika · 2014-05-29 17:30:07

That's kind of hilarious considering that a lot of people really hate Iggy.

SF_Sorrow · 2014-05-29 17:33:11

adding some choral work to the mix

glennmagusharvey · 2014-05-29 21:14:14

Yarrun XIX said:
My favorite's always been Bydlo. Nice and dramatic.

I have noticed that that sounds somewhat reminiscent of the Grotto area music in Anodyne.

Comparison:

original piano version

(probably more famous) version orchestrated by Maurice Ravel

^ This piece is gorgeous.

glennmagusharvey · 2014-05-30 01:16:06

Another gorgeous piece, courtesy of @SredniVashtar:

Sredni Vashtar said:

Sredni Vashtar is listening to avant-garde turn-of-the-century Russian piano music again.

Whoa. That was really nice. I really liked how it basically made use of a very traditional harmonic scheme, but richly adorned it with altered notes and other dissonances. I really love it when you have pretty much every note in the figuration contributing to the harmonic substance -- as this piece does. (As much as Rachmaninoff sounds awesome, he does use a good number of "effect" notes.)

The rhythmic complexity and ornamental figurations give this texture a little hint of...I guess what I could call pointillism, making it sound a little bit Prokofiev-like in that sense, that the melodic message can't be cleanly extracted from the harmonic message. It gives an intriguing feeling of complexity that I enjoy. Full-on pointillism isn't exactly my thing, nor is atonality, but this kind of fragmented melody can be really cool sometimes, such as here.

And is this a one-movement sonata? Not that I mind. Single-movement
sonatas are kinda cool because they're just, like, self-contained
messages. And I can't really name any off the top of my head other than
Prokofiev's 1st and 3rd, and Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas.

I can already think of ways to improve on this interpretation once I learn this piece...I guess I know what I'm learning next. In addition to the things I've already meant to learn...

...one of which is this piece, which the thing you linked to reminded me of a bit:

Fun fact: I only discovered the above piece because it was used to replace the audio in a Youtube upload of the second half of the first episode of Futari wa Pretty Cure.

Unfortunately, what piece and performer that upload used were not revealed there, and I didn't think to keep that vid at the time...I greatly regret that because that video's interpretation was my favorite interpretation of this piece. None of the other interpretations I've since found on Youtube have been quite as awe-inspiringly impressive as that lost one...or maybe it's just my wishful thinking lenses talking...

Alternate interpretation (more brilliant, but sloppier):

Another alternate interpretation (often slower and dreamier, but also much clearer):

I really, really, wish this piece were orchestrated. If only I had the knowledge and skill to orchestrate this...

Sredni Vashtar · 2014-05-30 01:27:42

Busoni was one of the first people to propose using third- and sixth-tone tuning to intensify chromatic movement and spice up harmony, although he never made it very far past the planning stage in his own work. And indeed, third-tones (1/18 of the octave* are decidedly more dramatic melodically than the arithmetic half-steps of 12-ET; and 36-ET allows for some lovely harmonies using septimal intervals (7/6, 9/7, 7/4) and even higher order harmonies (13/9, 21/13, 21/16).

Strachinsky was an interesting dude. Mad as a hatter, probably killed himself at twenty-six, but a brilliant pianist and composer nonetheless. Stretched tonality in some really interesting ways.

glennmagusharvey · 2014-05-31 18:30:34

Come to think of it, one thing that bugs me about that Stanchinsky performance is that there's a bit too much rubato -- alternatively, too little rhythmic coherence. For example, the 5-1 bass motif's recognizability depends on its being interpreted with a "snap", and many times it's played too slowly for that "snap" to be recognizable.

There's already quite a bit of rhythmic complexity in that piece, so one needs to play it with a strong sense of rhythm to keep it from devolving into sounding like meter-less improvisation. That interpretation lacks that strong sense of rhythm, in my opinion.

Sredni Vashtar · 2014-05-31 21:14:57

A cleaner performance would mess the vibe, though, and I'm not sure that there are that many other recording so I'm not sure how you would tell without playing it yourself...

glennmagusharvey · 2014-06-02 16:20:35

what classical piece is this?
the name escapes me at the moment...
http://vocaroo.com/i/s0Q4KWvlRY1Q

Tachyon · 2014-06-02 20:09:52

It's from the latter part of Purcell's Rondeau from Abdelazer.

It's possibly more famous as the theme around which Britten's The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra was structured:

glennmagusharvey · 2014-06-02 20:24:42

^ Ah, that would be it. I know it from Britten's work.

glennmagusharvey · 2014-06-05 18:48:23

> run across another passacaglia (Dohnányi's in Eb minor)
> quite interesting, though not quite truly up my alley.
> run across this passacaglia (Kosenko's in G minor)
> listen
> listen more
> listen even more

oh my gosh
i am loving this

so this is basically, like, a combination of the "eight bars of 3/4" passacaglia/variations style of Beethoven's 32 Variations in C minor and the beautiful G minor full-circle of fifths of Handel's Passacaille in G minor (from keyboard suite #7)

the theme is also a full-circle of fifths here, though with a bit more embellishment and basically a late-romantic (but still functional tonality) harmonic language treatment of that same theme, in triple meter.

even has a major-key section in the middle of it, like Beethoven's variations.

glennmagusharvey · 2014-06-05 18:58:02

NOOOOOOO IMSLP DOESNT HAVE THE SCORE FOR THIS

i want this i want this i want this i want this
/me digs through e-mail for music score publisher/distributor discounts

thenamelesssamurai · 2014-06-05 19:04:08

glennmagusharvey said:
NOOOOOOO IMSLP DOESNT HAVE THE SCORE FOR THIS

i want this i want this i want this i want this
/me digs through e-mail for music score publisher/distributor discounts

I did not know the IMSLP existed until you mentioned it. Thanks for that.

glennmagusharvey · 2014-06-05 19:18:54

you're welcome :D

also i found it on some site called scorser

i have no idea what it is but it got me the score! :D

and not even hutchins & rea offers a print version...they don't even have a composer listing for viktor kosenko :(

THIS IS SO BEAUTIFUL HOW CAN YOU NOT HAVE AN ENTRY FOR THIS

thenamelesssamurai · 2014-06-05 19:38:12

Just found a score of Crumb's "Black Angels" on Scorser. Fucking A'. I'll have to save that site as well. And they have Luigi Nono and Xenakis scores on there as well. Oh happy happy day.

glennmagusharvey · 2014-06-05 20:14:11

How do you play a piece on the organ, on the piano? I mean, there's that whole pedal keyboard that you're losing...or somehow have to strain to duplicate by having the left hand hit low notes.

Or you can just use two pianos:

SF_Sorrow · 2014-06-06 21:25:42

going through a plainchant kick again

glennmagusharvey · 2014-06-06 23:21:08

fun fact

every sonata-metaform piece that Chopin wrote reverses the two internal movements compared to the standard symphony metaform
EXCEPT the two concertos

standard sonata movement metaform: fast, slow, fast
standard symphony movement metaform: fast, slow, dance (e.g. minuet or scherzo), fast

in the trio, the cello sonata, and the three piano sonatas: fast, dance (scherzo), slow, fast

the concertos: fast, slow, fast

(I'm using the term "metaform" here to distinguish it from the term "sonata form" which is a specific form commonly used for the first movements of sonatas)

SF_Sorrow · 2014-06-07 02:16:47

have some early troubadour music too

Obā-san · 2014-06-10 11:57:16

glennmagusharvey · 2014-06-22 18:57:49

I've never hugely loved this piece, for some reason, though listening to it with the score and up close and personal has lent me a greater appreciation for it.

I guess I kinda like the first movement, though my favorite is the second. A lot of pianists like to play the third as a virtuoso showoff piece but I don't really like it as much.

Obā-san · 2014-06-25 13:12:27

i cant believe that i haven't posted this here yet

Obā-san · 2014-06-25 13:14:10

also

Obā-san · 2014-07-28 01:42:59

glennmagusharvey · 2014-09-09 19:01:14

Study for the Left Hand, by Bela Bartok.

I think this is an early work (1903) of his, so it doesn't have his trademark weird modal folk tonalities and stuff, and has a more typical Romantic-era tonality. But that doesn't mean it's not pretty.

It's kinda sad how obscure this piece is, because it's quite beautiful.

This is one of at least two uploads on Youtube. This one I believe is played "correctly" using only one hand (at least it sounds like it is); while the other I think is played with two hands -- which you could call "cheating", though the basic result is a different interpretation.

SF_Sorrow · 2014-10-02 22:30:23

my favorite opera piece

thenamelesssamurai · 2014-12-12 05:36:36

Heard this on the radio today and wanted to share.

glennmagusharvey · 2014-12-23 23:22:07

^ That was enjoyable. Thanks for sharing.

thenamelesssamurai · 2014-12-23 23:34:52

My pleasure. So far, my favorite piece of Ginastera's is his first piano concerto, which you might enjoy too.

thenamelesssamurai · 2015-11-08 05:19:11

Here's some Luigi Nono that I think people will enjoy.

Obā-san · 2015-11-08 05:25:12

Gabriel Prokofiev's Jerk Driver

Sredni Vashtar · 2015-11-08 05:44:04

^ Will check this out in a bit.

^^ Oooh, very impressive. Also a tribute to and requiem for the assassinated Chilean leftist activist Luciano Cruz.

plebeian classical(+ish) music appreciation thread

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