blasphemy
allegro assai
mozart's stuck in the baaath-room
let him out, let him out, let him out...
mozart's stuck in the baaath-room
let him out, let him out, let him out!
the mozart bored me.
the stravinski bored me.
the contemporary piece annoyed me.
and the second mozart bored me.
but i wasn't bored because i don't know music. i was bored because i do know music. the interpretation was sort of, well, affectedly, unconvincingly dramatic and on top of that, mozart bores me in general. blasphemous, i know. it's pretty and everything, yet it is boring. but hey, better boring than anxiety-provoking (bach).
i held my coat in my lap the entire time and wondered how much longer it would be. the contrabassoonist looked as though he wondered the same, there on stage in his tux, instrument on a stand, arms folded and resting on his protuberant belly, knees slightly apart, waiting for the piece to end. i wondered what he was really thinking about. from his posture, i was guessing beer or hockey. he may as well have been wearing an a-shirt.
why do i go to the symphony anymore? oh, yeah. because i love music. even when it's boring. i'm glad i went.
as an added bonus, the audience did not clap between movements. cough and snort they did, but applaud they did not. how refreshing.
oh one more thing. i've wondered for some time now what bach's reaction would be to hearing jazz. (i don't listen to his music because it makes me anxious, but i still admire his genius.) for some reason, i feel that he would get it, and probably even dig it.
props to puffintoad and to mozart for his symphony no. 40 in g minor, with apologies for misremembering. corrections would be accepted and considered helpful.
oh no! he's stuck in there
oh no! it smells in there
mozart's stuck in the baaath-room
let him out, let him out, let him out!
posted by CamoBunny at 22:29
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7 comments
7 Comments:
well, they didn't really play boringly. it's just that live mozart doesn't really do it for me. give me debussy, ravel, shostakovich, lizst, rachmaninoff, dvorak. or even schubert. not wagner or brahms. (ha, i wrote 'braums' at first.) but my friend likes the mozart no. 40 so that's why we went.
but it definitely could have been worse. i could have been made to go hear water music, which they play yearly.
also on our docket this season are bruckner, mussorgsky's muscular arrangement of pictures at an exhibition (which they also do yearly), schubert, and stravinsky's firebird.
2/13/2006 10:12:00 AM
while you deal with not wanting to be at the bach-ish or mozart-y end of the spectrum, i have to deal with being at the phillip glass, ucsd, our-music-department-is-known-for-being-innovative-and-experimental-so-we-should-play-grad-student-pieces-once-a-year la jolla symphony. maybe you would've enjoyed debussy's la mer in yesterday's program. you might have even liked the beethoven piano concerto and probably not brahm's academic overture. but look out for yumiko morita, the tiny japanese ucsd music grad student whose "echoes of a wave" made its debut this weekend. it sounded like some unearthly hellbound high school orchestra warming up before its first concert of the season replete with illegible scores, artificial harmonics out the ying yang, a massive percussion section, col legno after col legno, and enough dissonance to make you want to give peace a chance. nothing makes me more irritated by still being in an orchestra than playing shoddy program after shoddy program. every six weeks. during midterms. and finals.
you might like our next concert series though and it benefits from some excellent contemporary music. david lang's contemporary business machine, tan dun's crouching tiger cello concerto, with the firebird as the centerpiece. after that i quit.
2/13/2006 12:22:00 PM
Hey Camobunny, come see one of Ray's gigs, and my bride and I will treat you to lunch down the street at Point Loma Seafoods. (How's that for an incentive to pop for a plane ride, pricely La Jolla Hotel and expensive touristie-type food?)
caveat: limited-time offer, some restrictions apply*, see your local Twitz retailer for details.
*We may or may not treat your date, depending on our whim and, depending on him, more restrictions may apply.
2/13/2006 04:27:00 PM
wow.
wow.
that's quite an offer. and you have a plan and everything. i do like it when there's a plan. especially a plan that involves food. a very inviting offer indeed.
oh, but i have to find a date? bah. sigh. nevermind, i guess. wait, you were counting on that improbability, weren't you?
or i could just bring ray instead. and then, ray, afterward we could cover that cardigans song you wanted to cover. is s.d. too warm for cardigans?
dangit. now i'm hungry for seafood.
wv: ocapnum
2/13/2006 07:51:00 PM
As you know I'm no musician, but here are some little tidbits I picked up from having studied a little about the baroque. At the time, musicians like Bach were known primarily for their formidable improvisational skills in performance, not for their compositions. Improv was an essential part of this music as it was performed in its day, but now everyone just plays it straight as it is written. This is funny because the written compositions were originally intended to be pretty much like jazz charts, and the musicians already knew the basic idea of the chord progressions and so forth and were expected to embellish and alter what was there.
After I learned about this it always bugged me that on every recording of the Brandenburg Concertos I have heard, there is this one movement that is always about 10 seconds long, and basically is the harpsichord playing a couple of scales, with the strings playing a couple chords behind it. This was actually the place where the harpsichordist would bust out his big solo. The chords played for those ten seconds were basically supposed to be the vamp that started the solo.
So the bottom line is, Bach would totally have gotten jazz. You can have more than just a feeling on which to base this assertion. I quickly googled "baroque improvisation" so that I could have evidence that I'm not just making this up, and I immediately found this little article that talks about it. So I'm not smoking crack.
2/13/2006 11:46:00 PM
josué: actually i had more in mind the consonant dissonance of jazz chording and the rhythm, the rhythm, the rhythm. you know, the stuff that old stodgies generally object to when talking about new-fangled music. improv is cool too (see cadenza). thanks for your input.
puffintoad: camobunny's corner. it's where real musicians want to be.
2/14/2006 08:08:00 AM
Heck, no, you don't have to have a date. As Michelle Pfeiffer once said when adopting a child, solo, "Who wants some angry male stomping around." Not that a male with you would be angry. No, no, no. Just, you know, it sometimes goes with the species.
My bride and I had lunch there today. Outside, which is kind of the only place to eat at Point Loma Seafoods. Sunny, reasonably warm, looking out toward the bay. Very nice.
I recommend the shrimp sandwich.
2/14/2006 06:55:00 PM
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