Posted on 12/16/2006 10:57:05 AM PST by ZGuy
Happy Holiday Music Weekend! Hear the music of Mozart this weekend on Beethoven Radio!
That's a great piece of music right there.
Do you like Bela Bartok? He is as profound as Bach or Beethoven.
That is, the kings, queens, princes and other royalty provided subsidized havens of one kind or another for the talented musicians to enable them to create.
Popes and cardinals also sponsored composers and at the same time provided them with a stage for their work......churches, cathedrals, choir lofts, huge organs.......
For sure, the three Bs never had to do ditch digging or store clerking to provide sustenance for themselves and their families.
Saying there's equally talented composers "out there" today is like saying there's Rembrandts, Michelangelos or DaVincis out there. If there are geniuses out there, why have they never been discovered, or why haven't they stepped forward in some manner?
I think it'll be a long time before a genius like Beethoven comes forth Perhaps one of today's kings would be a patron for him, hmmmm.
I'm rather glad there's not even second or third-tier geniuses like Schubert or Chopin or Verdi around anywhere. They'd be on welfare and would not be able to produce. They'd be crucified if they accepted government subsidies to live at home and compose.
Beautiful, stirring music would have little to no paying audience today. This past century, for instance, the music from the "modern" operas are atonal, ugly and unbearable, appealing for the most part to eggheads, social snobs and stoned hippies.
A lot of art is ugly today, so is poetry, so is sculpture, so is contemporary popular and rap music.
A renaissance will have to take place in the future before great beauty and music is appreciated by a goodly part of the masses.
I won't live to see it, but I have hope. In the meantime, I surround myself with the music of the great composers of the past and consider myself blessed to hear it and know it.
A wag once expressed a view on today's popular music for the masses....."Americans as a whole don't like music. They like noise."
I think of that every time I shop at Publix and have to listen to the shrieking canned vocal music playing incessantly
I also think of the several generations of young people numbed by MTV and radio who never saw or heard an opera.......and who think Beethoven is a big, lovable St. Bernard dog.
Leni
There's still a lot of truly great music. It just gets buried in the chatter. In Beethoven's time it was the same. Out of 1000 composers born between 1750-1850, we remember a handful. It's the same.
Good composers today are not in the media. Then again, they never were.
to be honest, I don't think I ever heard of him, was he a classical composer ?
I wish I had the time to debate properly but I have to go. In short, new music has always been misunderstood. I can quote several critics of new music claiming it sounds ugly and unbearable, from 1100 until Beethoven's time. In fact, I have just read two large volumes of music criticism from Beet's contemporaries, and they share the view that he was incomprehensible and vague.
Classical music has always been understood by specialists. Today's music is no different. There are geniuses and Beethovens out there. It's just hard to find them because they don't get any exposure.
As far as state sponsorship, only after Haydn were composers really sponsored, and it didn't last long. I wish it had, you can't imagine the greatness you can produced if left to think without worries.
Thank you for all your thoughtful commentary.
More later.
Born 1881 died 1946. Very stirring orchestral music.
I bet that a lot of his emotions came out of his music.
Schubert and Chopin were third tier geniuses? Wow. The first was music's first lyric poet and in his song accompaniments paved the way for Romantic piano music and the latter virtually invented the modern pianstic vocabulary and was the most forward thinking composer of his time. Anyway Mozart actually did have problems getting a good position at court and Brahms never held one.
Bartok's music was used quite effectively in Kubrick's film of 'The Shining'.
Will have to acquire the Philips set. When I bought the Vox Box I was a poor college student and it was all I could afford. ;-)
tear jerker kind of music, there is just something about a beautifully played violin or piano.
That guy was good.
Concerning Brahms, almost but not quite. By the time of Brahms, the concept of court musician had changed. For a number of years, Clara Schumann had held the position of court musician at Detmold. What went on at Detmold was a winter music festival sponsored by the minor nobility of that pricipality, and Clara's job was to set the programs, hire the musicians and schedule the rehearsals. This is something that an artistic director at a festival would do today.
When the young Brahms came into the life of the Schumann couple, Clara put in a good word for Brahms, and for two years he was the "court musician" at Detmold. He was expected to write at least one piece for the winter festival, and for his two years at Detmold Brahms wrote his Serenades in D and A (Opp. 11 & 12).
So technically young Brahms did occupy a court position.
von Karajan
I disagree about Wagner--he's in the top three, IMO, but that's why they have horse races, huh? -:)
I think Rubinstein's Beethoven (I heard him in '76 when, as I suppose it was in '75, he couldn't see the keyboard due to the macular degeneration) was wonderful too. But Horowitz' Beethoven? I would question that strongly. What a pianist (I heard him in '75, 2nd row center, immediately behind Wanda), but Beethoven? His interpretations leave me cold.
A relevent quote from Cosmic Moral Law:
Aïvonhov speaks from a tradition that recognized a continuum from nature to mind (or life) to spirit, with each transcending yet including the previous. Even in those rare times such a continuum is recognized, it's rarely recognized and understood as it once was; this difference in understanding is reflected in today's politics, science, religion, and art.... Take the case of musical geniuses such as Mozart or Beethoven: they were beings whose brain – or, rather, whose musical nerve centres – had attained such a degree of perfection that they could listen to melodies of the invisible world and, then, write them down on paper. To be sure, it is always possible to 'create' a certain kind of music; all you need is some knowledge of the laws of harmony. In fact, nowadays, music can even be made on computers. But that kind of music cannot give us anything. Many modern musicians are fascinated by these methods of compositions and, instead of rising to the highest regions of their soul in order to receive and record divine harmonies, they sink to a lower level and become more material. It is the machines that are making the music for them!Today's artists are no longer the inspired beings of the past whose first concern was to rise to a higher level and contemplate the beauty of the world above, before trying to express it through their art. In those days they would not begin to create until they sense that they were in communication with the Heavenly regions and had succeeded in contemplating its beauty. They respected and followed the rules of a certain discipline which they handed on to others. Whereas, today, artists have forgotten these traditions; each one works according to his own whims and fancies and it is the most eccentric that are considered to be the finest artists. The truth is that art demands that the artist be initiated, that he know the laws of the universe, for, without that knowledge, he can never be a creator.
- Spiritual Master Omraam Mikhaël Aïvonhov, 1968
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