Music
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At first glance, and even more at first hearing, this acoustic folk-ish duo might make you think of Gillian Welch ("a two-person band named Gillian Welch," according to Gillian Welch the person). And you would be quite right. The comparison is apt and, more importantly, not an over-reach. I'm pretty much in love with this song,
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I will admit, somewhat defiantly, that I sometimes consciously operate on prejudice, especially with regard to the arts, and more especially with regard to music. It's generally not pure prejudice; I usually have at least some reason for supposing that my opinion of this can reasonably, or at least not unreasonably, be extended to that, which
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Supposedly, I don't buy music on physical media anymore. There are various reasons for that, lack of storage space being the major one. But I listened to this album once on Pandora and then ordered the LP. (I assumed my local record stores would not have it, which perhaps I should not have done.) And
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Quite a few years ago, though within this century, I heard this concerto performed live. As I recall, I didn't have a strong reaction to it, which was disappointing, because I had expected, being a great lover of some of Sibelius's symphonies, to like it very much. And though I don't remember it well at
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"The piece was written in Clarens, a Swiss resort on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Tchaikovsky had gone to recover from the depression brought on by his disastrous marriage to Antonina Miliukova. " So says Wikipedia. The poor man. And poor Antonina, too. It seems to be a generally accepted view that Tchaikovsky was homosexual. Whether the marriage
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I had a very minor little argument online recently with someone of the age classified, in that silly system that we seem to be stuck with, as "Generation X", on the subject of the music of the 1980s. "Boomers" like me, he said, could not understand, could not "relate to," that music as people of
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I've been rather busy for the past week or so, and will be for several more days, so I'm going to make this brief. Continuing my tour of the great 19th century violin concertos, sparked by Joseph Joachim's judgment of the four great German ones (Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bruch, Brahms), I've branched out from the Germans.
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With this concerto, I've finished what I call my Joachim project: to get to know the four concertos named by Joseph Joachim (the very famous 19th century violinist) in this remark: The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven's. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest, the
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It seems to be the practice these days to leave out the second "the" and refer to the work as The Art of Fugue. I don't know the reason for that. The German title is "Die Kunst der Fuge," which according to my high school (and little bit of college) German is literally "the art
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I have underrated this concerto. I've listened to it three times over the past week or so, as part of my little project involving Joseph Joachim's view of the greatest violin concertos: The Germans have four violin concertos. The greatest, most uncompromising is Beethoven's. The one by Brahms vies with it in seriousness. The richest,
Light On Dark Water 