Music
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I went to hear the Mobile Symphony last weekend, after having argued with myself about whether it was worth the trouble or not. That's no aspersion on the orchestra; it's just that the main attraction was Brahms's Fourth, a work that I love and know pretty well, and I was not sure the pleasure of…
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(The title is for you, Stu) For various logistical reasons we didn't go to the Easter Vigil at the cathedral this year, or even to our regular parish, but rather to a very small parish in a very small town a bit further away than our own. Well, why not be specific? It was St.…
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One of the composers on that disk of miscellaneous, indeed wildly heterogenous, classical music that I mentioned last week is Bartok. All six of his string quartets are there, and, as I also mentioned, the way the MP3 files are named means that the movements of the quartets are scattered among other pieces of music.…
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I’m not tough enough or self-denying enough to give up listening to music during Lent. But I do usually limit myself to classical music, and within that tend to favor works that are either explicitly religious (like Bach’s liturgical music) or at least of a contemplative and reflective cast. To that end I swapped the…
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I’ve been meaning to mention this novel, and putting it off because I felt that it deserved a fuller treatment than I had time to give it. But today I’m giving up. I have a busy few days coming up, and rather than put it off again I’m just going to say a little and…
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If you don't know that Big Star is a band, you probably don't care. If you do know, you probably have your own opinions, and might or might not be interested in hearing mine. But what's the point of having a blog if you don't opine on what interests you? Big Star, by the way,…
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This is another trip into the only partially explored territory of music I bought in MP3 format when it was very inexpensive at eMusic.com, and I could experiment in a way that I never could have before. His Name Is Alive: Livonia To some of us, the phrase "4AD in the 1980s" suggests magic. 4AD, in…
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I was working on a post earlier today but didn’t have time to finish it, and may not tomorrow, so, briefly: A remark from a priest seen on Facebook on Thursday: “I thought I was having an epiphany this morning but it was transferred to Sunday.” This evening my wife and I were shamefully late…
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Having had such a great experience with #6 a couple of weeks ago, I was eager to hear these. As with the Pathetique, I had not, as far as I can recall, heard them since I was in my early 20s. So I did, and it was a mistake. It was too soon. It was…
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Here's another recent discovery from the embarrassingly large number of recordings I acquired some time ago and never really listened to. Once again I put a CD full of MP3 files (over a hundred tracks) in my car player and listened to them one or two at a time as I ran little errands around…
Light On Dark Water 