Category: Music

Did he? The version I’m familiar with is Boulez saying Shosty was “the second, or even third, pressing of Mahler” (Shostaphobia) A lot of modern masters that have not severed themselves completely from Common Practice are in debt to Mahler some of the time. There’s several pieces I can think of that are very close […]

People pretty universally say the 7th is crap. I think the reason is only the last movement. The first four movements are great. They are quite not as great as the 5th or 6th, which seems to say what they say better. In fact, each of the first three movements seems to be quite close […]

The 8th is a barrage and a tour de force. And it has some amazing moments. But… IMHO you’re on to something there. It is something of a step backwards for Mahler. It is not less competent, but it is less personal, and musically more conservative than what he did before or after. I love […]

Slower than the Mengelberg Andy Anderson linked to, faster than Bernstein’s dirge. Mahler may have played it that fast, but geez, what does the author know about his own text? As Curtis Lindsay said, it is meant to be a song, not the slow-mo ringing of the spheres. Embarrassingly in fact Mahler did make lyrics […]

Mahler is not Schoenberg, and Mahler is not Webern, and Mahler is not Pierre fricking Boulez. He’s still solidly in the Common practice period, and his music is full of “vernacular music” catches, which make his music quite approachable. The marches, the dirges, the ländler, the lieder. But Mahler isn’t Johann Strauss either (despite his […]

There are underlying harmonic patterns that keep recurring in Bach, and that are his convention for moving music forward. The Circle of fifths is particularly prominent in Bach. It’s the kind of thing that writers, to be more complimentary about it, call “inevitable”. (And of course, recurring harmonic patterns make it predictable, at least for […]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4T4vdAV5Vk&list=PLbb22k7us7Y-74-CI7wrIMF6lhpPJ1riN&index=7 Agree with Patrick Alan Burke. I’ll add that the Lydian sounds more strange to Western ears because it not only changes a pitch in the exclusive Major and Minor modes of Common Practice: it changes one of the core pitches of the scale, IV♯, which is disorienting for Western ears. (It makes me smug […]

Not a hip hop lyric, but then the OP didn’t put that in the question. When I was a young lad, I lived in Crete, and I explored Cretan folk music, because that’s what you hear in Crete. One of the greats of Cretan folk music was Kostas Mountakis. Nikos Xilouris was greater and more […]

It’s an awful question to pose, to pick just one (or even several). I’m forcing myself to limit myself to five: The 2nd movement of the Ninth: a dialectic of nostalgia and dissolution, of wistfulness and nihilism. The 1st movement of the Ninth: an astonishing accomplishment both formally (everything is in the first two bars) […]