Category: Music

Brian van der Spuy is quite right that the extensive orchestral palette is in line with Mahler’s desire to encompass the world in his symphonies. Howard Levitsky’s answer, featuring Gershwin’s car horns, is ironic, given the contemporary reaction to the cowbells in Mahler’s 6th: Gustav Mahler Pictures The cartoon’s caption reads: “Herr Gott! Daß ich […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Dexterity in playing a musical instrument is all about muscle memory, not looking at the fingerboard. After all, you’re meant to play the violin while reading a score. And the fingerboard is in a rather awkward position to be staring at all the time anyway. So, if there is no score around to be read, […]