I used to be married into a family of world-famous violinists. Musical theory? Check. Art? Check. Music as God? Check. ( Except for some composers, where the correct answer is Czech. ). And yet never, ever, never did I hear ANYONE in that family support the bullshittyshit proposition that sitting in a large auditorium facing a stage filled with an orchestra and a conductor who are all counting silently to themselves whilst never once picking up their instrument to make a sound, was music.
Aside from taking their word as fact in a lot of areas of musical theory, performance and composition since I’m no musician, I will state here that I am a music lover. Not all music. Some music. From classical to prog rock to hip-hop, I’ll listen. This? This is the sound you hear as you are falling asleep. The sound of your blood pounding in your inner ear canal. It’s the sound of blood. It’s not music. It just isn’t.
Believe it or not ( with my OP ), I wouldn’t. That’s because if I had bought a ticket to this…uh…performance, I’d know exactly what I was in for.
If, for some reason, I’d randomly bought a ticket to a classical music concert because I found myself in town and was traveling and thought, " Hell- I’ll go see a concert ! " then perhaps a refund would be in order.
Or alternately, self-immolation in the lobby after. Whichever…
You’re a fan of silent musical performances? Well, you are the first to be invited to purchase two tickets to the world premiere of my new magnum opus.
It’s a little ditty I like to call “In Feces et Lucusta et Matre.”. The second half of the performance will be the 25th anniversary performance of my other well-known work, " De obscenitatibus , horroris tuxedo vermibus."
Tickets are $ 225.00 per seat. Two ticket minimum.
The audience will sit and listen to no musical notes being played, while they get to listen to the mellifluous sounds of a mature female lobster defecating over a state-of-the-art ceramic microphone.
Agreed. I wouldn’t buy a ticket, however, because sometimes supporting the arts isn’t about the tickets purchased; sometimes it is about the tickets that aren’t purchased.
It does, Monty. Attending the performance linked above would be a bit like walking past a girl you like in High School as you enter the school for the day and then walking past her to the busses at 2:45pm and whisper, " you were awesome "…having never seen or spoken to her.
You cannot have a rest when there has been no movement, as Czarcasm points out.
It’s hack work. The bemused smug smirks evident on the faces of some of the audience members really sealed it for me. Can you imagine the obligatory post- performance gatherings at local Pinot Noir huts? "I lurved the fourth movement from 3:22-4:18 !!! Oh, how evocative !!! "
More seriously, while I have no problem with the original performance of the piece and think it did what modern art does pretty well, I do find new performances of it totally eye-rolly. Whatever the original piece accomplished is already done. Re-performing it is like tearing another urinal off another wall and calling it art.
Often the problem with such transcription and adaptation, don’t you think? I much prefer Pictures at an Exhibition as the original piano piece, as an orchestra work it seems bloated and pretentious. If Ravel and Moussorgsky are both in Heaven, I doubt they are on speaking terms.
And as you might expect, given our increasingly depraved “culture”, the instrumentation suffers from too much sax and violins.
I listened to the OP’s link with my laptop on mute, and it took things to a whole new level of not listening to music. Alternately, if the true essence of this song is whatever vibrations are entering my ears while I’m watching musicians not doing anything with their instruments, then this was the best performance I have ever heard of the Tigers-Giants baseball game on TV.