Are there any composers who are better able to manipulate and enrapture a listener than Stravinsky? I am shocked, SHOCKED I say, at how long it has taken me to finally listen to Le Sacre Du Printemps (The Rite of Spring)…why the hell didn’t anyone tell me how freaking AWESOME it is??
I know, I know…there are plenty of people out there saying it, if I only had ears to hear…
I have loved Tchiakovsky and Brahms and Mozart and a lot of modern “alternative” music but only recently have I “discovered” Stravinsky. Holy shit! It reminds me of when I finally “discovered” Ingmar Bergman or when I “discovered” Vonnegut.
What’s the quote in the back of my mind somewhere, about being able to divide all music into two groups, ‘before le sacre’ and ‘after le sacre’?
Give Gorecki’s second symphony a try. The BBC Music review on that page gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect. (Note this isn’t the far better-known 3rd symphony, although that’s a good piece too.)
Philip Glass who I only discovered through his film scores. There is a generous amount of streamed music available to listen to at the site. Listen to Prelude to Akhnaten from Violin Concert it is a magical musical trick as clever as Bolero. If you like Stravinski’s music you should find lots of similarity in ideas with Glass.
Ravel did much more than write “Bolero” and orchestrate “Pictures at an Exhibition”. Listen to the second suite from his ballet “Daphnis and Chloe”.
And Debussy wrote much more than “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun”, “Claire de Lune” and “Reverie”. Listen to “La Mer” and his 3 nocturnes for orchestra.
Purely by similarity of surname, this has reminded me of another one: rent a copy of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. If you haven’t seen it, watch it and get that out of the way. Now, watch it again, but at all times concentrate on the music. It’s a fantastic build-up through the first fifteen or twenty minutes before the first real release of musical tension. And the end (well, the last half hour) is sublime.
(And now watch any John Williams-scored film and try the same )
E.S. Posthumus is a music group that produces cinematic style music. It is a form of epic classical that fuses intertwined drum beats with orchestral and electronic sounds. Their music is inspired by the Pythagorean Philosophy which states that “music is the harmonization of opposites; the conciliation of warring elements.” The “E.S.” stands for “Experimental Sounds” while “Posthumus” is said to represent “all things past”.
This is a great library of BBC programmes exploring individual pieces, including some of the ones already mentioned. And the Rite, too, so I’d strongly recommend listening to that one, to further understand how the piece is put together.
…and having started actually listening to the Rite of Spring programme, it’s absolutely fascinating, relating Stravinsky’s music to the real folk musics which were used as raw material, with examples of each compared to the various parts of his end result.
If you dig Stravinsky, check out some Arnold Schoenberg. I particularly love Transfigured Night (though I hear it’s not regarded highly by people who know more about music than I do).
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