Boy playing violin in Iraq. Photo by Julie Adnan, Reuters.
(via amodernmanifesto)
Boy playing violin in Iraq. Photo by Julie Adnan, Reuters.
(via amodernmanifesto)
[With Carmina Burana, Carl Orff] sought to attain a timelessness that he sensed in early composers like Monteverdi, and fabricated his own medieval chimera to that end. Although it sounds very little like medieval music, ”Carmina Burana” transports audiences to a dream of the past. For all its fleshiness, the music feels fake because the world it conjures never existed. This makes it suited to the film genres of fantasy, action-adventure and horror. Whether it adds to the glamour of the Arthurian knights or of rock’s Lizard King, Jim Morrison (Oliver Stone used elements of Ray Manzarek’s rock version of the piece for his soundtrack to his film ”The Doors,”), ”Carmina Burana’s” dynamic illusions help erase any thoughts of the outside world. The fantasy that ”Carmina Burana” creates is the source of its pleasures.
I want the dress, and I want to hear what it sounds like.
The Score Is Not The Music
David Cope wrote a computer program, called Emily Howell, that can compose music. There are snippets of the music all over the internet if you google David Cope, but Centaur Records released an album of the music in 2010.
The fact that the music is musical makes a lot of people feel very uncomfortable. If a machine can make music that might move us, what does that mean about our creativity.
“The question isn’t whether computers have a soul, but whether humans have a soul.”
-David Cope
A book was compiled on the issue - Virtual Music - with commentary from cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, it’s a fascinating question.
But this is a charge that can be leveled at Bach generally: being too excellent. A reviewer at a recital I played (Ives’ first Sonata and the Goldbergs) complained that he wished Bach would have let himself be more Ivesian, thrown in some wrong notes, let himself go. Ha, take that, Johann Sebastian! The Kalamazoo press just totally trashed you! I often talk about Bach as a great humanist, as having an empathy for the whole range of human emotion. (Rather than the cerebral, fugal stereotype.) I love the way his music seems to look down on the whole human deal, but not condescendingly, with (now I’m letting myself rhapsodize subjectively) a kind of benevolent understanding. He does not look down bitterly (like Shostakovich, for instance), saying look at this terrible empty comedy of human emotion. Nor is he himself the emoter, like Beethoven; but he is not distanced, either. He has hit a sweet spot. Perhaps the most serious complaint you could make about Bach is that he has every quality of humanity except imperfection.
– Jeremy Denk on NPR’s Deceptive Cadence
Involved in some particularly dreary rehearsals of Orff’s Carmina Burana so I’ve been doing a little research to keep me motivated. I had no idea the poems were from one manuscript and that the manuscript was so magical!
