There is music in the wars around us
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
I am generally resistant to albums that impose an external theme on unrelated pieces of music from different places and times. In this case, it is eastern Europe, 1814 to 2024….
This album comes into its own with the present Ukraine war…
Read on here.
En francais ici.
Careful, Norman, you can expect a deluge of hate mail from your Zionist readers who claim classical music and politics together are anathema.
Very interesting.
Indeed, music can say things about the human condition that words never can, because it bypasses the intellect.
Hence the irony that music, which does not want to ‘speak’ at all, and wants to remain pure sound patterns, nonetheless is experienced by audiences as conveying morbidity, terror, puverizing destruction, etc. etc. – but without the human touch that composers like Shostakovich were able to express.
Xenakis – who, by the way, also suffered through a war period:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3mHXaO88Pw
Shostakovich 2nd Sonata:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfT5I-fbqMs
If I was deaf…would I really care….
I would just take some exception to one statement: that music “bypasses the intellect.” More accurate to say that instrumental music bypasses the part of the intellect dealing with *semantic* meaning. (Which is why I consider instrumental music, along with pure mathematics, to be the highest forms of human intellectual expression.)
Agreed with the part between brackets.
It seems very clear to me that the experience of music does not need any involvement of any intellectual activity at all, which explains the number of [REDACTED] in music life, including [REDACTED].
“Forbidden – Visitors from your country are not permitted to browse this site.”
So much for your so-called anti-war statements.
What are you on about?