Revelatory Music
Mar. 16th, 2007 12:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
porphyryM. Ward,
I don’t think I can manage five recordings.
I saw 2001 at its initial release when I was 4 years old (the only good thing my father ever did for me was to introduce to the best cinema) and it made an overwhelming impact.
When I was in the fourth grade I got my first pitiful portable picnic player and happened to find the soundtrack of 2001 in the remained bin at a Kressgie’s for 99 cents. My so-called school-mates were already beginning to form their identifies through sub-servience to the latest trends in marketing and advertising (I recall one particularly annoying bastard was becoming keen on Elton John), so it seemed a perfectly natural thing for me to fortify my isolation from their world by turning to a form of music that they already reflexively ridiculed but whose worth was already apparent to me. Also, unlike them (but like yourself) I realized that the music used in the Warner Brothers cartoon shorts was all Classical. So that album led to more of Strauss and then Liszt, and so on.
By the time I was 13 I faciley accepted the idea that opera was inherently tedious, maintaining this even having heard a number of performances on the Met broadcasts and on record. I attribute this to the horrible lifeless Met simul-casts on PBS whose images involved virtually no cutting to speak of—I could see well enough how bad they were as films (by this time I was becoming with the work of Nykvist and other editors) and assumed the music, which I could not quite detach from that context, was no better. This changed when I went to see a double bill of Lousey’s Don Giovanni and Bergman’s Trollflöjten, to which I was attracted by the reputation the latter had built up with me already (this was at the Tivioli before its restoration, perhaps Siamhussein recalls it). This was a truly electrifying experience: I had to stay and see the program a second time and I went back the next day also. After that I wanted nothing but opera. I soon acquired the soundtrack of the Don (Abbado with Raimondi, van Dam, Te Kanawa), and the von Karajan Zauberflötte.
(since this is the internet, after all you might want to look here:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073822/usercomments
The first comment seems apt, but the hippy a few down who read the Neoplatonic content of the allegory as Buddhist is hilarious).
And this strange little site:
http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/magic_flute_bibliography.htm
I was going to link to Birgit Nordin’s site, but its evidently been taken down. I wonder if she has died?).
Other than that I can’t think of any particular albums that changed my life, and those are really all films aren’t they? I can’t even say that one particular Authentic Performance Practice recording had a revelatory influence, though for years I rather couldn’t distinguish between Hogwood and God.
My wife will be heartened to hear that you listen to the Cure.
I don’t think I can manage five recordings.
I saw 2001 at its initial release when I was 4 years old (the only good thing my father ever did for me was to introduce to the best cinema) and it made an overwhelming impact.
When I was in the fourth grade I got my first pitiful portable picnic player and happened to find the soundtrack of 2001 in the remained bin at a Kressgie’s for 99 cents. My so-called school-mates were already beginning to form their identifies through sub-servience to the latest trends in marketing and advertising (I recall one particularly annoying bastard was becoming keen on Elton John), so it seemed a perfectly natural thing for me to fortify my isolation from their world by turning to a form of music that they already reflexively ridiculed but whose worth was already apparent to me. Also, unlike them (but like yourself) I realized that the music used in the Warner Brothers cartoon shorts was all Classical. So that album led to more of Strauss and then Liszt, and so on.
By the time I was 13 I faciley accepted the idea that opera was inherently tedious, maintaining this even having heard a number of performances on the Met broadcasts and on record. I attribute this to the horrible lifeless Met simul-casts on PBS whose images involved virtually no cutting to speak of—I could see well enough how bad they were as films (by this time I was becoming with the work of Nykvist and other editors) and assumed the music, which I could not quite detach from that context, was no better. This changed when I went to see a double bill of Lousey’s Don Giovanni and Bergman’s Trollflöjten, to which I was attracted by the reputation the latter had built up with me already (this was at the Tivioli before its restoration, perhaps Siamhussein recalls it). This was a truly electrifying experience: I had to stay and see the program a second time and I went back the next day also. After that I wanted nothing but opera. I soon acquired the soundtrack of the Don (Abbado with Raimondi, van Dam, Te Kanawa), and the von Karajan Zauberflötte.
(since this is the internet, after all you might want to look here:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073822/usercomments
The first comment seems apt, but the hippy a few down who read the Neoplatonic content of the allegory as Buddhist is hilarious).
And this strange little site:
http://www.bergmanorama.com/films/magic_flute_bibliography.htm
I was going to link to Birgit Nordin’s site, but its evidently been taken down. I wonder if she has died?).
Other than that I can’t think of any particular albums that changed my life, and those are really all films aren’t they? I can’t even say that one particular Authentic Performance Practice recording had a revelatory influence, though for years I rather couldn’t distinguish between Hogwood and God.
My wife will be heartened to hear that you listen to the Cure.
