From: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org (stillpt-digest) To: stillpt-digest@smoe.org Subject: stillpt-digest V3 #202 Reply-To: stillpt@smoe.org Sender: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-stillpt-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk stillpt-digest Thursday, December 27 2001 Volume 03 : Number 202 Today's Subjects: ----------------- b/ASH interview ["David S. Bratman" ] m/Shostakovich ["David S. Bratman" ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 00:10:02 -0800 From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: b/ASH interview http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/dynamic/lifestyle/londonlife/top_review.html?i n_review_id=484308&in_text_id=440920 >After five years on the cult show, he is back in Britain and soon to be seen >in a BBC2 comedy called Manchild, a sort of Sex and the City for >fifty-something Englishmen. > >He has done too much vampire-slaying, however, to easily shake off the >Gothic. Posing for pictures this morning, he is drawn with childish glee to >a conveniently spooky grotto in the grounds of the Bath Spa Hotel. On a >whim, I ask if his character in Buffy has his own action figure toy. "Oh >yes," he boasts, "I articulate in 14 positions _and_ I'm a choking hazard." - - submitted by a proud owner of the above-referenced ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 27 Dec 2001 00:11:12 -0800 From: "David S. Bratman" Subject: m/Shostakovich Amazing article (a book review in disguise, really) by Richard Taruskin. http://www.tnr.com/122401/taruskin122401.html I was particularly taken by a section that amounts to a manifesto for my "hidden city" theory of 20th century classical music - which states, basically, that while enforced modernism ruled the land, there were composers - and fiction writers (like Tolkien), artists, etc. - operating below the high-cultural radar writing music that was great and distinctly modern while still appealing, and all that was necessary was to get academia to admit it. >The only time I recall hearing the music of Shostakovich in the classroom >during my undergraduate and graduate years (roughly the 1960s) was when the >"invasion" episode from his Seventh ("Leningrad") Symphony was juxtaposed >with Bartok's mockery of it in his Concerto for Orchestra, and we were all >invited to mock along. Then, I suppose, we went back to analyzing >Schoenberg's technical innovations. > >Soon afterward I was forced to revise my opinion, not only about >Shostakovich but about my own education in music. I spent the academic year >1971-1972 as an exchange student at the Moscow Conservatory, researching a >dissertation on Russian opera in the 1860s. The better part of my time, in >every sense of the word, was devoted to socializing with my Soviet >counterparts and attending concerts and opera performances. Many of those >events were devoted, naturally, to works by Shostakovich. At one concert I >heard the Seventh Symphony, performed under Kirill Kondrashin in the >Conservatory's fabled Great Hall. I knew the work not only as the butt of >Bartsk's sarcasm, but also as the object of one of Virgil Thomson's >snottiest reviews. Connoisseurs of musical invective knew Thomson's text >practically by heart. It opened with the remark that "whether one is able to >listen without mind-wandering to the Seventh Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich >probably depends on the rapidity of one's musical perceptions; it seems to >have been written for the slow-witted, the not very musical and the >distracted"; and it ended with an immortal insult: "That he has so >deliberately diluted his matter, adapted it, by both excessive >simplification and excessive repetition, to the comprehension of a child of >eight, indicates that he is willing to write down to a real or fictitious >psychology of mass consumption in a way that may eventually disqualify him >for consideration as a serious composer." > >Since deriding this symphony was a badge of musical sophistication where I >came from, I glanced at appropriate moments at my Soviet companions, hoping >to exchange a wink. But no: my friends, who were at least as learned and as >intelligent as I was, and who were normally just as irreverent about >everything that students are supposed to be irreverent about, were >mesmerized. I glanced around the hall and noticed my scholarly adviser, a >deeply erudite musicologist, and also some composition students I knew from >the dormitory who were studying with Denisov and Schnittke, the touted >non-conformists of the day, and even (privately) with Philip Gershkovich, >the shadowy ex-Webernite who was keeping the sputtering flame of modernism >alive somewhere in darkest Moscow. They, too, were in a trance. > >These were not eight-year-olds. There was nothing wrong with their musical >perceptions. For their quick wits and musicality I could certainly vouch. >The awful thought seized me that they valued this music, which I had been >taught to despise, more highly than I valued any music, and that >Shostakovich meant more to his society (and their society) than any composer >meant to my society. For the first time there occurred to me, half-formed, >the unbearable suspicion that the ways of listening to music and thinking >about music that had been instilled in me and all my peers at home were >impoverished ways. ------------------------------ End of stillpt-digest V3 #202 *****************************