yamamanama (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
yamamanama) wrote2025-02-18 06:15 pm
yamamanama) wrote2025-02-18 06:15 pm
the edge of reason
29 days until the vernal equinox
All of us are passionated and dedicated people.
Zander leaves pieces of paper for the orchestra to write down any comments or concerns they have. One of them said that “I really needed all of that beauty tonight in this time of despair and confusion.” Mahler and Strauss are quite apropos for these times. Maybe not necessarily for their music but for the context in which they lived.
He did that Mahler years ago. And ten years ago, he did this exact program on a terrible snowy day.
The Four Last Songs are, appropriately, the last thing Richard Strauss ever wrote at the end of his life. He started with Josef von Eichendorff’s In Abendrot (In Evening’s Glow).
By 1946, you’d expect something modern but no, this is all looking back. He wrote for a grand Romantic orchestra. He even quotes his own Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration).
As it goes on, it gets more weary and dark, then still and calm, and larks of flute and piccolo, the souls ascending up to the sky. You don’t want to clap at the ending and break the silence but someone has to.
Then he had to add something to it. So he picked three poems by Hermann Hesse. Frühling (meaning spring, coming from the words früh meaning early and -ling meaning -ness) is a very early and romantic poem with birdsongs. It starts in darkness, as spring does.
September in Germany is still September. Erenow I've not been out of the country so I don't know if September has a different sort of quality to it there. The poet is seventy one years old and welcoming death though he lived another 14 years. It ends in D major, a deep nameless emotion, and features a horn solo in honor of his father.
Beim Schlafengehen (before sleeping) depicts a starry night and ends in D♭ major. It seems abrupt to go from D♭ major to E♭ major. Strauss himself never heard this performed.
Mahler’s 4th symphony always makes me think of winter. Maybe it’s the sleigh bells. It evokes more a winter wonderland while outside was more like White Magick’s Embrace. Maybe the Ice Field of Clearsight if you were in the Common.
If you have a lot of time to spare, you can pair this up with the Third Symphony and notice that yes, the last movement was written as the seventh movement of the Third Symphony What The Child Tells Me but it was already almost an hour and forty minutes long. Longest symphony ever. Well, not really, but the longer ones by Kaikhōsrū Sōrābjī and Dimitrie Cuclin have never been performed, let alone recorded.
4 is a good introduction to Mahler’s music. it’s short, it doesn’t require a massive orchestra, and it’s not aggressive. There are parts of it that are almost Classical.
The poem it uses is from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which is a two-parter with The Earlthly Life that depicts a boy who wants bread but his mother has to do all the stuff to make the bread, growing the corn and reaping the corn and threshing the corn and baking the bread (so. corn. If you’re wondering why the Latin word Spica means corn when the Roman empire fell long before the Columbian Interchange (not to be confused with the Great American Interchange, which was caused by Central America forming and allowing camelids to migrate to South America and opossums, sloths, and terror birds to migrate to North America), the word corn can refer to any cereal grain and not just maize) and by the time she actually takes the bread out of the oven, the boy dies. The second poem is The Heavenly Life. Heaven has food and good music. Om nom nom nom nom nom. As the lamb gets slaughtered, an oboe goes waaah. As an ox gets slaughtered, something goes urrrrrrrr. Maybe it was that same oboe. Maybe it was a bassoon. I don’t know. People can talk faster than I can write. And I'm using my sketchbook, which is 14x21 cm as a surface and the paper is standard size printer paper and that makes it even more awkward. Zander's used a boy soprano but for reasons, you have to use an adult.
Mahler knew poverty. And also death.
Eighteen years after writing this, Mahler dug it up and built the rest of the 4th symphony around it.
There are some sketches that alternate purely instrumental music with lyrical songs, which includes that The Earthly Life as well as The Heavenly Life.
So it ends up a journey from Mahlerian complexity to simplicity. The military marches are in there too, although there is no tuba and no trombone.
Zander called the violin tuned up the Devil but the booklet and Wikipedia call it Death.
High strung describes a violin under standard tuning. Tuning it up an octave, well.
The second violinist plays a regular violin.
Mahler described the Adagio as his finest slow movement. There’s a part when the gates of Heaven open up.
I got a burger because that was the least amount of trudging through slush I’d have to do to get something to eat. Another patron had neon pink hair and a coat of a peculiar shade of mint green not found in nature and I’m extra-impressed because it’s winter and there’s no color to be found but gray, brown, white, sky blue, and drab greens.
Caitlin is not an artist. Julia, on the other hand, does sculpture and photography. She has long fingers and a quiet voice. There was a passenger on the Green Line who had a d20 pendant and a translucent cherry pendant but she got on at Boylston and I was getting off at Park Street.
Julia liked the drawing despite the fact that I depicted her in multiple positions at once.
burning question: O weiter, stiller Friede! So tief im Abendrot. Wie sind wir wandermüde – Ist dies etwa der Tod?
All of us are passionated and dedicated people.
Zander leaves pieces of paper for the orchestra to write down any comments or concerns they have. One of them said that “I really needed all of that beauty tonight in this time of despair and confusion.” Mahler and Strauss are quite apropos for these times. Maybe not necessarily for their music but for the context in which they lived.
He did that Mahler years ago. And ten years ago, he did this exact program on a terrible snowy day.
The Four Last Songs are, appropriately, the last thing Richard Strauss ever wrote at the end of his life. He started with Josef von Eichendorff’s In Abendrot (In Evening’s Glow).
By 1946, you’d expect something modern but no, this is all looking back. He wrote for a grand Romantic orchestra. He even quotes his own Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration).
As it goes on, it gets more weary and dark, then still and calm, and larks of flute and piccolo, the souls ascending up to the sky. You don’t want to clap at the ending and break the silence but someone has to.
Then he had to add something to it. So he picked three poems by Hermann Hesse. Frühling (meaning spring, coming from the words früh meaning early and -ling meaning -ness) is a very early and romantic poem with birdsongs. It starts in darkness, as spring does.
September in Germany is still September. Erenow I've not been out of the country so I don't know if September has a different sort of quality to it there. The poet is seventy one years old and welcoming death though he lived another 14 years. It ends in D major, a deep nameless emotion, and features a horn solo in honor of his father.
Beim Schlafengehen (before sleeping) depicts a starry night and ends in D♭ major. It seems abrupt to go from D♭ major to E♭ major. Strauss himself never heard this performed.
Mahler’s 4th symphony always makes me think of winter. Maybe it’s the sleigh bells. It evokes more a winter wonderland while outside was more like White Magick’s Embrace. Maybe the Ice Field of Clearsight if you were in the Common.
If you have a lot of time to spare, you can pair this up with the Third Symphony and notice that yes, the last movement was written as the seventh movement of the Third Symphony What The Child Tells Me but it was already almost an hour and forty minutes long. Longest symphony ever. Well, not really, but the longer ones by Kaikhōsrū Sōrābjī and Dimitrie Cuclin have never been performed, let alone recorded.
4 is a good introduction to Mahler’s music. it’s short, it doesn’t require a massive orchestra, and it’s not aggressive. There are parts of it that are almost Classical.
The poem it uses is from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which is a two-parter with The Earlthly Life that depicts a boy who wants bread but his mother has to do all the stuff to make the bread, growing the corn and reaping the corn and threshing the corn and baking the bread (so. corn. If you’re wondering why the Latin word Spica means corn when the Roman empire fell long before the Columbian Interchange (not to be confused with the Great American Interchange, which was caused by Central America forming and allowing camelids to migrate to South America and opossums, sloths, and terror birds to migrate to North America), the word corn can refer to any cereal grain and not just maize) and by the time she actually takes the bread out of the oven, the boy dies. The second poem is The Heavenly Life. Heaven has food and good music. Om nom nom nom nom nom. As the lamb gets slaughtered, an oboe goes waaah. As an ox gets slaughtered, something goes urrrrrrrr. Maybe it was that same oboe. Maybe it was a bassoon. I don’t know. People can talk faster than I can write. And I'm using my sketchbook, which is 14x21 cm as a surface and the paper is standard size printer paper and that makes it even more awkward. Zander's used a boy soprano but for reasons, you have to use an adult.
Mahler knew poverty. And also death.
Eighteen years after writing this, Mahler dug it up and built the rest of the 4th symphony around it.
There are some sketches that alternate purely instrumental music with lyrical songs, which includes that The Earthly Life as well as The Heavenly Life.
So it ends up a journey from Mahlerian complexity to simplicity. The military marches are in there too, although there is no tuba and no trombone.
Zander called the violin tuned up the Devil but the booklet and Wikipedia call it Death.
High strung describes a violin under standard tuning. Tuning it up an octave, well.
The second violinist plays a regular violin.
Mahler described the Adagio as his finest slow movement. There’s a part when the gates of Heaven open up.
I got a burger because that was the least amount of trudging through slush I’d have to do to get something to eat. Another patron had neon pink hair and a coat of a peculiar shade of mint green not found in nature and I’m extra-impressed because it’s winter and there’s no color to be found but gray, brown, white, sky blue, and drab greens.
Caitlin is not an artist. Julia, on the other hand, does sculpture and photography. She has long fingers and a quiet voice. There was a passenger on the Green Line who had a d20 pendant and a translucent cherry pendant but she got on at Boylston and I was getting off at Park Street.
Julia liked the drawing despite the fact that I depicted her in multiple positions at once.
burning question: O weiter, stiller Friede! So tief im Abendrot. Wie sind wir wandermüde – Ist dies etwa der Tod?