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| Arts copyright False Memory Foam™ Art Department O'Art© Dept. |
Arnold Bax is this Brit what wrote big violin music for them bands what need a stiff in a tux pointin' at them wit' a stick. Currently holed up in a palm-leaf hut on th' IoF© to avoid his creditors, Arnie and me chatted poolside whilst [grammar - Ed.] Rholonne Déodoranté served crispy hens' knees on a bed of surgery waste [Kreemé is currently interning for Bob Dylan - Ed.]
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| Rholonne Déodoranté |
FT3 So tell us for why you got into this longhair music, Arnie!
AB Duh. To get laid. Why does any guy go into the music business?
FT3 Did it work?
AB Oh sure. Dames fall for dat sufferin' artiste shit, like you wouldn't believe.
FT3 How did you come to write that First Symphony album?
AB I wants to write a Fifth, like dat one Beethoven guy, so I gots to start somewhere.
FT3 Talk us through the composition process, Arnie!
AB What? I don't know. I just sits dere at th' pianny wit' like dis big book o' pages wit' like lines on dem, and I put dese li'l dots in? Den some dame sashays in wit' her robe open an' drapes herself across me lap and I gets distracted. Den after I takes her roughly from behind on the piany stool, why, I casts her aside like yestiddy's dog race ticket! I stands there pushin' me fingers thru me hair sayin' how is th' artiste to compose when dames such as like you puts temptation in me way? She's hangin' on to me ankles and I'm draggin' her across th' floor.
FT3 This really happens?
AB You kiddin'? You're dumber than you look. Composin' snob music for posh twats is no way to pick up dames. I shoulda bin in dem Rolling Stones. They do all right.
This post approved by Velda Sputnik for the Commies Code Authority©
You want Arnie's first album? It's pretty good as first albums go.
ReplyDeleteWhat classic-type albums do you lissen to?
Tons of Tchaikovsky (Nutcracker, Swan Lake) since Ms Pmac was in companies that danced to them, Bernstein (West Side Story and Rhapsody in Blue) and always a sucker for deBussy.
ReplyDeleteCareful how you spell that last one pmac, especially with your NOLA accent...
ReplyDeleteMyself, I'm a sucker for Bee's 9th--what can I say--and oddly fond of Wynton Marsalis' Baroque Music for Trumpets, which feels like an homage to my father, who loved trumpet music of lit-er-al-ly any stripe but had a fondness for baroque trumpet music (and Ziggy Ellman...?). One of the best moments of my youngish life (21) was having a Saturday midnigh-6A show on WRKF, BRLA's public radio station and fighting one of it's founders and directors, Constance Navratil (and her ridiculous "Britlish" accent), about playing the music I played. I had been hired to sit out in their literally and figuratively ratty trailer studio to play tapes of some classical crap and figured out nobody cared if instead I played punk/new wave/whateverthehellIwanted and I did. Constance was not amused, but I had increased listeners from like 3 to, I dunno, 37. So a meeting was called--after she called and whined to my mother, mind you, essentially about how poorly I'd been raised--for me to "explain myself." My explanation, as I remember it, was that Vivaldi's The Four Seasons (Summer - 3rd Movement), Grieg's In the Hall of the Mountain King, Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, and Prokofiev's Toccata in C Minor were the basis of rock & roll. Props to my parents, who pulled that bullshit out for me. Constance was beside herself, the station admins loved it, and for the rest of that summer my show rocked & rolled on...
Was RKF the station that in the late 70s-80s had an elderly guy who spun jazz records starting around 10pm? There were some damn good djs on that station, in spite of Constance.
DeleteThe very same...
DeleteWhen I was growing up back in the 1950s-60s, my parents had an actual LP collection, including some serious classical music. As I got more acclimated to this sort of thing, Stravinsky's Firebird got to be my favorite of the lot.
ReplyDeleteOne day they brought home another album by that Stravinsky guy, which I checked out the next time they left me alone with the record player. I was maybe eight then. I wasn't ready for it at all-- it scared the bejesus out of me, to the point where I actually hid behind the sofa. Of course, it was the Rite of Spring. Took me a year or two before I could really wrap my ears around it. Now of course it's a great favorite, but now I also listen to the likes of Messiaen and Subotnick and Fred Frith.
This piece brings up some themes that are as yet unexplored by th' 4/5g© - can the imperative to succeed in artistic creation be carnal in nature, and therefore antipathetic to the presence of the Muse?
ReplyDeleteI don't know about that, maybe I should ask AI? Nice to see Rholonne Déodoranté popping into the office though.
DeleteI mean, I'm trying to raise the tone here, but it looks like a lost cause with youse bums.
ReplyDeleteMichael Nyman - especially the Peter Greenaway soundtracks.
ReplyDeleteAlso Gavin Bryars' "Sinking of the Titanic"...all versions are excellent!
~ Jon in California
Erik Satie - The Flower Duet is stunning. Chopin Nocturnes Opus 9 in particular. I prefer Chinese classical above all else. The Hugo Masters Series is the best thing out there. I first heard it on a riverboat back to Bangkok from a day trip to Ayutthia. I miss life.
ReplyDeleteIt's still out here, 5GW.
DeletePerhaps this doesn’t reflect well on me but I use classical music to drift off to sleep at night. At the moment in the UK we have The Proms from The Royal Albert Hall to enjoy on the radio daily, with selected concerts on the TV too. I note that this evening (Friday UK time) on BBC TV they are broadcasting the Prog Prom that was recorded last weekend - fifty six years after the famous Soft Machine Prom of 1970.
ReplyDeleteI was about to say that's the only Prom I really enjoyed.
DeleteSentimental souvenir: https://workupload.com/file/26jFdbqBarW
There was a Jazz Prom a few years ago curated by Quincy Jones that was very good too. Thanks for the sentimental souvenir.
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoMCtPh5bMQ&list=PL_wuYnCPmNDvBpvCGmjUceolU8l9NAnVl
DeleteYes that's the one Easily, great stuff, I can't believe it was ten years ago.
DeleteBtw I watched the Prog Prom last night, I thought it was mostly very good, they even did a version of Out-Bloody-Rageous from The Soft Machine 1970 prom.
Oof,I like the albums I have collected from the Opus One label. Very difficult to find. Beethoven is a great favorite. But I also listen to many others, Gershwin, Andriessen, Loevendie, Wagner, Berg, Webern, Strawinski and Varese. Last week I heard Copland and Ravel in First day of the Proms. Great.
ReplyDeleteYou're probably familiar with Bax, he seems the angsty type ...
Deleteparents listened to perry como andy williams so i don't really remember where i developed a taste for the classics Haydn: The Seven Last Words of Our Saviour on the Cross, op. 51 by the Borodin Quartett and Carmen in her many forms Pablo Casals' Bach: Cello Suites Nos. 1-6 Vladimir Horowitz's Pictures at an Exhibition Anne Gastinel's BACH Cello Suites just to name a few
ReplyDeletewoody
I was there at that Soft Machine prom in 1970. On the strength of the music I went out and purchased "Third" - still got the original vinyl double album, the prom concert programme and the ticket stub. Back then you could purchase at a discount orice a ticket for 12 prom concerts of choice (with some exceptions), which I did for three or four years. Ah, those golden days of yore. Barbirolli, Boult, Davis etc etc - all long gone.
ReplyDeleteIn no particular order:
ReplyDelete1. Antonín Dvořák
2. Aaron Copland
3. Ralph Vaughan Williams
4. Arvo Pärt
5. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
6. Edvard Grieg
Classical music, for me, is wonderful for allowing my brain to "reset".
Always had a fondness for the John Field Nocturnes cycle especially when played by Elizabeth Joy Roe
ReplyDeleteAfter bathing at th' Baxster:
ReplyDeletehttps://workupload.com/file/TacnrwgZtB4
I'm often approached on the street by citizens desirous to know my stance on classical-type music. "Why," I reply, "It's okay, I guess." I've felt that way since, like, forever. Still feel like it today.
ReplyDeleteAm pig-ignorant about "Classical" music apart from knowing I tend to prefer songs and chamber works to overbearing beetle-browed symphonic gargantuanism.
ReplyDeleteSo much of the "respectable" substrate of legacy European Art Music seems to be about ritualised cosplay, with the punters and the acts LARPing as bourgeois Mitteleuropaeischers of the society that WW1 sounded the death-knell for.
Still hoping to programme a Prom with works like Hussenfegger's Concerto for Poshness and Orchestra (basically a Dom Joly sort in evening dress bawling about how divine his poo smells, to a classical beat) or Jens-Petter Foelskapp's Trumpet Concerto for Piano wherein the soloist (ideally Les Dawson) plays grandiose thunderous chords whilst Sprechgeshouting a very meta libretto about the work itself eg "yes it's a trumpet Concerto played on the fucking piano. Where you expecting Richard Clayderman's arse?"
ReplyDeleteBig admirer of your work, Fanny, but watch that Freudian Fecal Fetish. Metaphorically.
Delete