This thread is for the discussion of music in the Western classical tradition.
>How do I get into classical? This link has resources including audio courses, textbooks and selections of recordings to help you start to understand and appreciate classical music: pastebin.com/NBEp2VFh
cool post, but have you considered making it on instead? As you can see in your address bar this is
Carter Adams
>Has one, and have the Herren musicologists, really forgotten, that Bach appeared so “incomprehensible” to his time, that he was actually recognized during his own lifetime not as a composer, but rather only as a virtuoso? How much abuse did the divinely favored Mozart have to endure? Was it not said that he — Mozart — composed too “densely” and orchestrated too “noisily”?!
>And how did the German critics behave toward Beethoven? Did not the majority of Beethoven’s contemporaries consider him completely insane? I cite here an assessment of the great Leonore overture: “rhapsodies of an incurable madman!” [“Rhapsodien eines unheilbar dem Wahnsinn Verfallenen!”] (And one could introduce here hundreds of similar views from “professional circles.”) How many difficult battles had to transpire before, for instance, Schumann achieved his “breakthrough”?! (He himself of course did not live to see this.) Have the immensely dire years of suffering of a R. Wagner been forgotten already? Have even the Herren music historians forgotten them?
>And Brahms: were not all Brahms’s symphonies received at their first hearing with icy remoteness? And Bruckner and Hugo Wolf? Was it not E. Hanslick who regarding Bruckner could write with cold blood the beautiful words: “This music stinks!” (By the way, Hanslick also wrote many books on music!) And when one compares the critiques that have been written in abundance against Beethoven, against Schubert, Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Bruckner, and H. Wolf — when one compares these to that with which Herr Professor Dr. Riemann’s protest seeks to brand the devilish moderns, one finds a remarkable similarity: it is the battle waged by those who no longer have anything to contribute against the impetuous progressives! — But hail, hail to those who are “evaluated” in the same way that the great immortal figures were once evaluated! It is an extraordinary honor for us disciples who, our health unaffected by the tuberculor pallor of remote theory, plant our trees in the eternally blossoming forest of German art with fresh daring and faith in the Germanic spirit.
Elijah Brooks
utter garbage
Noah Miller
In response to the question “What is Johann Sebastian Bach to me, and what does he mean to our time?”
>For me, Seb. Bach is the beginning and end of all music. All true progress is based on and rests with him! >What Seb. Bach means — pardon — ought to mean for our time? >A most powerful and inexhaustible remedy not only for all those composers and performers who have become ill from “misunderstood Wagner,” but also for all those “contemporaries” who suffer from spinal atrophy [Rückenmarkschwindsucht] of all kinds. To be “Bachian” means to be proto-Germanic, unyielding. >That Bach could be misjudged for so long is the greatest disgrace for the “critical wisdom” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.