I have two young cellists at home who recently sat transfixed through the whole of the Elgar concerto. They don't often sit still at all. So no.
More things like this. Likeable but ultimately wet, and almost criminally disconnected from reality.
I have two young cellists at home who recently sat transfixed through the whole of the Elgar concerto. They don't often sit still at all. So no.
More things like this. Likeable but ultimately wet, and almost criminally disconnected from reality.
I'll stop when I'm dead. The only difference will be I'll sleep-in a little later.
"I meant what I said, not what you heard"--Jflavell
Even Elgar was still under the Germanic influence of Handel through Mendelssohn on British music. But I still enjoy most of it. RVW and (a little) later Holst really skipped back over the Germanic influence and mined directly from the English Renaissance. That made a real difference. Of course, they followed Elgar by many important years--chronologically as well as stylistically. The 'cello concerto just slips into the period between the wars, when RVW--a late starter--was just getting wound up.Originally Posted by cjbroadbent
I agree with Struan that a lot of 20th-century British music lacks real direction. But Holst and RVW were both driven by a common set of goals that were larger than making pretty music. I think they both wanted to make British music what it might have been had Handel never relocated in London. I also agree with Struan that the national-music composers in other cultures had that same drive, and likewise went far beyond just making pretty music. Janacek and Bartok both would certainly fall into that category.
So. Struan, how would you categorize the Tallis Fantasia? Is it sublime? I've used that word to describe it, though without any of this thread's context for the meaning of that word. The harmonies are 20th-century late Romantic, the tonal palette impressionistic (a result of RVW's studies with Ravel), but the melody is Tudor. Is that a musical analogue for the sort of mining you describe?
Rick "who would love to connect musical and photographic sensibilities more clearly" Denney
Rick, I was listening to a recent interview with David Elkington, author of In the Name of the Gods: The Mystery of Resonance and the Pre-historic Messiah (book review). While the book is no longer available, the review mentions the premise that building architecture followed acoustic resonance theory. Therefore, to connect the visual to the aural, photograph things which are in harmonious relationship. For instance, in a scale, octaves double in frequency, so something could double in distance and halve in length.
Yes, I've thought about that with respect to architecture. I've also thought about scalability a lot, and spent a year or so exploring a chaos theory kick a couple of decades ago. That also has musical connotations, as anyone who has listened to Reich, Glass, or other modern minimalists will realize.
I was thinking more in the sense of how impressionism has both a visual face and a musical sound. In the case of impressionism, that connection makes sense to me. Vaughan Williams described it as orchestrating in points of color rather than in lines and voices (which is how Bach would have done it)--that's what he says he learned from Ravel. If a particular sort of music appealed to me at some deep level, what implications might that have on my visual sensibilities? Is that the same as what relates musical impressionism to visual impressionism, or Baroque music to Baroque architecture? There are landscapes that call to my mind particular music that just seems to fit with them. It is music composed by others, but it makes me wonder if that music could give me the key to representing the landscape in a way that revealed the inner me rather than just a set of skills.
Composers have often gone the other way, composing music that relates to visual or literary art that moved them. I'm sure that process is reversible, I'm just wondering (out loud) if I can make use of that.
Rick "more amateur theorizing" Denney
Struan, I'm happy to see that neither the 18th Century nor the flu has obliterated your mind or body.
Your not wanting to take "good photographs" resonates with me. For me it's not so much about striving for quietness, or against the "wow" factor, although both of these are often the result. It's more about questioning what "good" really means. In general I think it means conformity to certain conventions, whose uses are rarely examined. I'm most likely to be excited by images that challenge conventions, subtly or agressively, and do so because they're trying to show something in a way that's not well served by a conventionally good picture. The result may be a "Wow" or it may be a "Huh?" ... depending on whether the viewer has enough context to get what the picture is doing.
Of course this generation's "bad" photographs, when they're bad for good reason, become the next generation's good photographs. Same as with any art. Conventional-minded people disliked the impressionists; they disliked Weston; they disliked Robert Adams; they disliked Eggleston. From our perspective today these artists are all conventional and canonical. We've learned to see by looking at what they showed. As a result, certain kinds of bad light and mundane subject are already conventional.
I'm curious about the New Bad ...
I agree that the D.H. Tracey essay is a bit tidy and self-contained. But I don't think it's trying to be a full-on counterpoint to Empson. His essay is book-length; hers is barely a tweet. He looks at the subject broadly and philosophically; she sketches an idea and offers some semi-arbitrary categories and examples. I'm more interested in Empson's ideas, overall. Traceys' are like an illuminating footnote.
I would love to see a more honest / unromantic reconception of climbing photography and literature. I wrote a snarky story for Alpinist last year that made a small attempt. I've got some other ideas in the pipes, but they're all some flavor of satire. Someone else is going to have to figure out the photography; I'm not enough of a hard guy to photograph the kinds of routes that crowd cares about, even if I get some bright new ideas.All the same, I don't feel this is 'my photograph' - it's too much a fitting of my life into a standard pictorial trope. In retrospect I wish I had honestly recorded how completely knackered I was, and had paid more attention to the now much-receded glaciers.
The Tallis Fantasia is a perfect example of how to innovate within a tradition. It is also one of those rare works which is both immediately appealing and likeable, and at the same time is suffused with intelligence and a knowledgeable, refined cultural awareness. Musical Monet. Or perhaps Manet.
Judith Weir is one contemporary composer who incorporates historical works and folk culture into serious classical music. I'd recommend her CD of chamber works. Peter Maxwell-Davis is a bigger name who does similar things. It's a continuing British tradition.
For me, the main abstract lesson I take from music is not to trust my preconceptions. There are many pieces I took time to really appreciate, and perhaps more interestingly, plenty more I should love, but somehow can't. Britten's music is an example of the latter: he should push all my intellectual and aesthetic buttons, but I just can't take his music to heart, however much I respect it. Robert Adams is a photographic analogue - I can see why so many others love his work, but I just can't.
I think that's key. It can sound a bit like adolescent exceptionalism, but really it's another way of saying you need to keep your eyes fresh. My personal feeling is that photography is a sufficiently mature art that there is no requirement for interesting new work to extend or challenge the basic tenets of the medium. I prefer to accept photography for what it is, and use it to investigate the things I find interesting.
I started photographing 'seriously' both when climbing and when visiting museums and galleries because the standard photography of both activities (and the slides on sale in the museum shops) never seemed to share my interests. I still have to remind myself from time to time that it's OK that I never see another photographer in my usual haunts - in fact, it's a good sign.
Sometimes the new bad is the old good repackaged. For example, there are no shadows in contemporary art photography, and it's only a matter of time before the art world rediscovers directional light. Gesture and a sense of movement are due for a revival too.
I actually think the true New Bad is all the photography-related things which crop up around the periphery. Those that get dismissed as unphotographic. Collage is having a revival, but perhaps my favourite example for now is the explosion in stop-motion animation and other forms of non-linear film-making made possible by the convergence of cameras and computers.
I didn't mean to be over critical. I thought it was a good read, and obviously using Empson as something to bounce ideas off rather than trying to revolutionise literary criticism all over again.
Everyone laughs at Rum Doodle, and then carries on producing the very same stuff it satirises. I used to make my manly climbing friends nervous by explaining that I climbed for the deeply aesthetic experience of being among mountains in all weathers. Oddly, even supposedly artistic souls found that hard to accept as a motivation: the western tradition used to include a soldier or adventurer aesthete, but no longer.
If you don't know David Craig's writing, it follows convention a bit less than most. There are a lot of bright young Swiss art photographers who challenge the idea of the sublime, but they tend to stick to the valleys and the various human activities there. On the tops the sublime segues seamlessly into irreverence without pausing anywhere inbetween.
Britten affects me the same way, and his work is what came to mind when you used the word "gooey".
Yes, there is something happening below the intellectual level with art. But I'm finding that few photographs really move me, and the ones that do are deeply rooted in the Pretty Rocks School and get laughed at by people whose opinions I'm afraid to reject out of hand. At some point, I'm likely to give up and go back to my pretty rocks. Something Paul said a while back has stuck with me. Are pretty landscapes enough these days? I'm finding that they are not even enough for me.
This was true with Vaughan Williams. Many of his contemporaries rejected Romantic (and its antecedents') concepts of harmony, but it is as if he said, "No, not everything has been said about the harmonic modes. Not even everything has been said about the major and minor modes." What he learned of ancient and folk melodies made that clear to him.
Many now have rejected the Pretty Rocks School (even adopting that condescending name for it) as being dried up and no longer relevant. I'd rather be like RVW and find my own voice that would take it to the next level, at least for me. When that happens, I'll have the camera out every daylight hour, I think, until I'm dead.
Rick "whose aesthetic sense tilts musical, but whose aesthetic skills lean visual" Denney
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