Music Diary

My entries on music are bound to be sketchier than my entries on novels and films, because I lack the technical vocabulary and expertise to discuss what is "going on" in a piece of music, and without that, there is obviously much less to say. This goes for poetry, painting, architecture as well; I'm at a loss. But that does not mean those areas of endeavor are unimportant to me, just that I relate to them very much as a layman. Writers on fiction and film generally have before them the benefit of surface narrative and characterization, which are relatively easy to write about; the "narrative" of a symphony or a painting is more challenging to discuss because it does inevitably come back to technicalities. Non-technical descriptive language can be attempted, but usually comes across as soft and impressionistic -- not much of a contribution to the discussion.

But if this blog is to be an accurate picture of my interests, I can't leave out whole realms that matter to me. I just want it on the record that I am all too aware of my limitations.

Classical music became important to me around the start of high school. It helped that I had an excellent music appreciation class as a freshman at my small Catholic boys' high school; but simultaneously, I was beginning to explore the wide-ranging classical LP collections at the libraries in my hometown of Passaic, New Jersey, and the neighboring town of Rutherford. I gravitated right away toward music of the 1865-1940 era, including the really challenging composers such as Schoenberg, because no one had told me I shouldn't like them.

The dark heavy music drove my poor mother a little crazy, I recall -- especially those Mahler and Bruckner symphonies which went on and on and on to my complete enthrallment. Later when I was an enthusiastic concert-goer in San Francisco and Chicago, any symphony by either of those composers was enough to ensure my attendance at a program. The opening measures of a Herbert von Karajan performance of Bruckner's 7th wake me up every morning (and seem to be a favorite with my cat Claire, who will sit on the bed and listen to the entire symphony if given the chance).

This past week in the car I've been sampling a Daniel Barenboim box set of the nine standard Bruckner symphonies (leaving out the Symphony No. 0 -- a name I've always loved -- and the Study Symphony). So far I've listened to No.6 and No. 8. With Bruckner, the question of versions and editions is unusually thorny and complicated; for example Barenboim plays the hybrid Haas edition of No. 8, drawing on different versions of the symphony from Bruckner's lifetime -- a decision hard for any purist to defend (play one version or the other!).

Also playing in the car this week, a disk I own of the great Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos's complete solo guitar music, played by Fabio Zanon (who also offers thoughtful liner notes). Villa-Lobos is one of those composers bound to appeal to me on surface grounds: endlessly prolific (2,000 compositions!), the major representative not just of a vast country but of an entire continent to "European" art music, active at the height of the period that most interests me (his dates are 1887-1959). With an output that large, there is going to be variability of quality, compounded by the fact that HVL was careless of his manuscripts (there is a whole symphony, No. 5, still missing). But the guitar music is uniformly excellent, and the set of twelve Etudes in particular is a breathtaking workout (as Etudes ought to be).