Didn't Egg base one of their 'symphonies' almost completely on Stravinsky, and particularly on the Rite of Spring?
Last edited by mogrooves; 05-30-2013 at 02:29 AM.
Hell, they ain't even old-timey ! - Homer Stokes
A bombastic cacophony of sheer bliss
Why is it whenever someone mentions an artist that was clearly progressive (yet not the Symph weenie definition of Prog) do certain people feel compelled to snort "thats not Prog" like a whiny 5th grader?
never heard it, but I heard it sucks.
From the liner notes of the Eclectic (Esoteric) reissue of their first album:
"The second side of the album was to comprise a suite of improvisations of classical themes by composers such as Grieg and Stravinsky known as "Symphony Number Two". This remarkable musical cycle originally comprised five parts, but "Movement Three" was later to be removed from the final album due to objections from management in Decca's higher echelons who were concerned about possible objections from the administrators of Igor Stravinsky's music in Britain."
The movement is restored on the reissue.
There is a version by a guitar/bass/drums band, but I don't recall their name.
The Enid were going to do it at one point but it never materialised
My dad was a percussionist in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (I've mentioned this here before) and he turned me on to the ROS at an early age too. I didn't have much trouble getting into it, but I attribute that to the fact that young minds are more open in general (and I probably wasn't even 10 at the time). It's indeed a fantastic piece and I think one of the things that makes it work so well is the seamless combination of simplicity and complexity. There's some pretty "extended" harmonic things going on and there's times when the meter changes from measure to measure, but there's some pretty folky, sing-songy melodies in there too. Innocence and savagery, beauty and ugliness, subtle and bombastic; it's all in there! I've loved the piece practically all my life.
My dad is on the Ozawa/CSO recording... not only that, but I got to see them perform it live with Ozawa conducting. I was a lucky kid!
Music
http://greylyng.bandcamp.com/
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http://lightuponblight.bandcamp.com/...-upon-blight-2 (new album!)
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“The only truth is music.”
― Jack Kerouac
The Science Group - a mere coincidence tune: 14. Scale Invarians (3:36) (1999) - the rythm is built over a part from Le Sacre.
http://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=20804
- Bob Drake / bass, vocals, guitar, drums
- Stevan Tickmayer / keyboards, samplers, electronics
- Chris Cutler / drums, low-grade electronics
- Amy Denio / vocals
- Fred Frith / guitars
- Claudio Puntin / bass clarinet
In February, I saw the Joffrey Ballet do the recreation of the original production here in Los Angeles. My friend and I thought it was.....boring. I can see why the ballet audience of 1913 might have been upset, because the dancers do stuff that is closer to pure movement, not classical Russian ballet. They form geometric shapes -- a circle, a square etc.-- then don't do anything until they burst in to movement, doing mostly non-balletic movements in big, unwieldy costumes. To the audience of 1913, it must have seemed pretty radical, but in 2013, it looked kind of stiff and cold to me.
As for the music, let's just say I'm not a Stravinsky fan apart from The Firebird (which I like mostly because it's a pastiche of Rimsky-Korsakov for the most part). I think the "radicalism" of the music is waaaay overrated, helped by the great publicity machine that the Ballets Russe provided. Schoenberg was always bitter that Stravinsky got the credit for Le Sacre du Printemps being "revolutionary" or "the birth of modernism" etc. when he was writing music that was far more radical and "out there" years before. My favorite example is this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXdJfabr-6I
Listen from about :55 in to about 1:45, where the orchestra just explodes. I heard the Schoenberg years after the Rite of Spring and I thought Schoenberg had stolen that from Stravinsky until I looked at the date of the compositions: 1908 for Schoenberg, 1913 for Stravinsky. Then there's stuff like Erwartung or Die Gluckliche Hand or The Book of the Hanging Gardens or.........
As for Neo-Classicism *shudder* I heard Pulcinella on the radio the other day and I thought it was horrible, just utterly pointless. Then there's all the "let's wait until Schoenberg is dead until we start using the 12-tone system" stuff like Agon that I just find arid and deadly dull.
I'll sure be glad when the Wanger and Verdi and Rite of Spring centennials are over.
...or you could love
Why is it whenever someone mentions an artist that was clearly progressive (yet not the Symph weenie definition of Prog) do certain people feel compelled to snort "thats not Prog" like a whiny 5th grader?
http://www.salon.com/2013/05/30/comp...pring_partner/
Stravinsky goes digital
A software engineer creates "visual music" for the centennial of "The Rite of Spring"
By Allison Meier
It’s appropriate then that one of the most transfixing of the projects marking the 100 year occasion is a digital visualization of the piece.
Created by Stephen Malinowski, a composer and software engineer, the animation attempts to illustrate all the complications that are happening in Stravinsky’s score. The Californian has been working on this type of visual music for decades, sparked by an epiphany involving Bach and LSD, which developed into his Music Animation Machine in the 1980s. As he writes: “Music moves, and can be understood just by listening. But a conventional musical score stands still, and can be understood only after years of training. The Music Animation Machine bridges this gap, with a score that moves — and can be understood just by watching.”
I read a theory last year that said that the reaction against the ROS was not aesthetic, but political. The disturbance was fomented by a group of French nationalists who disliked the Russian ballet company in a Russian style theater with a Russian impressario, a Russian choreographer, Russian music. And, to top it off, primitive Russian costumes and dancing, that was the antithesis of traditional ballet.
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