Bernstein's 5 minute music history lecture (NMC)

[CarlM]

Finally got through the whole thing. It is fascinating if you have the time. A few thoughts here.

Listening to Bernstein's piano playing I cannot help being impressed, especially how he breaks out parts of these complicated symphonic works and plays them a bit at a time then puts it all together. He had a huge knowledge of music to understand all of those long, difficult works that he discusses and to break them down in that kind of detail.

His analysis of how composers would develop variations on a theme (what he calls a "motive") especially when he breaks down Beethoven's Pastorale or Mozart's G minor symphony and the comparisons to figures of speech has applications and parallels to what we try to do in improvising in bluegrass, jazz or other styles.

He showed what has happened as composers stretched boundaries over several hundred years, exploring what is possible to do with sound and tone. This lead to a breakdown as they got to the edges of what could be done with common harmonies and tonality. This lead to the really jarring discordant sound of the atonal music.. He seems say that this development was natural and necessary to explore the possibilities but that the music is better served by working with harmonic and tonal music than by the atonal.

He does not cover it but the same kind of path seems to have been followed in jazz as they stretched into the free jazz and atonal stuff in the 1960s then have kind of backed away into more melodic music again. Bluegrass and similar styles have not gone as far but there is a parallel as people push the edges a bit and traditionalists howl and stomp their feet.

The last lecture is called the Poetry of the Earth. He talks about retaining a connection to the earth in the music. He does not disparage folk styles as he talks about, particularly Stravinsky, drawing on folk idioms and in his case Russian tradition to build around.

A really good series of talks with a lot to think about if you can keep your mind open and not be put off by style. I believe it is important to listen to a lot of musical styles and ideas. Not all of them will be things you like and some may take time to absorb and appreciate. The best musicians, in any style, have remained open to outside influences from other genres.

[DougC]

The way that good 'folk'/trad players actually play a piece probably could be put into writing - one could laboriously transcribe a particular recording of a master player's version note-for-note (I've done that to some extent, when trying to learn a particular player's style), where maybe they play the tune for a solid 4 minutes but they never repeat the same exact thing twice... it would turn out to be everything *except* the "simple" music that Bernstein disdains - but the notation would be so cluttered and complex that it would needlessly hard to read.

A conductor interprets what is not on the page and trains the orchestra. Much like a folk musician 'interprets' a song and makes it his own. The obvious difference is that there is usually no paper involved with the folk musician.

The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra did 'Oh Death' with Sam Amidon on banjo. It was really cool. I'll see if I can find the clip... go to 4:26 for the tune.

https://content.thespco.org/music/concert-library/composition/migration-patterns-part-2-pekka-kuusisto

[Jess L.]

A conductor interprets what is not on the page and trains the orchestra. Much like a folk musician 'interprets' a song and makes it his own. The obvious difference is that there is usually no paper involved with the folk musician.

The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra did 'Oh Death' with Sam Amidon on banjo. It was really cool. I'll see if I can find the clip... go to 4:26 for the tune.

https://content.thespco.org/music/co...pekka-kuusisto

Thanks DougC, very intriguing, I didn't know that was allowed!

By the way, most of the rest of the stuff that particular orchestra plays in that video, sounds pretty sweet to my ears, maybe there's hope for me after all.