To wander a bit in another direction, and for those of you who have heard it, when Metallica performed with (I believe it was) the San Francisco Symphony, do you feel the genres enhanced or detracted from one another?
For a long time I've wanted music that would evoke the underlying lift of a flying swarm of blackbirds. Orlando Gibbon's instrumentals come the closest, that I've found. A group called "Phantasm" has a decent recording of some of them, called "Consorts for Viols". If one thinks of "modern" music as freeing itself from the tyranny of the measure and the bar lines, Gibbon's stuff is interestingly modern. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! The most telling live performance of my attendance was a piece called "Odegan Taiga", essentially composed (I believe) by Kaigal-ool Xovalyg and performed by Huun - Huur - Tu at the Cedar Cultural Center in Minneapolis a few years ago. There is a recorded version, which is bland and simplistic compared with that performance. Audiophile level sound quality is absolutely required - don't bother trying to hear that piece on an IPod. I don't know quite what to make of it, as far as classification. It seems to belong in "classical" somehow, in its ambitions. The group's stuff is usually filed under "folk" or "world" music, and much of their repertoire is folk.
I was totally underwhelmed. The Big Band era proved that an ensemble can do a great job with jazz, of which rock is merely a subgenre. But I think the music has to be written for the instrumentation that is to be used. The Moody Blues proved that that works, "Days of Future Passed" was written for rock band plus symphony orchestra forty years ago. Or at least rearranged, as so many great pieces from "Pictures at an Exhibition" to "Rhapsody in Blue" have been, both from solo piano to full orchestra. I thought the orchestra was not up to the task and neither was Metallica. Frank Zappa was a Compleat Musician; he understood orchestras and symphonically-oriented musicians and was able to get the best out a collaboration. I don't think that either Metallica or the conductor or arranger of the SF Symphony had the required skill to prepare music that was destined to sound great in an enthusiastic but somewhat clueless collaboration. There was too much duplication of parts: the strings and two or three other sections playing the same notes as the lead guitar, four other sections mimicking the rhythm guitar, etc. That's a symphonic technique for obtaining a particularly subtle and exquisite texture. Metallica's music is pretty short on subtlety so for me it fell flat. They should have broken it up more, let the band play more or less by itself and then cut out and have the orchestra break in, a la Moody Blues. In order to facilitate that they should also have written some new music specially for the orchestra. But they tried and it was a good effort. The next attempt by the same people or somebody else will be better. It was fun.
How's this: I'm definitely into the Romantics, but I'm more of an everyman with like, Bach, Handel, then Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin etc, but then Debussy, Satie, Rachmaninoff, some Tchaikovsky, Bizet, etc. I've strained my right triceps and shoulder going hard out on the Rach lately. I'm going to have to watch those fff parts. And modern stuff is like, a rearrangement of the older stuff, there are plenty of modern songs that borrow shamelessly from the Romantic era, which I claim is where Jazz comes from, after Eastern European and African/New World music got together in America. I mean, when you look at the music, there are patterns you can see, as well as hear when you learn to play the stuff. But that's just me. With my A-90 in the corner.
Then again some people do learn their mistakes and try to learn from them while others never do, do they?
J.S. Bach and Beethoven are the two greatest composers, the Old and the New Testament. Both have composed music of such spiritual intensity... the 9th, the 5th, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Goldberg Variations, Kreutzer, Pathetique, Hammerklavier, Well Tempered Clavier and i could tell many more... simply astounding... the violin concertos, the sonatas, the quartets.... I try to listen to as many composers as i can, but i'm more into the Baroque. Aren't you all forgetting about Vivaldi?
