A few relatively short ideas I had today.

1. Mahler is unbelievable.

2. I don’t understand why stores like Target and Amazon charge so much for CDs. If the record industry is failing, charging MORE for their products definitely isn’t the way to go. If the Radiohead CD that I want costs the same amount of money as 100 blank CDs AND a burrito from Chipotle, you can be assured that I’ll be comfortable with the burrito and a burned copy of the album (which I downloaded years ago). Fortunately, many classical CDs are pretty reasonable. If you don’t care about having the best recording available, you can pretty much get almost any non-opera work you want for less than $12, which I think is great.

3. Today I read one of the best sentences of my life, but also heard the worst lyrics of my life.

Best sentence: “Beethoven’s last quartets are esoteric creations, sung by the creator himself, just as God might meditate in his heart, finding no partner of equal rank.” -Music in the Romantic Era (p. 38) by Alfred Einstein.

Worst lyric: “I said shush girl/Shut your lips/Do the Helen Keller and talk with your hips” -some terrible band I heard at the gym.

Like I said, it was a day of highs and lows.

4. I need to do my Thesis homework and read a chapter in the 20th Century book. I feel like most of my posts are going to end this way for a while.

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Ravel, Bartok.

Well, I guess it’s time for a new post. School started yesterday. I’ve certainly been listening to and reading a lot.

I’ve been listening to a lot of Ravel’s solo piano, especially ‘Miroirs’. Pretty amazing stuff. ‘La vallée des cloches’ is one of my favorite pieces. The clocks/bells imageries in that piece are very cool, I’d like to see the score. I also listened to both operas, ‘L’heure Espagnol’ and ‘L’enfant et les soreileges’, both of which were great. Both operas had wonderful librettos, and his usage of different styles within each are very neat. I’m thinking about writing a paper on ‘L’enfant’ for my 20th Century class about the different styles he uses for each piece of furniture/animal/object in the opera.

I just listened to Bartok’s ‘Concerto for Orchestra’ with the full score. It’s such an incredible piece, each time I hear it, it blows my mind. Not as good as ‘Music for Strings, Percussion & Celesta’ though. I should have more to say- I’ve been thinking about making this post for the past few days. Now that my mind is working at full speed, I’ll have more to write about in the next few days.

PS. The first concert at the SLSO this year is Mahler 5, and I already got a ticket!