Our morning's musical meditations
Jun. 26th, 2009 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sawylInspired by Friday's Guardian, we had a very music oriented coffee discussion this morning. None of us were convinced by all the coverage of Springsteen in the paper. Our considered opinion was that he was too boring to be worthy of discussion and that even Michael Jackson would have been a better subject for conversation. Not that we talked about Jackson, of course. Instead, we talked about The Horrors' Primary Colours, which comes highly recommended.
On the way back to our desks, after I bad mouthed Tchaikovsky, we even debated whether Bruckner is more difficult than Wagner. While Wagner's operas have length and great melodic complexity — all those leitmotivs to keep track of — working against them, they've also got a plot and characters and things that you can hang on to if you ever feel you're at risk of drowning. But with the Bruckner symphonies, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the massive, structural hugeness of it all; it's not the sort of music that you can dip into or that you can just put on in the background; it's the sort of music that demands and requires concentrated attention.
On the way back to our desks, after I bad mouthed Tchaikovsky, we even debated whether Bruckner is more difficult than Wagner. While Wagner's operas have length and great melodic complexity — all those leitmotivs to keep track of — working against them, they've also got a plot and characters and things that you can hang on to if you ever feel you're at risk of drowning. But with the Bruckner symphonies, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the massive, structural hugeness of it all; it's not the sort of music that you can dip into or that you can just put on in the background; it's the sort of music that demands and requires concentrated attention.
