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Well, here goes nothing.
So recently I've been listening to stuff by this guy Alfred Schnittke. He died in 1996, after a long and painful illness, and is generally acknowledged as a main dude of things[1] in XX century modern music. If you don't care to read all the text below without knowing if you'll like the guy, here are some clips:
1 - I'm listening to this movement a lot lately. Not surprisingly, it's one of the pieces by Schnittke where he is a little more generous with actual beautiful human music.
2 - Olga Goija's performance is relentless and impeccable. (pt 1. and pt 3.)
3 - Notice the *gorgeous*, uplifting sound he gets at 1:33... and how it's mercilessly mangled just seconds later.
One of the first things you'll notice about Schnittke is that he uses any type of music that he thinks will suit a piece. I haven't heard much of his work (he was very prolific), but so far I stumbled upon some Russian folk songs, tango, baroque, classical, romantic all in the same piece. He produced soundtracks for Russian movies and TV, and I think that experience definitely shows in his pieces (If you're game for a massive mindfuck, fire up some porn and put Schnittke as the soundtrack. It changes everything,)
One term that's thrown around when people mention Schnittke is "black humor". Yes, it's all so extreme at times in its unpleasantness - in the way that the snippets of simple folk music and the pretty nuggets of classical music get relentlessly mauled, trampled over and over again by oppressive, diseased, ominous or mocking sounds -, it's all so violent that you end up laughing involuntarily (And indeed the image of that nice people in the first clip, sitting quietly and composed through all the aural slaughter is a funny contrast in itself).
Schnittke's idea of a variation on a theme usually involved squeezing the theme through a sonic meat grinder and then applying gaudy lipstick to the ground up mess. He also would usually let a few ragged bits of beautiful, soaring music slip through in the middle of the proceedings, but just glimpses, to be distorted a moment later. It achieves a dramatic contrast between hopefulness and destruction which seems to imply the futility of lofty endeavors - or of endeavors of any kind. This is the music of a man who had the overbearing Sovietic state hot on his heels all his life and who fought a debilitating illness for years (he had a row of strokes until he died). I think it's possible to argue a sad parallel about the current state of erudite music: Once an unified body, now fragmented, pulled apart in all directions as if by ravenous predators; It is an extreme image - but so is Schnittke.
It's not very uplifting music, to be sure, and I can see why some people would rather not invest time on him (actually, I'm kinda curious for the assessment of people with more knowledge of academic music than myself - I'm a stupid dude from grungier, simpler times, and probably dig Schnittke for all the wrong reasons).
[1] - I'm sorry, achewood fucked up my already slippery English. |
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