Friday, April 24, 2020

Another Playlist

While obviously within the barriers of my upper-middle-class white angst, I can't overstate the amount of shit I've gotten over the years for passionately loving classical music. Bullied as a kid all the time for it in manners I still don't really care to elucidate, and for a number of years was completely ashamed to even admit I listened to the music, I even tried to pass myself off for a number of teenage years by saying 'I don't really listen to music,' and to this day I'm sometimes looked at with a suspicion of snobbery to this day by music lovers of other types that frankly I still find a bit ugly - as though one could ever say that one music is 'better than' another when 'better than' means so little in artforms that by their nature cannot be quantified.
But for me, the biggest difference between classical music and the American music nearly everyone we all know listens to is that the emotional stakes are so incredibly large that they foretell events like these, events of a size that have not existed within living American memory. And now that we're here, it feels yet again as though Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, Shostakovich, Schubert, Dvorak, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Tallis, Wagner, Verdi, Berlioz, Sibelius, Palestrina, Janacek, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Bruckner, Suk, they foretold all this. History once was much more unpredictable than it is now, and they lived it all. Just as the old American religious music did, both black spirituals and white hymnals, and you find the hope of emerging from it all in soul music and some older jazz and blues too. Now that we're living through this, I think something resembling a golden age of American music and arts is coming to us, and it will be a reflection of having experienced all the suffering of these times, but until that happens, try listening to some of that outsize, bombastic, obsessively long traditional classical music. You may find in it a reflection of how you feel.






Verdi Requiem


Verdi Rigoletto

Verdi Otello


Verdi Don Carlo


Verdi Simon Boccanegra






































more later probably....



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