All computer and phone manufacturers would include a link to the following video on their products. When anyone felt the urge to commit an act of violence or perform some other regrettable action in the heat of anger, they would first watch these gentlemen sing their song all the way through.
Category Archives: Art
Górecki on the Turnpike, Not the Turntable
While leisurely gliding home on the New Jersey Turnpike this rainy afternoon, I gave up on the rock album in the CD player and tried the radio. Listener-sponsored, free-format rock? I don’t think so. Classic rock? Definitely not. Fortunately, Columbia University’s WKCR was playing something beautiful. It was a slow-moving work featuring a soprano and orchestra. If I’d heard the piece before, I didn’t remember what it was.
After 20 minutes or so, a young woman with very precise diction softly announced that we had been listening to Henryk Górecki’s Symphony No. 3, Opus 36, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. The orchestra was the London Sinfonietta and the soprano was Dawn Upshaw.
When I got home, Wikipedia kindly revealed that Henryk Górecki was a 20th century Polish composer. He wrote the piece in 1977, but neither he nor it became famous until 1992 when the very recording I’d heard was released. The album went to the top of the classical charts and has now sold more than one million copies, “vastly exceeding the expected lifetime sales of a typical symphonic recording by a 20th-century composer”.
Regarding its surprising commercial success, Gorecki once said: “Perhaps people find something they need in this piece of music…. Somehow I hit the right note, something they were missing. Something somewhere had been lost to them”.
One interesting aspect of this story is that, although Polish critics considered it a masterpiece, Gorecki’s Third Symphony didn’t fare well at all when it was first heard outside Poland, at least partly because it was a departure from his earlier dissonant compositions:
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, recordings and performances of the work were widely criticised by the press outside Poland.The symphony drew hostility from critics who felt that Górecki had moved too far away from the established avant-garde style…The world première … was reviewed by six western critics, all of them harshly dismissive. [One wrote] that the symphony “drags through three old folk melodies (and nothing else) for an endless 55 minutes”. Górecki himself recalled that, at the premiere, he sat next to a “prominent French musician” (… probably Pierre Boulez), who, after hearing the twenty-one repetitions of an A-major chord at the end of the symphony, loudly exclaimed “Merde!”
Nevertheless, the 1992 recording caught fire and may now be “the best selling contemporary classical record of all time”. (Maybe I’ll even buy a copy for cruising the Turnpike.) Since this is the age of Spotify and YouTube, however, a base financial transaction is no longer necessary in order to hear great music in the comfort of your own home:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPhrG82nV2c
A final note from Wikipedia: The popular success of the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs “has not generated similar interest in Górecki’s other works”. Thus, even in the world of contemporary classical music, it is possible to be a one-hit wonder.
Henryk Górecki died in 2010 at the age of 76 in Katowice, Silesia, Poland.
Twilight Time
Daybreak is some people’s favorite time of day. It’s peaceful but promising. It’s when journeys so often begin:
When the rosy-fingered Dawn appeared, we drew our ships into the water, and put our masts and sails within them…
When the child of morning, rosy-fingered Dawn, appeared, Ulysses put on his shirt and cloak…
Personally, I avoid dawns and daybreaks whenever possible. They tend to be too early in the morning.
Twilight, on the other hand, is wonderfully appealing. The day’s work is done. The sky explodes with color. Who knows what the night will bring?
Yet this most evocative time of day is often the saddest. It’s natural to feel a sense of loss when the sun disappears. There’s darkness ahead. Loneliness too.
But cheer up! There’s twilight music – and some of it’s even upbeat.
Electric Light Orchetra, 1981:
The Raveonettes, 2005:
Elliott Smith, circa 2002:
Antony and the Johnsons, 1998:
The Platters, 1958:
Mainly On Not Writing a Novel
Many of us have the urge to write a novel, or even more than one. I’ve thought about writing one, but have never begun the process, for two reasons.
One, I don’t have a story I want to tell or characters I want to write about. That’s kind of held me back.
Two, I’d probably lack the patience to develop a novel — I’d want events to move along, so any novel I wrote would end up as a short story. (An English teacher once told me I had a “spare” style. For a couple of reasons, I don’t think she was comparing the story I handed in to one of Hemingway’s.)
The Spanish novelist Javier Marias has written several novels, including successful ones. Nevertheless, he’s also written an enjoyable little article for the Threepenny Review called “Seven Reasons Not to Write Novels and Only One Reason to Write Them”. It’s worth reading, even if you’ve never had the urge in question. Having been surprised and impressed by the single reason he gives for writing one, I may reconsider.
Deadwood Is Dead
Well, we’re all done watching the third and final season of Deadwood (having become seriously addicted). It would have been great if there had been another season, but at least season 3 didn’t end with a big cliffhanger. In the video below, David Milch, Deadwood‘s creator, talks about the show’s sudden cancellation. He doesn’t disclose much in the way of future plans for the characters, however, except for mentioning what happened to a few of them in real life.
There were talks about doing a Deadwood movie or two, but it appears those plans have since fallen through. But maybe they can do a fourth season of Deadwood when they get around to doing a fourth season of Star Trek with Kirk, Spock and McCoy (with the original sets and costumes, of course).
(Maybe that’s one of the activities available to pass the time in the afterlife. Watching seasons of your favorite shows or sequels to your favorite movies, none of which were made while you were alive.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZQqyoawXj8
Al Swearingen sums it all up for us:
PS — The last voyage of the Enterprise:
https://screen.yahoo.com/star-trek-last-voyage-starship-000000229.html
Whereof One Can Speak 🇺🇦 
You must be logged in to post a comment.