Here's something you might be interested in.
Today I had to move my Cd’s away from the wall due to a water leak.
I decided to go through them and find something I haven’t listened to in years.
I tend to listen to a few core compositions. By few I mean a hundred or so.
The most esoteric of those few compositions would be something like Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony or Bruckner’s Third Symphony, maybe Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major.
None of that music is truly esoteric like Penderecki or Berg but it is music that’s not done too often by symphony orchestras.
What did I listen to? I came up with Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. Tenth.
I have to wonder how conscious he was of Beethoven while writing it.
To my knowledge, Shostakovich was the first composer since Beethoven to write more than nine symphonies.
There are sketches of a Mahler tenth but it was very raw and can’t be counted.
Think about it. Brahms, Schumann: four symphonies. Schubert, Dvorak, Mahler, Bruckner: nine. Tchaikovsky, Sibelius: six. Prokofiev: seven.
On the other hand, Mozart: 41. Hayden: 104.
After Beethoven the scope of the symphony ballooned until it reached Mahler’s Eighth, The Symphony of a Thousand. The thousand refers to the one thousand musicians required to fill out the orchestra, soloists, and chorus positions.
Shostakovich scaled his symphonies back a little in terms of length although some do get to almost ninety minutes long.
I’m not sure why Shostakovich was able to break the ninth seal and compose a tenth symphony.
What I do know is that he had an abundance of oppression to use as emotional material. Shostakovich might be the most political composer the world has seen.
He was composing in Stalin’s Soviet Union both before and after World War II. His relationship with Stalin was complicated, to say the least.
Over the course of the next few posts, we’ll explore Shostakovich and why he felt as though he was being beaten with a stick and commanded to rejoice.
He compared it to the opening scene of Boris Godunov where the peasants are being told to rejoice and cheer for Boris or they’d be beaten to death.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zA5lv8uZHw
Today I had to move my Cd’s away from the wall due to a water leak.
I decided to go through them and find something I haven’t listened to in years.
I tend to listen to a few core compositions. By few I mean a hundred or so.
The most esoteric of those few compositions would be something like Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony or Bruckner’s Third Symphony, maybe Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major.
None of that music is truly esoteric like Penderecki or Berg but it is music that’s not done too often by symphony orchestras.
What did I listen to? I came up with Shostakovich’s Tenth Symphony. Tenth.
I have to wonder how conscious he was of Beethoven while writing it.
To my knowledge, Shostakovich was the first composer since Beethoven to write more than nine symphonies.
There are sketches of a Mahler tenth but it was very raw and can’t be counted.
Think about it. Brahms, Schumann: four symphonies. Schubert, Dvorak, Mahler, Bruckner: nine. Tchaikovsky, Sibelius: six. Prokofiev: seven.
On the other hand, Mozart: 41. Hayden: 104.
After Beethoven the scope of the symphony ballooned until it reached Mahler’s Eighth, The Symphony of a Thousand. The thousand refers to the one thousand musicians required to fill out the orchestra, soloists, and chorus positions.
Shostakovich scaled his symphonies back a little in terms of length although some do get to almost ninety minutes long.
I’m not sure why Shostakovich was able to break the ninth seal and compose a tenth symphony.
What I do know is that he had an abundance of oppression to use as emotional material. Shostakovich might be the most political composer the world has seen.
He was composing in Stalin’s Soviet Union both before and after World War II. His relationship with Stalin was complicated, to say the least.
Over the course of the next few posts, we’ll explore Shostakovich and why he felt as though he was being beaten with a stick and commanded to rejoice.
He compared it to the opening scene of Boris Godunov where the peasants are being told to rejoice and cheer for Boris or they’d be beaten to death.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zA5lv8uZHw