Mood: Kinda Sad
While listening to classical radio the other day, they announced Haydn's Symphony #572, "The Indistinguishable" or some such, and I meditated once again on that man's dreadful legacy. What miserable luck that Mozart, Music's Supreme Genius, should live his formative years in Haydn's shadow. Then, just as he was starting to find his own voice and get good, Mozart had to pull one final stunt by dying on us.
The same sense of melancholy pervades the crackup (if that's the right word) of Dale Warland's choir. Having linked to the Ensemble of the North previously, I am now urged to give The Singers some equal time, which I am glad to do. (Don't overlook their sound files.) The two choirs formed after Warland's group "split." I have no evidence the two groups view each other with hostility, but any kind of parting of the ways must be awkward. The news gives you the same sick stab in your gut you felt when you first heard that Bible Girl and Mr. Sin were married to each other. It's as frustrating as euphemism inflation, or searches for ghostly voices in white noise recordings that recall the continually embarrassing Face On Mars business, which is almost as embarrassing as when bloggers impose dubious themes on groups of links as a means of tying a post together.
And did I mention that Seraphic Fire has the name than which none cooler can be conceived?
My friend Alan sent me a link to a Josquin setting of Ave Maria sung by the Vocal Arts Ensemble of Cincinnati. Alan warns it supplants the Monteverdi Sicut Cervus as the most beautiful piece of Renaissance music. He's wrong, but it cheered me up a bit anyway.
Umie the Umlaut says, "ask your doctor about the Fredösphere!"
3 Comments:
don't be sad, Fred: when you're sad it makes me feel the same... as you. Your melancholy will pass. My mother always says, into every life a little rain must fall.
The Josquin Ave Maria is indeed beautiful. And really quite famous for a piece of Renaissance music--it always gets pulled out to illustrate Josquin because it's one of the few a fairly large audience of music people might know...
"Sicut cervus, desiderat ad fontes a quarum..." The first piece I've ever conducted...
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