Thanks, Paul, for a very stimulating message -- I can only say "wow" and
sit here enviously [I'm not volunteering, mind you!].
It got me to thinking about my favorite hobby horse these days, viz.
distinguishing between performances and recordings of performances.
Last Sunday I improvised a piece at church (unaccompanied singing of the
Song of Moses, Ex 15) that was quite tolerable. A few people came up after
the service and asked about it -- this must happen all the time to jazz
players -- "Was it written down? Could I learn it? Could you do it again?
Do you have a recording of it?" Well of course it wasn't, and that's that
-- it'll never occur that way again, and the musical moment was all the
more special because it was unique. But why is there such a strong
tendency to want to re-live moments of music (which are at some level
impossible to replicate, utterly altered in replication, etc.)? I wonder
-- is this a question of psychology, cognition, philosophy, or what?
Best wishes,
Bob
At 10:24 PM 3/27/2002 +0100, you wrote:
> Tonight I videotaped the recent performance of Bach's St. John
> Passion by
>the Berlin Philharmonic and the outstanding RIAS Kammerchor with Sir Simon
>Rattle conducting, plus the soloists Juliane Banse, Michael Chance, Ian
>Bostridge, Reiner Trost, & Thomas Quasthoff (140 minutes).
>
> In similar fashion, Good Friday television (repeat: TELEVISION)
> will pipe
>these musical didbits into my humble abode:
>
> Bach's "Musical Offering" (performers not named; 60 minutes);
>
> Bach's St. John Passion with Michael Gielen conducting the
> Baden-Baden
>Radio Symphony and the Bad Tölz Boys' Choir, plus soloists including
>Christoph Prégardien & Quasthoff;
>
> the St. Matthew Passion from Bach's own St. Thomas's Church in
> Leipzig
>(where he lies buried), with his present-day successor as Thomaskantor,
>Georg Christoph Biller, conducting arguably the world's finest boys' choir
>and Leipzig's superb old Gewandhausorchester, plus soloists including the
>baritone Olaf Bär (175 minutes);
>
> the "Dies irae" movement from the Verdi Requiem, with Claudio Abbado
>conducting the Berlin Philharmonic plus Angela Gheorghiu, Daniela
>Barcellona, Roberto Alagna, and Julian Konstantinov (40 minutes);
>
> the children's opera "The Emperor of Atlantis" by Viktor Ullmann,
> murdered
>by the Nazis in Theresienstadt concentration camp, as performed in the
>memorial site at the former Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria (60
>minutes);
>
> a repeat of the St. Matthew Passion (see above); and
>
> the St. John Passion from Baden-Baden.
>
> I should porbably have my head examined for even thinking about
> making this
>offer, but it tears my heart out merely thinking about all my poor musically
>deprived fellow Americans as victims of the continuing and apparently
>unstoppable disappearance of good music throughout the Land of Unlimited
>Possibilities, the richest country in the whole damn world, so if anyone
>reading this feels moved to take on the office of central stateside
>converter-distributor, in a manner that will relieve me of as much as
>possible of the burden at this end beyond putting the master cassette(s)
>into the mail, let me hear from you.
>
>Paul Moor (Berlin)
><Texas-Paule@Sigmund-Freud.Org>
>Telefon: (030) 8639-5784
>Telefax: (030) 8639-5785
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 28 2002 - 05:26:13 PST