stlukesguild
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Usually, reading about music will not necessarily help me enjoy it more, but in the case of Mahler, it really did help me make more sense of his work when I learned that he basically tried to put entire worlds into his symphonies, so that they would contain everything from the profound to the utterly banal, from glorious sunsets to cowbells.
This explains their seemingly rambling structure, and I listened to them in that way: as a world to discover, that doesn't necessarily need to "makes sense". It's like taking a walk through city streets, with all manner of things to see: a lovely street tree here, some kids playing a silly game over there, a young punk in a souped-up car coming roaring past. At the end of the street you enter the grounds of a cemetery, beautiful and serene and somewhat sad, but halfway through a police helicopter comes thundering overhead. And so on and so forth: endlessly varying and interesting; it's the perfect stuff for the musical flaneur.
I think I came to appreciate later composers such as Wagner, Mahler, and Richard Strauss... on through Gershwin, Bernstein, and Reich.... because I approached classical music in something of a linear, chronological manner. My family attended the Lutheran Church and my mother sang soprano in the works of Bach in the services. I came to love Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi early on... before moving into Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, etc... My appreciation of "Early Music"... Renaissance and Medieval... only took place later. I think the structures of Bach as well as those of Minimalist composers helped me to make sense of Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Leonin, Perotin, and Gregorian Chant.
This explains their seemingly rambling structure, and I listened to them in that way: as a world to discover, that doesn't necessarily need to "makes sense". It's like taking a walk through city streets, with all manner of things to see: a lovely street tree here, some kids playing a silly game over there, a young punk in a souped-up car coming roaring past. At the end of the street you enter the grounds of a cemetery, beautiful and serene and somewhat sad, but halfway through a police helicopter comes thundering overhead. And so on and so forth: endlessly varying and interesting; it's the perfect stuff for the musical flaneur.
I think I came to appreciate later composers such as Wagner, Mahler, and Richard Strauss... on through Gershwin, Bernstein, and Reich.... because I approached classical music in something of a linear, chronological manner. My family attended the Lutheran Church and my mother sang soprano in the works of Bach in the services. I came to love Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi early on... before moving into Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, etc... My appreciation of "Early Music"... Renaissance and Medieval... only took place later. I think the structures of Bach as well as those of Minimalist composers helped me to make sense of Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Leonin, Perotin, and Gregorian Chant.
