What are you reading now?

[Peter]

I love Dr. Faustus and the Magic Mountain and Death in Venice. Mann is a phenomenal author. It would be great if you could , after giving the talk to summarize it on this site for people in the UK. Sounds fantastic!

Not forgettting Buddenbrooks and the very funny (unusually for Mann!) Confessions of Felix Krull which unfortunately was not completed.

[Peter]

Reading Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus in preparation for a conference talk I am giving on Beethoven and Literary/Philosophical aesthetics.

Wasn't Faustus based on Schoenberg?

[marquis66]

There are certainly allusions that Leverkuhn (the... "protagonist"? Main character, if nothing else) was meant to be a parody of Schoenberg. In fact the whole novel is so tinted with parody of German High philosophy, as to be almost ridiculous. I am using the Ch. 8 lecture on op. 111 (itself a parody of Adorno, most likely) as the entry point to Beethoven.

Mann and Schoenberg were at least acquaintances. I remember reading somewhere that Ole' Arnie was a little put off when he first read it, until he realized just how true-to-life the facsimile was in many regards. Don't quote me on that bit though, I am not sure where I saw that.

[marquis66]

very funny (unusually for Mann!)

It isn't that he isn't funny, it's that he isn't laugh out loud funny. More witty, biting satire. Faustus is ridiculous, more than funny.

[Whoops. I have clearly not had enough coffee... I didn't realize I described him as ridiculous in two different posts...]

[Sorrano]

I've been reading G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare. That was an interesting read, indeed!

[Peter]

Just finishing Delacroix's journal: he has some very interesting views on art and composers which I don't entirely share but I suppose they give a French mid 19th century view of things. Overall he comes across as a rather unhappy and lonely man. Next up is Bowells's London journal of 1762/3 which I'm sure will be a happier read!

[Sorrano]

Victor Hugo: Les Miserables. I decided to give this a shot (the complete and unabridged version).

[Quijote]

Who needs conductors? An interesting question (and an old one, of course) that this newspaper article examines. Bonne lecture.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/20...ok-tom-service

[Sorrano]

Who needs conductors? An interesting question (and an old one, of course) that this newspaper article examines. Bonne lecture.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/20...ok-tom-service

Sometime last week I listened to a work performed by a conductor-less orchestra, but cannot recall who or what. Attention was drawn to the fact that the orchestra operated without a conductor and that everything seemed to go well.

[Joy]

Sometime last week I listened to a work performed by a conductor-less orchestra, but cannot recall who or what. Attention was drawn to the fact that the orchestra operated without a conductor and that everything seemed to go well.

Also I seem to recall reading about a robot that conducted an orchestra and did quite well at that too.

[Quijote]

(Re)reading Adorno : Essays on Music, University of California Press, 2002 (a new translation). In particular, one essay : Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis (1959).

[Quijote]

And another essay which I never read first time round (too many years ago) : Wagner's Relevance for Today (1963).

[Chris]

Phrasing and Articulation: A Contribution to a Rhetoric of Music, by Hermann Keller (Translated by Leigh Gerdine)

[Quijote]

Phrasing and Articulation: A Contribution to a Rhetoric of Music, by Hermann Keller (Translated by Leigh Gerdine)

Give us a couple of ideas from this book, would you?

[Chris]

Give us a couple of ideas from this book, would you?

It covers the history and development of phrasing and articulation. In the beginning it focuses on explaining what these things are, how they are different from one another, and how they developed throughout the history of music. This includes a look at the notation, including an examination of the stroke, wedge, and dot, which was helpful. The second part of the book is a closer examination of phrasing and articulation in the works of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.

Some very interesting examples are given, which I really can't reproduce without a way to easily post notation, unfortunately. Bruckner gets a few mentions in it, though, such as:

"Wagner has, in his orchestral language, increased to the ultimate the reach of his 'endless melody' by ceaseless phrase-linkages from one instrument to another. Bruckner did not follow his master Wagner in this respect, but, for the most part, lets one theme die away completely before a new one arises; Reger, on the other hand, with his motifs organized from small elements is, in phrasing, to be considered a disciple of Brahms."