Palmer and His Money Are Soon Parted

I have to make a confession: I spent a lot of money today. And I feel a bit guilty about it.

At least a chunk of it went for groceries. The majority of it, though, was spent at a bookstore. Walking in, I intended only to get a copy of Bill Malone's Don't Get Above Your Raising: Country Music and the Southern Working Class but I walked out $275 poorer. My first mistake was to walk into the CD/DVD section. Surveying the area, I immediately got a bug up my ass to bolster my meager classical music collection. While I love classical music, I don't have an in-depth knowledge of it nor as broad a taste as I would like. I did know that my Shostakovich CD had a scratch and the knowledge that I had only 1 piece by Beethoven in my collection would have driven Karlos Moser, my music appreciation professor in college, into fits of hysteria. So I bought a few CDs.

Being rather uncultured and, as I said, quite ignorant about classical music, I enlisted the aid of The NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection: The 350 Essential Works. Theoretically, I could get the "better" recordings - whatever that means. Something about fidelity and performance and interpretation. With the tome firmly in hand, I made my way to the racks.

I have to admit that I prefer newer stuff. By this, I don't mean that I'm a big John Adams fan, though Fearful Symmetries is good, but classical music really got interesting, for me at any rate, around 150 years ago. The first thing I grabbed was a 3-disc set of Stravinsky featuring a complete performance of The Firebird along with The Rite of Spring and Persephone. Le Sacre du printemps is not only of historical significance, ushering in modern Western art music, but it's also a fucking great piece of music. Whenever those guys starting bashing the tympanis in the "Mystic Circles of the Young Girls" section, it sends chills up & down my spine. I think I have a soft spot for Stravinsky because he died in 1971, a year before my birth. I think that many people have this weird conception about classical composers - like all of them lived contemporaneously with Beethoven and that it was all written at least 150 years ago. So I think that, when I was a child and heard Stravinsky's name for the first time, I just assumed that he and Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, and the gang all hung out in taverns together or something. Finding out that he died just a year before I was born somehow endeared him to me. It's like my mind made him an honorary Generation Xer or something. Still, another great, Aaron Copeland, died within the past 10 years yet, despite enjoying his music, he doesn't match-up to Igor for some reason in my head.

Next I found that they had a recommended recording of another favorite of mine, Carmina Burana. (Orff died in 1982, by the way.) It's epic and has like a chorus of like a million people and it's sung in Latin! I don't care what anyone thinks - the opening "Fortuna Imperatrix Mundi" bit rocks as hard as anything Metallica has ever done. In an odd way, it reminds me of "Creeping Death".

As I said above, my Shostakovich CD somehow got scratched and this has rendered his 5th Symphony unlistenable which is a travesty. So I picked up a nice recording of it along with Dmitri's 9th. I love the 5th! It's so melodic and tuneful. Several years ago, I read a book by a guy whose goal was to get people who like rock music into classical. So he took a rock standard and gave a classic equivalent. Well, sort of. I can't recall anything specific but it would go something like this: "When you think of sappy rock ballads, you think of 'Yesterday' by The Beatles. The equivalent in the realm of classical music is..." It was really a bad book but I'm gonna take a page out of it here. Pete Townshend's "Let My Love Open the Door" is, to my mind, one of the most blatantly catchy pop songs ever and Shostakovich's 5th is a bit like he wrote several Let My Love Open the Door's and squished them together to form a symphony. I'll quit before the analogy gets any thinner.

Completing my trifecta of Russian composers, I acquired Leonard Bernstein conducting Pictures at an Exhibition and Night On Bald Mountain by Mussorgsky. I'd first encountered Pictures via Emerson, Lake, and Palmer who transferred the piece to the rock domain and added words. (I should note here that I got a performance of Ravel's orchestral adaptation - the original was for piano.) I dunno - I just love these pieces. A certain sense of...majestic darkness. Come on! They're Russian so what can you expect. I have no idea why I find Russian composers so appealing. Maybe I have a bit of that darkness inside of me.

Before heading to the checkout counter, I needed Beethoven. Why? It's Beethoven. I began to wonder if it was my copy of the glorious 9th that was scratched instead of Dmitri's 5th. Or was it both? I threw caution to the wind and figured I'd just get both. But which version of the 9th? They had a Deutsche Grammophone version which initially caught my eye. If you're going to listen to a piece of German musik, who better than to perform than Germans? Then I found a recording of the 9th done with period instruments.

There is a camp of classical music cognoscenti who believe that the listener can really connect with composers and get as close as possible to feeling what they felt when composing by listening to pieces performed with original scores and period instruments. While I don't think a listener can ever feel exactly what a composer felt by listening to a piece of music, I am sympathetic to their cause. If there ever was any pure or raw emotion that Beethoven wanted to impart to his listeners, we'll never feel it as intended. Ludwig van is long dead and instruments have changed. But I suppose certain measures can be taken to approximate Beethoven's wishes.

Finding a blurb about the recording in the book, I read about the conductor's hardon for period instrumentation. Then I thought, why pussyfoot? So I bought all of Beethoven's symphonies recorded by this guy. I mean, it is Beethoven. Some of the finest music ever created by a human being. Having only 1 of his symphonies is like having a dictionary which only covers a few letters of the alphabet.

And so my music collection grew today. Still lots of classical to be added in addition to the jazz, folk, rock, world, etc. Oh, and I got some books too. After having read a couple of Julie's entries, I spent a lot of time poking around the aisle with all the books on Christianity...