Wagner

I don't know if that is really an aria...Mime sings in it just as much as Siegfried. But it's definitely one of my favorites. My very favorite aria, is Elektra's first monologue It's so awesome! Worship it. King Marke's monologue in Tristan might be my next favorite. To alot of people its sort of boring but I think it is very sensitive. I don't know if you can consider it an aria, but Hans Sachs monologue at the end of Meistersinger is great. 1. Elektra's first monologue 2. Hans Sachs final monologue 3. Marke's monologue.

Any viewpoint regarding the quality of anything, on absolutely any grounds, is subjective.

What happened to "Sheet Music Fox"? All the files have been de-actived.

I thought it was just as eloquent, necessary and perceptive as your remark.

I did not mean it wasn't worthy of being studied or that it would not be liked by cosmopolitan gays who like to point out perceived inadequacies so they feel like social and intellectual superiors, but that, by Stravinsky's own philosophy, was not intended to be sophisticated in the sense of the word that gianluca was using it.

Can we really separate music into different ontological categories? I.e., this is deep and meaningful, this is shallow. Or does that sound like those goofy philosophers who try to ascertain ultimate reality amidst a perceived sea of illusion and say "This is real, this is true and the rest of the universe is crap!" Didn't Stravinsky once say, "Music is incapable of expressing anything but itself"? What is harmony? Surely it exists outside of human activity, even that which is believed to have been conceived by human activity. Do you believe music is the essence of things like Wagner, and then, to insult a harmony, would be to insult some other things in the universe that emits that harmony with their vibration? Or are these the same things that the philosophers put in a separate ontological category from ultimate reality? I think these are questions you should ask yourself, if you deem pop or any music unworthy. I say I like this and I don't like that, for the sake of having an argument, not because I fervently believe in the objective superiority of Wagner and Strauss' music It is you who are painfully naive and humanistic, if you hold a true opinion for or against a harmony. Are you sure? I know an awful lot about Wagner; he was found of Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart but I never read or suspected Schubert, whom one of his earlier "enemies", Schumann, exalted. Chopin, perhaps, through Liszt, but I doubt Schubert. Secondly, can we really call Wagner and early Stravinsky sophisticated? Is that what comes to mind when you hear the Forging Song or Firebird Suite? I believe that, depth is not found in sophistication - it is found at the very center, downward and into, rather than up and away from. I was saying, that brilliance = elegance, which is opposite primal.

I come from a vastly different perspective than you; but I agree. Only the pathetic will feel that their heroes are objectively better than anyone else. As THe Emperor said, "Good is a point of view". Personally, I feel that Mozart, Bach, Schubert, Haydn, Brahms, Handel and Tchai, are all very dry. Furthermore, I feel that refinement and elegance is the opposite of depth...brilliance is a high-spinning thing, the opposite of primalness.

Huh, I agree with that, even the generalization that everyone likes people with ADD. I think there is some logical/ mathematic facility that has a symbiotic relationship with "ADD" - for some reason it seems as if lots of the mathematically inclined kids at my school possess it to some degree. Everybody likes people with ADD, because their lack of penetrating, holistic thought makes them innocent, as opposed to... OCD Wagnerians - the people in which there is no logic. For some reason we are the most hated wherever we go and whatever we do. OCD can be a really unusual and hard condition to have, but I doubt there is any other pathology that opens the potential for illogical thought as a whole.

Alright, don't believe a word I say (You justifiably never do) but here's what I have to say. But, about 10-15 years into the future, I think education is going to become much more systemized and they will take kids with "talent" and give them a very specialized education (in public schools)...one of the areas it will be most apparent is music. Music scouts will be just as prevalent as they are in baseball, scoping out the young talent and all. It's unlikely that anyone who is not identified by the education system as musical has any sort of chance at being a musician, since education otherwise will be rigorous and there will be little chance for them to develop such abilities. Also, after this gets going you're going to see a distinct attraction to music as sheer beauty, as opposed to experimental stuff. It will sort of go hand in hand with the explosive discoveries in science, and a general appreciation for pattern-like phenomena.

Could you please elaborate on what his ideas are that his disciples attempt to impose on the musical world?

What the heck was his philosophy that all you guys are talking about? I know he said something like "The world trade center attacks a great work of art" or something, is that what y'all are talking about? I really want to know.

I don't know much about Stockhausen beyond what I looked up in a wikipedia article. Could you explain?

I concur with everything you said, but I didn't know Wagner had formal harmony lessons with Liszt, as opposed to just generally sharing ideas? I thought he learned from a local cantor.

How about the actual operas themselves - Salome, Elektra, Daphne, Ariadne auf Naxos, and to a lesser extent IMO, Der Rosenkavalier are all incredible.

I second that :)

I remember I was reading something about how orchestras are playing music from video games now. The author was fervently against this, and called for people to challenge the "modern PC view" that said that the White Stripes album was just as good as a Schubert Waltz. They had orchestra members talk about how the video game music was cheesy and so on. I think my opinion on the matter is obvious vv

Amen to that! Though I'm not so fond of a few things here and there like "frare jacques" in #1.

Hahaha, those buffoons who don't realize when each section is given soloistic treatment! What simpletons! Ho ho ho! What pitiful musical intellect!

Everyone will have their opinion, however snobby. And people will point out their "snobbery" which is fine... Because, it is all subjective. People might declare a Schubert waltz to be superior to White Stripes, but there is no objective ground as to what makes it better. The harmony is all thanks to the universe and not the composer, and to insult it is not insulting the composer but insulting the universe.

I would actually be very grateful if you WOULD attack them, so that I can understand more about the conventional viewpoint. As has been noted by some of the forum users I'm not one to engage in specific personal insults or quips, so rest assured that I would give the utmost respect to your argument.

My comment on time is as Heraclitus says; "Everything flows, nothing remains fixed." This would be in opposition to the validity of truths across time - only a snapshot in space time, is where the truth of that instant only can be captured. This is in opposition to a "Cause and effect", formulaic view (which for all logical purposes is better, but I am not fond of conventional logic), in which randomness and alternate potentiality is non-existant. The only thing that is always there, is the primal nature of things (which is not a specifically physical thing), which you experience every moment but probably fail to conciously notice. By intuition I do not mean biological traits that appear through evolution. I do not mean anything that helps you survive. I basically just mean the primal depths of the subconcious, in which I assert that this "primal nature of things" is known. To me, this is the superlative of everything. Heraclitus said,"The Beginning is the end". The intellect of people will grow and grow, and they will be brighter than the people today, but search for what is, ends where it began - before intellect (in the example of humans and their evolution), there was no intellect. When you stop thinking, the way a frog would not think like a human, there isn't anything you can't know.

Well, I haven't heard this name yet in this thread, and he may not be the most influential or universally liked. Richard Strauss seems like a really underrated composer to me. I just think he was brilliant on the same level as the "greats", but rarely gets as much recognition for it. Although he returned to classical aestheticism with his later operas, I think he had a really wonderful "voice". I think he is the master of the leitmotif.

Knowledge is ultimately harmless. It does exclude mystery, but the ultimate knowledge is that of mystery, and once knowledge of that is possessed, there is no part of knowledge more knowing. Time makes knowledge invalid, since change is the only unchanging thing. People will behold things of "beauty", but this view of beauty that you are contemplating is illusory - the ultimate beauty is the whole of the infinite. You say that ignorance is evil - ignorance of this definition of beauty keeps the universe alive. I always talk about how logical reasoning and excessive attention to detail is a way to make up for a lack of intuition, but for the sake of saving you from a "wall of china", I will not delve into it more than that. You say that the Lizard cannot like Brahms. Well, it does not like Brahms over the squawk of Geese, because it knows the definition of beauty, because it has no logical reasoning. THere is not a happy medium, unless you care to distinguish between good and bad, which is when you will immediately lose sight. The distinction between beauty and not beauty is a cause of conflict - yes, ignorance is this distinction, and it allows for people to say what is evil. So if you consider conflict evil, than this conventional defintion of beauty, which is ignorance, is evil. But, ignorance is not necesssarily beauty, if you define what is ignorant. People who do use logical reasoning, who say what is good and bad, right and wrong, to me they are ignorant, because they do not behold the whole. And since I said that the whole is the only truly beautiful thing, they do not behold true beauty.

I really like La Mer...I listened to it in its entirety over the summer once, and it was great!