My Own Private Carmina Burana
Mar. 16th, 2002 04:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miko2It's funny how memory works.
Music acts like some sort of memory wildcard sometimes. All sorts of songs remind me of specific places or moments in my past. I remember riding the bus to kindergarten and first grade, and listening to "Put Your Hand In The Hand" by Ocean. "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo" by... whoever it was... reminds me of the house on Water Street that we rented for six months when we first moved to Ketchikan, Alaska. I remember our other house in Ketchikan, on the North end of the island above a rocky beach, and I can picture myself listening to "Don't You Love Her Madly" by The Doors on the radio. Most of my early music memories are tied to pop radio, because that's what I listened to at the time.
As for Carmina Burana... I don't remember when I first heard it. At one time I just had a vague idea that it was a piece of music that they borrowed from for the Conan soundtrack. (And eventually, I came to realize that half of all fantasy or sci fi movies have borrowed from either Carmina Burana or Holt's The Planets, heh.)
I remember when Alan lived here, and he had a copy of Carmina Burana. I didn't know much about classical music at the time. One year I bought him a cd for his birthday (wow, Miko buy a cd as a present? What a concept!) and I wanted to get him something classical that he'd like, but I had no idea where to start or what to look for.
And then one day I decided to get into classical music more. I bought a beginer's intro book and started looking for music I already knew. Planets and Carmina Burana were at the top of the list of course. ^_^ I bought more books, read a lot, built a good-sized collection, talked to people online (at Genie). I found The Record-Shelf Guide to Classical CDs and Cassettes, by Jim Svejda, to be the best guide to what I should buy. He's very opinionated, but I agree with his assessement on music most of the time.
Anyway, I became something of a classical snob. ^_^ Only the best performances for me! And not because some critic said it was good... but because I can clearly hear the difference between Bruckner's 4th Symphony as performed by Eugen Jochum and... just about anybody else. There aren't a lot of good versions out there.
So when I pick up a book that claims to be a good, critical guide to classical music, I seek out some of my favorite examples of very good or very bad performances of works I like... and if they reccomend something that I know sucks, or diss something that I really like... well, it helps me seperate the good music critics from the posers. With Jim Svejda, I think what clinched it for me was that he dissed Neemi Jarvi's version of Dvorak's 7th Symphony, which I had the misfortune to buy (hands down the worst performance of that symphony I've yet heard).
But as for Carmina Burana... I own two copies, neither of them the one that Svejda reccomends, but I bought them before I found his book, and both are good enough. The image that Orff's music brings to mind is me driving to work along I-99, down the corridore that passes by the Woodland Park Zoo. I think that was me listening to my new Carmina cd for the first time. ^_^
And if you want to know Svejda's opinion on Carmina Burana... he calls it trash, calls Orff "not just a one-work but a one-idea composer", admits it can be a dazzling experience the first few times, but that repeated listenings reveal its "vulgarity and yawning vapidity"... and then he goes on to talk about how much he really likes it. Sort of reminds me of the one literature professor at SPU who taught a class on, essentially, pulp literature (detective stories) and in his first class he ripped the genre to shreds and then admitted that he was writing one of his own.
I like that in Svejda... he can seperate "I like it" from "it's great art". Other critics I've read either love or hate Orff (quite a few classical critics hate him), but Svejda admits to liking things that he doesn't really consider good music. And when he really hates something, he lets you know. As, for example, Pachelbel's Kanon in D, where he reluctantly provides a reccomendation "If you really MUST..." and then adds "This compact disc version is especially useful, in that you can program the Kanon to repeat again and again, and thus save yourself untold thousands of dollars by putting off that frontal lobotomy...."
Music acts like some sort of memory wildcard sometimes. All sorts of songs remind me of specific places or moments in my past. I remember riding the bus to kindergarten and first grade, and listening to "Put Your Hand In The Hand" by Ocean. "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo" by... whoever it was... reminds me of the house on Water Street that we rented for six months when we first moved to Ketchikan, Alaska. I remember our other house in Ketchikan, on the North end of the island above a rocky beach, and I can picture myself listening to "Don't You Love Her Madly" by The Doors on the radio. Most of my early music memories are tied to pop radio, because that's what I listened to at the time.
As for Carmina Burana... I don't remember when I first heard it. At one time I just had a vague idea that it was a piece of music that they borrowed from for the Conan soundtrack. (And eventually, I came to realize that half of all fantasy or sci fi movies have borrowed from either Carmina Burana or Holt's The Planets, heh.)
I remember when Alan lived here, and he had a copy of Carmina Burana. I didn't know much about classical music at the time. One year I bought him a cd for his birthday (wow, Miko buy a cd as a present? What a concept!) and I wanted to get him something classical that he'd like, but I had no idea where to start or what to look for.
And then one day I decided to get into classical music more. I bought a beginer's intro book and started looking for music I already knew. Planets and Carmina Burana were at the top of the list of course. ^_^ I bought more books, read a lot, built a good-sized collection, talked to people online (at Genie). I found The Record-Shelf Guide to Classical CDs and Cassettes, by Jim Svejda, to be the best guide to what I should buy. He's very opinionated, but I agree with his assessement on music most of the time.
Anyway, I became something of a classical snob. ^_^ Only the best performances for me! And not because some critic said it was good... but because I can clearly hear the difference between Bruckner's 4th Symphony as performed by Eugen Jochum and... just about anybody else. There aren't a lot of good versions out there.
So when I pick up a book that claims to be a good, critical guide to classical music, I seek out some of my favorite examples of very good or very bad performances of works I like... and if they reccomend something that I know sucks, or diss something that I really like... well, it helps me seperate the good music critics from the posers. With Jim Svejda, I think what clinched it for me was that he dissed Neemi Jarvi's version of Dvorak's 7th Symphony, which I had the misfortune to buy (hands down the worst performance of that symphony I've yet heard).
But as for Carmina Burana... I own two copies, neither of them the one that Svejda reccomends, but I bought them before I found his book, and both are good enough. The image that Orff's music brings to mind is me driving to work along I-99, down the corridore that passes by the Woodland Park Zoo. I think that was me listening to my new Carmina cd for the first time. ^_^
And if you want to know Svejda's opinion on Carmina Burana... he calls it trash, calls Orff "not just a one-work but a one-idea composer", admits it can be a dazzling experience the first few times, but that repeated listenings reveal its "vulgarity and yawning vapidity"... and then he goes on to talk about how much he really likes it. Sort of reminds me of the one literature professor at SPU who taught a class on, essentially, pulp literature (detective stories) and in his first class he ripped the genre to shreds and then admitted that he was writing one of his own.
I like that in Svejda... he can seperate "I like it" from "it's great art". Other critics I've read either love or hate Orff (quite a few classical critics hate him), but Svejda admits to liking things that he doesn't really consider good music. And when he really hates something, he lets you know. As, for example, Pachelbel's Kanon in D, where he reluctantly provides a reccomendation "If you really MUST..." and then adds "This compact disc version is especially useful, in that you can program the Kanon to repeat again and again, and thus save yourself untold thousands of dollars by putting off that frontal lobotomy...."
