What is sublime? What is the most sublime piece of music you ever heard, what was the context and did you ever hear it repeated?Was it somewhere here:
Beethoven - Piano Trio Op. 97 in B Major, Brahms - Piano Trio No. 3 in c minor orShostakovitch - Piano Trio No. 2 in e minor [with Natalia Gutman], which, incidentally, is coming up live in early February.
Can popular music ever be sublime? If my reputation is not already shot to ribbons, I’m going to thrust forward the Stranglers’ Down in the Sewer [all four movements of it] as an example of how a genre was hijacked and turned into a piece of fabulous music [within the parameters of pseudo-punk].
All right, all right, I know, I know. So what about Thijs van Leer and his magic flute, with Jan Akkerman and his improvised guitar and keyboards, in Focus, in such classics as Birth and Hamburger Concerto?
What about one of my favourite groups of all time – Can – and Tago Mago?
Funny how this ties in with the latest discussion up at Alex's. If I hadn't gone on for long enough already there, I would have posted there about how the closest I have ever come to knowing God to exist was during a Russian Orthodox funeral mass sung in the Peter and Paul Cathedral on Hare Island in St Petersburg, burial place to many of the Tsars.
ReplyDeleteYou know I'm agnostic; if I did believe, I think the Russian Orthodox church would still be far too medieval for my taste. I carry no torch for the Russian Empire, either, which is not to say I think its successors were improvements. It's not even as though it was an actual funeral, it was a concert performance. It's not even as though I'd planned to hear it, the concert just happened to be scheduled for the day I was visiting.
But as I sat in that cathedral, and I listened to the unaccompanied male voice choir, and the harmonies flowed through me, and the impossibly low notes reverberated around me; as I heard the beauty which man could attain, and contemplated the devotion which inspired both composer and performers; well, I might not have known it for sure to be God, but I did know it to be sublime.
Yesterday clearly wasn't a good day for me to be commenting; Of course I meant this discussion. Sorry.
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