brahms god: note to self but the second movement of the second and fourth symphonies tie for first place if i have to pick Coyo22Faith: i would rather not pick though 010614 ... unhinged listen god; i'm going to educate you. yes, sit right there on the little carpet and i'll tell you a story about brahms. see, first there was bach back in the late 1600s or something like that. he was a baroque composer. he wrote the tocotta and fugue in d minor for organ that everyone associates as scary music and jesu joy of mans desiring and some other famous stuff that maybe even if you don't know what i'm talking about you would know if you heard. my violin professor says he's the father of jazz and i think he might be right. he did some cool stuff with cross rhythms and chord progression that no one else was doing at the time. then in the late 1700s this guy beethoven came around. he bridged the gap between classical and romantic music. he invented the symphony form that the romantics like brahms used. his music is actually sometimes considered romantic because he was very emotive. he was deaf for most of his career and his late works were designed without performer limitations in mind. many composers of the 19th century were afraid that they could never compare to beethoven and brahms was one of them. he spent almost 20 years writing his first symphony because he wanted it to be absolutely perfect. but at a time when all his contemporaries were experimenting with program music that had extra-musical associations and flashy writing brahms wanted to stick with absolute music and wrote concertoes with interplay between the soloist and orchestra and not just to showcase a virtoustic display of craziness. in his time, brahms was thought to be boring and tame by most except a few people that saw his true genius. so the way i kind of look at this whole thing is bach started it beethoven expanded it and brahms finished it off. and he finished it off quite nicely. 010615 ... oblivionettianna unhinged, can't people like god have their own opinions? why must you go around always following up on everyone else's words that have to do with this type of music? it's obvious that you want people to know on blather that you play a music instrument. well, so what! so do lots of other people here and they probably have music mentors, as you do. the words that you type are quite hilarious to me, generalizing, disregarding, and misrepresenting composers and entire centuries of music. maybe you should spent a little less time here and more time in the practice room. 010615 ... god relax. this was information i asked for. 010616 ... unhinged uuummm...maybe you should shut up???? and maybe he didn't ask for my opinion (which by the way he did), but so what? that's what this place is for. opinions. obviously, since you put your ignorant one here as well. and please don't make me sound like i am uneducated. i have spent the past two years studying this and i know a lot more than i typed here. i was trying to write a blathe not a fucking novel. if he wants to know more because he was interested in what i wrote or finding out if i'm lying that's his perogative. i write what's in my mind at the moment. not every fucking detail i know because i don't want to be pedantic and long-winded. you know what...i shouldn't even bother wasting my time writing this but i'm really high and you just agitated the fuck out of me. i'm allowed to have opinions and write them here just like everyone else. sorry if i seem so misinformed, but don't tell me that i am ignorant about my life's passion. i kind of find it hilarious that your opinion is in and of itself is so hypocritical. 010616 ... oblivionettianna oooh, you just caught me. shut-up? maybe you should! i can have an opinion too. the way you always follow up on everything musical with your pompous attitude is getting old. i've seen the way you talk down to blatherers about their musical knowledge. i just hope you don't do that to people in the real world. 010616 ... unhinged sorry for being an over-opinionated, pushy, pompous, bragging, ignorant asshole. i'll shut up now and never say another word about it. (and just so you know, god's 'opinion' was really a piece of a conversation that i was having with him and it was something that i said) 010617 ... oblivionettianna excellent. 010617 ... god i think she is just high on her own intellectual stratification. she really enjoys music, and she has preferences. that doesn't make her pompous. 010618 ... sleepy bird lullaby 010618 ... god exactly 010618 ... god got symphony 2 mvt 2 off napster. it's beautiful 010620 ... unhinged i think i'm going to go listen to that right now 010621 ... absent but still present does the baby move around a lot when you perform? is there any composer he moves around to more than others? well in the beginning he moved around the most to brahms, but lately he just moves around a lot to everything. 010713 ... Teenage Jesus Brahms played piano in bars when he was a teenager. His chamber music is where he excels. In particular the Piano Quartet in Gminor- astounding. 010724 ... Teenage Jesus and oh yeah-- the B minor Clarinet Quintet is tremendous. Speaking of Clarinet Quintets, my wife and I used parts of Mozart's outstanding Clarinet Quintet for our wedding. tah 010724 ... Dafremen You want I should take care of this light work unhinged do0d? 010724 ... Teenage Jesus Bring it on `ya Johann Strauss waltz lovin', Bolero-guzzelin', "I just love The Seasons," Pachelbel Loose Canon!! 010724 ... unhinged brahms is awesome daf i think you might like it 010724 ... Aimee I love his Symphony No. 4 in e minor... it's heavenly 010724 ... Dafremen I have been lulled to sleep by Brahms on many occasions. Most of them in my Dad's car when I was a teenager. 010724 ... god i like to be lulled to sleep by some brahms when i drive my car. especially on an unfamiliar road hundreds of miles from home 020405 ... unhinged i have dreams sometimes that i am clara schumann 020405 ... unhinged that same baby not even two recognizes the strains of brahms. talk about conditioning from the womb. in masterclass, they were playing a brahms quartet, i don't remember which one now, a movement and he sat in the back of the hall with his mom ready for her to make a quick escape if he started squealing. and at the very end you could hear a distinct child-like 'yay' and much tiny clapping from the back of the hall. it amazes me that that child already has the aural capacity to recognize brahms; i'm sure it helps that his mother and father are both excellent chamber musicians and his grandparents too; that brahms is somewhat of a birthright in that family. but still, a kid not even two... i had always loved brahms. well maybe not always when i was about fourteen trying to learn the first violin part to his second symphony. then i hated brahms because he was beyond me. but since then, i have always loved brahms (i guess this page is a nasty testament to that). and this year working on the g major violin sonata revealed so much to me. and maybe brahms was better than beethoven at portraying emotion but he lived in a better time in music history for portraying emotion with beethoven the father of his entire era. without the innovations of beethoven, brahms would have been nothing more than a baudy bar piano player in a whore house. but his love of obscuring the major/minor tonality was definitely his. i have a weak spot for second movements in general but the second movements of all the violin sonatas, the second symphony....aaaahhhhh. it hits my spot. and maybe the more emotional side of beethoven: second movement of second symphony (one of the most melancholy and wonderful creations ever written) second movement of op. 132 string quartet subtitled a hymn of praise after a sickness (sic) both have moved me to tears in public places. both are the epitome of emotional expression. both are beethoven ;-) 030823 ... unhinged the second movement of beethoven's SEVENTH symphony...guess i was still daydreaming about that bassoon, cello, french horn ecstasy of brahms' second second... *sigh* 030823 ... oldephebe That was everything i thought it would be and more - like i said under the beethoven blathe any addition words i attach to this at this point would be superfluous - a prescient encapsulation i did get a little emotional reading this but ah ..blibber! later ... please post some more ... 030823 ... oldephebe should read unhinged, please post some more... later, 030823 ... unhinged oh *sigh* dear old oldephebe you feed my ego...that's dangerous. and you feed my ego about my passion; even more dangerous. brahms....brahms is never appreciated by the young. my first exposure to brahms was when i was fourteen; acadmeic festival overture, second symphony. many tears of frustration at parts that were beyond my ability; but brahms got me over a certain plateau then. two years or so later i played the second symphony again but this time the second violin part. and because technically it was a little easier, i sat in the back of the section in severance hall and began to understand brahms. why brahms was so beautiful and wonderful. and why it was worth it even though it was so goddamn hard. and then it got to my degree recitals. and i decided to do the great german lineage of b's. bach, beethoven, brahms. because all of them have contributed monumentally to the violin literature. i played a beethoven sonata on my junior recital. and since i had to write a thesis type paper on my recital i decided to do bach brahms and bartok on my senior recital. i had no idea what brahms i wanted to play; i just went to my professor and told him i wanted to play brahms and he picked out the first sonata in g major for me. the thing about the violin sonatas is that they are really piano sonatas with violin accompniament (another cue brahms took from beethoven and advanced and developed and deployed) and i needed desparately to find a GOOD pianist if i was going to play it on my recital. i ran into my theory professor of two years who also played the piano in the hallway one day and asked him if he knew anyone that could play the piano part of the brahms first violin sonata and he stuck his thumb to his chest. i honestly hadn't even considered asking him because he was one of the most crotchity professors in the whole school. so before winter break i got him the part and he promised to learn it. we rehearsed three hours a week starting at the beginning of the spring semester. my bach_goddess often came to the rehearsals and turned pages for dr. largent. i fell in love with brahms so deeply in his pages of his first violin sonata; the typical flowing melodies, the hungarian/whorehouse piano player roots, hemiola, the genius of form and melody, the obstruction of tonality....all the things i had learned in history class became so real. and i felt the intense longing in brahms, longing for something he could never have, love he could never have even after the obstacle passed away in the asylum. something that i felt myself, it struck down in me so deeply. and one day after rehearsal, me and my bach_goddess drove around our neighborhood and got high, a pretty permanent fixture in our afternoon routine at that point. and i strolled down the hallway of my dorm on my way to my room with the smile of someone who had just fallen in love, swinging my arms, humming the tune. brahms....*shuddersigh* and i put the recording of perlman and axe (which is actually not a very good recording) into my stereo and listened, high. very high actually. and the miniature roses on top of my speaker the way the light shone through the almost completely closed blinds, the emotional rollercoaster journey of the first movement ellided with the peace/torment of the second movement ellided with the melancholy dissolved into sudden contentment of the third rolled into sobs as i laid in my bed in the dark very high listening to a recording of the brahms first violin sonata and i was completely and totally in love. all the turmoil of my life my last semester in youngstown could always be suspended when i would have my brahms rehearsals with dr. largent. we both looked forward to it so much. some of the most beautiful musical moments of my life took place in those afternoons. and now sometimes i listen to the recording of my recital and i think 'hey kid not half bad.' 030825 ... oldephebe you go girl! that was really heartstopping - took me back a little - to my voice instructor trying sometimes in vain to get me to sound more like placido domingo and ah my heart was really into pop/alternative style singing - or something - and ah i just wanted to deconstruct charlie parkers' improvisations - okay maybe this is not an analabgous comparison but still - oh wait yeah, we did a few musicals and ah the director kind of encouraged me to sing my solos in the pippinesque ephebic "pop" vein or style ah this is not analogous either - nothing in my saxophone classes rivals this - except maybe when our orchestra did wagner "die miestersinger" and our director worked in a little extended first alto ah voicings of the melody - without the vibrato though 'casue yeah i use vibrato to sing but i think it obscures the mellifluos alto-tonality -bah! anyway unhinged that was incredible - it seems your english teacher was right - you have been kissed by two muses - nice very romantic ... 030825 ... oldephebe and yes the previous post has nothing to do with brahms - ah being a saxophone player - unfortunately i've never had the pleasure of playing or even studying his music intensly at any great length - i eventually changed majors - history/pre-law - blah - but unhinged you paint a very moving picture 030825 ... unhinged brahms paints some very moving pictures too. not only does he develop the musical ideas, but emotions. it's always a journey. 030826 ... User24 unhinged, I love your pushy, arrogant pompous style. (referrring to 2 year old argument and diving in to give support a little too late) 030826 ... unhinged yes, but i think my voice has changed a little around here since then. thanks though user24 ;-) 030827 ... user24 indeed. 031015 ... unhinged paper done worried it's too long worried it's off topic over nine pages on first violin sonata wondering if analysis is out of place realizing that analysis, while hated, brings some of the comfort of the concrete, like much dreaded calculus homework in high school nothing like pencil pushing numbers to definite ends even if it is bastardizing the beauty of brahms the semester almost dead and gone, thank god, since i barely can find the energy to think in complete sentences brahms chamber music a concrete and permanent escape where is my johannes? 031126 ... andru235 there are several heirs to the bach-beethoven-brahms developmental legacy but in a world that cares not for harmonious absolute music, will their voices ever be heard? it's doubtful. the brahmsian heir has the same birthday, plus 146 years. i guess that isn't the same birthday. what i meant was, same birthdate. 041229 ... somebody gotta agree with the first skite that symphony 4's second movement is fuckin wonderous 081018 ... unhinged second movement of symphony no 4 reminds me of skinny dipping in a lake under a full moon i want an orchestra to play the second movement of the second symphony at my wedding (still cringes when she sees this page) 081018 ... no reason i like brahms 081019 ... unhinged i'm in_love again violin sonatas ( the henryk szeryng / arthur rubinstein recordings) serendipitous synchronicity a very big circle of my life completed by sunshine through windowshades brahms sad/happy tears heroin_doll s brahms brings things out of me that words cannot there_are_no_words_here 100401 what's it to you? who go blather from