shostakovich unhinged string quartet no. 8 wow (you must listen god...you must. and yana...you have to come hear the performance) 020628 ... Teenage Jesus Symphony #13, hands down, #1. (esp the last movement.) 020629 ... Mahayana yes i shall come hear the performance even if yall dont get to play, at the very least ill make [you] play for me so i can hear 1/4 of the quartet. ¿[a one forth-tet]? im eXcited & very much so looking forward to witnessing your talents in action :] on a side note: [mmmmmmm clove ciggys] :i really do think if worst comes to worse we should go amugging for some cloves: 020629 ... unhinged heart-wrenching heavy psychotic violent depressing opressive hopeless desperate sarcastic censored prolific 020629 ... unhinged i guess my heart was already wrenched and russian old school does nothing for me. i need to find a better recording. 020905 ... oldephebe i like that - russian old school composers...yeah they definately impart/transmit the zietgeist of the whole russian soul thing... 040216 ... unhinged yana YANA yana sass...SASS i'm playing shostakovich 8 in quartet this semester. *happydance* last week when we were rehearsing and it was cold and windy and the square outside the music building looked like a frozen tundra with all the loose snow riding on the wind two of the guys in my quartet came up for the perfect music video for shostakovich 8. a quartet playing out in the snow with big russian ear flap hats on with bottles of vodka chilling in the snow at their feet. today we were rehearsing the second movement and the cellist looks at us and says 'and so it begins' and then all i could think about when we were rehearsing for the rest of the day is the helm's deep battle in the two towers. not too pleasant images but nonetheless appropriate for a quartet dedicated to the victims of facism and war. i wouldn't say shostakovich is necessarily old school since he composed the eighth quartet in 1960, but he is my man. funny you brought this page up pheb. i've totally had shosty on my brain lately. GOD I LOVE THE EIGHTH QUARTET 040216 ... oE all things are connected... :) 040217 ... unhinged yeah, i think i'm getting way too far into the russian zeitgeist this semester. playing shostakovich in quartet and reading dostoevsky short stories for 'fun' .... for some reason russian art cuts right down to the quick with me. violist of my quartet: 'this is really depressing music.' me: 'why do you think i like it so much?' 040218 ... oldephebe unhinged - i love listening to you talk about your art, your music, your life...have you read any chekov?...glad you're enjoying your ensemble playing.. :) 040218 ... oE chekhov..sp 040219 ... a thimble in time Shostakovich. His very name shudders the bones. The seventh quarter is a musical miracle. How can notes so hallow make the world seem so deep? How can a motif so bitter be made to sound sweet? 040219 ... oE hear hear! *applauds vigorously* 040219 ... unhinged not chekov (russian transliterated is a bitch so i pick the one with the least amount of letters) but dostoevsky. just started reading a book of his short stories over the weekend. i had my first coaching for quartet yesterday and our prof picked on every little detail of my playing for like 15 minutes. how i hold my bow, where i put my bow, how fast i pull my bow, the speed of my vibrato, the speed of my shifting, how i place my finger on the string when i shift...gggaaahhh. not that i don't appreciate it, but sometimes it makes me want to crawl in a closet so he can't look at me. but even then, i'm sure he would know exactly what i'm doing wrong. 040219 ... ethereal Shos-TAK-O-vich reminds me of band. Festive Overture. making his name sound funny. i have such power in that song. gavorcna. bass line. ruler of all. chris keeps poking me. knock it off chris. im in my own land now. where i am important. where i have meaning. value. life. 040219 ... unhinged it is not as shostakovich out as it was last week. all the snow has melted and the sun is shining. but i feel even more shostakovich this week than i did last week. stupid contrary...blah. 040227 ... oE dark shadow draped over the soul kind of a thing is it? or just pounds and peaks of pique?..okay so that was just pointlessly alliterative...i make my own dissonance...blech 040227 ... unhinged we performed it in convo yesterday. i haven't been that nervous in a long time; i just wanted everyone there to know how much that piece means to me. damn shaky bow. 'how come no one stands for shostakovich?' 'well i guess that's just not the kind of piece that makes you wanna stand up when it's over.' 'it makes you wanna cry at the very least.' 'yeah, at the very least.' dead baby roses, shut blinds, endless stoned tears. 040417 ... oldephebe damn that was so incredibly apt... beautiful brick in my chest unhinged... ... 040417 ... unhinged 'it seemed to you that he is 'frail, fragile, withdrawn, an infinitely direct, pure child.' that is so. but if it were only so, then great art (as with him) would never be obtained. he is exactly what you say he is, plus something else -- he is hard, acid, extremely intelligent, strong perhaps, despotic and not altogether good-natured (although cerebrally good-natured). that is the combination in which he must be seen and then it may be possible to understand his art to some degree. in him, there are great contradictions. in him, one quality obliterates the other. it is conflict in the highest degree. it is almost a catastrophe.' in a letter by mikhail zoshchenko to marietta shaginyan, who was at the time infatuated with shostakovich from the book 'shostakovich: a life' by laurel e. fay 070516 ... unhinged 'i am firmly convinced that in music, as in every other human endeavor, it is always necessary to seek new paths. but it seems to me that those who see these new paths in dodecaphony are seriously deluding themselves. the narrow dogmatism of this artificially invented system rigidly fetters the creative imagination of composers and deprives them of individuality. it is no accident that in the entire legacy of schoenberg's dodecaphonic system there is not a single work that has gained wide acceptance...dodecaphony not only has no future, it doesn't even have a present. it is just a 'fad' that is already passing' take that john_cage i am more deeply in_love and seeing how shostakovich is still more loved and more played than schoenberg or webern or berg, i guess his somewhat snobby opinion was founded. 070531 ... unhinged i finished the book. awesome. know i know the whole story and i love his music even more and feel even closer to it. 070609 ... unhinged 'but i myself am not ready to die. i still have a lot of music to write.' 'you ask if i would have been different without 'party guidance'? yes, almost certainly. no doubt the line i was pursuing when i wrote the fourth symphony would have been stronger and sharper in my work. i would have displayed more brilliance, used more sarcasm, i could have revealed my ideas openly instead of having to resort to camouflage; i would have written more pure music.' that shostakovich's persistent stance of nonresistance to authority --- assumed during the stalinist period --- placed him at odds with his natural allies among the increasingly outspoken creative intelligentsia of brezhnev's russia was a painful fact that could not escape him. in her memoirs, vishnevskaya recalls that he often advised them: 'don't waste your efforts. work, play. you're living here, in this country, and you must see everything as it really is. don't create illusions. there's no other life. there can't be any. just be thankful that you're still allowed to breathe!' 070609 ... stork daddy his waltz from the jazz suite no. 2 demonstrates a pitch perfect emotive parity between tragedy and comic, the absurdly horrific and the sensibly pleasant. it should be called the bipolar waltz. 080109 ... unhinged we talk about it when we're drunk at the bar periodically joseph_and_i ; our joint shostakovich project. going back to youngstown and shooting a silent film to go with string quartet no. 8. and i wonder if i could get some ivet footage out of kt from back in the day. i wonder if she even still has it. 081025 ... unhinged piano trio no 2 in e minor op 67 playing this piece makes me so emotional, gives me goosebumps, especially the fourth movement 151221 what's it to you? who go blather from