George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra's Debussy - La Mer

Only half a record tonight, because Debussy's La Mer only takes up one side. This is George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra playing Debussy and Ravel (i'm not interested in hearing Ravel right now).

La Mer is a tricky piece. It's not a symphony, it's not a symphonic poem, it's not "impressionistic," it's not what Debussy was known for writing up to this point, and nobody had much nice to say about it until he conducted it himself. The general reception ran along the lines of "how the hell is this 'the sea?' It's just half an hour of scribbley nonsense."

I'm sure it won't shock you that i find classical music criticism even more odious than rock criticism. Let's ignore them and take a more bottle approach.

It took a year of looking at Japanese paintings and daydreaming of childhood memories for Debussy to write it, and for him that was a rush job. He didn't want it to be an actual symphony, but he didn't want it to be overly pretentious fluff either. What have you got to work with? Waves? Light? An unpredictably violent briny death? Mermaids? I can hear all that in there, same as any Disney apprentice tracer. More importantly, the sea has it's own moods and men can never control or predict them. On that score, it's brilliant. The movements don't follow a formula, they just unfold; things happen, other things happen afterward, there's continuity for sure, but no immediately observable logic. The calm is not actually calm, it's a tense vibration waiting to explode. We are fascinated by the sea because we cannot truly inhabit it. We can endure it, harvest from it, explore it, traverse it, but it will always be a force that we cannot control. Everything in the piece happens in waves and ripples.

I hate the way it ends, but i don't have a better suggestion. It has to stop at some point, and big crescendo with a plop is a pretty standard "it's over."

Next

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Welcome to my blog, and my record collection.

This is a blog about my love of listening to albums. It started off as a nightly perusal of my dad's record collection (which sadly became mine) on my personal facebook page. Over the last two months it has become quite an enjoyable process of simply ranting about what i think is a real art form, the album. It needs a more permanent home. Some of my reviews are positive, some negative. They might not be what you expect from album reviews, but i hope you at least find them entertaining. For the most part i do very little research, and they tend to be train of thought reactions rather than calculated essays. If nothing else, know that i'm really listening to them and whether they are amazing or abysmal i want you to go listen to them too.  I'll start migrating the 60+ i've written so far over here in the next few days, and hopefully get to the point where i just start writing them here. I'd probably even take suggestions if you're just dying to know my tho
Read more

Eyrth - Meridian

Image
A terrible sadness accompanies the release of Meridian by Latvian Ambient Metal band EYRTH. Since their debut Fracture in early 2019 the band, and indeed the whole world has suffered a global pandemic, intense ideo-political turmoil, the death of friend and bandmate Igor Golovin, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.  The war in Ukraine still wages on, even though we in the Western hemisphere seem to have largely forgotten. These are turbulent times, and Alex and Andrey are rightfully entering an extended break. We may not see or hear new music from them for a while, if ever, and that is completely understandable. The music they've created, however, is truly breathtaking. Self-described as "Uranium wreckage in audio," the music of Eyrth is every bit as hauntingly beautiful as it is brutally crushing. Close your eyes and you'll quickly find yourself in the achingly cold and desolate wasteland of human technological atrophy. Slow, ponderously heavy, at times rabidly ragi
Read more

My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult - Hit & Run Holiday

Image
I noticed today that the strange part of the world who actually knows about My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult has finally accepted that they are in fact "industrial disco." The history of Wax Trax and Chicago industrial music is a subject worthy of an entire library, but MLWTTK is my favorite band to emerge from those humble record store beginnings. They are an unpredictable band for sure, and i definitely don't like all of their albums, but Hit & Run Holiday is an album i think every human being on the planet should hear at least once. This album is simply impossible to describe, because it doesn't actually belong to a musical genre as we understand them. It's actually a movie. I know that sounds weird, but the band is actually a movie. My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult was the name of the movie they were trying to make, but composing the soundtrack led them so far afield that they just shrugged and kept going as a band instead. All of their albums come f
Read more