Aesthetic Ascetica

Art is the gateway to rapture.

[illustration-alcove]

Harry Brockway’s illustrations for Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

[armchairharmonist]

Artwork from the first edition of Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana, Op. 16.

(Musical Musings: Schumann and Chopin I)

[aestheticascetica]

Unpacking the head of the Statue of Liberty (1885)

[aestheticascetica]

Robert Schumann: Kreisleriana, Op. 16 (via olla-vogala)

[magictransistor]

Paul Klee, Tale à la Hoffmann, 1921.

[aestheticascetica]

Nikolai Medtner: Fairy Tales, Op. 20

[books0977]

New Fairy Tale (1891). Nikolay Bogdanov-Belsky (Russian 1868-1945). Oil on canvas. National Arts Museum of the Republic of Belarus.

Bogdanov-Belsky was fascinated by the activities of children. Here, the group of four read aloud and listen to the new fairy tale from a crisp, clean book. This group must gather often to read again and again from the books that they own. The torn covers and ragged edges of their books tell of their passion for reading.

[urbanfragment]

“The Isle of the Dead.”

Die Toteninsel by Arnold Böcklin, 1883. Materials: Oil on wood. Dimensions: 150 x 80 cm.

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[these-exultations]

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Johann Nepomuk Hummel, 1778-1837.

An Austrian composer and virtuoso pianist, his music reflects the transition from the Classical to the Romantic musical era. At the age of eight, he was offered music lessons by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was impressed with his ability. Hummel was taught and housed by Mozart for two years free of charge and made his first concert appearance at the age of nine at one of Mozart’s concerts.

Hummel’s music took a different direction from that of Beethoven. Looking forward, Hummel stepped into modernity through pieces like his Sonata in F-sharp minor, Op. 81 and his Fantasy, Op. 18, for piano. These pieces are examples where Hummel may be seen to both challenge the classical harmonic structures and stretch the sonata form.

[huariqueje]

The Violin Concert   -  Edvard Munch  1903

Lithograph on paper 48.5 x 55.5 cm 

Art Institute of Chicago, IL

[sonateharder]

How far music has travelled down the barren road of the academic these last fifty years is most easily understood when we remark how infrequently the idea of ‘sleight of hand’, with all its overtones of mischief and delight, is applied to the modern performer. The whole idea of such overt expression of individuality in a performer seems irreconcilable with the manner adopted by the generation now in the ascendant whose musical naissance occurred after 1945. The concept and practice of what amounts to civilised mannerisms has largely vanished from modern-day performing, along with rubato and portamento which have become misunderstood, misapplied and finally expelled from the vocabulary with the accusation of being unauthentic and unmusical. So music making now patently lacks the colour of the music making of fifty years ago. And this is not because we have progressed and stripped away unwanted gilding applied by the previous generation’s egocentric players, but rather because we have retrogressed, narrowed our horizons, elevated authenticity out of its place and reasoned most stupidly that the quality and character of the performer must not intrude on the music he makes. Even on a technical level we falsely praise ourselves; technique has come to mean how fast, how accurate, how loud, and the acquisition of these talents has obscured the deeper meaning of technique – colour, space, and constant adaptability to change.

Adrian Farmer, 1984

(from the liner notes of Nimbus records NIM 5021, Shura Cherkassky in concert 1984, volume two)

[aestheticascetica]

“There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.”

--Walter Benjamin. On the Concept of History. Gesammelten Schriften I:2. Suhrkamp Verlag. Frankfurt am Main, 1974.

Trans. Dennis Redmond

http://members.efn.org/~dredmond/ThesesonHistory.html

[coral]

A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.

Umberto Eco  (via ratak-monodosico)

[nyphil]

How Composers Spent Their Time

These snapshots give us just a glimpse of what life was like for these towering figures of classical music. Take a look at some of the quirky, idiosyncratic doings of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, and other geniuses of note here.

[aestheticascetica]

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Dmitri Shostakovich:  Prelude and Fugue No. 15 in D-flat Major from 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op. 87. Performed on piano by Keith Jarrett, who rose to fame primarily as a jazz pianist.

This prelude and fugue is perhaps one of the most celebrated of the set. The prelude is a brief waltz that resembles the sparse style of Prokofiev's late period waltzes (e.g. Waltz Suite, Op. 110).

The following fugue is a chaotic perpetuum mobile that is just barely held together and kept "tonal" (the subject uses 11 of the 12 tones in the chromatic scale) by the fugal form itself. There is a brief, measure-long quotation from the preceding waltz prelude halfway through the fugue. The voices gradually converge into a syncopated cadence over the forward moving subject in the bass, which makes for an exhilarating, if rather grotesque (in the literary sense), piece of music. 

[aestheticascetica]

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/63739/blarzn_1.pdf?sequence=1

A dense, but thoroughly enlightening analysis of Rachmaninoff's compositional technique and style.

[aestheticascetica]

http://www.international.ucla.edu/media/files/woo-journal.pdf

A fascinating and informative read.