Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan

Subject: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: Mark Cohen
Date: 17 Nov 04 - 05:48 AM

I just heard (on Hawaii Public Radio) a recording of John Corigliano's "Mr. Tambourine Man," a collection of seven of Bob Dylan's poems set to new music for orchestra and soprano solo. I think it was the premiere, by the Minnesota Orchestra. I hated it. Now I admit that my taste in "modern classical" music runs more to Vaughan Williams and De Falla than to Cage and Hovhaness. I guess like most folkies I'm sort of a melody geek. And it's not that I'm a hardheaded traditionalist: I love Chris Thile's new tune to Flow Gently Sweet Afton. But that at least keeps to the spirit of the original. I was initially intrigued, although a bit annoyed as well, to hear the conductor talking about how "hearing the text of the poems set to new music" really helped him appreciate the text. But I found the piece painful, and had to turn it off after about 5 minutes. It really sounded like a bad joke. I'd be interested in hearing other reactions.

Aloha,
Mark

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: Ron Davies
Date: 17 Nov 04 - 10:55 PM

Well, I suppose I really shouldn't comment, having not heard it.

But I'll have to say I'm not smitten with Corigliano. He has scads of respect in the current classical world---I think one of his pieces won a Grammy.
My choral group has sung some of his stuff.

But I just don't really want to sing (or listen to) a faithful choral reflection of the modern world's angst and misery--(i.e. no melody, little harmony, LOTS of dissonance), for instance (he's actually done this)---a vocal and instrumental depiction of the AIDS crisis.

I may be unreasonable but I'm just not always looking for "intellectual stimulation" --(seems like castor oil sometimes)-- in music. Some of the people in my group like this stuff, but then a lot seem to like minimalist music too. Sorry, repetition is not the basis of all music in my view.

I always have a huge backlog of songs I want to learn to sing or play, so I'll have to say I'm not even tempted to listen to Corigliano and the other modern classical composers--except the ones who think there is a place for melody.

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: Mooh
Date: 18 Nov 04 - 08:00 AM

Note from a cynic...a marketing ploy to cover for the possibility he's run out of original ideas and to bank on another's name. Just supposing.

Peace, Mooh.

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: Mark Cohen
Date: 18 Nov 04 - 11:25 PM

Well, Mooh, it seems to be in character for him: he also did settings of three Dylan Thomas poems. And his Symphony #1 was supposed to be "an impassioned response to the AIDS crisis" -- whatever that means. He did win the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2001. He did the score for The Red Violin, and I liked that movie. But this piece sure left me cold. I wonder if Dylan ever heard it. (I wonder if he got royalties.)

Aloha,
Mark

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: Ron Davies
Date: 18 Nov 04 - 11:50 PM

That's right, Mark, he did those Dylan Thomas settings--my group did them. I was lucky enough to get picked for the tonal part---(thank goodness there was one)-----a small ensemble---who didn't have to sing quite as much dissonance as the big group did.

So that piece--- (at least from my perspective)--- wasn't as bad as the Dylan sounds like it was.

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: PoppaGator
Date: 19 Nov 04 - 11:35 AM

I have serious doubts that today's academic so-called "classical" music will survive the test of time. Our heritage of orchestral music consists of music that large audiences enjoyed when the composers were alive. I don't think that this contemporary claptrap meets the same criteria.

Many jazz enthusiasts call jazz "American classical music" or something like that, and they have a point. I realize that many of y'all Mudcatters have little or no interest in jazz, and/or dislike what jazz you've been exposed to, but the best of it is both serious and listenable, to many folks anyway, and stands a decent chance of being remembered long into the future.

A hundred years from now, who's going to be listening to this guy Corigliano? Or even Stockhausen, John Cage, et. al.? Anyone, you think? They're *much* more likely still to be listening to Dylan and the Beatles, to Stachmo and Coltrane, Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald, Gerhwin and Cole Porter, etc.

I think the last hope for modern-art academic so-called-classical music died when Phil Lesh quit music grad school to play bass for Grateful Dead.

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: Little Hawk
Date: 19 Nov 04 - 03:51 PM

I can't wait for a classical treatment of Ozzie Osbourne's greatest hits... :-)

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: Ron Davies
Date: 19 Nov 04 - 10:07 PM

I remember an article, in the Wall St. Journal--where else?-------(never let it be said the Journal doesn't deal with the important issues of our time)------ about a competition between 2 California radio stations as to who could play the most different versions of "Louey,Louey". The winning station came up with I think it was 53 straight hours of it, including anybody who wanted to come in off the street and sing it.

One of the entries was a string quartet version---which the quartet called "Ludwig, Ludwig".

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: Mark Cohen
Date: 20 Nov 04 - 01:47 AM

I'm with you, PoppaGator. And I love jazz. Well, I'll qualify that to include jazz where you can find a melody at least once in a while. Some "modern" jazz is as unpleasant to my ears as Corigliano...and as forgettable. I'll take "Kind of Blue" any day, not to mention Bix and all the other stuff Rick Fielding used to dig up from the 20's and 30's.

Aloha,
Mark

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: PoppaGator
Date: 20 Nov 04 - 07:01 PM

53 hours of Louie Louie! Too much! (And much more appealing than even 5.3 hours of any modern-classical piece.)

I used to have a cassette-tape copy of an all-Louie Louie LP. There were maybe 12-15 versions, including the original, the first few covers, and a bunch of novelty versions (like the USC Marching Band's, a painfully slow Spanish-language bit, etc.)

The Kingsmen's hit was actually the third version. Richard Berry, the writer, cut a very different-sounding song at a moderate tempo; it was a minor local hit in Seattle. The next guy to record it was another black artist in the same city; I'm sorry I don't remember his name, because he's really the creator of the song we now all know and (maybe) love today -- he altered the rhythm drastically and introduced the "Whao, no" and "Aii-yi-yi-yi" bits. White fraternity boys The Kingsmen, also living in Seattle, heard that version on jukeboxes and copied it note for note to make their record.

The reason so many people thought the song had "dirty" lyrics is that much of the hit record was essentially scat-sung. The Kingsmen's singer didn't know the words -- couldn't decipher them from listening to the previous recording -- and faked his way through half the lines.

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: Little Hawk
Date: 21 Nov 04 - 01:09 AM

Yeah. All the kids in my high school were under the impression that "Louie, Louie" had dirty lyrics. Accordingly, the song became so popular and notorious that the local radio stations banned it (on account of the dirty lyrics it didn't actually have)!

What a farce. In retrospect it's pretty funny. The fact that the song was banned raised its value to virtually priceless, of course. Everybody wanted that record...except me, I guess...I was listening to Joan Baez, Ian & Sylvia, stuff like that. I couldn't care less about "Louie, Louie" at the time. I have since grown a bit nostalgic for it.

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: Peace
Date: 21 Nov 04 - 01:11 AM

Nostalgia isn't what it used to be, LH.

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: Ron Davies
Date: 21 Nov 04 - 10:45 AM

Oh well--I suppose this is thread creep.

But I also remember from that article that they also said the guy who sang Louie Louie had braces when he sang it and was yelling into a mike several feet above his head.

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: PoppaGator
Date: 21 Nov 04 - 11:36 AM

I heartily endorse this particular thread creep. Who gives a shit about Corigliano, anyway? We're much more interested in Louie Louie!

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: katlaughing
Date: 21 Nov 04 - 11:42 AM

My brother, the classical composer who writes TONAL music in the old manner, has been fighting the trendy BS of orchestras commissioning this kind of crap for years and years. He had several articles published about it back in the 80's when I was his chief cook and bottlewasher/agent. I guarantee you his music is beautiful, original, and well-received..no avant-garde, minimalistic, plagarism crap!:-)(Got him in big trouble with his professors, earlier at university too!) Here's an excerpt from his 1987 article, The Gaea Concept in Music:

speaking of "spiritual musicians" he says, "They realise that some pseudo-music is negative and darkening, while great music, music based on universal laws of harmony (such as the law of octaves in the checical elements, the septenary colors of the spectrum, etc.) has an uplifting effect on people, plants, and animals who in turn modify the planet herself.

"But what of so-called concert "serious" conductors and musicians alike? We find them commissioning and playing ...works of decadent, materialistic/reductionist composers who use bizarre instrumental and compositional techniques to cause inharmony and shock to the auric fields of their listeners. Yes -- as we have considered before, music affects the aura of animate entities and inanimate objetcs. Everyone knows how a glass can be shattered by a powerflly sung note from a tenor. Music is a powerful planetary modifier. The ancient Greeks realized this fact; thus the Greeks felt certain modes and rhythms were dangerous to play, even having a deleterious effect upon the State. Modern concert composers, however, with few exceptions, care only about airing their desperately negative feelings and emotions of futility under the guise of experimentalism in barrages of painfull ugly orchestral sounds.."© 1987 by Delton L. Hudson

Personally, I think those who use songs like Dylan's are just lazy, jaded, and lacking in creativity.

kat

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: Ron Davies
Date: 21 Nov 04 - 12:02 PM

Re: thread creep: What's more, if we hide here the folk police will never find us.

Kat: Good for your brother!

I think modern classical composers seem to feel it their bounden duty, for some crazy reason, to faithfully reflect the modern world's chaos, unhappiness and misery. Unfortunately, reviewers aid and abet them, partly since they themselves get a chance to show their own alleged erudition--they're so relieved not to have to say something new about Beethoven's 9th----and they get a chance to show off.

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: PoppaGator
Date: 21 Nov 04 - 01:36 PM

TO kat's brother: Here here! (Or is it "hear hear?). Very eloquent, and it reminded me of thoughts I've learned and thought before but since forgotten.

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: Mark Cohen
Date: 21 Nov 04 - 03:13 PM

I agree. I think many people who grew up in the iconoclastic sixties have a bias against things that have existed for centuries, and in favor of anything new and different. What they seem to forget is that some things have existed for centuries because they are valid and beautiful and they resonate with the bodies and brains and spirits of human beings...who also happen to have existed for quite a few centuries.

kat, it's not the use of Dylan's lyrics that I object to--there are many gorgeous musical settings of other people's words. It's the sound of Corigliano's music.

Aloha,
Mark

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: Little Hawk
Date: 21 Nov 04 - 06:39 PM

Well, I deeply appreciate things that have existed for centuries, and evidently Bob Dylan does too, judging by his own writings. If we cannot appreciate and understand the past then we are not very likely to build a harmonious future for ourselves.

I agree that orchestral arrangers often record modern pop material in a way that is patently phony, and they are probably doing it just to show off and get some attention.

Subject: RE: Corigliano 'classical' setting of Dylan
From: Peace
Date: 21 Nov 04 - 06:47 PM

I can think of a few musical pieces that were on the radio. I liked them very much.

"Love is Blue"
"Musicbox Dancer"

These songs had no words.

However, I think it strangles a song to have it done by an orchestra. The song had words for a reason. Words were integral and fundamental to what the melody did in it, and vice versa.

I heard Mr Tamborine Man once in an elevator somewhere. I go off at the next available floor. There has to be limits.

Unless someone I trust tells me that it's worth listening to an orchestral/symphonic rendition of a songwriters word, I ain't gonna listen.