|
roslynmuse
|
 |
« Reply #15 on: 22:51:14, 09-02-2007 » |
|
No overt references to book depositories or grassy knolls so I think our Herbert stayed on the right side of tasteful!
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
Tam Pollard
|
|
« Reply #16 on: 00:13:03, 10-02-2007 » |
|
I just wonder if the metaphor isn't faulty. After all, the Adams piece was, as I understand it, commissioned by the NY Phil - this is hardly analogous to a lawyer chasing after an ambulance and begging the injured patient to cash in. And if it is, then surely any piece written for any vaguely sombre occasion can be put into the same category - is Mozart's requiem really ambulance chasing, is Britten's War Requiem?
Simply because something is about a tragic even that doesn't necessarily make it ambulance chasing. Take, for example (albeit not an especially musical one), the 9/11 episode of the West Wing (were the actors donated their salaries to charity).
regards, Tam
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
Smin
Posts: 3
|
|
« Reply #17 on: 18:13:06, 10-02-2007 » |
|
Following roslynmuse's apt comments on John Adams' 'On the Transmigration of Souls', I thought I'd start a list of what I call 'ambulance-chasing works', specifically works that seek to cash in on the emotional capital generated by some death, disaster, or the like, in order to create some sort of 'lament':
Penderecki - Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima
James MacMillan - Tuireadh (after the Piper Alpha disaster)
Frederick Stocken - Lament for Bosnia
Keith Burstein - Requiem for the Young (after the Marchioness disaster)
Keith Burstein - A Live Flame (in memoriam John Smith MP)
Keith Burstein - The Year's Midnight - a Mediation on the Holocaust
Those are just a few off the top of my head (9/11 works are too numerous to mention). Other suggestions?
Interesting that 4 out of the 6 are by the Birtwistle-denying Hecklers. Any agenda here, Ian? |
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
teleplasm
Gender: 
Posts: 49
|
|
« Reply #18 on: 13:58:18, 24-03-2007 » |
|
Tippett - A Child of Our Time
Britten - War Requiem
Shostakovich - Symphony no.13 (Babi Yar)
Shostakovich - Symphony no. 7
Penderecki - Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima
Morricone - The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti
Benjamin Meyers - Defendants Rosenberg (opera)
|
|
|
|
« Last Edit: 14:00:44, 24-03-2007 by teleplasm »
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
Kittybriton
|
|
« Reply #19 on: 15:15:15, 24-03-2007 » |
|
As far as the chasing thing goes: I would suggest John Adams Short Ride in a Fast Machine but it could equally be police doing the chasing.
For those who were a little slow off the starting line, I suppose Purcell's music for the funeral of Queen Mary could qualify?
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
Click me -> About meor me -> my handmade storeNo, I'm not a complete idiot. I'm only a halfwit. In fact I'm actually a catfish. |
|
|
|
autoharp
|
|
« Reply #20 on: 15:16:12, 24-03-2007 » |
|
I'm a bit puzzled by your choices, teleplasm. By the War Requiem for example ?
Benjamin Meyers is a new name to me - any info on him ?
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
Tony Watson
Guest
|
|
« Reply #21 on: 15:18:22, 24-03-2007 » |
|
As far as the chasing thing goes: I would suggest John Adams Short Ride in a Fast Machine but it could equally be police doing the chasing. It would be more likely to be compensation lawyers. That work seems to be jinxed. It was axed from the last night of the Proms about a week after Princess Diana's death and there was another occasion I can't remember. |
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
time_is_now
|
|
« Reply #22 on: 15:24:11, 24-03-2007 » |
|
axed from the last night of the Proms about a week after Princess Diana's death and there was another occasion I can't remember September 2001, I think. |
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
|
|
|
|
Ian Pace
|
|
« Reply #23 on: 15:30:51, 24-03-2007 » |
|
I'm a bit puzzled by your choices, teleplasm. By the War Requiem for example ?
Well, it could be argued that the very choice of subject matter is entailed with a certain emotional blackmail, appealing to a purely emotive response to the horrors of war as an alternative to a more rational engagement with the very phenomenon and how it comes about. And the collective grieving it instills acts as a type of purging catharsis, so that its audience can feel their consciences to be alleviated and not have to worry about such things the rest of the time. |
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
'These acts of keeping politics out of music, however, do not prevent musicology from being a political act . . .they assure that every apolitical act assumes a greater political immediacy' - Philip Bohlman, 'Musicology as a Political Act'
|
|
|
|
Ian Pace
|
|
« Reply #24 on: 15:34:53, 24-03-2007 » |
|
Tippett - A Child of Our Time
Britten - War Requiem
Shostakovich - Symphony no.13 (Babi Yar)
Shostakovich - Symphony no. 7
Penderecki - Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima
Morricone - The Ballad of Sacco and Vanzetti
Benjamin Meyers - Defendants Rosenberg (opera)
Maybe Schoenberg - A Survivor from Warsaw could conceivably be added to that list? However, I would feel uneasy about a high-handedly critical attitude towards the work of those composers for whom these events were very much a living reality; in Schoenberg's case there can be no doubt that he would have been acutely aware of his own fate had he still been resident in Europe. I suppose the works of Britten, Tippett and Shostakovich might be considered in such terms as well. It depends what one is criticising (even if implicitly): the possibly cynical motivations of the composers concerned (which I don't believe to be the case for any of the four composers I've mentioned, though in the case of the Hecklers and so on it may be a rather different matter), or the possible meanings and functions that such works come to assume over and above their composers' intentions? |
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
'These acts of keeping politics out of music, however, do not prevent musicology from being a political act . . .they assure that every apolitical act assumes a greater political immediacy' - Philip Bohlman, 'Musicology as a Political Act'
|
|
|
teleplasm
Gender:
Posts: 49
|
|
« Reply #25 on: 15:41:37, 24-03-2007 » |
|
I'm a bit puzzled by your choices, teleplasm. By the War Requiem for example ?
Benjamin Meyers is a new name to me - any info on him ?
I'm puzzled by your puzzlement. As surely everyone knows, the War Requiem is a lament for the slaughter of the First World War, using Wilfred Owen's wartime poems. Of course, Britten, being a pacifist, sought to imply that all war is wrong in any circumstances, but that was something attached to its ostensible purpose. If you can swallow some of the choices in the opening message, I can't see why you have trouble with this one. I don't know much about Meyers' opera beyond the fact that its subject matter is Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (the two American Communists who gave Stalin the secret of the H-bomb), who are regarded as martyrs on the left, like Sacco and Vanzetti also, of course. |
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
autoharp
|
|
« Reply #26 on: 17:51:11, 24-03-2007 » |
|
This is an interesting thread but I'm not sure we all can agree exactly what is meant by ambulance-chasing . . .
Suppose I get up tomorrow and write a piano piece which relates somehow to the death of Bob Woolmer. I haven't been "specifically approached" to do so and I'm not doing it "purely for financial gain" therefore it can only be an "honest response or self-serving gesture". If it's to be an "honest response" it presumably shouldn't rely on a programme note to justify it - like I'm a cricket fan or knew Bob Woolmer - that would be "loading the listener with emotional baggage". (No music should rely on a programme-note to justify it, anyway). And it wouldn't do for the title of the piece to be seen to be "plastering the details of the tragedy . . ."
Any advice on escaping criticism from any possible quarter ?
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
Ian Pace
|
|
« Reply #27 on: 17:54:55, 24-03-2007 » |
|
This is an interesting thread but I'm not sure we all can agree exactly what is meant by ambulance-chasing . . .
Suppose I get up tomorrow and write a piano piece which relates somehow to the death of Bob Woolmer. I haven't been "specifically approached" to do so and I'm not doing it "purely for financial gain" therefore it can only be an "honest response or self-serving gesture". If it's to be an "honest response" it presumably shouldn't rely on a programme note to justify it - like I'm a cricket fan or knew Bob Woolmer - that would be "loading the listener with emotional baggage". (No music should rely on a programme-note to justify it, anyway). And it wouldn't do for the title of the piece to be seen to be "plastering the details of the tragedy . . ."
Any advice on escaping criticism from any possible quarter ?
How about just writing the piece, with those motivations in mind as you do so, and keeping them to yourself, rather than advertising them through titles and programme notes? Just a thought......  |
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
'These acts of keeping politics out of music, however, do not prevent musicology from being a political act . . .they assure that every apolitical act assumes a greater political immediacy' - Philip Bohlman, 'Musicology as a Political Act'
|
|
|
|
martle
|
|
« Reply #28 on: 17:57:52, 24-03-2007 » |
|
axed from the last night of the Proms about a week after Princess Diana's death and there was another occasion I can't remember September 2001, I think. t_i_n, yes that's right - replaced with the same composer's Tromba Lontana. |
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
Green. Always green.
|
|
|
|
autoharp
|
|
« Reply #29 on: 10:02:53, 25-03-2007 » |
|
Possibly right, Ian. I should just entitle the piece "To B.W." and have done with it ! But you're escaping the point aren't you ? Unless of course you believe that any form of piece declared (shall we say) as a memorial is "ambulance-chasing": that's a bit over the top isn't it ?
|
|
|
|
|
Logged
|
|
|
|
|
