Well, as I've just said over in the other thread, I'm a recent convert. . . . I suddenly lost all conviction in my own position. I . . . felt the scales dropping from my eyes . . . and so the time is now ripe, I feel, for a time_is_now Shostakovich odyssey.
Mr. T. Now you have decided us to give Shortakovich one more try. We admire your determination and have been persuaded that we should emulate you. In due course then we too shall come back with a report to this thread. The mid-point between 1 and 15 is 8, so we shall listen to the Eighth "symphony".
And in the other thread about "musical camp" you very interestingly wrote:
"I might explain that the realisation which rescued me from my Shotchauvitch-resistant tunnel vision was this: that in the 'new music' I value most I recognise, and appreciate, aesthetic awkwardness, forced 'dumb'-ness, and all sorts of other stagings of the impossibility of a pre-1908-style reconciliation of art to the world; and that I really ought not to be so prissy about Shosta for having staged such an impossibility in what appear, or perhaps rather pretend, to be the more traditionally-valued forms of symphony and string quartet."
In fact the whole of the human race can be thus described, can it not? As an "awkwardness" we mean - as a falling short. Yours is a profoundly religious idea. It is bigger than all of us!
What about seeking and striving though? Are they still necessary do you think?
By "staging" we suppose you to mean something like "put on a platform in front of an audience" do you?
By the way we have just been listening to Martinu's Fourth Symphony. There are passages therein which sound quite like parts of S.'s peculiar productions. Who was influenced by whom?
