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The Radio 3 Boards > The Music Boards > Music Through The Ages > 20th Century > Bridge shows Shostakovich how to write slow movements
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Author Topic: Bridge shows Shostakovich how to write slow movements  (Read 1364 times)
Baziron
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« Reply #30 on: 09:08:09, 10-05-2007 »
Quote from: Sydney Grew on 07:05:50, 10-05-2007
...it is the sort of music which stays in the mind for many days after one has heard it.
Yes - I can understand that. It's similar in its staying power to that of gratuitous abuse, whether aimed at important people like Shostakovich, or merely to lesser though well-intentioned Members of this message board.

Baziron
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Bryn
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« Reply #31 on: 23:58:52, 16-05-2007 »
Quote from: Bryn on 18:42:41, 07-05-2007
As a matter of interest, Richard, how does Tom Phillips translate that passage? (I feel sure you must have a copy of his beautiful translation to hand. I don't, unfortunately. Even my copy of "A Humument" went missing during a house move). Sad

What a useful stimulus this thread had proved to be for me. Not only did I find a sensibly priced copy of the 4th edition of "A Humument", (already delivered) but one of the 3rd edition too. Better still was the unread, "as new" copy of Tom Phillips's illustrated translation of "Inferno", and for only £29.95 + p&p. That was a real find. It arrived today, so I can now relate that Phillips translates the passage as:

"Just halfway through this journey of our life
I reawoke to find myself inside
a dark wood, way off course, the right road lost."

Somewhat different from John Ciardi's:

"Midway in our life's journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in dark wood."

No sign of SCGrew's "thicket" in either, however.

Henry F. Cary, however, favours "thicket" in Canto XIII, where Phillips and Ciardi opt for "trunks" and "roots" respectively.
« Last Edit: 00:21:23, 17-05-2007 by Bryn » Logged
rauschwerk
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« Reply #32 on: 17:08:17, 25-06-2007 »
Quote from: Sydney Grew on 08:14:03, 07-05-2007
Quote from: roslynmuse on 20:05:30, 05-05-2007
By coincidence I was spinning a compact disc of Young Frank's Lament for Strings only last evening.

It is very odd we have always thought that the music of Bridge is so entirely different from that of his most famous pupil. Was it ever actually composition we wonder which young Britten was being taught or something else altogether?


Good Heavens! It would be a poor sort of teacher who encouraged his pupils to imitate him. Did not Ravel approvingly say of Vaughan Williams that he was "my only pupil who does not write my music"? And Britten said of Bridge that there were two cardinal principles in his teaching. "One was that you should find yourself and be true to what you found. The other ... was his scrupulous attention to good technique... ."

Some, of course, question whether composition can be taught at all. Richard Rodney Bennett recently opined that if you are a composer you will make your own way and find solutions to your problems (Elgar springs to mind here), and if you are not one, then composition lessons will be of no use to you. I wonder if he got any calls from his composition students after that?
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Ian Pace
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« Reply #33 on: 17:57:49, 25-06-2007 »
Quote from: rauschwerk on 17:08:17, 25-06-2007
Good Heavens! It would be a poor sort of teacher who encouraged his pupils to imitate him. Did not Ravel approvingly say of Vaughan Williams that he was "my only pupil who does not write my music"? And Britten said of Bridge that there were two cardinal principles in his teaching. "One was that you should find yourself and be true to what you found. The other ... was his scrupulous attention to good technique... ."
Ferneyhough also says something in some interview about the best teacher being the one who has the least number of imitative students. He doesn't score too badly on that front (thinking of students like Saariaho, Lindberg (though I believe he never studied with BF for any extended period), Rodney Sharman, Czaya Czernowin and others), but I'm not sure how well many teachers would do by that measure....
« Last Edit: 18:05:17, 25-06-2007 by Ian Pace » 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'
time_is_now
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« Reply #34 on: 18:00:53, 25-06-2007 »
Well, Ferneyhough 'studied' with Lennox Berkeley! Wink

I should imagine 'the least number of imitative students' could be a necessary but not a sufficient condition. After all, some of those Ferneyhough pupils you mention are pretty poor composers, in my books at least ...

It's Chaya Czernowin, btw.
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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
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