In my conception of Good Music for this blog, one of the things I encouraged my readers to do, was to listen to each piece of music on its own terms, and not ask the music to be anything it wasn’t trying to be. There has been much debate about what Also Sprach Zarathustra is... Continue Reading →
1896: A Musical Odyssey
Two of the most famous minutes of music in the public consciousness has to be the opening theme to the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. This movie is one of the masterpieces from the influential director Stanley Kubrick, with a screenplay written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. In creating the screenplay, they drew on... Continue Reading →
Exhibitionism Part 3: Showing it All
Two of the most dramatic movements of “Pictures at an Exhibition” are “The Hut on Fowl’s Legs (Baba Yaga)” and “The Great Gate of Kiev”. Fortunately for our discussion here, both of the Hartmann images have survived. These two pictures inspired Mussorgsky to write some of the most memorable music in the entire suite. The... Continue Reading →