Mozart's Requiem

[Morlock]

stupid question, but does any one know the words to this piece? I am a great classical music lover. If you could recommend a piece of music I'd appritiate it.

[fable]

Originally posted by Morlock:
<STRONG>stupid question, but does any one know the words to this piece? I am a great classical music lover. If you could recommend a piece of music I'd appritiate it.</STRONG>

Yeah--I gotta couple of versions of it. It uses the standard RCC liturgical Requiem text, which permits to be used in churches. I can probably locate it for you, but it's really pretty long.

Are you looking for a piece of music like this one, in terms of Mozartian style and seriousness? Or are you looking for other Requiems, of other styles and places?

[Obsidian]

fable, once again I am impressed. I had several of the more well known classics, but cleaned out my harddrive.
Try the napsteresc sites, they do carry an assortment of the better known stuff.
If you want some good music including vocals, try Les Miserables or Notre Dame (french version)

[fable]

@KE, thanks. I love music, always have. I wrote reviews for Jazziz Magazine during its first couple of years, and right now I write for Fanfare Magazine, the only surviving US magazine of new classical CD releases.

I only wish I had the time to transfer all the stuff I've got on LP to CD.

[Minerva]

There is a thread about "favourite classical music" a few weeks earlier. I hope someone can find it.

[Morlock]

Originally posted by fable:
<STRONG>Yeah--I gotta couple of versions of it. It uses the standard RCC liturgical Requiem text, which permits to be used in churches. I can probably locate it for you, but it's really pretty long.

Are you looking for a piece of music like this one, in terms of Mozartian style and seriousness? Or are you looking for other Requiems, of other styles and places?</STRONG>

As someone who doesn't go to church, I wouldn't know.
Could you maybe post enough to get what it's about, or just give me the jist of it in your own words?

I am looking preferably for something less dark and more calm. Like Beethoven's 6th symphony, it just sends a care free message.
But I will settle for anything good.
(@Fable) I am assuming you saw Lord of The Rings here, and a great tune is in it about 5 minutes into the movie, when Gandalf rides in to The Shire, after meeting Frodo, called "Concerning Hobbits" (By Howard Shore). It also has a great simple and care free aura about it.

Among my favorite pieces:
1.Mendelssohn's violin concerto
2.Bach's Bradenburg concerto
3.Dvorak's "Jurney to a new world"
4.Beethoven's 9th symphony ("Joyful, Joyful we adore thee god of mercy and of love... although it is realy in german)
5.Vagner's "Ride of the vlykries"
6.Greig's "In the hall of the mountain king"
7.Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro"
8.Rimsky - Korsakoff's "Flight of the bumblebee"
9.Bach's Overture/suite no. 2
10.Vivaldi's "Four seasons"
11.Mendelssohn's Wedding dance.
12.Bach's Toccata,For something very dark.
13.Scott Joplin's "Ragtime" ("The Sting" used a bouncy version of it for the theme)
14.Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake"
15.My all time favorites will always be Beethonven's 5th and 6th symphony.

@KE:I rather them without vocals on the most part, but I liked "Les Misarables" less then Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's other musicals, like "Evita" or "Joseph and his amazing technicolour dreamcoat".

[Sailor Saturn]

Originally posted by fable:
<STRONG>@KE, thanks. I love music, always have. I wrote reviews for Jazziz Magazine during its first couple of years, and right now I write for Fanfare Magazine, the only surviving US magazine of new classical CD releases.

I only wish I had the time to transfer all the stuff I've got on LP to CD. </STRONG>

I've got a friend who would get along great with you, fable(as long as you steered clear of the religion topics ). He's practically obsessed with classical music. He often gives me 'lectures' about Mahler and Wagner and other composers who's names I forget. He's planning on being a classical composer, even started composing a piece already. I, personally, enjoy listening to classical music and know more about it than some people, but my friend, he can tell you anything you want to know about Mahler, Wagner, etc., plus another dozen or so details you didn't know you wanted to know, and another half dozen you didn't wnat to know.

Well, I've got an 8 o'clock class tomorrow morning and a severe headache now, so I'm going to end this post here and go to bed. Oyasuminasai.

[fable]

The Mozart Requiem is in 12 parts, and like other Requiems, it's essentially an elaborate prayer for the dead. There are sections praising the Christian god, fearing judgement, supplicating and praising Christ, weeping for loss, escoriating evil, etc.

One of the mildest and most ethereal Requiems (and a personal fave in this kind of music) is the Requiem of Gabriel Faure. By his own admission, Faure meant the work to be less aimed at depicting the judgement of a soul than comforting the grieved ones left behind. (Faure was also an agnostic, which may have colored the emphasis in his religious music.)

Personally, I'm not Judeo-Christian (being kind of a pantheist, but a very friendly one), but there's an excellent variety of wonderful sacred music in older forms of Christianity like the Roman Catholics (from the 11th century onwards, our oldest records) and the Eastern Orthodox (from the 17th century).

@Morlock, have you ever tried a piece by Johannes Pachelbel, frequently called (as though he'd only written one, which he hadn't) the Canon? It was very popular back in the 1970s, and I imagine it would still be easy to find it. The work has a wonderfully gracious, calming effect about it, though that's true in quite a few Pachelbel works. (Curiously, his nephew moved to the United States shortly after the American Revolution, and set up as a composer without great success.)

You might want to check out Beethoven's symphonies # 7 & 8. Both are bright, dancelike works (except the Allegretto movement of the 7th), and again, very popular. There are literally dozens of recordings to choose from.

If you like Flight of the Bumbleebee, I strongly suggest you try Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. It's a symphonic suite based on the 1001 Arabian Nights, and despite being poo-poo'd by the critics, remains a highly evocative, very attractive work of great orchestral and inspirational skill.

Grieg's Hall of the Mountain King is part of his first Peer Gynt Suite, a bunch of incidental music written to a play by Henrik Ibsen. You might try looking for the pair of Peer Gynt Suites. They're well worth it, though nothing else in it has the menace of the piece you've mentioned.

So, you like Mendelssohn! Nice to hear. You might want to check out his Hebrides Overture (written to portray the violent, storm-tossed seas and the rocky coast of Scotland), and his Octet for Strings. The Octet was actually composed when Mendelssohn was in his mid-teens, and is considered a masterpiece of the chamber music genre. Also excellent is his Overture to Midsummer Night's Dream, depicting some of the moods and events from the play.

For something very melancholy and wistful, I suggest Faure (again) in his Pavane. Not the later vocal version, but the original one, strictly for orchestra. A well-known conductor by the name of Thomas Beecham once did a wonderful recording of it, and that's the one I usually suggest. (Beecham was a brilliant conductor and a man with an outrageous sense of humor. He hated the harpsichord, and once told an audience that it resembled "a pair of skeletons making love on a tin roof--during a hailstorm.")

There's a fantastic website where you can buy excellent over-runs of classical CDs. These are *not* secondhand, but unopened. Check out the Bershire Record Outlet, at [url="http://www.broinc.com/"]http://www.broinc.com/[/url]

Prices typically vary between $1.99 and $6.99, for CDs that originally sold for $12.99 to $16.99. There's a lot of excellent stuff, there. And if you want to see how anything sounds, try doing a search at the same time for a particular work over at the Tower Records site. Many Tower Records CDs have brief excerpts from cuts. It's a good way to get a nice sample.

Hope that helps, at least, a bit.

[Curdis]

@Fable - You have a consistent ability to gob smack me! It is not just the breath but the depth of your knowledge. As nobody has yet mentioned Mussorgsky I thought I would.

Speaking of horror in music; I have an arrangement of Beethoven's fifth for orchestra and slide guitar which I could share with you. My dad is a classical music buff and it used to drive him nuts !

To the point - there seem to be an almost endless supply of ner do wells here who could spend their time moving LP's onto CD's. You might consider using it as a punishment. - Curdis

[Morlock]

I saw your replies, but don't have time to answer them right now- I have to leave.

[Morlock]

Originally posted by fable:
<STRONG>
@Morlock, have you ever tried a piece by Johannes Pachelbel, frequently called (as though he'd only written one, which he hadn't) the Canon?

If you like Flight of the Bumbleebee, I strongly suggest you try Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. It's a symphonic suite based on the 1001 Arabian Nights, and despite being poo-poo'd by the critics, remains a highly evocative, very attractive work of great orchestral and inspirational skill.
</STRONG>

1.I downloaded "The Cannon" and I ofcourse heard it before, just didn't know it by name.
BTW why is it called "The cannon", there is nothing resembling a cannon in it, it is not overly dramatic, and it is not realy loud.

2.You misspelled the name, so I looked it up in the book and downloaded it, and I didn't think it was that great, O.K but not great.

3.I have all of Beethoven's symphonies, I was just saying that his 5th, 6th and 9th were the best.

[fable]

Originally posted by Morlock:
<STRONG>I downloaded "The Cannon" and I ofcourse heard it before, just didn't know it by name.
BTW why is it called "The cannon", there is nothing resembling a cannon in it, it is not overly dramatic, and it is not realy loud.

2.You misspelled the name, so I looked it up in the book and downloaded it, and I didn't think it was that great, O.K but not great. </STRONG>

Which name? Unless you mean Canon, or in the German, Kanon. That's the correct spelling. A musical canon is a form that involves the use of imitative counterpoint. (Counterpoint is the use of more than one line of music existing in a work at the same time, and moving more or less independently of one another.) If an entire theme is stated, then restated in another key while a variant of the the first one repeats, etc, you have a fugue. If only part of the theme is heard before the second version starts, you have a canon.

If you hear a composer or musician speak of a "canon in the fifth," they mean the second entry of the canon theme is heard on the fifth tone, er, the fifth note of the current scale in use: so if the canon was in C, (do in English), the seond entry would be on G (so in English). A "canon in the first" is actually another name for the old kid's favorite, a round. Yep! We were all singing canons in the first when we sang nursery rounds like "Row, Row, Row Your Boat!"

[ 01-15-2002: Message edited by: fable ]

[fable]

@Curdis, I was responding to @Morlock, which is why I didn't mention Mussorgsky--he hadn't. I just added Faure, I think.

Pictures at an Exhibition and a Night on Bald Mountain are both old favorites in the concert hall, though few people realize the first was written for piano, while the second was inserted as a mood piece in an opera. There's a lot of fine music by Mussorgsky that's seldom heard. If you have an interest in moody, Russian vocal music, with characters of Shakesepearean gloom and size, check out the opera, Boris Godunov. It is a wonderful work, set in the 18th century, with a self-tortured main figure and a bunch of wonderful, colorful side characters. Most CDs of this work feature the original Russian alongside English translations in the jewelcase booklet, so it shouldn't be a problem to follow along, and the work is a sonic spectacular.

And for anyone who has an interest in scratchy old movies, there was a fantastic film version made of Boris Godunov back in the mid 50's by the great Soviet director, Vera Stoyeva. It catches perfectly the period flavor of the work, as well as its tension and drama.

Another Mussorgsky work that people like who enjoy vocal music is the cycle of four songs (orchestrated by his friend Rimsky-Korsakov) entitled Songs and Dances of Death. (Mussorgsky was a little preoccupied with death, but then, he was Russian, after all. ) There's a song in which Death stands as victor on a field of battle, and another in which he calls to a peasant plodding heavily through the snow to end his cares. The stuff is eerie and wonderful.

As for humorous satire on classical music, my tastes run to the first album by Peter Schickele under his pseudonym of PDQ Bach, supposedly the "last and least" of the many children of JS Bach. Schikele at the time was a minor composer and teacher at Juillard, in NYC, who would enthrall is students by mocking the concepts and cliches they were learning by "becoming" an incredibly inept baroque composer. All of this stuff was gathered together in his PDQ Bach: A Town Hall Concert. The other albums since were hit and miss, but that first one was magnificent. I'll never forget his Quodlibet, which Schickele described as a series of variations on no theme whatsoever. He also claimed that the theme was lost, and may turn up someday, in which case, maybe he'd write a new work. Then, there was the Concerto for Horn and Hardart, the Hardart being a Schikele invention of bells, whistles, and horns, each for a different pitch. (Horn and Hardart was a popular cafeteria in New York City from the 1930s through the 1960s.)

[Morlock]

@Fable, I was thrown off track, because where I downloaded from it was spelled Cannon not canon.

and I was referring to Scheherezade - that how it was spelled in my version of Arabian nights.

[fable]

Originally posted by Morlock:
<STRONG>@Fable, I was thrown off track, because where I downloaded from it was spelled Cannon not canon.

and I was referring to Scheherezade - that how it was spelled in my version of Arabian nights.</STRONG>

Oh, I see! The problem with Scherezade in all its alternate spellings is that it began as a word written in another written script, a modern Arabic version on the old Semitic alphabet. The name of the wife of the sultan of the 1000 Nights and a Night (as it is more accurately called) was then transliterated into a number of other scripts, including Cyrillic, which is the one that Rimsky-Korsakov, as a Russian, used. That, in turn, was translated into other languages. Typically, German was considered the "great language of scholarship" in the 19th century (I will *not* discuss this), so a lot of words in other scripts and languages came to us through Teutonic filtering. Consider:

Tchaikovsky. Hey, that's not how *he* wrote it. The composer wrote his name in Cyrillic (and I can't reproduce it here, or I would). In English, it would be more appropriate to write: Chaikofski or Chaikofsky, but TCH is needed in German to prevent the hard sound of the gottal stop (the sound of CH in LoCH Lomond). So TCH it was--and when it moved to the US, we acquired it, too.

Scheherazade is another Teutonization. Ravel wrote a work with the same character in mind; he called it Sheherazade. And there are at least another few alternate spellings.

I guess what I'm saying in all this maze of nonsense I'm posting is that there's no one accurate spelling on many of these transliterated words from languages in non-Latinized script.

[Obsidian]

fable
@KE, thanks. I love music, always have. I wrote reviews for Jazziz Magazine during its first
couple of years, and right now I write for Fanfare Magazine, the only surviving US magazine of
new classical CD releases.

I only wish I had the time to transfer all the stuff I've got on LP to CD.

Explains much, from your awe inspiring knowledge of music and culture to your great skill as a wordsmith.
Fable the Bard!
btw, what did you take in University?

@KE:I rather them without vocals on the most part, but I liked "Les Misarables" less then
Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's other musicals, like "Evita" or "Joseph and his amazing
technicolour dreamcoat".

Morlock, I couldn't stand Joe and his coat, But Evita I admit was amazing.
Phantom of the opera has its moments too.

The harmonica is an underated musical instrument too.

[fable]

btw, what did you take in University?

Mono-nucleosis. Gods, I hated sleeping twenty or more hours a day.

My schooling was a disaster, though. I kept running into teachers who either thought I was too advanced and graded me down, or thought I was uppity and graded me down. I ended up with a perfectly useless degree in the visual and performing arts, after having the requirements for two separate degrees changed and enlarged on me in my senior year. My advice, for what it's worth: get a strong advisor, and raise merry hell if you don't get treated right. I was too much into my shell at the time to do that. These days, I'd probably go for a computer major and sit in the back of arts classes, heckling.

[Obsidian]

sit in the back of arts classes, heckling.

I mean, if being a mod doesnt qualify you for that, what does!
There are some really good musicals out there. Guys and Dolls, which I was in a few years ago. (Imagine Big Jule at 5'4 120lbs) and South Pacific, are both very good, fun plays.
I'm trying to get Oh what a wonderful war, but havent found much

[fable]

Guys & Dolls *is* great, I agree. A shame they screwed up the casting of the film, but Loesser had no control over that. Frank Sinatra as Nathan Detroit...? Well, at least it was better than Marlin Brando, who has the other lead, and can't sing anymore than my wife. So you were Big Julie? He figures into quite a few Damon Runyon stories.

I'm also fond of Bernstein's Candide (first version; he remade it) and a virtually unknown musical by Jerome Moross called The Golden Apple, which combines turn-of-the-20th-century Americana with The Trojan War.

Anyone here into Gilbert & Sullivan...?

[Obsidian]

I dont know, I never really pictured Detroit as Sinatra, he didnt sound right...
Maybe I'm just corrupted by my the version I was involved in...

Gilbert and Sullivan!! I know I've heard that before.
I want to see HMS Pinafor (sp) really badly, but being a stereo typical poor teenager in a small town I rarely see any good drama.
(If anyone has HEARD of Saskatoon Saskatchewan I'll be impressed)

*sigh* Soon I'll be free, one more year!!!

With luck, I'll be in Kingston!

[ 01-16-2002: Message edited by: Knight Errant ]