Music

John Salmon has hinted that I should write on music, and he is right, but something funny happened late last night. I have not been reading Terry Teachout for a couple of weeks, due to lack of time, but went to his site and saw that he is going through a period where music just doesn't do it for him.

I am certainly not going through something like that, although I have, when even Bach seems more of an intrusion than a pleasure. I have been more in a period of retrenchment, where I am only interested in listening to a narrow range of music, even to the point of playing a disc several times in a row to really dig into it (as much as one can dig into a recording when doing other things). Since Melanie can't stand this sort of listening, it happens late at night after she and Amalia go to bed. It has been Respighi these last few weeks (the car is a different story, where it is almost all country). Since I do not have a score on hand for these pieces (Roman Pines, Fountains, Festivals, you know the ones), I am not going to write an analysis (even if I had the score, I probably would not write something like that), so it will have to suffice to say that I am finding more in these pieces than I expected, even on multiple listenings.

Other than Respighi, I have listened to a new round of turkeys for record reviews, as well as three pretty good discs from the Rough Guide series. They will be coming out in February, so I will post reviews as we get closer to street date. For the country in the car, I have been stuck on Adolph Hofner's fantastic Texas Swing (sung in Czech sometimes!) and Sam McGee. Both are Arhoolie titles, and are great.

If I have energy after panning one of the crappy discs on my review pile (or maybe I will review something better that has been out for a little longer, as I hate giving any ink to garbage like these), I will go back and write another installment of the Building Blocks of Music.