All Entries Tagged With: "criticism"
Now With Handpuppets
Stephen Brookes, music critic at the Washington Post, posted a great video of Anne Sofie von Otter singing Der Erlkonig.
Miss Mussel has always thought that a revue-type version of Der Erlkönig featuring a baritione, his falsetto and a pair of handpuppets would be highly entertaining. Anyone else? No?
One of the perils of the intertubes [...]
For Instance, The Choir Need Neither Receive Or Deserve A Flogging
Sir Donald on performance practice
The conditions under which poor Bach worked were neither metropolitan nor otherwise oputlent. He furnished his church cantatas week by week, as the parson furnished his Sunday sermon; and a trustworthy tradition tells us that the performances were generally atrocious and that a subsequent flogging for the ringleaders of the [...]
Come Here, You Old Fuddy Duddy, You
From Sir Donald Tovey’s 1936 book entitled Normality and Freedom.
“Bach, to the few critics who knew of him otherwise than as a brilliant organist, was always hopelessly out of date. When he was nineteen he played figured chorales to Reinken, a man ninety years of age, who exclaimed: “My son!, I thought this [...]
Suffering For Your Art
Steven Wells has a story in today’s Guardian about music critics getting physically attacked by band members and crazy fans for daring to give a bad review.
The demographics of the average classical music audience is a persistent trope in our corner of the universe, particularly how to include a younger, less affluent population. While [...]
Collecting Statistics Of The Wild Oat Crops
After a brief hiatus, the indefatigable Sir Donald Tovey is back.
At this time of day, it ought hardly to be necessary to point out that our criterion must not be that of the criminologists who, at the end of the nineteenth century, demonstrated to their own satisfaction that they could not distinguish genius from [...]
Hindu Maidens and Hot Jazz
Terry Teachout’s call for title suggestions got Miss Mussel thinking about a paper she wrote in her undergraduate days called something like Yellow Fever: Orientalism and Hot Jazz in 1920s Chicago. Slightly awkward title aside, it was a fascinating subject to research, mostly because it quickly became apparent that black musicians had no qualms about [...]
The One That Started It All
On her About page, Miss Mussel acknowledges the influence of Sir Donald Francis Tovey. The real truth is that he is the reason this blog got started in the first place. Well, that and writing about reverse mortgages really tends to destroy rather than nourish Miss Mussel’s soul. Here’s how it went down:
One day [...]
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