All Entries Tagged With: "Sir Donald"
Birthday Wishes For The Artful Codger
Whether you like him in a powdered wig and livery or looking as if he should be on his way to a Celtic match it impossible to imagine what Western classical music would be without its elder statesman Johann Sebastian Bach. Sure, there are older composers (Lully,
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“Bach, to the few critics who knew of him otherwise than as a brilliant organist, was always hopelessly out of date.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 [...]
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 [...]
The Contents Of An Ostrich’s Or Even A Hen’s Gizzard
A discussion in which Sir Donald takes a long walk into the Land of Tangential Analogies and compares music to amoebic digestion and various poultry gizzards.
Every work of art, from the most absolute of music to the most pantomimic of operas, selects its material in much teh same way as the amoeba selects its food; [...]
“That’s A Buncha Airiadite Readin’ You’ve Got There”
Miss Mussel’s local library had a book sale this morning and for the bargain basement price of $9, she has become the owner of the following volumes:
Gray, Cecil. Contemporary Music. OUP, 1924.
Sullivan, JWN. Beethoven. Pelican, 1951.
Bonavia Hunt, HG. A Concise History of Music. Scribner’s Sons, 1903.
Nettel, Reginald. The Orchestra In England. Alden, 1946.
Guerber, H.A. [...]
The View From Here
Location: The green 1950s naugahyde recliner in which Miss Mussel daily smiths words and the like. Heat and massage features are on and being enjoyed as we speak. What follows is laundry list of items in the immediate vicinity.
1 stack of French horn music
1 chamber pot (for decorative purposes only. There is a limit [...]
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