You've completely misunderstood what I said. I'm lucky in that here in France my 3-1 Bouygues TV/landline/mobile provider gives me access to 7 different music channels. There are really only 2 that I listen to - Intermezzo and Stingray Brava/Classical. With these two channels I get to listen classical concerts from the 60s' onwards. Sure the sound quality from the 60s' and 70s' is'nt as good as current but I do get hear all kinds of classical music and importantly the work of different composers. I get the best seat in the house at concert halls all over the world. One of my favourites the Concertebouw I've actually been in person, it's not 'neutral, it's coloured and warm, vibrant. Via the TV I've listened to concerts at the hugely expensive new concert hall in Hamburg, superbly accurate acoustically both great places to listen to music.
So you've actually been to the Concertgebouw. Lucky. How did you flavour the music when you were listening live? Oh, that's right, you didn't. You had different experiences of different sound. So that's how it works. I've been to many concerts in both good and bad venues. What makes one hall "accurate" and the other "warm"? Are you still thinking in terms of your audio system? Both were, shall we say, real and worth experiencing as they are. Except when it's a recording made at the venue.
I love Baroque music, it amazes me that this music was an almost complete break from that which came before. It's so fast, so full of energy. So totally different from the dirge like constricted repressed 'stuff' that came before. The classic example has to be the incredible Four Seasons by the red monk he captured those seasons transforming the music into three dimensional living breathing images.
I presume that is a dig at my screen name here. Well, you don't get away with that rubbish. Baroque music did not just suddenly appear: there were political changes, new influences from Spanish music, important changes in late Renaissance court music which lead to the wider adoption of major and minor key music as opposed to the previous emphasis on modes and the hexachord, and particular things about Italian stage drama that lead to the innovations of Monteverdi.
Then again, I'm guilty of thinking and learning stuff. I've been doing Renaissance and some Baroque dance for some twenty years now as a late starter, and the day after tomorrow I'm attending an intensive course in Baroque dance. I do have my credentials as well, you know. I also play classical guitar - not so well these days because illness has broken my practice routine. Of course, you never have to think when dancing formally or performing. Never happens at all. Not even when you're learning the music. And it's all automatic writing for composers.
As for Vivaldi, he comes in at around one hundred years into the Baroque period. It doesn't come from nowhere, he's a trained musician and composer in a mature style: much of his writing is manipulation of form. Here's a question for you - how does he capture those seasons? Is it simply, as was once put to me by a violinist (no, not a soloist), that he gave the music those titles, and that you could probably substitute a fair few of his other works into the suite with the same title and it would have the same effect? Is there some magic involved? Does it matter, do you even care? It's such good music, that to be honest the answer "no" to the last question can suffice, and we should just experience it. Fine, but remember, that music depends on a good performance by a highly trained solo violinist.
I get the impression that you cannot dance,
Oh, for goodness' sake. (I'm crap at ballroom though). I've given some of my dancing credentials. What are yours?
Your obviously a very 'structured' person, I don't see any spontaneity coming through. How arrogant to say that it needs years of programming to play good enjoyable music. I've lived in southern Spain for 9 years, Granada was the city I visited often, lots of friends there and heard lots of professional Flamenca being played. But you know the best by far was one night waiting for the night train to Paris to arrive in Hendaye. It was 1968, I'd gone to Spain with a friend to do film work and the weather had been against us so we didn't get much. We were a bit miserable and had just witnessed first hand Fascism on May 1st in Pamplona, I was lucky to come out alive. At the train station there were about 100 Andalucians leaving Spain to work in France, the Netherlands, Germany. They had come prepared with lots of food and wine and seeing a couple of foreigners invited, no insisted we eat and drink with them, typically Spanish. So after eating plenty of the Med. diet (very different today) and plenty of vino tinto, up stood a lovely young woman and began to sing Flamenco. A young guy started playing guitar. Neither were brilliant but it was genuine and then out from the crowd came a man in his 50s', no sun tan, obviously an indoor worker and with a paunch.
Then to every bodies surprise he began to sing Flamenca and could he sing. And so began an incredible 50 minutes or so of real Flamenca, vastly better than any of the professional kind I was to listen to 40 years later. Women started the clapping that Flamenca is famous for, every one got involved. They hadn't studied for years, they weren't intellectuals - they were just real people leaving behind their way of life for the cold northern countries where people just don't have that joy in being alive. When they left Spain they wouldn't have to think before they spoke - in Franco's Spain you had to. All this was in the mix. I just wish I could have had a couple of good mikes and a portable Uher tape deck to record it. You can't buy a ticket for something like that you just have to be in the right place at the right time.
In the early 60s' my mother who always loved live music, bought tickets to see Manitas de Plata at the Dome in Brighton a great music venue where King Crimson first played ITCOTCK in 1972 before they made the LP. A Flamenca performance will always be dependent to a certain extent on how involved the audience is. That night there were many Brits and Spanish who came to work in the UK who were really into Flamenca and as soon as Manita came on stage they let him know. What an evening, you would never know your were in early 60s' England. The whole place was fired up and I've never seen anyone else play a guitar one handed but Manitas did. We both saw him two years later, his son had died in a car crash months earlier and the audience was completely different, 'trapped inside their heads' - it just wasn't the same. They weren't 'participating' they were spectators. Instead of the passion his sorrow over his dead son came through, it was a sad evening.
But you have no idea about the childhood or teenage years of those people you are praising, and probably no idea about how hard flamenco actually can be.
Those rhythms are intense and some are complicated. You'd think from the rubbish that gets written about flamenco, that Andalusian children are born able to clap rhythms in complex time signatures like 12/5 and gifted in singing about the problems of life. No. They learn those rhythms and sounds in the home, at school, in music making, from an early age. You learn those things by repetition and more repetition. They learn the singing at the feet of singers. It's insulting to any form of folk music to think it just happens, and something as complex as flamenco even more so. As it happens, flamenco has origins in older folk dance and song forms, such as the zarabanda, the original folias, and forms like the Sevillanas. The names of the different rhythms in Flamenco refer often to other origin dances. Guess what period these older dances are recognised and come to their key form? Yes, that period the century before Baroque starts, the one where you only seem to hear dirges.
Back when I was in Manchester, a troupe of Flamenco dancers performed daily for a week in one of the shopping centres. There was a fourteen year old dancer among them and she was doing quite astonishing technical feats of keeping different times with castanets and stamping polyrhythms. She was asked how she could do so much at such a young age. She replied (translated for us) that she started at three years old, and that to do such things, you had to do it day after day, and that unless you went through a period of hating it and out the other side, you didn't really learn it. Maybe not intellectual as you think I mean it, but that is how people learn these things. Not studied for years? Of course, studied for years.
In the early 60s' my mother who always loved live music, bought tickets to see Manitas de Plata at the Dome in Brighton a great music venue where King Crimson first played ITCOTCK in 1972 before they made the LP. A Flamenca performance will always be dependent to a certain extent on how involved the audience is. That night there were many Brits and Spanish who came to work in the UK who were really into Flamenca and as soon as Manita came on stage they let him know. What an evening, you would never know your were in early 60s' England. The whole place was fired up and I've never seen anyone else play a guitar one handed but Manitas did. We both saw him two years later, his son had died in a car crash months earlier and the audience was completely different, 'trapped inside their heads' - it just wasn't the same. They weren't 'participating' they were spectators. Instead of the passion his sorrow over his dead son came through, it was a sad evening.
To use your expression - I wonder if you are actually listening to the music or just 'thinking about it'. To really hear music you have to stop thinking - thought is not reality, only reality is.
In the Court of the Crimson King was released in 1969, which obviously comes after 1972
It takes a great musician to make an audience sad, and a receptive audience to catch that sadness. Don't feel that you missed out because that evening was sad. It's part of life. The term in Flamenco is duende. Do you not appreciate sad music? It sounds like you see it as lesser. As for playing the guitar one handed, I've played a couple of short runs that way and I'm just a mediocre amateur classical performer (I've even lost the right to call myself mediocre now since I practice less, talent is what you have when you practice). It's a trick that takes a while to learn to do well, involving tapping and plucking with the same hand. The same kind of technical trickery you decried earlier...
Thinking, learning, practicing: if you really think that stuff doesn't go into any half decent music performance, I'd sentence you to a month of listening to those "talent show audition" videos on YouTube where people actually think they are talented and can just turn up and sing something, maybe interspersed with a few evenings in those karaoke bars where spirits are cheap.
