Tuesday, January 16, 2007.2:37 PM
Quintet
So here I am listening to Naxos online for possible nice quintet pieces we can try out that hopefully YST library might have. Came across this recording of the Estria Wind Quintet playing pieces by Stewart Grant, Ka Nin Chan, Andrew P. MacDonald, Robert LeMay, and Dennis Gougeon. It's an all canadian production, from the quintet members to composers featured. All of them are contemporary music, and as many of you might know, SOME contemporary works sound noisy, irrelevant, makes no musical sense, and all the notes are stringed together like randomly picking a bead out from a box full of colourful beads of different size and texture and putting it together to make a necklace - it might all make mathematical sense but who cares about that? We're talking about music, not maths here. Not to be rude to some modern composers, but you don't write music to be different or win some awards for the Most-avant-garde composition in the 21st C. And playing contemporary music is challenging. Stop trying to make us do some weird things using our instruments and we are humans. We have limits. I don't have a tongue that can flag continuously at an interval of a split second (ok, my tongue is slow...)
Back to the quintet pieces that we'll read next week...
On the other hand, contemporary pieces make classical ones sound like nursery tunes. Simple and lyrical...the way I like it. :)
I think we'll do some Reicha's Quintets.
Labels: Chamber music
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