This blogging unit is exciting because the students all get to choose the topics for their blogs. I may regret this decision when I have to read 48 blogs this weekend on different topics, but at this point I'm enjoying hearing what topics they're choosing.
N is going to write about classical music and how it is under appreciated. I thought of her today when I read this article from the New Yorker about small opera houses in New York bubbling up to compete with the Met.
While the journalist is in favour of much of the avant grade work in opera taking place, the article refers to a performance of Tosca at a small theatre which didn't come off properly:
In early March, LoftOpera attempted “Tosca,” the kind of big-boned late-Romantic work that more or less requires a large orchestra. In some ways, the experiment fell short. An ensemble of thirty-two musicians, led by Dean Buck, conveyed much of the atmosphere and the nuance of the first act but came under strain in the second. The heroine’s ceremony around Scarpia’s corpse—the arrangement of the candles and the rest—was undercut by sketchy string intonation, and the frigid final chords of E minor and F-sharp minor, which should incite a shiver, merely wheezed.
While I certainly don't have this nuanced appreciation for the sound of the F-sharp minor, I appreciate the concept of cramming a grand form into a smaller mould. I think this relates to my class's discussion today of how sensationalism can only be effective to a certain point in conveying a message - after a certain point, it degrades the value of the message.
If a blogger is talking about freedom for Palestine, or justice for women, or a gravely endangered species, using humour, farce, or other sensational tactics will make it seem as though an "opera" of a topic is being presented on a "tatty fairground" stage. (That was an allusion to the tatty fairground in the closing simile of Ted Hughes's The Seven Sorrows, a poem which most students roundly disliked and I love).
The same article referred to one brave composer who has proposed a piece to compete with the traditional and well-loved Bach passions staged so frequently at this time of year. Frank Martin wrote "Golgotha," which sounds to me as though it would require a big stage.
N is going to write about classical music and how it is under appreciated. I thought of her today when I read this article from the New Yorker about small opera houses in New York bubbling up to compete with the Met.
While the journalist is in favour of much of the avant grade work in opera taking place, the article refers to a performance of Tosca at a small theatre which didn't come off properly:
In early March, LoftOpera attempted “Tosca,” the kind of big-boned late-Romantic work that more or less requires a large orchestra. In some ways, the experiment fell short. An ensemble of thirty-two musicians, led by Dean Buck, conveyed much of the atmosphere and the nuance of the first act but came under strain in the second. The heroine’s ceremony around Scarpia’s corpse—the arrangement of the candles and the rest—was undercut by sketchy string intonation, and the frigid final chords of E minor and F-sharp minor, which should incite a shiver, merely wheezed.
While I certainly don't have this nuanced appreciation for the sound of the F-sharp minor, I appreciate the concept of cramming a grand form into a smaller mould. I think this relates to my class's discussion today of how sensationalism can only be effective to a certain point in conveying a message - after a certain point, it degrades the value of the message.
If a blogger is talking about freedom for Palestine, or justice for women, or a gravely endangered species, using humour, farce, or other sensational tactics will make it seem as though an "opera" of a topic is being presented on a "tatty fairground" stage. (That was an allusion to the tatty fairground in the closing simile of Ted Hughes's The Seven Sorrows, a poem which most students roundly disliked and I love).
The same article referred to one brave composer who has proposed a piece to compete with the traditional and well-loved Bach passions staged so frequently at this time of year. Frank Martin wrote "Golgotha," which sounds to me as though it would require a big stage.
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