Charles Ives: Complete Symphonies, Los Angeles Philharmonic & Gustavo Dudamel
Can any of this music matter now? How could it?
If it was …
- Not statements, but listenings, auditions. Echoes rather than statements (quotations).
- Intimate and idiosyncratic.
- Capturing a moment when the European classical tradition and the brass band tradition and the ballad tradition, and widespread domestic music-making and ragtime and all the newer traditions were colliding with modernity, modernism, recording, radio, urbanization, mass media. The last composer with all of these as living memories.
- Memory not nostalgia. The quaintness of Ives’s life story has outlived its usefulness. Anyway, Ives’s subject isn’t 19th century Danbury but his process of remembering. Not the tune, but the memory of the tune.
- Spaced out. A space and time in which different musics are sounding all around the listener.
- Inclusive. Not this or that but all. Challenging us to take in it all.
- Two opposite moods: Pandemonium & Stillness
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