End of the Year Reflections
Getting started early...
My friend Victor (thejoyofvictor) has started a list wherein he highlights someone for each month who has really pissed him off. Good idea, but I've been in a really bright mood as of late, so I'll invert it and give someone or something who really improved my month. Maybe by the time I get through all the others, I'll have something for December. Whatever. Anyway, I'm going to go backwards.
November: Beethoven's Piano Sonata 32, Op. 111, Mvt. 2, Arietta
The other day I went to the library and pulled this off the shelf and took it to the record player and listened to it. It's featured in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and my iTunes Library says I've listened to it half a dozen times, but I had never really spent time really absorbing it.
My attempts to describe it would be both non-expert and probably rather embarrassing to both me and Beethoven, so I won't try. However, I will say I felt clean all over after the needle had lifted itself off the record and returned to its resting place. I paused for two or three minutes, literally enthralled, and wondered at the mind that could elicit so many varied and intense emotions in less than 18 minutes and with only a piano's small and regimented notes.
I would say it's the most perfect piece of music I've ever heard, but it has some parts I cringe at with some distaste--I find a lot of it purposely puerile, but it contrasts those parts so amazingly with the more somber, mature passages that these parts I hate are absolutely necessary.
Need I draw a hackneyed comparison to life itself? Whatever, it's a great piece of music.
My friend Victor (thejoyofvictor) has started a list wherein he highlights someone for each month who has really pissed him off. Good idea, but I've been in a really bright mood as of late, so I'll invert it and give someone or something who really improved my month. Maybe by the time I get through all the others, I'll have something for December. Whatever. Anyway, I'm going to go backwards.
November: Beethoven's Piano Sonata 32, Op. 111, Mvt. 2, Arietta
The other day I went to the library and pulled this off the shelf and took it to the record player and listened to it. It's featured in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and my iTunes Library says I've listened to it half a dozen times, but I had never really spent time really absorbing it.
My attempts to describe it would be both non-expert and probably rather embarrassing to both me and Beethoven, so I won't try. However, I will say I felt clean all over after the needle had lifted itself off the record and returned to its resting place. I paused for two or three minutes, literally enthralled, and wondered at the mind that could elicit so many varied and intense emotions in less than 18 minutes and with only a piano's small and regimented notes.
I would say it's the most perfect piece of music I've ever heard, but it has some parts I cringe at with some distaste--I find a lot of it purposely puerile, but it contrasts those parts so amazingly with the more somber, mature passages that these parts I hate are absolutely necessary.
Need I draw a hackneyed comparison to life itself? Whatever, it's a great piece of music.