 In light of recent discoveries and developments, I've shunted aside large numbers of the rocker fellas on the iPod, such as the J. Geils Band and the Stones, and even "progressive" Pink Floyd" to make way for the giants who have been sitting in iTunes unheeded for far more than a year.
I've haven't put Wagner's 'Ring' cycle back yet!
It may not be some people's idea of relaxing to listen to Liszt's 'Faust Symphony', Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, Bruckner's Fifth, or as I am now, to Mahler's 'Resurrection' Symphony No 2 under Leonard Bernstein's brilliant baton, with long logging pauses for the quiet passages ... but I think you get the drift.
 Since there's also just enough room on a big iPod, without removing any of hundreds of "popular" women musicians, I'll be going on trips like Arnold Schönberg's 'Gurrelieder'. This work, illustrated as I now have it conducted by Riccardo Chailly but wonderfully recorded too by Pierre Boulez, is about as powerful as you can get any love story beyond until death did they part. I also find it's perhaps the vast piece that could lift somebody who thinks "I don't know anything about 'classical music'" -- a nonsensical statement* foisted on too many people -- straight through from the 19th to 20th centuries without an explanatory word needing to be said, apart from the fashion in which the composer himself introduces speech and the springtime; this is, if you've managed to survive a ghoulish onslaught until that stunning moment of surprise (and even that doesn't give the game away). The tale of Tove and Waldemar is an overwhelming epic of a kind I used to dose myself with about once every couple of years when I was a sprightly lad.
In such a slowed-down mood, I've also got a ready ear again for other "late romantic" masterpieces like the operas 'Der Ferne Klang' by Franz Schreker and Ferrucio Busoni's 'Doktor Faust', I'm going for rather a long stroll because all those were written around the turn of a century ago.
It would seem my friend Dom has opened a very rusty door, but nothing the other side of it needs oiling or dusting down. It's more a matter of sending the minute electro-chemical charges down some neuronal pathways like memory lanes waiting to be lit up again.
 One or two very old friends remember how I adored -- and used to write about -- taking the kinds of cosmic excursions and inner journeys created by people in the last century who are still scarcely all household names, such as Horatio Radulescu (Piano Concerto 'The Quest'); Henri Dutilleux (Cello Concerto 'Tout Un Monde Lointain'); Edison Denisov (Symphony); Ernest Moeran (Symphony); Benjamin Britten ('War Requiem' and a concerto where the solo violinist is expected to double-stop** her or his way about as high as the Pole Star in the last movement); Alfred Shnittke (whose 1977 Concerto Grosso No 1 included some of the wittiest and sudden "jazz fusion" of the pre-Perestroika period); Michael Tippett (for the première of his choral work 'The Mask of Time', some decades after the oratorio 'A Child of Our Time', which some readers will know I love); and the bushy-bearded Per Nørgard (who burned my brain with the 1976 first performance of his Third Symphony, then went on to achieve what Wagner had in mind before he died and wrote 'Siddharta', an opera on the life of Prince Gautama, the Buddha); and many others too long neglected.
I just feel that fully to resource myself, I need men like these arm in arm with the ladies right now. Concerning the latter, today a decision was made: I do have a deeply favourite record to sum up my 2005. It just has to be Heather Nova's 'Redbird' (but you've had plenty of pictures).
I may be gone for some time.
Given the woman's seeming capacity to turn her moods, spirit and hand to anything, I wonder what Heather Nova would think of doing a concerto for alto voice, chorus, acoustic guitar, Bermudan band and an orchestra whose brass section is about the size of Mahler's...
Certainly gone, I fear, are the days I might have aspired to help write it!
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*What is truly "nonsensical" is to be put in a position where you've got a perfectly sound musical ear but are led to think you know nothing about so-called classical music by people who are pretentious and put you down -- outside their élitist arena.
Most people simply begin by knowing what they enjoy, much as I love some impressionist or surrealist painting while knowing very little about most of the artists, how they do it or their place in art history.
If you catch me writing about music like some pompous academic, the "comments" box is there for you tell me to pack in that kind of off-putting bullshit immediately! The chances are, however, that along with the women, from now on we shall find a place on this log for composers of both sexes like the ones named above.
I'd never suggest one kind of music is "light" while the sort listed above is "heavy" since there's so much radiance as well as darkness in many such orchestral and choral works, but to try to say the impossible -- that is by weighing music in a way nobody really can -- some of these extensive works calling for huge forces are a ballast I feel I've been missing for too long.
To take such a line of argument any further, though, would be as absurd as asking if a magnificently storm-tossed ocean is more or less beautiful than a crystal mountain brook. It all comes from the same wellspring in our shared humanity, doesn't it? This music log has never been about anything else.
**To "double-stop" on a violin or other stringed instrument is a technique of playing two notes at once. If they're in a very high register or soaring pitch, as in the third, closing part of Benjamin Britten's concerto, a good player can draw joy from your tear ducts and lift the hairs on the back of your neck.
10:28:23 PM link 
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