Customer Reviews (1)

A Peculiar And Amusing Commentary on Art, in Music!
Who would have thought of combining, on one disk, music by Peter Schickele (the infamous associate of P.D.Q. Bach) based on Thurber's drawings, with music and words based on classic artworks such as "Christina's World" and "Nude Descending a Staircase" ?

This wonderfully imagined but definitely peculiar item has a different cover on each side (see photos) and a very useful booklet including copies of the relevant art plus helpful explanatory text.

Personally, I liked the Schickele/Thurber stuff better than the other, but it was a painless way to learn a lot more about art. If your learning style is "audio" as much as video, you might enjoy this too!

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With much enthusiasm, Schickele accepted a suggestion from the quintet An Die Musik to adapt the classic The Emperor's New Clothes as a performance piece for their Timeless Tales series. Each character in the story is identified by a theme, and the mixture of characters leads to the corresponding mixture of themes - "everything from minimalist classical sounds to boogie-woogie piano." ... Read more

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Piano 4 Hands
Morning Music, a new work for piano, four hands by Peter Schickele, is written to be played at sunrise, in the manner of an Indian raga, though its musical style bears no resemblance to the raga itself. Schickele describes this work as a string of beads; each bead is a concentrated, somewhat static musical section. One of these sections is fast and driving, another is languid, others flow in a songlike manner, but they all have a rather hypnotic quality... "This piece was not commissioned; it simply wanted to be written. It was first performed by Jack Behrens and the composer on February 6, 1983 at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario. For advanced players. Duration: 11 ... Read more

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Intermediate level. ... Read more

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10 songs composed in classical style by the man whose alter ego is P.D.Q. Bach. Illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings of cats. Song titles: 1."Life Before Birth" 2."With Closed Eyes" 3."Kittenhood" 4."Coming of Age" 5."Making the Rounds" 6."Good Hunting" 7."Parenthood" 8."Family Games" 9."White Whiskers, Width, and Wisdom" 10."I've Loved Them All" ... Read more

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Commissioned by the composer?s college music instructor, William Reese, for his choir in Rockland County, New York, Schickele?s setting of the first part of the Magnificat text.It was premiered in April of 1998 by the Rockland Camerata. As most of Schickele?s choral works are secular, this is a rare and truly lovely contribution to thesacred choral library from a well-known composer. From Schickele?s notes: ?In the outer sections of the work the three musical entities (chorus, piano, and the strings) are given overlappinghomophonic phrases much in the manner of Monteverdi?s and the Gabrielis? antiphonal choir pieces in early 17th-century Venice, although, of course, theharmonic language is completely different. The middle sections feature lyrical vocal lines over repeated instrumental figures, leading to a climactic ending.?String parts available on rental. Duration: 4?30? ... Read more

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For Contrabass and Piano
Commissioned by legendary bassist Gary Karr and his accompanist Harmon Lewis, Stepping Out is outgoing and exuberant, featuring two highly stylized dances (polka and tango) followed by a driven, jazz-tinged finale with plenty of virtuosic passages. For advanced players. ... Read more

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"A supermarket tabloid of classical music criticism."--from the new foreword by Peter Schickele. A snakeful of critical venom aimed at the composers and the classics of nineteenth- and twentieth-century music. Who wrote advanced cat music? What commonplace theme is very much like Yankee Doodle? Which composer is a scoundrel and a giftless bastard? What opera would His Satanic Majesty turn out? Whose name suggests fierce whiskers stained with vodka? And finally, what third movement begins with a dog howling at midnight, then imitates the regurgitations of the less-refined or lower-middle-class type of water-closet cistern, and ends with the cello reproducing the screech of an ungreased wheelbarrow? For the answers to these and other questions, readers need only consult the "Invecticon" at the back of this inspired book and then turn to the full passage, in all its vituperation. Among the eminent reviewers are George Bernard Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Hans von Bulow, Friedrich Nietzsche, Eduard Hanslick, Olin Downes, Deems Taylor, Paul Rosenfeld, and Oscar Wilde. Itself a classic, this collection of nasty barbs about composers and their works, culled mostly from contemporaneous newspapers and magazines, makes for hilarious reading and belongs on the shelf of everyone who loves--or hates--classical music. With a new foreword by Peter Schickele ("P.D.Q. Bach"). ... Read more

Customer Reviews (10)

Wonderful book for musicians
I give this book to my graduating piano students -they love it.It has all the critical articles written at the time that now famous composers first presented their pieces.i.e.Beethoven's ninth symphony was panned!
It helps that I was once a student of Nicholas Slonimsky, the author.Fascinating and fun.

I Laughed! I Cried! I Played The Rites of Spring!
When most people think of the world of classical music, they think of stuffy, staid, reserved, and often pompous people. This book shows that Slonimsky could throw water balloons at the whole genre that "should" be approached with "reverence" and get a good laugh.

And he does. No matter how you look at it, weather the reviewer was being pompous himself, or even if the composer deserved it (personally, I wouldn't mind if someone were to rake Offenbach over the coals), this collection does exactly what Slonimsky intended. It makes us laugh.

Mind you, I love classical music! I get just as much of a thrill listening to Beethoven as anyone, and Vaughn Williams is a personal favorite. But they were human beings, not demigods. They probably never took themselves as seriously as most of the classical music world does (except maybe Wagner). This book is a refreshing and welcome change from the stereotype attitude of a dusty, embalmed world of self-aggrandizing fops who take themselves way too seriously - and are getting what they deserve.

Lexicon of Musical Invective
Of interest to the most serious listeners of classical music.The author, Nicolas Slonimsky, was a composer, conductor, and author/editor of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians and was the most thorough chaser after obscure biographical information ever known.This lexicon compiles spiteful reviews of music from the 1800s to the middle of the twentieth century.It is essentially a look at the music critic's mis-judgment of the new and innovative music of their time.

Good to flip through for a chuckle at how wrong some critics ultimately proved to be
Nicolas Slonimsky's LEXICON OF MUSICAL INVECTIVE collects those critical reviews of composers from Beethoven's time which proved "biased, unfair, ill-tempered, and singularly unprophetic judgements". It's handily arranged in alphabetic order by composer, so while listening to, say, Bela Bartok's first piano concerto, you can amuse yourself with a 1928 review from the Cincinnati Enquirer:

"Mr. Bartok elected to play his composition dignified by the title Concerto for Pianoforte and Orchestra. Note the ommission of key. Ultra-moderns cannot be bothered with such trifling designations ... It has been said that the Concerto is based on folk tunes. They have been successfully concealed. Only tonal chaos arises from the diabolical employment of unrelated keys simultaneously."

A 1913 review from the Boston Journal manages to make unprophetic judgements about two composers in one go:

"For the most part the latest symphony [the Sibelius Fourth] from the pen of Finland's foremost composer is a tangle of the most dismal dissonances. It eclipses the saddest and sourest moments of Debussy."

In addition to these citations, Slonimsky offers his own analysis of critical tendencies in the opening essay "Non-Acceptance of the Familiar". To the elderly among the old critics, Slonimsky notes, new music always seems louder than what they are used to. They also often resorted to linguistic similes, comparing new music to "Chinese", a then-handy symbol of incomprehensibility. He gives some general anecdotes about the world of music reviewing, such as a Russian journalist writing a review on Prokofiev's "Scythian Suite" before the concert even took place--he was fired when the review appeared but the piece had actually be taken off the programme at the last minute. There's even an index of Invective, so if you want to find all reviews making use of the terms "Hideous", "Grunting", or even "Feeding Time at Zoo", you'll know which pages to turn to.

Though the work is entertaining, it's no essential addition to a home library. You can read it in an hour at your public or university library. Also, the work was never updated after 1965--it ends with the generation of Bartok, Webern, and Varese--and so those hoping to read invective against Boulez, Stockhausen and others won't find it here.

Great Fun
The ill-informed and pompously long-winded "12x88" completely misses the point. It doesn't matter what Slonimsky says in the Forward - the content of the book is hugely entertaining and in many cases hilariously funny. And "12x88" doesn't seem to realise that a good deal of the most vituperative attacks on music came from other composers, frequently of equivalent eminence, so condemning or praising "critics" leads nowhere.
Also it is not clear the previous reviewer has any clear idea what he means by "atonal" music. Is aleatoric music, which may be "tonal" or not or beyond such classification, included ?
And what about much baroque music, that also creates little if any emotional involvement ? ... Read more

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S.A.T.B A Cappella Christmas (312-41180) ... Read more

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Theatre program. Vol. 88, No. 9. ... Read more