UPDATE: I've not been publishing posts for the past several weeks because I was on a month-long road trip (my wife and I travelled historic Route 66 from St. Louis, MO, to Santa Monica, CA). We're now back home, so I'm ready to start back up with weekly posts.
I’m back after a four week trip on the road down historic Route 66. Wow, what an experience. One of these days I’ll post info and pics from the trip. For now, I’m back at home, and I’m returning to my regular routines -- including the posting of a weekly blog entry on classical music that is new to me. My last post -- before the trip -- was for the week of September 26th, and it was on “Three Continents," a cello concerto by Nico Muhly, Sven Helbig, and Zhou Long. I landed on that piece because I wanted to listen to something by Nico Muhly, one of the composers listed on CultureTrip.com’s “10 Young Composers Who Are Redefining Classical Music" (HERE). For the past several weeks I’ve been working my way down that list, and this week I’m down to the seventh name, Daniel Bjarnason. I know nothing about Daniel Bjarnason, and as far as I know, I’ve never heard anything by him; therefore, I went to YouTube, typed in his name, and chose the first piece that popped up, “Collider.” “Collider” is a fifteen-plus minute tone poem, and I’m not sure what Bjarnason was visualizing mentally when he wrote the piece and named it “Collider.” What is he suggesting with the tone of this piece? I had a thought about that about five minutes into the piece -- although I don’t think my idea matches exactly what Bjarnason was trying to convey with this music, as after five minutes his piece went into a direction that was incongruent with my idea. More on this later. So what is Bjarnason attempting to convey? The first definition that popped up when I typed into Google, “define collider,” was “an accelerator in which two beams are made to collide.” However, with the extremely slow and quiet opening notes of the work -- sustained whole notes drawn out by some very serious and solemn strings -- I don’t think that is what Bjarnason was after. This is not a fast-paced thrilling piece -- suggesting an acceleration of beams about to collide. Nor is it a lyrical piece with a beautiful, memorable melody. Instead, it is a sober piece that layers sustained notes on top of sustained notes as the intensity of the piece grows in crescendo.
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A New Hope:As the header above says, each week I will listen to a piece of classical music that I've never heard before, and then I will report out what I thought about it. Archives
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