Actually, I'm a HUGE Caroline Shaw fan, but to be fair, starting off the show with both of them seems heavy-handed to me. Missy Mazzoli is another who is a major darling of the classical music world. Not my favorite, but she's really good.
Because — and I can't believe I'm clearing my throat here — their styles are SO erudite and SO intellectual, that the first half would be hard for most audiences to sit through. It's NOT because they are women.
Ok...back at the symphony...just watched Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha followed by Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. You expect rhythm from Hiawatha because of the meter of Longfellow’s poem, but Taylor gives us melody, peak classical sensibility as opposed to the rhythms of Jazz. Then the rhythm comes in at Gershwin. Nature vs. the city and all that. This is doing woke right. The audience for this is mostly white.
That’s a better way of putting it. I would have liked to have been introduced to those composers in a way that sparked appreciation. Instead they were tokenized and held up alongside the man I was really there to see.
Ok...they did a better job than that. The Caroline Shaw piece they used was The Observatory. The Mazoli piece was the violin concerto Procession. We start with a telescope looking at the planets, proceed to an avant garde ascendance into the heavens, and then Planets just speaks for itself.
My wife and I had fun trying to pick which scifi/fantasy movies had ripped off Planets.
Actually, I'm a HUGE Caroline Shaw fan, but to be fair, starting off the show with both of them seems heavy-handed to me. Missy Mazzoli is another who is a major darling of the classical music world. Not my favorite, but she's really good.
Because — and I can't believe I'm clearing my throat here — their styles are SO erudite and SO intellectual, that the first half would be hard for most audiences to sit through. It's NOT because they are women.
Ok...back at the symphony...just watched Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Hiawatha followed by Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. You expect rhythm from Hiawatha because of the meter of Longfellow’s poem, but Taylor gives us melody, peak classical sensibility as opposed to the rhythms of Jazz. Then the rhythm comes in at Gershwin. Nature vs. the city and all that. This is doing woke right. The audience for this is mostly white.
Ooooh! Hiawatha is great. Samuel Coleridge Taylor is a wildly underrated composer.
That’s a better way of putting it. I would have liked to have been introduced to those composers in a way that sparked appreciation. Instead they were tokenized and held up alongside the man I was really there to see.
Ok...they did a better job than that. The Caroline Shaw piece they used was The Observatory. The Mazoli piece was the violin concerto Procession. We start with a telescope looking at the planets, proceed to an avant garde ascendance into the heavens, and then Planets just speaks for itself.
My wife and I had fun trying to pick which scifi/fantasy movies had ripped off Planets.