#debussy

[masonyin]

50 composers

[scherzokinn]

Things To Never Say To Someone Who Just Came Out - Composers Edition!

[sixty-silver-wishes]

everyone shut up this is ACTUALLY what fans of different composers are like

Mahlerians are PROUD TO BE ABSOLUTELY INSUFFERABLE DRAMA QUEENS, THE LIKES OF WHICH EVEN THE WAGNER CULT COULD NEVER SO MUCH AS ASPIRE TO BE. WE ARE ONE WITH THE UNYIELDING EBB AND FLOW OF THE BOUNDLESS UNIVERSE, DAMN IT ALL!

Shostakovich fans are like Mahler fans except they actually understand what sarcasm is. We also all really like the Muppets for some reason. Most of us own cats and likely have at least one mental illness.

Liszt fans are either tweenagers who love anime or salty old pianists who know a disturbing amount about music theory. These two factions are constantly at war.

Copland fans are either very, very far right or very, very far left. Either way, neither side actually listens to all of Copland's repertoire.

Tchaikovsky fans are either Russian grandmas or LGBT orchestra kids on Tiktok. Either those or the one noob who heard there were cannons once.

Wagner fans. Yes, there are the cringey neo-Nazi Wagnerians, but anti-Nazi Wagnerians are a whole new level of chaotic good. They spend their time dreaming up the most disastrous, chaotic Ring productions possible, with the sole purpose of making Richard Wagner's entire family simultaneously spin in their graves. They take "death of the author" to a whole new level and constantly run on nothing but 100% pure spite. You want a Wagnerian who would beat up Wagner in a Denny's parking lot on your side.

Prokofiev fans will unironically say "ackshually...". That's it.

Dvorak fans are homeschool kids. They're either soul-crushingly innocent or devastatingly horny.

Sousa fans are just high school band directors who try to convince themselves they like Sousa to get through the semester.

Joplin fans constantly argue over whether Joplin's music should be played twice as quickly or twice as slowly than it's actually written. Also sick of hearing about Janis.

Chopin fans are exactly like Liszt fans, except there are 20% more "uwu softboi flowercrown" edits of Chopin than Liszt floating around on Instagram and Tumblr.

Holst fans will drag you into an alleyway and beat you up with their bare hands if you so much as mention The Planets.

Bernstein fans are either horny theatre kids or communists, but it's more likely they're both at once. They are very opinionated about recordings, and express their approval of the ones they like by gyrating excessively to them. If you put a Bernstein fan, a Mahler fan, and a Shostakovich fan in one room, they will either topple a national government or have a threesome.

Ravel fans are inherently Wes Anderson fans. You can be friends with one for years without knowing a single thing about their personality.

Schoenberg fans are like Mahlerians but with worse memes.

Brahms fans are... I have never met a Brahms fan. I'm sure they exist, but I'm pretty sure my own taste in music scares them off.

Paganini fans are almost always TwoSet kids, particularly the ones who try to convince people that "classical music isn't boring because it's basically metal." If you tell them Paganini played viola, they will spontaneously combust.

Rachmaninov fans are ultimately really chill, but are often socially awkward. If you ask a Rachmaninov fan "how are you?", they will most likely respond with "you too."

Schumann fans are Mahlerians on medication.

Stravinsky fans think they're chaotic and unhinged and listen to the most obscure underground shit, but in all actuality they just decided to enter their edgy phase after a lifetime of being sheltered and forced to listen to nothing but Handel by their parents. Possibly homeschooled.

Ysaye fans are like Paganini fans, except they're depressed graduate music students with permanent calluses on their fingers.

Debussy fans go to art school, decide they don't like art school, but have been doing art school too long to turn back, so they can't get out of art school. They may be high on weed at any given moment.

Satie fans are just possessed vessels of Erik Satie. Death cannot hinder Erik Satie. Erik Satie will return to this mortal plane. Search your feelings. You are already Erik Satie.

[larphis]

Holy fucking shit you guys I’m probably not the first one who picked up on this since the OFMD fandom is big but I’m literally one second away from crying my heart out right now and I haven’t heard anyone talk about this before.

Stede accepting his feelings for Ed and Ed cutting off his feelings for Stede share the same background track.

But not only that: The scenes literally transition into each other if you cut them together because the soundtrack connects them.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

I am by far your superior, but my notorious modesty prevents me from saying so.

- Erik Satie

To his contemporaries and peers Erik Satie was something of an enigma. Just a few of his quirks included claiming he only ate white foods, carrying a hammer wherever he went, founding his own religion, eating 150 oysters in one sitting, and writing a piece with the instruction to repeat 840 times! As a composer, Satie paved the way for the avant-garde in music and became a very influential figure in the classical music of the 20th century whose works still sound fresh today.

Born into a poor and difficult childhood in the Normandy harbour town of Honfleur on 17 May 1866, Satie would always be an outsider. The Paris Conservatoire to which he was enrolled by his stepmother, herself a pianist, became for him “a sort of local penitentiary” during his teens; he left with no qualifications and a reputation for being lazy. He signed up for military service in 1886 and dropped out within the same year. Immersing himself in the bohemian life of Montmartre, he became linked with the popular music scene and eked out a living as an accompanist, playing at the Chat Noir cabaret. Always on the periphery, and forever out of money, he later downgraded from the cramped room in which he lived to the less fashionable Parisian suburb of Arcueil, where he holed up in isolation and squalor – no visitors set foot in the room during the near-30 years he lived there.

Much has been made of the eccentricities of this flâneur, who was always seen in a grey velvet suit, and yet underlying Satie’s music is his serious desire to create something new. You can hear it in his popular piano pieces: the haunting scales and rhythms of the Trois Gnossiennes written under the spell of Romanian folk music, and the meditative world of Gymnopédies, where, as in a cubist painting, motifs are “seen” from all sides. At a time when French composers were looking to escape the shadows of Wagner’s epic Romanticism, the French composer’s stripped-back mechanical sound, inspired by the humble barrel organ, offered a radically simple approach.

Satie preferred originality to the mundane. The composer of the famous Gymnopedies, could never be accused of having an uninteresting personality. For one, his outgoing fashion statements always caused a stir. During his Montmartre years, he had 12 identical velvet corduroy suits hanging in his wardrobe, which earned him the nickname ‘The Velvet Gentleman’, and in his socialist years, he donned a bowler hat and carried an umbrella.

Debussy helped to draw public attention to Satie, orchestrating two of his Gymnopédies, yet Satie had to wait until much later in life to attain celebrity status. While still earning a living writing salon dances and popular cabaret songs, and after suffering a creative crisis, he enrolled himself at the Schola Cantorum in Paris at the age of 39. Rather than finding him validation, his studies seem to have fuelled his hatred of convention - it’s with more than a hint of bitterness that he claims to put “everything I know about Boredom” into the Bach chorale of his masterful Sports et Divertissements piano pieces. But notoriety led to a succès de scandale and when it came it came with a bang in Parade, his surreal, one-act circus ballet for Diaghilev. Into the orchestral score, which featured jazz and cabaret tunes, were thrown typewriters, sirens and a pistol - just the kind of noises a wartime audience would normally pay not to hear. With its rigid cubist costumes by Picasso - which restricted Massine’s choreography - and a promotional push from Cocteau, it was provocative enough to secure Satie’s position at the vanguard of modernism.

Yet Satie was continually frustrated in his attempts to be accepted as an artist in high society France - his failure to establish himself at the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts, to which Debussy had won a scholarship, only compounded his resentment. Was this treatment by the cultural elite fair? Certainly his determination to antagonise his audience in his late ballets did little to endear him to the critics, but the fierce criticism he received in Paris was also a sign of things to come. Pierre Boulez would later poke fun at Satie’s lack of craft, while composer Jean Barraqué - another proponent of 12-tone music - would deride Satie as “an accomplished musical illiterate … who found that his friendship with Debussy was an unhoped-for opportunity to loiter in the corridors of history”.

Satie is perhaps, to this day, the most audacious and original composer when it comes to naming his works e.g. Gnossiennes and Gymnopédies. With Satie you will not see symphonies, concertos or opus numbers. Satie possessed a wicked sense of humour and his mockery, both of himself and others, became an inspiration for many of his irony-tinged works. His Sonatine bureaucratique is a spoof of Muzio Clementi’s Sonatina Op. 36 and contained many witticisms in the score. For example, he writes Vivache (vache being French for cow) instead of the original Italian tempo marking Vivace.

Whether in the collage-like miniature piano parodies he wrote during the World War I, his creation of a theatre format that has endured over the years, or in his collaboration with Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso y Sergei Diaghilev, there is a liveliness of imagination and a hunger for innovation that made Erik Satie In the torch bearer of the vanguard in his work. Satie would influence so many so strongly that years later some of his closest friends became radical artists, for example. ManRay, the sculptor Constantin Brâncusi, and Marcel Duchamp, or a much younger group of Paris-based composers like Les Six.

Satie, a known drinker of absinthe, and apparently every other alcohol available, died of cirrhosis at the age of 59 in Arcueil, France in July 1925. But his compositions, especially those deceptively simple-sounding solo piano works, find life today through recitals, concerts, and great movie scores. Although he died in poverty with little success to his name, today Erik Satie is acknowledged as a founder of 20th-century modernism, who changed the face of music.

Personally I do find Satie's music enriching, But I also find that his calculated wackiness is culturally apt. Pieces like ‘3 Pieces in the Shape of a Pear’, ‘Flabby Preludes for a Dog’ and ‘Desiccated Embryos’ rewardingly deflate Wagnerism's excesses in a characteristically French way.

[classical-music-suites-bracket]

Classical Music Suites Bracket

Hi everyone! After the success that the symphony bracket has been so far I thought I'd keep the fun going by hosting the suites bracket that was initially discussed on that blog. The format will remain quite similar, but I'll clarify this when the tournament starts which will likely be sometime in December. There is only the one mod, so please be patient with me (oh also she/they pronouns please).

I'm accepting submissions, so here's some guidelines for that:

Please make submissions to the ask box.

You can include propaganda if you would like to but you don't have to.

If there is a specific recording that you would like me to use please specify it in your submission.

For the purposes of this bracket suite is fairly broad, though it will be restricted to suites with at least 2 movements. Please don't submit works that are other forms (eg. symphony, concerto, opera etc). If the mod determines that a submission is not clearly a suite then a poll will be created to determine general consensus.

The number of suites to make it into the bracket is yet to be determined, but it will be either 16, 32, or 64, depending on the number of submissions.

As submissions come in, I will add them to the bottom of this post every so often.

Also as an extra little novelty, feel free to guess the suite, movement, and instrument of the sheet music in the header image :)

Tagging @symphonybracket to credit the idea as that is where the idea was first talked about and much of the format has come from.

Feel free to share this post, ask any questions you may have, and of course start submitting!

[gasparodasalo]

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) - Prélude for Piano, Livre II No. 6 - Général Lavine – eccentric. Performed by Hiroko Sasaki, 1873 Pleyel piano.

[torse]

[ophelialoveshandsomemen]

I have polls! Time to be insufferable...

[friend-crow]

Now invoking Pan, god of summer wind.

Who wants to play the seconda part? It's not too hard, so long as you can handle changing time signatures every other measure.

[scherzokinn]

Dr. Bashir as Nijinsky's Faun

First Star Trek: Deep Space Nine fanart! I've been getting more interested again in Star Trek lately and wanted to make a drawing related to that.

Context + details under the cut + alt version

There are quite a few "jokes" circulating in the Trek fandom about Dr. Julian Bashir being a ballet fan, or even a ballet dancer himself, because of his ex-girlfriend being a ballerina, so I got inspired by that and... drew him as the faun from the ballet "Prélude à l'après midi d'un faune" by Vaslav Nijinsky, based on the piece of the same title by Claude Debussy (which again, was based on the poem "L'Après midi d'un faune" by Stéphane Mallarmé).

The costume was, obviously, heavily based on the original from the ballet by Léon Bakst, although I made some adaptations to make it look more futuristic (? though this was hard because the original attire itself is already pretty modern), and also make sure Bashir was recognizable (I replaced the headpiece that maintained the horns with a rose crown, which I guess isn't fully off tracks either because Léon Bakst did design a costume made of roses for another ballet!)

And no, this isn't "Vulcanface", that's the actual makeup of the faun in the ballet haha.

I dedicate this drawing to my friend @bashircore! Dr. Bashir is his favorite Star Trek character.

The veil Julian is holding is Elim Garak's, by the way. :)

Some close-ups:

Alternative version (with a background and some minor adjustments):

[freddiemercurylegendabovelegends]

In these days, April, 1984 - Queen Promotional Video 'I Want To Break Free'

Director David Mallett;

Filming Location: Battersea, London, Limehouse Studios, London (now destroyed warehouse next door)

Written by John Deacon

🔸 Intricate recreation of the Debussy ballet "L'Après-Midi D'un Faune", performed by the Royal Ballet.

Freddie rehearsed intensely with the Royal Ballet members, and the results, which took an entire day to film and were choreographed by Wayne Eagling, were astonishingly beautiful, and have since become yet further proof of Freddie's perfectionist genius, even if he felt somewhat humbled by his lack of dancing ability compared to the professionals

(➡️ source: queenpedia.com)

[feerz]

Trying to do this on my phone was a mistake

Tbh I feel like Liszt & Mozart could switch places