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iggyting

Funeral Music!

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Hi Folks, in the midst of the Seventh Month we have "Getai" music all over Singapore. Singing to the dead is no laughing matter and money is "sure good enough"!

Heard any touching piece lately? Well, I would recommend one hauntingly beautiful funeral piece by Rachmaninoff, who is better known for his popular romantic 2nd Piano Concerto, among others. The piece that I think stands out among the descriptive music in romanticism is Rachmaninoff's "The Isle Of The Dead". The 1976 EMI version by the London Symphony Orchestra, under Andre Previn, remains my favourite. The score gives musical content to a painting of the same title by Arnold Bocklin, which depicts a lone white robbed-hooded ferryman with a coffin on deck a small gondola rolling towards a craggy stand-out deserted Isle of the Dead which entrance to the cave is shrouded by tall cypress trees. The back of the figure is set against the Isle in a dawn setting at the horizon, painting a gloomy and mysterious picture. The music begins with a repeated motive in rythm with the rolling motion, the middle passages give tormented emotional content to the cravings for the lost pleasures of the departed souls interned on the Isle. Towards the ending, the music climaxes as the souls despaired for the ferryman, who after unburdening, rolls away from the Isle with the rythmic motive at the beginning repeated. Previn really makes the LSO "feels" in a superb performance. This may not be frightful music, but it sure sets you thinking about your last journey!

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Alban Berg's Violin Concerto is recognised as an advant garde masterpiece, a lamentation for a deceased young daughter of a friend - 'To the Memory of an Angel'. The atonal music form, described by Arnold Schoenberg as 'an emancipation of dissonance' as equivalent to the comprehensibility of consonance, is used by Berg to convey his sentiments.

 

The opening 6-tone theme of the 1st movement is signature to the Concerto. This leads into a discordance of sounds and chords, like conflicted emotions, giving a sense of incomprehensibility of the tragedy. This dark melancholic reflection gives way to a much more agitated dissonant 2nd movement in which all the traumatised emotions (all the angts n dark feelings), dissociated from thoughts, are played out, like in a descent into madness, before a sort of normacy settles in with a brief return of the signature theme. The music in the later part takes on a calmer tone and ends in a sort of resignation to the inanity of it all.

 

I can't say I understand the music fully. Yet, don't we at times experience emotions taking over our senses? That Berg's Violin Concerto draws us into a musical equivalence of a trauma is great arts.

Edited by iggyting

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