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Rating: Sometimes it happens that you have nothing specific or urgent to do, as happened to me this Sunday morning, and so you open the deck chair in the backyard accompanied by a kindle and amidst the whistling of blackbirds, you search for a random book and start reading it earnestly. The choice fell on this title published by Garzanti in 1992 (though in the kindle I have the Feltrinelli paperback edition of 2009), and anyone who assumes it to be something humorous/philosophical would be greatly mistaken, as the subtitle is "A reflection on cultured music and modernity", an essay full of considerations on classical or "serious" music, and on the New Contemporary Music, in the light of the present moment of modernity, or post-modern (boh!). I must admit that essays have always inspired very little attraction for me, but by virtue of its few pages (96), I said to myself: "Well, if you've downloaded it, you might as well try to read it" and that's how I spent 2 hours under the sun following the Baricco musings on the subject.
The book says little or nothing about Hegel and even less about the cows of Wisconsin, apart from two considerations before the first chapter, while it delves into discussing how "cultured" music was born for the benefit of the bourgeoisie and the upper classes and how it ended up becoming an object of "enjoyment" for a few connoisseurs, a sort of other "elite" (very far from art in my view), all this transitioning from tonal to atonal and dodecaphonic serial music.
The ingredients are in order of appearance (copy-pasting exactly):
- G. W. F. Hegel
- Louis Armstrong
- Beatles
- Berio
- Sting
- Vivaldi
- Elvis
- Beethoven
- Chopin
- U2
- A Clockwork Orange
- Strauss
- Adorno (Aesthetic Theory)
- rock
- jazz
- The Marriage (Mozart's production)
- 45 RPMs
- Haydn
- Mozart
- Brahms
- Mahler
- Ravel
- Morricone
- Madonna
- advertising jingles
- Philip Glass
- Liszt
- Schönberg
- Anton Webern
- Wagner
- the Wieck syndrome and his daughter Clara
- Schumann
- Flemish polyphony
- Bachian harmonies
- Puccini
- The Girl of the Golden West
- Turandot
- Berlioz
and nothing... actually no, once again this book has asserted and confirmed my very little inclination to flip through and immerse myself in an "essay". From this book, I have instead learned:
- That certain cows in Wisconsin, when listening to symphonic music, produce an increased amount of milk by 7.5%.
- That Louis Armstrong said regarding jazz: "If you have to ask what it is, you'll never know".
- That Giacomo Puccini was born exactly one hundred years and one day before me and that he died before completing the "Turandot" (being a heavy smoker) due to throat cancer at the age of sixty-two.
which is not little but also not much!
p.s. um, to whom it may concern: I note and point out that in the DeGeneri, the "Essay" box to check is missing.
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