Hate Mail

Simps and the Simpletons of Eschaton - what is said there is totally unimportant.  Anyone who is stupid enough to believe them is too stupid to be convinced of the truth so why bother?  Maybe if it amuses me I'll mention it but it's going to have to be a lot better than that. 

Stupid Mail Update:  Well, if there's one thing that Steve Simels is it's a liar.  I've mentioned Bernard Herrmann I didn't say anything bad about him or his music.  I said of his score for Citizen Kane 

It is a good movie, it is beautifully filmed, beautifully structured, well to greatly acted, very well written and the score is very effective, though I am unaware of anyone excerpting the music to stand on its own.  So much of movie music is so much less without the movie to support it.

Which is all true.  I have never seen any of Herrmann's concert music programmed by an orchestra or performed in recital or a chamber music concert.  Though it has been and you can hear some of it at Youtube.*

The only commercial recording of music from Citizen Kane I found listed this morning was a single performance of  "Salaambo's Aria"conducted for a "movie music" recording by Charles Gerhardt. I suspect as part of that 1990s fad of pretending "movie music" was great music** which it seldom is.  Apparently a number of pops performances of that one piece have been done, though it's just a tiny part of the score.  I doubt that Bernard Herrmann wouldn't have rather had some of his concert music achieve that level of performance.   

*  His Symphony of 1941 is a respectable enough attempt at writing a symphony but it's not a piece that I'd ever expect will be much revived.  If he hadn't been famous for his movie music I doubt the available performances would have been recorded.   Oddly, it seems to me like Virgil Thomson's music would be if Virgil Thomson didn't have a sense of humor. 

Echoes for string quartet is also perfectly respectable, though I found it quite boring, extremely repetitious, the kind of music that might be effective in the background of a movie sequence.   In the different sections of it I kept feeling like I should expect something to happen that didn't. 

Souvenirs de Voyage, or at least the available first movement for clarinet quintet was, for me, more effective, if too obviously inspired by Ravel.   I think he is one of those composers who were so brilliant at studying other peoples' music and so good at their lessons that they were unable to find their own music.  Maybe the movies helped him in that, even his admirers seem to admit that his concert music wasn't his best.   He was certainly well rewarded, financially, for his work and his work was the kind for which there are financial rewards.  Maybe he shouldn't have expected artistic success for himself at the same time.  

I can imagine some of his music will occasionally be revived by faculty and student ensembles at universities and conservatories, I don't think it's the kind of music that will inspire anyone the way that really great music will.  I would even expect occasional revivals of his symphony but not too often, probably decades between performances.   He was one of hundreds of very talented composers whose talents - perhaps thwarted by his easy achievement of technical mastery and the work of previous composers - failed to develop an importantly distinctive idom to stand on its own without other support.  A lot of those in the past worked in the theater, either opera or musical comedy.  I do have to confess that while I was listening to his symphony this morning all I could think of was Meridith Willson's two Symphonies as issued by Naxos, a disc I think I might have listened to twice but it's still sitting somewhere in the W section of my CD shelves.   Youtube, for all its shortcomings at least lets you try music out without having to buy a disc.   

**  As I remember becoming aware of the fad, it was a desperate attempt to get young people to start going to orchestra concerts because they were afraid that their audience was dying off.   Since TV and the movies, adding to the attention deficit and stupidity of the American public were a big part of the reason for the reduction in consumption of more challenging art of all kinds, it was bound to be something of a flop.  I think other than for pops orchestras it's pretty much run its course long ago.