The Detroit String Quartet played Brahms last night. Brahms lost.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Brahms is one of my all-time favorite composers.
That was one of the big problems when I was at Harvard studying music. We had to write choral pieces in the style of Brahms or Mendelssohn, which was distressing because in the end you realized how good Brahms is, and how bad you are.
Brahms' Variations are better than mine, but mine were written before his.
After working with Ligeti I began to hear Brahms and Beethoven differently.
Last year in Germany at a town hall in Leipzig there was a game music concert played by the orchestra and some of the Final Fantasy scores were played. This year there is another concert scheduled in the same location, for game music.
Orchestra had a little brass ensemble on two tracks as well, but the rest was me. I knew I couldn't continue in this direction, even if people liked it, because I can only duplicate myself.
To my mind and ear, there is simply nothing that compares to the musical sophistication of a late Beethoven, Bartok, Schubert or Brahms work for minimal forces.
Schumann's 'Quintet in E flat for Piano and Strings' is one of the sublime moments in Romantic music.
I've watched the demise of the Hollywood orchestra, the house orchestras of the big studios.
I don't believe that a lot of the things I hear on the air today are going to be played for as long a time as Coleman Hawkins records or Brahms concertos.