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Some time ago I wrote about a favorite symphony of mine, the Sibelius Fifth, and I went into a little detail about the last movement.  Obviously, I am not the only one on Earth who loves this piece, and it has no doubt been appropriated for other uses.  I knew that I knew a popular song that lifted the big theme, but couldn’t remember it at the time.  It finally came to me!

Sibelius: Symphony No. 5:

First Class: “Beach Baby”:

Five novels and five papers in the next three weeks, and the only thing I can think of is this:

Look at this.  Would you pay that much for a compact disc of anything?  I wouldn’t.  I couldn’t.  Even if it was a CD set of me playing Brahms’ Ballades, I couldn’t imagine paying almost $600.

But I knew something like this would happen when I began watching this auction.  The story is that Kyrstian Zimerman made these Brahms recordings, DG released them, then he had second thoughts and the recording was deleted.  Very few people have copies of this set, and when any reach the used market they fetch scandalous sums, though not always over $500.

A three-panel painting by Francis Bacon (not the philosopher, unfortunately) entitled Tryptich, 1976, has sold at auction for over $86 million.  Although I certainly know what I like and what I don’t, I can’t claim to be an art expert by any means.  I’d love to hear from someone who is an expert who can defend such an astonishing price for what I consider a completely underwhelming painting. 

 Maybe I just need more education.  I recognize that the more you learn the more you can appreciate things that once appeared to make no sense.  And I am apt to defend abstract music that others may call noise.  Towards the end of the semester, as I was leaving a class in the Music Building, there were a hundred identical metronomes set up on a brick wall, all clicking away at different tempi.  It was György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique.  There are no actual instruments, and, by its very nature the music has a huge degree of unpredictability and every “performance” will be different; the metronomes swing back and forth until they stop, at different times depending on how much they were wound.  I wouldn’t compare it to the Missa Solemnis, but for what it is it’s okay. 

Of course, nobody can put a price on a hundred clicking metronomes.  And if they could, it wouldn’t be $86 million.

I’m feeling a bit of relief this afternoon, having just put an oral presentation and a final exam behind me.  I think both went well.

My presentation formed the first part of our major semester project in my History of Consumption class.  I’ll write a substantial paper on the same topic for the second part.  The topic I chose is CD collecting, a subject close to my heart, and wallet.  I tried to explain to the class briefly today how one might become a collector of recordings, and how the style and course of collecting might evolve over time, from collecting for repertoire to collecting for performer, and the intricacies of each.  I used some audio-visual aids, including the clips I made of the Barcarolle from Tchaikovsky’s Seasons I posted some time ago.  People seemed interested in my presentation, and I got more questions than I had time to answer.  Afterwards, one girl even passed me a note that read: “I have 12 recordings of the Fanfare for the Common Man (it makes me cry).”  It was sweet of her to share that with me, so I told her she might want to hear Copland’s Symphony No. 3, the last movement of which is built around the Fanfare.  Also, the Lincoln Portrait might be right up her alley.

The final exam in my History of Architecture class had me a little nervous, but I did a lot of studying for it, so I felt reasonably prepared going into it.  The studying paid off, too, since some of the buildings and architects I had just been reviewing over the last couple days were on the test, and had I not used Flickr as a resource to look at pictures of important buildings, I might not have been able to identify some correct answers.

This weekend I need to read a novel, drive to Orlando and back, Jacksonville and back, watch a rock show, review some source material to use in my paper, etc.  Good times!