Wednesday, October 3, 2007

music and beyond

For everybody who likes crazy homepages... here is one I really enjoy:

www.lichtensteiger.de

An enormous collection of quotations and thoughts about old music, new music and New Music!

"I view the period we're in as 'post-style'. I think there are periods in the history of art when this kind of post-stylistic point of view is the thing. I think one could even look at the work of Mahler from a hundred years ago and say Mahler does not represent any one particular style; he's really kind of a magpie, looking back over the entire 19th century European art music and you can find Wagner and Strauss, but you can also find Verdi and Bach, Austrian village band music and sentimental music. The same goes for Charles Ives. It's interesting that we're now at a fin de siecle again, the end of the 20th century, and people my age and younger seem to be embracing all sorts of styles, with a lot of influence from outside the Western canon. We're feasting on this enormous buffet." — John Adams in conversation with Alan Olshan

Lichtensteiger is a lateral thinker - composer, musician, writer, photographer and philospher in one person, who posts his thoughts on a homepage as dense as a jungle. It's not easy to navigate, so there is a certain amount of luck involved where you'll end up. I know this page for a long time now and still find new things everytime I look at it. The language switches occasionally between English, German and French, but I'm sure some of you will like it!

2 comments:

Hugh_Boyle said...

Hi, do you have a source for this quote from adams?

Hugh_Boyle said...
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