Thursday, November 08, 2007

Pan Cogito's Dreams For Enlightenment Knee-Capped By WETA/WGMS Listener Chosen Top 90 Thanksgiving And Alex Ross/Ben Ratcliff Chat On Uses Of Music

WETA/WGMS-FM Classical Countdown

"Help us select the top 90 pieces for our Thanksgiving countdown

This Thanksgiving, Classical WETA gives thanks for the greatest music in the world [sic] with our first annual Classical Countdown. From Thursday, November 8 through Wednesday, November 14, you can vote for your favorite classical music pieces. We'll tally the votes and play the top 90 pieces in reverse order during Thanksgiving week.

Here's how it works: The Classical WETA staff has constructed a list of over 200 of the top pieces we play on 90.9FM. Listeners can select up to three of these pieces and/or write in other pieces, which were not on the list. Each person can vote only once.

Beginning on Monday, November 19, we'll start the countdown with one or two pieces per hour and then present the remaining pieces all day long on Thanksgiving Day, November 22, culminating with the #1 selection at 8pm."

Vote now

[If Beethoven Symphony #9 wins, will they suppress the final "Ode to Joy" choral/vocal movement?]

[hmmm ... greatest music in the world, my foot. Addinsell, but no longer any Josquin nor Monteverdi. And don't even bother checking for Bach's Saint Matthew Passion (as featured on Minnesota Public Radio), or for any vocal music.]

[Pan Cogito wonders whether WETA/WGMS-FM receives funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a Great Nation deserves Great Art.]

*

On to Alex Ross and Ben Ratcliff chatting at Slate about inter-cultural dating between classical and pop and jazz music:

"Dear Ben,

People tend to listen to various kinds of music over the course of the day: rock at the gym, jazz on the drive home, maybe a little Vivaldi while waiting at the dentist's office for the root canal. There's a long tradition of mixed-genre listening in American culture: As Joseph Horowitz notes in his book Classical Music in America, opera houses in the 19th century would offer Don Giovanni together with "Ethiopian songs, choruses, solos, duets, jigs, fancy dances, etc." Yet conversations about music always seem to take place within a particular genre. Our concept in this Slate Dialogue is to converse for a day or two across the walls of specialized taste. I write mostly about classical music for The New Yorker, though I've touched on pop. You write about various kinds of music for the New York Times, with an emphasis on jazz. ...

Alex"

*












Henryk Siemiradzki. Leading Light of Christianity. Nero’s Torches. 1876. Oil on canvas. 305 x 704 cm. National Museum, Krakow, Poland, European Union.

[Click on image for enlargement.]

[Pan Cogito and his colleagues are being prepared to be burnt by Nero in the upper right-hand corner of the painting.]

Photo credit: (c) Olga's Gallery -- On-line Art Museum www.abcgallery.com. 2007. All rights reserved. With thanks.

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