- Nov 26, 2015
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Don't know if there is an old thread buried way back, but music critics and musicians themselves can be real catty about artists and their works.
Thought it would be fun to read some of the more droll ones you may be able to recall.
Always liked this one.
Alan Dent on Bela Bartok.
"The opening allegro took me straight back to childhood and gave me in turn the rusty windlass of a well, the interlinking noises of a goods train that is being shunted, then the belly rumbling of a little boy acutely ill after a raid on an orchard, and finally the singular alarmed noises of poultry being worried to death by a scotch terrier. The second movement gave me continuously and throughout its short length the noise of a November wind in telegraph poles on a lonely country road. The third movement began with a dog howling at midnight, proceeded to imitate the regurgitations of the less refined or lower-middle-class type of water closet cistern, modulating thence into the mass snoring of a naval dormitory around the dawn, and concluded inconsequentially with the cello reproducing the screech of an ungreased wheelbarrow. The fourth movement took me straight back to the noises I made myself, on wet days indoors, at the age of six, by stretching and plucking a piece of elastic. And the fifth movement reminded me immediately and persistently and vividly of something I have never thought of since the only time I heard it: the noise of a Zulu village in the Glasgow Exhibition, a hubbub all the more singular, because it had a background of skirling highland bagpipes. Both noises emerged in this final movement of this Fourth Quartet of Béla Bartók."
Thought it would be fun to read some of the more droll ones you may be able to recall.
Always liked this one.
Alan Dent on Bela Bartok.
"The opening allegro took me straight back to childhood and gave me in turn the rusty windlass of a well, the interlinking noises of a goods train that is being shunted, then the belly rumbling of a little boy acutely ill after a raid on an orchard, and finally the singular alarmed noises of poultry being worried to death by a scotch terrier. The second movement gave me continuously and throughout its short length the noise of a November wind in telegraph poles on a lonely country road. The third movement began with a dog howling at midnight, proceeded to imitate the regurgitations of the less refined or lower-middle-class type of water closet cistern, modulating thence into the mass snoring of a naval dormitory around the dawn, and concluded inconsequentially with the cello reproducing the screech of an ungreased wheelbarrow. The fourth movement took me straight back to the noises I made myself, on wet days indoors, at the age of six, by stretching and plucking a piece of elastic. And the fifth movement reminded me immediately and persistently and vividly of something I have never thought of since the only time I heard it: the noise of a Zulu village in the Glasgow Exhibition, a hubbub all the more singular, because it had a background of skirling highland bagpipes. Both noises emerged in this final movement of this Fourth Quartet of Béla Bartók."
