Really Old Music

[Dashe]

I suppose contemporary pop culture doesn't really cover artists from the eighteenth century, does it?



When I was in grade school music, the teacher tried to get us into listening to classical music with things like The Nutcracker, which was ridiculously long and bored me every time we had to watch it. If she'd forced us to watch this video of Bach's Kaffekantate, I'd have probably jumped on the bandwagon earlier. There is a quote often attributed to Bach "Without my morning coffee, I'm just like a dried-up piece of roast goat" that is really just a line in this thing translated to English, and I read somewhere that he collaborated with a poet to make this, so I'm not sure those are Bach's words precisely, but the fact that this thing even exists pretty much cements him in history as a coffee addict.

For the uninitiated, the plot involves a man named Schlendrian who is really annoyed that his daughter Liesgen is addicted to coffee and takes away all of her privileges to try and get her to give it up. She relents when he offers to have her engaged to be married immediately if she quits, then sneaks off and has it arranged behind his father's back so her marriage contract says that she's allowed to have coffee whenever she wants.

All opera-like performances should really have plots more like this one.

[Aiyumi]

Seeing mentions of the Nutcracker and coffee together instantly reminded me of ToC! XD

Anyway, I had never imagined that something like this cantata existed! ... Though I'm not a fan of operas, mainly because I can't understand what they're saying. In fact, I mostly prefer instrumental music over "vocal" music, even in the case of the contemporary ones. That's probably why I like game soundtracks so much (most of them are instrumental).

I'm not from a musical family or anything, I'm just a mere listener. My first contact with "old orchestral music" was when I was a kid, when I watched cartoons where some of those songs were featured. I also had a collection of magazines which came with CDs featuring music by those famous composers. I listened to those CDs a lot. I liked the songs, but didn't even know their titles! (but I always skipped the operas )

My knowledge about the subject is very limited. At the (public) schools I studied, nothing about music was taught at all. Artistic education only focused on painters and writers. The piano lessons I took were very informal and weren't focused on this kind of music (my teacher is a jazz pianist). The very little I know about this kind of music comes from what I read after becoming obsessed with violins a few years ago (I don't even remember what made me begin to like violins so much! It must have been some soundtrack I ran into along the way...). Now I'm set on listening to everything all over again (I still have the CDs) and finding out the titles to the songs I liked. I might compile a list of my favorites and post it here some day when I'm not feeling lazy.

[Dashe]

I'm not from a musical family either. Mr. Ninja and I just both ended up musical by random happenstance, and in my case, a very fabulous gay choir troll who liked winning, getting trophies, threatening bodily harm unto his students when they messed up, and pulling out all the cool music our grade school music teacher wouldn't touch. Needless to say that music program was really fantastic. He was influential enough that when he moved across the country, I found out he came back to see the school's musicals and got in specifically to show him how much I'd improved at shouting empty, hyperbolic threats at people. I can also operate a trombone in the event of a dire trombone emergency.

I'm extremely picky when it comes to vocal music because after that rigorous music boot camp with the gay choir troll, it became pretty hard to handle hearing songs that I know I can sing better. But since opera singers are actually trained, I listen to it. Liking languages a lot helps, too. I've been both graded for singing in a crap ton of languages I will probably never actually learn, and had a friend when I was a little kid who was really into them, especially German. Sometimes I wonder if that rubbed off a bit.

Here's some Reinecke. I think this one's my favorite non-vocal piece so far, but I've barely scratched the surface of the way-way-oldies so there are probably a lot of pieces I don't know about, too. Non-vocal music is hard to recognize because I can't just fall back on "It's the one that goes 'da da da da da...'" when I'm trying to identify it online. I don't even know any weird trivia about Reinecke, just that he's the stereotypical go-to composer for flute players looking to show off, but I could easily listen to the first movement of #283 for hours on a loop for a good long while.

[Lumigado]

Hmm, coffee? Reminds me of someone...

[Loken]

Wow I can't believe this thread doesn't have more responses. This is right down my alley.

I'll start you out with some Django Reinhardt.



Some of you may recall this track from a brief appearance in the game Bioshock. Django's music is so great that it embarrasses me slightly to admit that a game is where I first heard it. Of course that's a great thing about video games, sometimes they broaden horizons. Anyway this is an instrumental version of 'Beyond the Sea' played by Django Reinhardt on guitar and his best friend Stephane Grapelli on violin. Their group, the ridiculously long-titled 'The Quintet of the Hot Club of France', was probably the first all string jazz bands and it's a sound that is really unique and beautiful. Django was a gypsy and was so trained in the Romani guitar style, but when his tent caught fire he badly burnt two of his fingers on his left hand while him and his wife evacuated. It took him two years but he recuperated and became even better than he was, and in the process, he invented the modern two digit guitar fingering that is now ubiquitous. The Hot Club disbanded during WWII and Django lived in a dangerous situation in Nazi-occupied France, since not only was Jazz considered delinquent, but his gypsy heritage made him a target. Luckily France was somewhat of a Nazi playground where rules against Jazz were ignored as well as Django's background. 

     This was recorded after the war when the band reunited. Unfortunately Django died of a brain hemorrhage in the early 1950's, and he was still in his 40's. His also superbly talented friend Stephane did now die until 1993, outliving his friend by about 50 years. Stephane released tribute albums to his friend every few years along with his own work until his death.

Django is considered in many circles as the greatest guitarist who ever lived.

[Fatman X. Jones]

Ooh, we're talking Django Reinhardt in here? He's one of my favorite guitarists, namely because he's such an inspiration to one of my favorite classic rock bands, The Allman Brothers Band. His style of playing guitar is what inspired guitarist Dickey Betts to compose the song "Jessica", which many of you may know is the theme to Top Gear on BBC.

As for classical music, I'm pedestrian and favor more modern artists than the classics like Beethoven or Mozart, though I do have a soft spot in my heart for Mozart's specific variation of the Requiem.