Finrod

When the mood comes to me (rarely!) I sit down and set my stall out with with manuscript paper, 4B pencil (much better than 2B), sharpener, eraser, set square (for bar lines) and Roland keyboard. The last time I felt inspired I started work on my own set of variations on the theme 'by Haydn' [it's doubtful that Haydn composed it] that Brahms used, and wrote down quite a number of bars that didn't get erased the next morning (as usually happens). But like William Walton's Belshazzar's Feast when he got to Praise ye the god of gold I've run into a brick wall and don't know whether to go up or down or left or right. I've tried using the computer to aid composition on numerous occasions but have never been successful. It just doesn't work for me.

*Finrod bows* Thank you. My apologies for not making myself clearer. I've learnt that communicating through text alone can go... somewhat awry at times. I was waiting for someone to ask me that question! Yes, I do - but only from time to time. My manuscript pad is full of unfinished four-stave sketches, the latest being based on the 'theme by Haydn' (the St. Antoni Chorale) that Brahms used in his Variations on it. I once (foolishly!) offered to write an overture for an amateur production of Under Milk Wood and ended up 'doing a Rossini' - locking myself in a room a couple of days before curtain up and not emerging until I had the score completed and the synthesizer programmed.

Indubitably Yes. Though we should remember that 'Germany' as we know it today did not then exist. I knew even without thinking that Bach worked at one time for a Calvinist, who proved upon checking to be Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. During that time Bach had no church music to write (the prince had no use for it) and, funnily enough, didn't write much; confining himself mostly to the Orchestral Suites, the Partitas and Suites for solo violin, and the Cello Suites. At the time of the Reformation, some of the German princes Reformed and some didn't. In Osnabrück they apparently had an arrangement where prince-bishops were for many years alternately Protestant and Roman Catholic. I forbear to comment on this. In Thuringia, the state where Bach was born, there was at the time a minority of Roman Catholics. Centred around Erfurt, according to my research. There was also a [dwindling, apparently] small number of Anabaptists, a sect about which I know next to nothing. No doubt there were others whom my necessarily limited research has not tracked down. I do not contend the first part of your statement at all. His output was prodigious, especially cosidering how complex some of his polyphony is (My favourite fugue of his, if forced to choose, would be BWV 542 in G minor. Second would be the last thing he wrote - the final quadruple(!) fugue of Die Kunst der Fuge - which famously even thematically includes his surname in German musical notation: B-A-C-H) . But for much of his working lifetime writing church music was part of his job, and I respectfully submit that it would be equally difficult to argue that he could have made a living without doing so. I look at it the other way round - Bach had a huge influence on music in general, in the long term - and also on church music as well. As a final point, as well as once being admonished for admitting a female(!) into his organ loft, Bach was also once criticised by church authorities for quietly going to the tavern during the (hour-long!) Sunday sermons. I must say that I've known similar organists.

Then why refer to it as 'the' Church (or church)? I mean 'He didn't write any.' As I attempted to point out, a 'song' (translated by the words 'Lied' and 'Gesang' in German) is not a motet, a cantata, nor any of the other categories I mentioned. My apologies for not making myself clear enough.

Which Church/church do you have in mind, may I ask? I don't think that statement has any meaning. Which 'songs' do you have in mind, may I ask? J.S. Bach wrote cantatas, motets, masses, a Magnificat, Passions, oratorios, chorales, organ works, keyboard works, orchestral music, instrumental music and Die Kunst der Fuge. Songs (whether Lieder or Gesänge, if you speak German) don't feature in his output.

How? I don't comprehend any conflict at all. You don't have to be religious to compose. Why should it be intrinsically interesting?

No, I think you're quite right. Though I remember the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was exceptionally scathing about Beethoven's vision of eternity, saying that it even included "a kiss from the barmaid."

Partially true. But Mozart himself failed to make a living out of freelance writing. I know this because when he was my age, he'd been dead for some years "No fool ever wrote, except for money." (Dr. Samuel Johnson) More likely impossible - though I myself have never been able to get under the skin of anything that doesn't involve equal temperament. Indian music, for example. God knows I've tried.

Well... I think it would be more correct to say that there were rumours of an Eighth Symphony for donkey's years, but nothing surfaced from Sibelius for the last forty years of his life; if I remember correctly, he published Tapiola in about 1928 and then fell silent until his death in 1957. I would certainly agree with you that especially in his programmatic works, his evocation of dramatic episodes (mostly from the Finnish epic, the Kalevala) can be breathtaking. I would give as examples The Return of Lemminkainen, where he derives every motif from the first three basson notes(!), and The Swan of Tuonela, where his string writing is little short of miraculous. Someone once commented that his writing wasn't orchestrated; it grew on the orchestra. In my opinion his symphonies are rather less Norse, as you put it. The decidedly odd no. 4 is probably my favourite amongst them. A curiosity about Sibelius which I've just remembered is that some of the works he published - piano works, mostly (again if I remember correctly) - are quite trivial and show not a trace of his genius. I've played one or two of them in years past and they made no impression on me whatsoever.

Once announced by an ex-colleague of mine to a school audience as 'Bolero's Ravel.' Me: Mahler's Symphony No. 6. It keeps playing itself in my head. Today it's the massive, half-hour long 4th (and last) movement that won't go away.

Favourite: Beim Schlafengehen, by Richard Srauss. Not the greatest of titles (German for Going to Sleep); but a heart-rendingly beautiful five-minute setting for soprano voice and orchestra of a poem by Hermann Hesse. It's the third of the group called the Vier Letzte Lieder, or Four Last Songs, written by Richard Strauss (not to be confused with the waltzing Johann Strauss II and that crowd from Vienna, who are no relation) when he was in his eighties. I’ve known them all, and other works by Strauss, for years, and I can’t think of anything even remotely as good in the song department. Beats anything else into a cocked hat. Except, maybe, Im Abendrot (In the Twilight), the last of the four… but I think this one wins by a short head. Just. Hated: I've thought for a few minutes but can't think of one that I hate; but that's probably because I avoid listening to 'popular' music.

If I might proffer an opinion, I would say that while what you say in your first post is partially true, in that all composers are influenced by the music they hear and play in their youth (Gustav Mahler springs to mind as a good example), and this effect was much more marked before the twentieth century - i.e. before the recording process was developed - the mark of a 'good' composer lies in the way they absorb outside influences, process them, and then compose their own music in a way that is notably individual. Take Gustav Holst, for example: an English composer (despite his name - it started off as von Holst, but he decided to drop the 'von' in the First World War) who in his youth fell under the spell of Richard Wagner's music, as did so many others. As a result, he wrote imitation Wagner, of which his early opera Sita is an example. But in his mature music, the impression is that only Holst could have written it. The Planets is the obvious example but his chamber opera Sāvitri shows it better, in my opinion. An anecdote I heard many years ago relates how someone, after hearing Sibelius's Symphony no 6, asked the composer if he'd been studying Palestrina's music while composing it. The response was apparently not pretty to hear, but he eventually conceded that he had. Elgar was another who didn't appreciate being told that his music sounded like anybody else's; I think it was the lady who appears as 'Dorabella' in his Variations on an Original Theme (Enigma) who was reported as getting her head bitten off on more than one occasion (you'd think she'd have learnt from the first time!).

Origami. Black belt. And thank you for your welcome.

Thank you, orbsycli. I don't think I've ever communicated with a resident arachnid before. With regard to your 'Rome falls nine times an hour,' you may find pleasure in the anagram: Rome wasn't built in a day - -but Italians may wonder!

Greetings from sunny Lancashire. I've registered here after carefully reading Hilton Ratcliffe's 'Newtonian Mechanics' thread. And boy, did that take some time. Scientist, educator, carer, paperfolder. That's enough of a description for now. I've used the name Finrod because it basically stops me getting confused. My real name is Ian, should anyone have occasion to use it.