Some music

I just read this in an enclosure somebody sent me:

"One of the most profound musical compositions of all time is the Quartet for the End of Time written by French composer Olivier Messiaen in 1940. Messiaen was 31 years old when France entered the war against Nazi Germany. He was captured by the Germans in June of 1940, sent across Germany in a cattle car and imprisoned in a concentration camp.

"He was fortunate to find a sympathetic prison guard who gave him paper and a place to compose. There were three other musicians in the camp, a cellist, a violinist, and a clarinetist, and Messiaen wrote his quartet with these specific players in mind. It was performed in January 1941 for four thousand prisoners and guards in the prison camp. Today it is one of the most famous masterworks in the repertoire."

Here is a performance of that piece.

I read recently that something like nine out of ten new Canadian compositions are performed once and then never again. Which means, perhaps, that in spite of our material prosperity we are less creative than at least one Nazi concentration camp. Who knows what we look like from the viewpoint of the spirit?

"Some of you may know Samuel Barber’s heartwrenchingly beautiful piece Adagio for Strings. If you don’t know it by that name, then some of you may know it as the background music which accompanied the Oliver Stone movie Platoon, a film about the Vietnam War. If you know that piece of music either way, you know it has the ability to crack your heart open like a walnut; it can make you cry over sadness you didn’t know you had. Music can slip beneath our conscious reality to get at what’s really going on inside us the way a good therapist does."

For the rest of this defense of music, go to:

http://www.symphonymusicians.com/WelcomeAddressbyKarlPaulnack/tabid/87/Default.aspx