Word: tk
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...TK: One reason is that they're great pieces. But you're right to think that other pieces could fit. There's no Mozart or Bach here. First, you have to pick a piece that you know enough about to make a plausible reconstruction of the first performance. For a Bach cantata, you may not know enough about how it worked or when it first was performed. These five pieces also span a broad history of music. We go from the very late Renaissance to 20th-century music. For a person who only studies music in a limited manner, this...
...TK: These pieces are icons, they're placed on a pedestal and worshiped like gods in most books. In this book, we stop studying once the first performance is over. There's a whole lot of scholarship on the later influence of these pieces, but all of those things are built up after the piece. I'm interested in what these pieces were like when they had no history at all, when they played the first note and you didn't know what the second note sounded like...
...TK: No. The book is not intended to be a textbook. It's intended to be for people who are interested in music. The pieces are pieces that people interested in classical music probably know something about. We are using it as a textbook, but it's not written to be a textbook, and I hope it doesn't look and feel like a textbook...
...TK: I don't think that any of these pieces got their best performance at their premiere. And they've now been performed in many different ways. There are jazz versions of Handel's Messiah, there are Christian Rock versions also. Things become a masterpiece by subsequent people acknowledging them as such. Other things are masterpieces because you can just look or listen and say, "This is a masterpiece." The Rite of Spring was hated at its premiere. But it was still a masterpiece then, in absolute terms...
...TK: I study classical music because I love it, but we all know that it occupies an increasingly smaller part of the everyday attention span. I hope that's a temporary thing. I hope it comes back, like natural fibers and vegetarian diets. I'm going to wait it out. I am interested in making people involved in actively engaging music, supporting the presence of music and musicians in their world. Ultimately, I want people to realize how lucky they are to be alive on a planet that has such wonderful music past, present and future...