Search Results
6/11/2025, 9:43:56 PM
Just came across this great substack article written by Zizek regarding his favorite music. Recommended for fans of classical music and Zizek.
https://slavoj.substack.com/p/my-favourite-classics
https://slavoj.substack.com/p/my-favourite-classics
6/11/2025, 9:43:08 PM
great substack article by Slavoj Zizek about his favorite music
https://slavoj.substack.com/p/my-favourite-classics
>Let me begin with the standard stupid question: if I were allowed to take only one piece of music to an island, what would it be? For decades, my answer has been the same: Arnold Schoenberg's Gurrelieder. What makes Gurrelieder really unique is the mirroring between its musical line and the history of music itself: the shift from the late-romantic Wagnerian heavy pathos to atonal Sprechgesang is rendered in the very progress of the piece.
>Otherwise, my tastes are classical, and definitely ‘eurocentric,’ with a preference for chamber music... seriously? How to bring this together with my total dedication to Gurrelieder which demands around six-hundred musicians for a proper performance? Schoenberg’s preferences for chamber music are well-known: in a nice swipe at American vulgarity, he said that everything in music can be told with a maximum of five or six instruments – we only need orchestras so that Americans get it… How, then, to account for Gurrelieder, which demands soloists, a full orchestra and three choruses? In the notes to his recording, Simon Rattle proposed a wonderful formula: Gurrelieder is a chamber-music piece for orchestra and chorus – this, effectively, is how one should approach it.
>So here we go with Bach: while I cannot follow any of his Passions without yawning, I find his solo violin and cello sonatas irresistible. Take the second movement (fugue) of Bach's three sonatas for solo violin, in which the entire polyphonic structure is condensed in one instrumental line, so that, although we "effectively" hear only one violin line, in our imagination we automatically supplement it with other unheard implicit melodic lines, and seem to hear the multitude of melodic lines in their interaction...
is the opening and continues from there
https://slavoj.substack.com/p/my-favourite-classics
>Let me begin with the standard stupid question: if I were allowed to take only one piece of music to an island, what would it be? For decades, my answer has been the same: Arnold Schoenberg's Gurrelieder. What makes Gurrelieder really unique is the mirroring between its musical line and the history of music itself: the shift from the late-romantic Wagnerian heavy pathos to atonal Sprechgesang is rendered in the very progress of the piece.
>Otherwise, my tastes are classical, and definitely ‘eurocentric,’ with a preference for chamber music... seriously? How to bring this together with my total dedication to Gurrelieder which demands around six-hundred musicians for a proper performance? Schoenberg’s preferences for chamber music are well-known: in a nice swipe at American vulgarity, he said that everything in music can be told with a maximum of five or six instruments – we only need orchestras so that Americans get it… How, then, to account for Gurrelieder, which demands soloists, a full orchestra and three choruses? In the notes to his recording, Simon Rattle proposed a wonderful formula: Gurrelieder is a chamber-music piece for orchestra and chorus – this, effectively, is how one should approach it.
>So here we go with Bach: while I cannot follow any of his Passions without yawning, I find his solo violin and cello sonatas irresistible. Take the second movement (fugue) of Bach's three sonatas for solo violin, in which the entire polyphonic structure is condensed in one instrumental line, so that, although we "effectively" hear only one violin line, in our imagination we automatically supplement it with other unheard implicit melodic lines, and seem to hear the multitude of melodic lines in their interaction...
is the opening and continues from there
Page 1