Listen

Due to my blogging hiatus of roughly a year from since last fall I thought I might post some of what I've been up to since my arrival in Germany. This post addresses what I've been up to quite narrowly: what I've listened to in the last year.

Beethoven's string quartets have taken up more of my listening time than anything else. I had avoided chamber music in my listening for so long until my frustration with my own ignorance of the repertoire caught up with me last year and I purchased the Takacs Quartet's recordings of the early and late quartets. I've found that while his early quartets define a comprehensible formal standard for Viennese classicism, the ingenuity of his voicing, the violence of his gestures and silences in even the earliest chamber works allows the listener enough surprise as to be vaguely unsettling without destroying the formal framework. The quartets are truly an adventure of the mind. I feel that mine isn't yet nimble enough to grasp many of the later works, but there is more than enough material for a lifetime of listening, study and thought here.

After Beethoven comes Josquin, whom I rediscovered about a year and a half ago. The Missa pange lingua, Missa l'homme armé super voces musicales and the Missa la sol fa re mi recorded by the Tallis Scholars have been a great comfort to me as has

Johann Sebastian Bach's St. Matthew Passion. The music never wears on me and never ceases to amaze me for its inventiveness and infinite variety.

There was a period this year of about a month when a ridiculous desire drove me to listen to the ballet from Sanson et Delila over and over. This small piece is as near perfection as music can be. Saint-Saëns never seemed an ambitious composer to me, but this bagatelle does everything such a piece should and exceeds expectations.

Lastly I would like to mention an addiction I've developed that surprised me. Ever since Lady Gaga became ubiquitous around 2008, the strains of "Just Dance" or "Poker Face" were a constant annoyance, but it wasn't until this February when I first noticed "Bad Romance" that I stopped to listen. I have learned to appreciate the image she has constructed of herself and the intersection of glamour, self-expression and self-concealment and surprisingly good musicality. There was a time a few months ago when I would have said that Lady Gaga was the soundtrack of my time in Afghanistan.