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    The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Music
    The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Music
    The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Music
    Ebook69 pages18 minutes

    The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Music

    By Barry Goldensohn

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    About this ebook

    “They couple words and music as surely as Schubert and Irving Berlin. But Goldensohn’s poems aren’t song lyrics; rather, they are intense reflections on music as experienced, by ear and by mind. The essence of listening is his key topic. For the Bach cello suites, it’s the inviting conundrum of one voice being several. For Schumann’s Dichterliebe it’s the clarity and purity of the piano in contest with the “groping,” “searching,” “laboring,” “huffing” voice. Broader issues matter, too: Don Giovanni’s “comic murderous lust” and its absurd end, he and his “phallus errant cursing through the trap door and stage flames.” The people making the music enrich the experience: “The first violinist, all of him, follows his arm... The cellist grinds his teeth, clenches his face in spasms of control.” Blues and jazz are there with the classics: we hear Bessie Smith, “with the whole world’s sorrow in her voice” and see Thelonius Monk “doing a march time heavy footed non-dance dance.” Eros is often up front: “the girls forget themselves, skirts / above their breasts as they flash their white unsunned asses and the house is all meat, / shrieks and hair.” Mainly, we are led to open our ears wider and to abandon the filters that steer our hearing by custom. Immediacy is Goldensohn’s great gift in this brilliant collection.”
    Lewis Spratlan, composer, Pulitzer Prize for his opera Life is a Dream

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFomite
    Release dateMay 28, 2019
    ISBN9781937677251
    The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Music

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      Book preview

      The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Music - Barry Goldensohn

      The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Music

      The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Music

      Barry Goldensohn

      Illustrated by

      Douglas Kinsey

      Fomite Burlington, VT

      Contents

      On the Poems in The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Musi

      Untitled

      Untitled

      The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Music

      The String Quartet

      Untitled

      Time and the String Quartet Domesticate Eros

      Untitled

      Padre Antonio Vivaldi

      What Is the Condition of Music?

      Untitled

      The Religion of Art: 1 Feb 58

      Last Act: Don Giovanni

      Lulu (after Alban Berg)

      Carmens, The Audition

      Before Beethoven’s Creation of Music as Personal Expression

      Performance

      Lost Yellow Dress

      Thelonius Monk Dancing

      Funeral Beginning with Bach

      Gesualdo in Concert

      Dichterliebe, for Voice and Piano

      Untitled

      Desire

      Untitled

      Late Quartet

      Marching Band

      Untitled

      Lute and Virginal Outdoors

      Untitled

      Hearing Schubert’s Cello Quintet Again

      The Harmonium

      Choral Concert, St. Pancras Old Church

      David and Saul

      Burmese Temple Bell

      The Bells

      Untitled

      Rest

      Acknowledgments

      About the Author

      About the Artist

      Books By The Same Author

      On the Poems in The Listener Aspires to the Condition of Musi

      "They couple words and music as surely as Schubert and Irving Berlin.  But Goldensohn’s poems aren’t song lyrics; rather, they are intense reflections on music as experienced, by ear and by mind.  The essence of listening is his key topic.  For the Bach cello suites, it’s the inviting conundrum of one voice being several.  For Schumann’s Dichterliebe it’s the clarity and purity of the piano in contest with the groping, searching, laboring, huffing

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