(This is part of an ongoing series about Hector Berlioz. Catch up on all the Fantastique details here, here, and here!)
Hey folks! Sorry I've been so silent recently, it's been hella busy, and pretty stressful these past two weeks especially. I'll go into more detail next week, which is reading break. But for now...
INTERNATIONAL HECTOR BERLIOZ AWARENESS DAY IS UPON US!
Ah yes, today is the day we think about that special someone we all know. That someone for which we dearly yearn, but know we can never have. The someone who makes us feel happy in our melancholy, but is simply an idea, a concept of perfection. The someone whose face we see in a crowded ball. The someone whose laugh we hear in an empty, peaceful field. The someone who is the last thought we have before our hallucinated execution. And the someone who mocks us from the middle of a demonic orgy in the same hallucination, while an E-flat clarinetist plays the only solo that could ever hope to beat the first movement of Sacre du Printemps for "most obnoxious E-flat clarinet line ever." And in honour of this noble day, I present you... today's top twenty Hector Berlioz facts!
Hector Berlioz performed Steve Reich's Piano Phase on an elastic band wrapped around a tissue box. Both parts.
Hector Berlioz is the answer to Charles Ives' question.
Antonio Vivaldi has the second-largest output of any A-list composer because every sound Hector Berlioz ever made is considered part of his magnum opus.
Eric Whitacre refuses to refer to his compositional style as anything but "aspiring Berliozian."
Hector Berlioz once had a period where he was afraid his composition wasn't up to par, so he went by the pen name "Gustav Mahler."
Tchaikovsky is to melody what Hector Berlioz is to melody.
The Second Viennese School only existed because Arnold Schoenberg was fed up over how Hector Berlioz was the maximum attainable level of tonality.
Historical records show that the victor of every war in history is the side which had more performances of Symphonie Fantastique during the duration of the bout.
Hector Berlioz is your father. Actually.
Each string on Hector Berlioz's guitar is made of a strand of pure sound willed into solid form.
The ring in Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen was made out of a lock of Hector Berlioz's hair that happened to fall into the Rhine and solidify.
Camille Pleyel was cut from the final scene of Inferno because Dante was afraid of angering Hector Berlioz with the sight of the name.
Playing Un Bal while courting your significant other has a 200% success rate, in that both the target person and the second-on-the-list will instantly become infatuated with the performer.
Hector Berlioz rarely plays the flute anymore, due to the strain it puts on weather patterns to move an entire atmosphere's worth of air.
Chopin, Liszt, Sibelius, the Mighty Five, and other nationalist composers wrote in their country's style because it meant they wouldn't be compared to (and fail to match) Hector Berlioz.
Frederick Chopin once re-gifted a copy of Treatise on Instrumentation. That's really all I need to say.
The average person is 400% more likely to leave their significant other for someone named "Harriet Smithson" than someone with any other name.
If you play Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 backwards, it sounds like someone saying "Hector Berlioz ist der Übermensch" ad nauseum.
The Ronde du Sabbat has topped every positively-inclined top 10 list ever written, regardless of the requirements of being on the list.
And finally...
Felix Baumgartner's famous space dive failed to break the record distance of the last time Hector Berlioz fell in love.
Happy International Hector Berlioz Awareness Day, everyone!
Off to the start of a brand new arbitrary division of the planet's orbit with reference the tilt in its axis and direction relative to the sun! Or year. I guess that's a little bit easier to say. And this year, I'm going to try and make things AWESOME. Why, as some of my friends have openly asked the everybody-but-really-nobody that is Facebook, do we need such an arbitrary date to begin something, and would we have had the motivation to otherwise? Well, I can't answer for everybody, but I'm a kind of odd person in that, if I need motivation, I can just kind of... MAKE motivation happen for myself. I don't like to, but when I do, it really gets the ball rolling.
Anyways, what's the point of this? Do my posts ever REALLY have a point? Probably not, but that's besides the non-point. Basically, I just want to get my life resolutions (not New Year's resolutions, because it's not just this year that's making me do it... it's LIFE) down on the cold, hard, unforgiving internet, so that I can say I wrote it, and I have something to follow. Plus, paper is destructible, but once something is on the internet, it's there for life (YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED).
THE BIG RESOLUTION - stop being so damn depressing, both on this blog and in real life! My last several posts were about me whining that I'm not good enough to play this piece, or that this audition is really hard, or that I end up spending a lot more time alone than I would like to. In person, I'll complain about things like life being expensive, or deadlines for auditions being early, or wanting more sleep, or not wanting to write papers because of the year I took off between degrees. Well... stop it! I'm not going to stop complaining, I mean, I'm just going to stop letting it bum me out.
"But dude," you say, "that's pretty much impossible, unless you're a robot and can re-wire your brain!" "Well, dear reader," I respond, "I'm not a robot, but you're thinking about this the wrong way." I can't stop depressing things from happening. And I can't stop myself from feeling annoyed or bad about things. And I KNOW I'm not going to stop complaining. But what I can do, is force myself to see the good in things, to not let details get me down, to see deadlines as a challenge rather than as a sentence. Piece really hard? Find individual challenges that are parallel to etudes, Arbans drills, Irons drills, Clarke studies, and isolate them like that. Challenging audition? No worries, everyone else probably thinks the same thing. You'll sound better pretending to be a showoff than feeling insignificant. Spending the night alone? Write a story, draw a picture, listen to a new symphony, learn some basic programming. Life's expensive? Go out to music events, introduce yourself to other players, see if you can get set up with a gig or two. Go out to schools, see if you can get some students set up. Audition deadlines coming up? Recording's super easy, I have a lot of rep on the backburner. And don't forget about Neruda, that thing has saved my life more than once! Don't want to write papers? Deal with it. B/
There's a great line in a fantastic recent article on Cracked, where a hypothetical reader asks the author how he can get girls to like him. The author's response? "... it's always 'How can I get a job?' and not 'How can I become the type
of person employers want?' It's 'How can I get pretty girls to like me?'
instead of 'How can I become the type of person that pretty girls
like?'"
This is great in its own right, but to me, it made me realize something on a much simpler level. It made me realize that, if I'm depressed with how things are going, I really shouldn't be asking "how can I stop being depressed with my current life state?" The real question is "How can I change my life to one that I like?" And this, folks, is what I'm working on now. No more being sad that music just keeps getting more and more challenging, more finding creative and efficient ways to improve and becoming a better player because of it. No more "gotta go play this concert, groan" and more "Man, I'm actually learning to PLAY MUSIC FOR A LIVING. How is that not awesome?!" SMALL RESOLUTION #1 - I'm going to learn to cook. I'm not a BAD cook, per se, I'm just an incredibly boring one. I don't know a lot of meals offhand, is my main problem, though I've never had a disaster following a recipe. So, the obvious fix to this is... amass a whole lot of recipes! If I know that I have the POTENTIAL to make awesome food, just not the KNOWLEDGE, I'm going to (watch what I do here) find a creative and efficient way (see what I did there?) to fix that, which is to fill in the missing gap. Which is the knowledge. In case you missed that part. In a more concrete way of putting things, I'm going to, at least once every two weeks (but more is totally okay!), cook something I've never made before. Or, cook in a style I never have before. A new meal, minimum twice per month. Seems reasonable to me, and I usually have the time on weekends that I can spend a little longer than throwing rice in a pot or pizza in the oven or veggies in a frying pan or whatever.
SMALL RESOLUTION #2 - I'm going to learn to write music. Not well, mind you. I'm going to learn to be comfortable composing. What kind of music, you ask? Well... I'm not sure yet. I might write a small piano piece. I might write for brass quintet. I might write for rock band. It might be jazzy. It might sound like Luciano Berio. It might sound like a bad attempt at Mahler. It might sound like Elton John. It might sound like Jun Senoue. It might sound like a bad attempt at Koji Kondo. The important thing is, I won't know until I give it a shot. The point of this is to learn what I like to write, and what I don't like to write. To learn how to just let ideas come to me, and to learn how to take little ideas and make big things out of them. Again, to be more concrete, I'll give myself a goal: one new, finished piece, no matter how small, per month. And it can be anything. Hell, it could be this and it'd count, since that is, in fact, one finished piece of music that was written by someone. Except it can't ACTUALLY be that because it has to be new. But you know.
So that's my goals, and that's what's going to happen. I'm also going to try and keep this blog fairly well updated, and especially with content! Some things to look forward to in the near future, in likely the wrong order:
*New MAHL WARS, moving on to Episode Three
*Two new Video Game Musicology columns planned: an analysis of the use of leitmotif in Kid Icarus: Uprising, and a compositional critique of the music in EarthBound (which is REALLY DAMN GOOD, if you didn't know)
*Launching a new section called Hidden Musicological Masters, which satirically deconstructs works by artists "Classical" musicians generally frown upon (Ke$ha, Bieber, etc), and finding little bits of "genius" in a begging-the-question fashion, starting likely with Toxic by Brittney Spears; requests welcome
*Continuing that series on composers I said I'd start but didn't
*Of course, the International Hector Berlioz Appreciation Day special in February!
*General thoughts on music topics as they occur to me, and updates on life in general
Hope you guys occasionally read something here that piques your interest, and though I mostly just do this blog for my own sake, as a means of collecting thoughts, ranting about things I don't think anyone would want to sit through me talking about in person, and the like. This website really is for my own benefit, and if I end up getting a hit count of zero after a new post goes up some day, I doubt I'll shut it down, since I actually DO get super stoked about some of the things that go up here, and need an outlet. But, fans, don't think I'm ignoring you, because it's those moments people come up to me and say "So I read your blog post about..." that really just make me super-high-on-life for the rest of the day. So I really do appreciate those of you who take the time out of your days to sit through this nonsense I throw at you. See y'all next time!
(I hope no one missed the fact that this was linked up there. This movement is, in my opinion, the most beautiful piece of music ever written. But that's just my opinion.)
