Oh come on it can work well on piano. You just need imagination.. The transcription is very very well written.

How can any classical pianist not like the Ravel concerto? This
is classical piano at its finest...

P.S. Listen to the Liszt b minor pleeeeeeease!!!!!!!!Although I think I remember you said you knew it..

I'm still catching up on all the listening.

Babama, I did indeed like the Scriabin you suggested.

I think Ravel, for the most part, is just not for me. Debussy? - some are okay but I'm not going to run out and buy the music.


No, I've never heard it before and yes, it is definitely a WOW! Thank you all for opening my ears!

I have trouble imagining that you haven't heard that one before. As for Ravel, to really gain an appreciation for him, I think you have to start with his orchestral works. Who doesn't like his Bolero, for instance?

Bolero? It's rather simplistic. Pretty but tedious and certainly not a "10".

Most of the posters on this thread who dislike some composer seem to be so unfamiliar with the works of those composer(s) that saying they don't like them seems awfully premature.
[...]

It's also important to listen to their non piano works. For example the Debussy violin sonata, what a great piece.

It is often somewhat of a proverbial "vicious circle." I don't like Debravprovsky's music, therefore I'm not interested in listening to his music. As a result, I don't listen to his music, so the only few of his works I know I've heard "by accident'. Those few that I know don't interest me, so I don't listen to more.
Regards,

Have you listened to Liszt’s transcription of Chopin’s “The Maiden’s Wish”? It’s really quite lovely – here’s a YouTube link if you’re interested.

My, what a long thread.

This posting will make it longer too, oh well ...

But reading this thread was worth it. Among other things, I discovered someone else with a blog that I will read and maybe (if I like it) post a link to it from mine.

This topic, like whether one likes green eggs and ham, or dark chocolate, is roughly about taste, one of the things that is not arguable in polite French conversation, the other being color.

I'm coming at it from another angle; that of the cultural influence of one or more art forms on music.

So let's also apply some set theory to all of this. The largest set shall be ALL keyboard music from all periods. Then I'll describe all the music written before JS Bach's lifetime (1685-1750) and call that "Antique" for use of another word. Then I'll describe all the music written by JS Bach, his sons and contemporaries and everyone since as "Modern" for use of yet another word.

I'll make some statements about these two sets of keyboard music.
1) Antique music sounds best on "antique" instruments.
2) Some modern music can be reproduced on "antique" instruments, but mostly works best on "modern" instruments.
3) Antique instruments use anything other than a forte-piano mechanism (after Cristofori) to instigate the vibration of a string or strings.
4) Modern instruments include all the forte-piano (after Cristofori) instruments and anything using electricity to generate sound.

Two more sets:
1. Music that's only about music
2. Music that's about something else in addition to music

This second set, whether we like it or not, must be essentially "romantic" since it is based on "roman" the French word for novel and hence of some story whether real or metaphorical, often poetic (yet another art form distinct from prose fiction) and often employing themes from mythology. Note that anything "romantic" is about something besides music and that complicates things tremendously. Also note that "romantic" and "romance" inevitably imply fiction; applying to some story which may not have to adhere to the typical journalistic rendition of strict factual sequences. We are here in the arena of fantasy. I'm going to be bringing this topic up in many ways over the next few months until I can arrive at a convincing model for just how something that makes use of fantasy (abstract sometimes to the point of a dream) can become so convincingly a part of the every day lives of millions of people, who whether they realize it or not, are being affected by ideas and art forms that have little or nothing to do with the everyday purposes of most of their lives. Indeed the "romantic" in our lives is asked to carry an awful lot of baggage; expectations, presumptions, prejudices that are as has been said here, often formed on first impressions and then usually not challenged thereafter.

We are all in the same boat when it comes to achieving the best from others especially those who might offer us, however kindly they are presented, challenges to our presumptions. After a while, people reason that we are "grown up" and therefore shall take no further advice from anyone. Put another way, if one emerges from teenage years with a host of bad attitudes and troubled outlooks, one may realize by the time one reaches forty or fifty that nobody bothered to offer any advice to change simply because one made that possibility more difficult with each passing year.

Now, among the "antique" music, there was nonetheless "romantic" music, including, and we must do this, ALL opera. Opera was what preceded the widespread availability of novels (more a late 18th century to 19th century thing) and novels were serialized in newspapers, similarly to the way stories were serialized when first radio then television, came upon the scene.

Meanwhile, all throughout the last three centuries or so of music in the Western tradition, we have had music that is supposedly not about anything but music. The vast bulk of JS Bach's music goes here. Meanwhile a fellow German composer, Georg Friedrich Handel, had a lot of various experiences writing music for the stage (romantic), first in Italy where he wrote Italian opera and later in England where he wrote what amount to operas that are not staged as plays; oratorios, Messiah being of course the most famous one. Now, Handel did write some music just for music's sake too, and a lot of it is quite good, but fewer people know it.

One even has to regard Chopin's etudes as music about music. Chopin is "romantic" only in the sense that his music often suggests scenes from operas or plays or scenes out of novels or verses of poetry. Chopin didn't set any words to music that I know of.

Liszt, with his transcriptions, and other material, was often writing music not just about someone's stories, but about himself. Other "romantic" composers followed in this vain, aided it must be argued by the technological developments of "modern" instruments; the modern concert grand piano being at the apex of this development.

By the time we get to Scriabin (who considered himself the rightful heir of Chopin) and his contemporary Rachmaninoff, and Debussy and his later contemporary, Ravel, we are dealing with music that isn't really fundamentally about music at all. We are dealing with sound painting; where not only printed stories or acted plays (whether opera or not) but actual painting styles (specifically impressionism, post-impressionism, expressionism, futurism, fauve, etc.) begin to affect the way composers think about composition and hence about the music produced.

Debussy's preludes are titled, therefore there is a story, they are "romantic".
Chopin's preludes (Scriabin's too) are not titled, they are not "romantic" per se, but only suggest or sound like they could be romantic.

Whether or not one decides one likes a piece or not is largely based on how one responds to the totality of rhythm, melody, harmony and form. Where one's taste wants formality to dominate, one is better off with the pure music about music composers. Where one wants to wander about in the tremendous emotional colors of the romancers and story-tellers whose stories may be only about themselves, again, it becomes only a matter of taste.

One caveat though, at least for me. With the piano I currently have, certain kinds of music, often the very romantic or really "sound painting" kinds of stuff that Ravel or Debussy wrote, are simply not going to work out very well. For the really heavy stuff like Liszt with his "too many notes, just cut a few and it will be perfect," only a really good piano is going to do. If your taste doesn't tend to these kinds of music, then perhaps you are fortunate in not having to seek out a much better piano.

Looking forward to your comments.

So let's also apply some set theory to all of this. The largest set shall be ALL keyboard music from all periods. Then I'll describe all the music written before JS Bach's lifetime (1685-1750) and call that "Antique" for use of another word. Then I'll describe all the music written by JS Bach, his sons and contemporaries and everyone since as "Modern" for use of yet another word.

I'll make some statements about these two sets of keyboard music.
1) Antique music sounds best on "antique" instruments.
2) Some modern music can be reproduced on "antique" instruments, but mostly works best on "modern" instruments.

Two more sets:
1. Music that's only about music
2. Music that's about something else in addition to music

This second set, whether we like it or not, must be essentially "romantic" since it is based on "roman" the French word for novel and hence of some story whether real or metaphorical, often poetic (yet another art form distinct from prose fiction) and often employing themes from mythology. Note that anything "romantic" is about something besides music and that complicates things tremendously. One even has to regard Chopin's etudes as music about music. Chopin is "romantic" only in the sense that his music often suggests scenes from operas or plays or scenes out of novels or verses of poetry. Chopin didn't set any words to music that I know of.

By the time we get to Scriabin (who considered himself the rightful heir of Chopin) and his contemporary Rachmaninoff, and Debussy and his later contemporary, Ravel, we are dealing with music that isn't really fundamentally about music at all. We are dealing with sound painting; Debussy's preludes are titled, therefore there is a story, they are "romantic".Chopin's preludes (Scriabin's too) are not titled, they are not "romantic" per se, but only suggest or sound like they could be romantic.

One caveat though, at least for me. With the piano I currently have, certain kinds of music, often the very romantic or really "sound painting" kinds of stuff that Ravel or Debussy wrote, are simply not going to work out very well. For the really heavy stuff like Liszt with his "too many notes, just cut a few and it will be perfect," only a really good piano is going to do. If your taste doesn't tend to these kinds of music, then perhaps you are fortunate in not having to seek out a much better piano.

4. You, and everyone else for that matter, are certainly entitled to your opinion. Most "educated" people are trained to think in a particular way about a subject and frankly very rarely dare to think independently or "out of the box" about anything. The point about becoming increasingly immune to any criticism also applies. It also follows that a particular point of view that has been inculcated into a student by a professor (they who profess to know but in fact rely on their opinions as passed down to them), is bound to be accepted as an unshakeable stone, when in fact it is a pebble in a stream subject to the whims of time and the vagaries of memory. One usually has to wait for some old professor to die before the acceptance of a new point of view is possible.

Hey, how can anyone not love dark chocolate - yet I know someone who hates it.

So let's also apply some set theory to all of this.