Seeking Silence for the Symphony
I recently fell in love with a new piece of music. Well not a new piece, but new to me: Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony. It started when I went to see the Nashville Symphony perform the piece last month, after which I immediately picked it up from amazon.
This doesn’t happen often, the last time I felt this way was probably back in ‘98 or so with Wumpscut’s “Soylent Green”. Of course it’s a little more difficult to play a symphony over and over again, but I’m starting to find my skip-to points…
Now, I’m no classical music snob/expert or anything, but I listen to enough that I can assure this isn’t just a case of “yokel goes to symphony, decides that whatever they played must have been great”. No, this particular piece reached deep inside and grabbed me, it found one of those spots in my head where I had already reserved room for a piece of music that wanted to write if I couldn’t find it elsewhere.
How would I describe it? Mmmm, ok — take the thunder and violence of Holst’s “Mars”, blend with Mahler-esque discordance, then polish it back up with a certain sense of cinematic grandeur that I, as a child of my age, want to link to John Williams, but which of course Shostakovich found elsewhere from an earlier time. In fact I was led to wonder if this piece may have directly inspired some of Williams’ “Imperial March” (e.g. the Darth Vader theme).
Anyway I got the CD but soon discovered I couldn’t listen to it. Rather, I couldn’t hear it. The album features some extreme dynamics, and the quiet parts were just eaten by the ambient noise in my living room. Which led me to notice just how f*ing loud my Home Theater PC had gotten. I mean this thing was LOUD. It didn’t start out that way, it just crept up and I didn’t notice it.
Turns out the fan in the power supply had died, so the variable speed case fan was working like a beast to try and compensate. So I trotted out to CompUSA and picked up one of these badboys. Ahhh, much better : )
But still not good enough. I think I need to spend some time here to see if I can get this beast down to a whisper.
UPDATE: Digg just pointed me to another site to look into.
[...] Musically the highlight was the Symphony No. 5 by Shostakovich. I mentioned before my love affair with his 11th Symphony — well coincidentally at that same time I went out & bought a CD of the 5th as well. So it was quite a treat to find this piece up first in the season. I don’t think the 5th is nearly as good as the 11th, but it definately has some wonderfully dramatic moments. [...]