Can we talk? Or maybe for now mostly listen? (Coming up we've got Beethoven and Elgar, both worth hearing!)

BEETHOVEN: Piano Trio No. 1 in E-flat, Op. 1, No. 1:
i. Allegro

Suk Trio (Josef Suk, violin; Josef Chuchro, cello; Josef Hála, piano). Denon-Supraphon, recorded in Prague, December 1983

by Ken

Sometimes the eerie solitude of this space has its advantages. It is, notably, a not-so-bad place to come to be alone. And after the exhaustive purposelessness of last week's remembrance of bass John Macurdy, I have a couple of quasi-self-therapeutic goals to attempt, starting with this presentation of the opening movements of the first two of the three piano trios that make up Beethoven's Op. 1. I spent what is for me a lot of money to acquire this CD, one of two I was missing from the series of "complete" Beethoven piano trios ("complete" in quotes because of the numerous questions that come into play when we try to define what constitutes "all" of Beethoven's works for piano trios) as recorded by the Suk Trio as constituted above in the early 1980s, the dawn of the digital era, as coproduced by the Japanese and Czechoslovak companies Denon and Supraphon.

For reasons I can't begin to understand, these CDs have been out of print for ages, and the prices of used copies of some of them have risen to weird levels. Over the years I have periodically gone to the shelf to: (a) figure out which CD or CDs exactly I was missing and (b) reconnoitre online to see what it would cost to complete my holdings. Each time I eventually figured out that I was missing the CDs that contain what we traditionally think of as "the first four" Beethoven piano trios: the three trios of Op. 1 and the Op. 11 Trio, written for clarinet rather than violin but playable either way. Some of you may recall that one of the many Sunday Classics threads currently suspended in mid-air is some consideration of this very trio, Op. 11, alongside Mozart's sublime Clarinet Quintet. This may have been the proximate cause of my most recent reinvestigation of the Suk Trio Beethoven lacunae.

THE DECISION I MADE . . .

Special Thursday edition: Here's some music so beautiful that it almost doesn't matter whether it matters at all

Including a note from Kurt Vonnegut expounding
his "canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts"


"I was perplexed as to what the usefulness of any of the arts might be, with the possible exception of interior decoration. The most positive notion I could come up with was what I call the canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts."

-- K.V. (who else?), a full half-century ago -- see below, just a bit

ALL RIGHT, TIME TO GET TO WORK



Music Sample No. 1

Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center: Wu Han, piano; Ani Kavafian and Arnaud Sussmann, violins; Paul Neubauer, viola; Fred Sherry, cello. CMS Studio Recordings, recorded in New York City, April 2007


NOW, EXCERPTED FROM MR. VONNEGUT'S "Address to
the American Physical Society, New York City, February 5, 1969":

Many of you are physics teachers. I have been a teacher, too. I have taught creative writing. I often wondered what I thought I was doing, teaching creative writing, since the demand for creative writers is very small in this vale of tears. I was perplexed as to what the usefulness of any of the arts might be, with the possible exception of interior decoration. The most positive notion I could come up with was what I call the canary-in-the-coal-mine theory of the arts. This theory argues that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.

The most useful thing I could do before this meeting today is to keel over. On the other hand, artists are keeling over by the thousands every day and nobody seems to pay the least attention.

(appended in Vonnegut: Novels & Stories 1963-1973, Vol. 2 of Library of America's four-volume Kurt Vonnegut Edition)

by Ken

Okay, so I've missed yet another Sunday, in case it matters, which of course it doesn't -- and, oh yes, a Monday, Tuesday, and I guess Wednesday too, if you insist on counting every last gosh-darned day. But since I more or less had the components of this, er, post ready to go, or at least readyish, I've somehow summoned the determination to proceed, on the slim (slimmest?) chance that it might somehow matter, or come to matter. Somehow.

I'm pretty sure you don't want to go there, though. How 'bout instead we listen to more music? Perhaps a somewhat larger and sort-of-semi-self-contained chunk.