Stop Fucking With My Music

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1

Okay. I love music, particularly the romantic and post-romantic periods. So when, such as in a movie, a piece I’m familiar with is begun mid- or part-way through, is not finished–is sometimes clipped, butchered, reassembled out of order, etc. … I get pissed.

Stop fucking with my music.

One recent example was Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat (op.9-2) at the Olympic women’s solo figure skating. It was so bad that even my father noticed something was wrong. I just about kicked the TV.

Stop fucking with my music.

Another example is this movie that I’m watching, All About Lily Chou-Chou, which heavily features the piano works of Debussy. To make matters worse, most of them are in my repertoire. Arabesque No. 1, clair de lune, and la fille aux cheveux de lin are not only performed rather stiffly, like one might want to play Bach’s minuets or some Hanon exercises, but clipped and inserted anachronistically.

Stop fucking with my music.

I can understand if you’re practicing, working different sections (as I often do), stopping when something’s not quite right, and then restarting, but good god… and they call arabesque no.1 ‘arabesque’! Just fucking ‘arabesque’. There were two. Un? Non, deux.

Stop fucking with my music–and if you do, at least get the fucking name right!

It’s a good damned movie, so why fucking ruin it like that?

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just an asshole…

…and very tired.

2

This is like when you listen to nate dogg sing “16 in the clip and one in the hole”, and it censored, but then you listen to ludacris say, “if you hold your head steady I’m gonna milk the cow”. It just doesn’t make sense. People who fuck with music usually make it worse.

3

Stop fucking with Sotchi’s music, many underscores.

4

Relatively, I’ve just begun to regularly listen to decent music such as Chopin. I take your complaints as a unpleasant warning. I hope that by the time I can readily name whatever piece of music they may be massacring on TV, I’ll have no more use for TV.

5

I threw out my tv a year ago. Glad to report I’ve not seen more than a couple of seconds of the whole Olympics.

I used to enjoy the hockey when I was younger, especially when Canada was playing. I liked the Canadians. I remember them beating Germany in the semi finals and the Soviets in the finals. That was incredibly exiting. Now I couldn’t give a fuck.

6

I find it easier to watch sitcoms than read slightly more sophisticated fiction or watch most modern philosophically inept movies. It’s a vice in a way, but I have no need to plan on quitting it. Everyday I find I have less and less desire and patience for such TV.

I haven’t watched the Olympics either. Lately I’ve narrowed down my interest in sports to the NBA. After so many years of long weeks of work, in the last couple years I have only worked part time and have finally had the time to watch and play basketball. I have little interest in the outcome of the games I watch. I watch to learn as much as anything.

7

Unfortunately, that was my entire experience of the Olympics; I haven’t had a television in a while myself, so my brief encounters come at my parents’ house. Well, I do possess a television, only it’s been unplugged and sitting in the closet since I got into my apartment last July.

8

While many remakes of original music sound wrong or awful at first if given a chance and understanding that it is an interpreted work, they become a fine piece on its own. Then others just flat suck.

9

I hate remixes. I think the idea is they’re supposed to be an improvement on the original, but 99% of the time they just ruin it.

10

I’m not talking about remakes, interpretations, arrangements, or sampling, all of which I support. What I’m bitching about is not a musical endeavor, but a theatrical one; they are mutilating a work of art to fit it into their given time slot as the background; ambi[size=50]val[/size]ent.

In the video below (from a different competition, but the same performer and the same program as I originally bitched about), you will hear Chopin’s Nocturne in E-flat (major) played as the accompaniment. In measure twelve (counting the pickup measure as ‘zero’), it is chopped halfway through (at the poco ral.) and then looped back to the second half of measure ten, after which it then properly proceeds through the poco ral. to the second verse … except now it plays the third ending where it should play the second (i.e., measure twenty-four where it should play measure sixteen), and then repeats the abomination rather than proceeding to the third verse. Finally, it wholly removes measures twenty-seven through thirty, but plays the end more or less correctly.

Stop fucking with my music, people in charge of Mao Asada’s program.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brfCY93jgqc[/youtube]

I’m going to go play it correctly now in an attempt to purge the horror from my ear drums.

11

I think my connection’s too slow for streaming music.

12

______,

:slight_smile: You obviously know music. While I understand, I can’t hear. I respect your ears and knowledge.
But , I can’t skate like that either. Perhaps allowing one form of art to adapt another form of art is horrible. Perhaps.
It does give many an appreciation for the arts.??? Is that not a positive? ?

13

People rarely need to be told that great arts are out there, they will find them if they look, or occasionally chance to come upon them, where they’re done right. If they haven’t been ruined by TV, they will have a much better chance of appreciated the art as distinct and coming from a rich culture, rather than only being a part of the vast merciless cultural wasteland, mostly represented on TV.

14

Kris,

Again, adaptation is good, and I encourage playing around with the music of the greats–but you should not do so unless you understand what you’re doing, and the person in charge of this ‘adaptation’ had/has no fucking clue. I’ll try to explain this without getting into too much theory, but theory’s more or less inevitable here. We take the poco ral. section for our example, because it’s the most horrific. As I said before, they chop it halfway through measure twelve. The last chord before the chop is an F 13 chord, which is composed of the notes (from lowest–bass–to highest–soprano–and in the voicing present) C, E-flat, F, A-natural, and D. This chord is supposed to proceed to a B-flat major chord, which is composed of the notes B-flat, D, F, and another B-flat. Chopin set it up this way so that the F is the common tone (the note both chords have in common), the minor third (C and E-flat) drops down to a major third (B-flat and D), and the perfect fourth (A-natural and D) drops down to another perfect fourth (F and B-flat), all of which result in what are called ‘resolved’ harmonies. In the ‘adapted’ version, this same F 13 chord instead goes to an open quadruple octave of e-flat. This is like pissing all over Chopin’s face, and then wiping your ass on his manuscript–because you’ve just taken everything he set up, torn it out, left all the harmonies unresolved (the only melodious interval being the D in the soprano going up a major second to E-flat), and then, when you actually let his work carry through, you’ve negated its effect (the law of diminishing return). I could illustrate with lines, but I don’t have time right now.

Also, they must’ve payed the pianist quite a bit of money to butcher his/her performance like that; the really tricky senza tempo portion was fantastic, and, unlike many pieces, the slower Nocturne in E-flat is played, the more difficult it is, so I’m guessing the performer was quite good.

15

I have only just started to look at this piece, but if you can play it, good for you. I assume you’ve been playing for some time, I took lessons in HS but then was away from a piano for over 40 years and have only had a piano in the house for 3 years. One thing I have noticed is that it is taking longer to learn a piece, and it is very frustrating to pick up a piece of music that I had played before, and now I can’t play it. I had played one of the Chopin Waltzes that sounded a lot like this Nocturne, but I’m not sure of the title and can’t find the music.

16

http://imslp.org/wiki/Complete_Works_for_the_Piano_(1894)_(Chopin,_Frédéric) Book 1 has all his waltzes.

17

Don’t like this thread.

Our music - maybe. Your music - No.