Friday 12 September 2008

Erik

I was really very pleased that one of the bloggers who has landed here in recent days found my post about a piece by Stars of the Lid, checked out the link to the piece mentioned and was, (and I quote) completely blown away.

That's just marvellous, and makes me smile. I did my best in that post in question to give a description of the music and the feelings it evoked, whilst aware that I don't exactly have an adequate grasp of vocabulary, at least as far as certain musical/technical terms are concerned. Not that I would let such things stop me.

Meanwhile, I've just been listening to Erik Satie: Danses de Travers, and Petite Ouverture a Danser (scuse the lack of little dots above the letter a and so on, I can't be bothered) amongst some choice others.

This is one such occasion where no amount of description would do justice to the music in question. But in terms of the impact - they've just stopped me in my tracks, once again. It's the kind of music which forces stillness and silence, and I'm left shaking my head in wonder.

I'm glad these things still serve to have such an impact upon me.

Update: here's a link to an interpretation of Petite Ouverture a Danser, which is along similar enough lines in pace and stuff (my descriptive powers really aren't with me today) to the one I have, which is on a cd entitled Piano Works by Reinbert de Leeuw.

15 comments:

Merkin said...

Trousers, you are a Star.

I hope that when you are famous you remember the likes of Zola, Anti, LavvyBlue and me - all of whom will be scrabbling for an Autograph.
I don't give a toss - Croatia with ten men?
F- right off.

Fine. Happy to see you so sprightly.

Futhermore, I am severely happy.
I did the Szwagier Quiz.
I am next to Ghandi (almost).

Apparently.
heheheheehh

trousers said...

I stand by my words about Croatia :)
And thank you, I loved reading this comment, it too really made me smile.

Nice one merk ;-)

Pants said...

Hi Trews

It's so very good to have you back. I like Erik Satie but I have to be in the right frame of mind for him.

xxx

Pants

DJ Kirkby said...

Totally amazing. Make sme think of sitting by the shore verye arly in the morning. I have written the impact of listening to Pianoless vexations by Randy Nordshow into a particluarly emotive bit of 'The Plump WAG's Club' where Trish is keeping busy being creative and listening to this music while her partner is falling apart from the inside out.

DJ Kirkby said...

Excuse the typos, I am still in novel writing mode and my brain is going faster than my fingers, thank gawds for spell check, byyeeeee. xo

Anonymous said...

Hi, found you via the widget. Love cats, need to look up Eric Satie, my ignorance never fails!

Crystal Jigsaw x

Daphne said...

Erik Satie is fab - good to find someone else who likes him too.

Trixie said...

Quite nice when a blogger goes through your srchives, isn't it?

DJ Kirkby said...

There is an award for you over at mine.

Jennytc said...

Oh yes, love Satie, especially the Gymnopedies. Someone once told me that he lived in abject poverty with three grand pianos in his flat.

DJ Kirkby said...

Widget brought me here and as for wich choices coincided with yours...well Trousers... you are a bit of a naughty boy arent you?

Unknown said...

You definately have me intrigued enough to listen.......

black boxes widget brought me back again :-)

Unknown said...

There is sometimes music or a work of art that does just defy words - Satie does do that.

Blackboxed here, btw :-)

nmj said...

hey trews, i am expecting my stars of the lid tomorrow, just pray i am awake for the delivery... i just downloaded an eric satie but i had to stop listening, it wasn't my thing, it made me agitated, but i prob chose totally the wrong track, theme music to a film, relache, i will look for those you describe instead! x

trousers said...

Hi pants, and good to see you too, as always. Well yes, I suppose I have to be in the right frame of mind for our Erik (how shit is that, calling him "our Erik"?) as well - but when I am, it's really something. Friday night was one of those times, a nice quite evening - it was relatively late (or it felt like it, since I was so tired) and the aforementioned tracks just really blew me away.

Hi dj, nice to see what it makes you think of. I wouldn't have necessarily had those associations myself - more of a late-night kind of thing, as mentioned above. But now you've said it, I can really imagine it.

Oh and the typos - well, I seem to leave plenty of typos in my comments over at yours - and anyway it looked like some kind of old English - "verye arly" :)

Hi crystal jigsaw, thanks for stopping by and commenting. You may find our Erik to be as described so far, or you might find it hopelessly maudlin. Hope it's the former not the latter!

Thanks daphne, and also for stopping by :)

trixie indeed it is, and I feel that the comment in question made my day as much as the post had done for him. I've yet to do much more than scratch the surface of most of all these new blogs that the widget has made me aware of: but I'm glad to have all these links here to explore in my own sweet time...(yours included of course)

dj - you just can't keep away can you! Many many thanks for the award, I'll be over in a bit to see what's going on. And as for my choices - well I'm remaining stumm - but there's times when I've used the widget and ended up back here, despite rather than because of the choices I've made :)

Hi jennyta, I must admit I'm not as keen on "Gymnopedies," though that may be as much as anything because they remind me of a really dreary tv advert from 2 or 3 decades ago, and that's never a good thing to associate such music with. I feel that I'll go back and listen to those pieces from time to time though and hopefully learn to appreciate them more than I do at present.

Hi again liz - do try and find some out - apart from the link I included I don't have any decent links to recommend (and haven't explored the other one properly: I just wanted to have a link which wasn't wikipedia, just for a change!). Again, as mentioned above, it's often found to be music which suits a certain frame of mind. It may even be worth trying youtube?

Can only agree, absolute vanilla (and atyllah). Glad the widget brought you here, though your name is familiar to me from comments on other blogs. Hi!

Hi nmj, good news about Stars of the Lid.

I will have to try and search for some links for the pieces in this post. As mentioned to liz above, I haven't fully explored the link I included to Satie, so perhaps I should look around more for something which has the ones I was talking about.