Music Monday-7/28/2014 B-52's, Tchaikovsky

Aleathia says:

This week Michael brought home this:

Yes!

I remember owning this when it came out and thought I still had it, but the library of music was consulted and he said I didn't have it anymore.  This was a spectacular album for a small town, rural girl.  Each member of the band their own unique character...so bold, so confident.  This meant a lot to me in those high school years as I was moving away from bubblegum pop and hair metal into new wave and alternative.

Years down the road I would live in Atlanta, GA and hoped I would see them wandering around or even get to see one of their shows, but it never materialized.  I remember singing many of their songs while working shifts for my parents karaoke business in Arizona.  Ah....the good old days.

You love to hate it, hate to love it.  Yes, "Love Shack":

                          

You may begin cussing me out at any time.  Earworm!

John says:

Me and Tchaikovsky

I don’t profess to know much about classical.  I like what I like.  And one of those things is the music of Pyotr Ilych Tchaikovsky.  Tchaikovsky (or Tchaik as I call him) had a pretty miserable life: separation from his mother, her death of cholera, a bad marriage, and closeted homosexuality for a start.  It’s odd to me that he’s probably most famous for the Nutcracker when overall Tchaik was a pretty melancholy guy.  And this brings me to my point about me and Tchaikovsky.  Of all of his great music I’m most partial to his final symphony, his No. 6 in B minor, Op.74, or otherwise known as the Pathetique.

By Pathetique Tchaikovsky meant music more passionate or emotional rather than how we know the word pathetic; in fact Pathetique and pathetic have no correlation at all in terms of meaning.  And Tchaik couldn’t have been more correct on this one.  This symphony is full-blown passion and emotion from a first movement that teeters on the schizophrenic, to two exuberant middle movements, including a third that is so full of wondrous buoyancy that when the final movement hits it’s so breathtakingly somber and broken hearted that it takes your breath.  And you stay that way through the rest of this piece of gloomy genius, until the notes have no choice but to fade out at the end.  I can’t think of another symphony that completes itself in such a way.

The first time I heard the Pathetique was at the symphony back on 2012 and it has been a favorite of mine since then.  I walk to work daily.  Five miles.  Every other week I’m working Saturdays which means I’m doing six days straight of getting up to act as a public servant for the humble masses, when all I want to do is find a dark bar and sit there until the sun sets.  More often than not I find myself turning to Tchaik’s 6^th on those Saturday walking days.  It gets me through it in a way that no other music can.