# Your classical music fetish market...



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Just reading the first page of this now locked thread, esp. Petrb's post HERE made me connect that with a video I've been watching lately on world religions. One segment is on voodoo, which is still practised today in West Africa. People who practise this believe in the power of fetishes and have these totems. These have magical/supernatural powers, and can help you have a longer life, protect you against enemies, make you richer and help you have a better love life (& then some).

But my point is that a segment of the video showed a fetish market like this:









and this:

http://www.xenophilia.net/westafrica/fetish1.jpg

Quite a grisly sight to behold I think.

So let's play a game lampooning and sending up all our obsessions with making composers into fetishes. Which composer matches which fetish? Which dead animal, in other words?

Here's a list:

Wagner is a venomous snake - the most powerful/potent fetish of them all. Play with it at your peril (like playing with fire). Note that they actually sell live snakes at fetish markets, they are considered the most powerful fetishes.

J.S. Bach - Giraffe, towering over other composers (but if you just have the head, then what?)

Webern - a mongoose. Defeated Wagner the snake...but bred his own cult in return.

So I invite you guys to do your own. But keep it civil. The aim is to have 'good clean fun' as they say.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

btw you can also assign special powers to your fetish. Eg. which your fetish imparts to the listener.

Eg. Wagner imparts power of long attention span. J.S. Bach I dunno. Webern gives the ability to enjoy the smallest of moments to the max (a symphony in like 10 minutes, all that concision, the opposite of you-know-who)...


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## Xaltotun (Sep 3, 2010)

This is pretty funny! Tchaikovsky could be a freshly dead, perfectly white dove, with a single tiny speckle of blood in its exquisite beak. Just looking at this beautiful creature makes you sad. Sibelius, on the other hand, could be the skeleton of a raven, a real messenger from the spirit world, or a guide to navigate that kingdom. Bruckner is a chunk of petrified wood or a bone of a mammoth... or a piece of an ancient whale. Mendelssohn is a stuffed-up cute mouse that looks almost alive - it even has a cute, dead smile on its face. Schubert is a collection of dried alpine flowers that still give their fragrance...


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## PetrB (Feb 28, 2012)

In the vein of where you take it... 

Bach ~ Pit bull, bites down on idea, does not ever let it go.

Brahms ~ the large pet dog who, to leave marks of territorial claim, bites the legs of every stick of furniture in the house.

... while I prefer to stay on theme but on a musical platform.

Wagner ~ Leitmotif ad infinitum.

Berlioz ~ Idée Fixe, how much more fetishist can it get?

Takemitsu ~ Idée Fixe-like: simple theme or idea so raked over, gone over around and through within the course of one piece that it becomes a near fetish-like object with which the composer is obsessed.

Morton Feldman ~ Ditto the mono-thematic and obsessive reiteration, though with glorious small variants, and highly intuitive handling making a completely new way of 'form' for a piece.

Stravinsky ~ a very Russian trait - a taste for the whole melody or idea to sit within a very narrow compass; his favorite, a descending minor third, back up to the three, up a whole tone to the outside major fourth (D down to B up to D up to E.) It runs through all of Les Noces, for one.

Bartok's lifelong affair with his beloved interval of the major second


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Bruckner: (fortissimo tutti unison with extra brass) DAA DAA DA-DA-DA DAA DAA DA-DA-DA DAA DAA DA-DA-DA DAA DAA DA-DA-DA DAA DAA DA-DA-DA DAAAAAAAAAAAA DAAAAAAAAAA

Hemiola headache.


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## Renaissance (Jul 10, 2012)

I have only one :

_"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...and the *God is BACH*"_


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## Flamme (Dec 30, 2012)

Never saw them that way...Need time to think...


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

*Messiaen* would be a bird of paradise, for his interest in birds and the colours of his music. Birds of Paradise are found in New Guinea and in Australia, which Messiaen actually visited to see and hear these birds in the wild. Sadly, exotic birds like these are smuggled illegally out of these countries as pets for the rich, esp. in Asia.

Special power of his music: to make the listener lose himself to the senses.

*Stravinsky *I see definitely as a chameleon, all those changes in style he went through, like those animals which can change their colour at the drop of a hat. & like chameleons who change to protect themselves against predators, Igor's changes where well timed. Eg. he went into serialism in a big way just after Schoenberg's death, & some see this as more than just coincidence.

Special power of his music: To be adaptable to changes in style.

The analogy above about *Bruckner* being an old bone is apt, but I'll just steal what I think Hanslick (or Brahms?) said of Bruckner's symphonies - they where boa constrictors in sound. Implying that they wrap around and smother/choke the listener before eating him whole. Funny that, but whoever said it obviously forgot about ol' Johannes' piano concertos, which pushed that genre to its limits at that time, just as Bruckner was doing with his symphonic 'boa constrictors.'

Special power of his music: To "climb every mountain, ford every stream" without listening to The Sound of Music. In other words travel to the Austrian alps (& maybe even to an abbey in Salzburg?)...


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