# Have you ever been Musically Stalked?



## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Let me explain. You know/like this one guy right? And he might know you, and he probably likes you too. Well, you catch him following you around sometimes, and occasionally bump into him on the street "by accident" so it seems, except for his rather suspicious grins. Ok, here goes a mad (and figurative) rambling.

Several weeks ago:
: "Good Afternoon, *****(my name censored)!" "Huh, what?" "I said, Good Afternoon! It's me! Here's my Lyric Poem for you on the radio!" "Ohhh... not again. I just happened to hear your 4th symphony yesterday already." "Oh! So I bet you want more, don't you?" [I smack my face]

A week or so after that:
: "Hello, *****!" "Huh, what?" "I said hello! I closed the pool for you!" "What?? I wanted to go swimming! Why on earth did you do that?" "I did it so you could hear my lovely Piano Miniatures come on the radio right then! You would have been swimming otherwise, and missed them!" "Oh... very kind of you." "I know, thank you!"

Less than a week ago:
: "Helloooooo *****!" "... You again? What are you doing here?" "Oh, I found out you were alone this evening... all alone... I thought I'd drop in, you know, take the chance to have you all to myself for a bit... heh heh."  "You CREEPER!! You're STALKING me!!" "Ugh, why do you have to see it that way, and not some other way? But nonetheless, here's my ballet the Seasons, just for you. Enjoy!"

This morning:
: "Good Morrrning, *****!!! I'm so glad you woke up early or else you would have missed my Ballet Scenes op. 52 on the radio! Enjoy!" "Um... can you please go away?" "Hahaha, *****! Of course not!"
That same day:
:"NOOOOO *****!!" "What are you so mad for now??" "You listened to other music other than public radio earlier this evening!" "So what?" "You MISSED me! I was waiting just for you with rare piano performance of the Seasons and dargghhgarrrghhargghh!!" "But didn't you already meet me this morning?" "... YesbutIwantedtomeetyouasecondtime!!" "Tough. Goodnight and good riddance." 
Half an hour later:
‎: "BOO!" "AGH!! Stop laughing, this isn't funny!" "Hahahaha ***** I CAUGHT YOU! Since you didn't catch me the 1st time, well, 2 hours later, I'M BAAACK!! I have Raymonda for you this time, my suite. Enjoy!" "Eeeek! What do you want with me?! Just, take my money, but please leave!" "Did I ever want money? You know that. It's not money I'm after..." :devil:

Drama to be continued... 

Do you get what I'm trying to say?

Has this ever happened to you with a composer?


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## Cnote11 (Jul 17, 2010)

Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe.... if it wasn't the drunk girls screaming it outside my window at 2 AM, it was the girls singing it on the bus, or it being played in every single store. Couldn't get away from it... but as far as composers? No, can't say I have.


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## powerbooks (Jun 30, 2012)

All the music ringtones! Tiny whinny or sharply noisy annoying. Pathetic!

(However, I am also the guilty one, but I love my ringtones!  )


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> ...
> Do you get what I'm trying to say?...


A metaphor for slowly becoming addicted to one composer's music?



> ...
> Has this ever happened to you with a composer?


Not to that extent. But it has happened with a genre, namely chamber music.

But I am treating my addiction with the opposite. A quick dose of music on steroids by you-know-who-I-love-to-hate-and-bash-on-this-forum overloads me totally, like Mr. Creosote from 'The Meaning of Life' by the Monty Python guys, and then I can't consume any music for days, weeks, months.

...NOT...only joking :lol:...


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

Sid James said:


> A metaphor for slowly becoming addicted to one composer's music?


Not quite. That a composer seems to be _following _you. Of course, they can't _actually _be, it's figurative, but it's almost like they're haunting you. You keep "running" into their music everywhere. I've also ran into Glazunov's music 2 times on TV music channels too, that was very bizarre, and I've also ran into his music in another state, on another radio station. 2 other times, I turned on the radio, and "Glazunov" was the first coherent word I heard from an announcer (I was a little bit unnerved the 2nd time). I think, if I didn't "run into" him that fateful afternoon over 4 years ago, I would have had *100 *other chances to discover him by now and love him _anyway_.

So has this ever happened to you with a composer stalking you?


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Huilunsoittaja said:


> Not quite. That a composer seems to be _following _you. Of course, they can't _actually _be, it's figurative, but it's almost like they're haunting you. You keep "running" into their music everywhere. ...


Okay, gotcha. Understand now. I am not good with metaphors, obviously!



> ...
> So has this ever happened to you with a composer stalking you?


Kind of. I remember, ages ago, I had been listening to Copland's music, it was one of his popular 'Americana' works. I had a tape of that stuff, with the NYPO under Bernstein. The moment I finished listening to that, I turned on classical radio, and the same piece (I think 'Four Dance Episodes from Rodeo') was playing on the radio! It was kind of spooky. That kind of thing has happened for me a few times.

Another one was that amongst the first cd's I'd gotten of Vaughan Williams' music was his symphonies under Adrian Boult. & I remember I was at one of the big train stations here, and they were playing one of the movements from one of those symphonies or other pieces. It was wierd as it was not a well known piece, it definitely was not eg. 'Fantasia on Greensleeves' which virtually everyone here knows, classical listener or not. I liked hearing that, it took me a while to figure out what it was. I don't remember the exact symphony. But ironically, they play music like that at train stations, or used to, to discourage loitering and move people on, esp. young people who tend to hate classical music (or anything their parents listened to, which could even be Madonna!)...


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## samurai (Apr 22, 2011)

@ Sid, A similar type thing happened to me, also involving RVW. I was really going thru a phase of being immersed in his *Fantasia On A Theme Of Thomas Tallis, *listening to as many interpretations as I could on *Spotify *and the copies my father owned, etc,etc. After a half-night or so of this, I was driving in my car the very next dayand happened to put on *WQXR,* our local NYC classical music station. And, surprise of surprises! Guess what they were playing? So, in a sense, I can relate to what you and the op are referring to when you mention being "stalked" by a composer. It really is very weird how that works out sometimes, isn't it?


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## ComposerOfAvantGarde (Dec 2, 2011)

Cnote11 said:


> Carly Rae Jepsen's Call Me Maybe.... if it wasn't the drunk girls screaming it outside my window at 2 AM, it was the girls singing it on the bus, or it being played in every single store. Couldn't get away from it... but as far as composers? No, can't say I have.


Drunk girls screaming a song I've never heard of before? Sounds like fun.


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## Crudblud (Dec 29, 2011)

Oh boy, have I ever!

It was just one night. Just one. A month or two passed, I thought nothing of it. I would hear a little melody here, a little lyric there, but then someone using the name "El Bee" started sending me notes. Sweet nothings, I thought, but nothings were not what they were, they were in fact somethings, and not really all that sweet either. Actually they kind of tasted like mustard, English mustard, hot, gets in your nose, total nightmare if you accidentally put too much on your ham sandwich. Yes, that kind of mustard. Bloody awful. Dijon would've been okay, but that... that was just too much. 

So there I was, many notes slipped under my door, which was odd considering that my door had a built in draft excluder which made it impossible for notes to be slipped under it without serious effort on the part of the note slipper. Then it began, I saw him everywhere, the trench coat the colour of coffee with far too much milk in it, the cartoon race car baseball cap with the built in cheapo shades and twirling propellers. His unique stench of lacquered wood and tuxedos followed me all around town, and I knew that it would soon permeate my place of residence like a marshmallow expanding inside a cup of hot chocolate. In desperation I changed my lock, I bought extra locks, I put locks on the locks. I became a recluse and bided my time, watching QI on interactive catch up TV like a southern philosophy student with a hangover.

8 PM. Thursday. 4th of July. 1957. AD. It was a hot and humid evening, and after somehow coming to terms with the fact that I had mysteriously travelled 55 years in to the past and still owned my house and that it still had the same decor and the same over-abundance of locks and really trying really hard to convince myself that the historical inaccuracies of this story are not just a result of lazy writing, I heard a knock at the door.
"Who's there?"
"El Bee."
"Go away!"
"Don't you want to heard my stunning rendition of the third movement of Charles Ives' Holidays Symphony?"
"Well, maybe, but not to... Wait, just who are you?"
"I can't tell you, but I can tell you who Mahler is, if you'll just... let me in." The sickeningly lascivious tone of his otherwise perfectly charming and rather pleasant-to-listen-to voice pierced my ears like a teenage girl squeezing an inflamed lump of pus from her acne ridden face.
"No, no, no! Please, just leave me alone!"
At this point, I realised the fatal flaw of my plan, and so did he. Although I had paid much attention to my door, its shiny new locks gleaming in the twilight, I hadn't invested in my windows, the simple single panes of glass did not offer the level of resistance common to UPVC double glazing. The sound and vision of smashing glass offered a terribly poignant parallel to the fragility of human life, but it is rather difficult to dwell on such things when a demented man is climbing in to your kitchen and making a serious mess of the drying ceramics and cutlery on the draining board. Like a flash, he was on me, humming the melody to West Side Story's "Pretty". With determination, I pulled away the hat and mask.
"You! No! Oh god, no!"
I tried to escape, oh how I tried, but it was too late. There I was, pinned to the floor, being lectured on Mozart's 41st symphony with surprisingly detailed recreations of the music for reference. Some 14 hours later, the man had left, but I would never hear my beloved Bernstein Mahler recordings in quite the same way ever again.


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## Huilunsoittaja (Apr 6, 2010)

^^^ You are a true writer Crudblud! Very nice!

Well, here's a sweet incident that happened last week. As you may have been able to pick up before, I was getting kinda frightened by the stalking situation I was in. Well, here's the continuation.

"Hello *****." 
"Oh! You're here! But how did you know---?" 
"That you're not in such a good mood right now?" 
"Well, yes." 
"Yeah I know. I found out someone said something mean to you that was very very wrong of them, and just to let you know I support you for standing up for the right thing today, here's one of your personal favorites, The Sea, op. 28." 
"What? That's not solving the problem though, is it?"
"Oh right, instead of crying about the insult I might make you cry because of the piece of music?" 
"Well... _yeah!_"
"Well, the latter is still better isn't it?"
"I guess... Thank you for showing up."
"My pleasure."


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