Glass is a Pane

[Elmer Elevator <bobmer@javanet.com>]

Hope you enjoyed my knock-knock joke. My brother, a very talented pianist, writes:

======================

Your caption [about the 0.00043 % of the population who gets this joke] is
probably pretty close to accurate but I'm not sure I've ever wanted to brag that I
was dumb enough to sit for however long that was (it seemed an eternity) through
whatever of Glass' composition I actually did sit through.

Anyone with half a brain would have walked out after the first, say, three
minutes.

Instead, alas, I can chuckle at this joke.

M(aury)

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Now it seems to me that if anybody does have the clarity and guts to walk out
after three minutes of a Philip Glass concert, he/she should just say to the other
people in the audience, "That's okay, I'll just fill in the rest for myself at
home!"

When they round up the Usual Suspects in this category, sometimes they
inadvertently throw in Henryk Gorecki. Wrong. I think his Symphony No. 3 (the Dawn
Upshaw vocal version particularly, which was on the UK POP! chart for a year!) is
a magnificent piece of music, startlingly powerful, creative, deeply moving. The
theme does great credit to the capacity of 20th Century music to try to express
the saddest and most important questions of our time.

For a listener. A string player on this list says rehearsing this piece left him
with a very different feeling about it. I can only sympathize. It must be quite
the horror to rehearse this piece. "Let's take it from the start of measure 119"
is very like "Let's take it from the start of measure 334" which is very like
"Let's take it from the start of measure 712" etc.

Does anyone here have strong feelings about Gorecki? One of the things about
classical music which always fascinates me is its capacity to generate fistfights
in the lobby of the concert hall. Is it really true that fistfights broke out at
the premiere of The Rite of Spring / le Sacre du Printemps?

Bob

Elmer Elevator wrote:

> knock knock
> who's there?
> knock knock
> who's there?
> knock knock
> who's there?