BOOMBAPHEAT

Impermanence part 2

Monsieur Croche is Debussy’s argumentative alter ego in his loose collection of writings published posthumously in 1921. Like all good writing on aesthetics, Monsieur Croche, Antidilettante is full of irony, ambiguity and contradiction, where meaning and intention are always elusive and just beyond our reach. 
Irony and contradiction are equally at play in his Etude No. 9 (Pour Les Notes Répétées). The Etudes were written at a time (1915) when the composer was fighting a Kultur war as bitter and protracted as the war in the trenches.
“I won’t get on the subject of German barbarity… I think we are going to pay dearly for the right not to love the art of Richard Wagner and Schoenberg.”
The Etudes are as much studies in composition as they are exercises in keyboard technique. So why did Debussy choose a light and playful ragtime to explore Schoenberg’s atonality? The opening eight bars of No. 9 are strikingly similar to a serial ‘tone row.’ Germanic rigour meets black American spontaneity amidst a hail of repeated notes fired off as if from a machine gun? I fear we are back in the world of irony and contradiction, this time in spades, and I’m not sure whether Monsieur Croche would approve of fugues!  

Michael Parkin

Monsieur Croches Fugue

SQEAKY CLEAN Mix 12 (Logic)

Piano – Hsiang Tu
Arranged, recorded, and mastered by Scott Hanenberg

Recorded June 5, 2020 in the Squires Recital Salon, Blacksburg, VA.

Darn That Dream

String Quintet - Into the Cave

Live recording of Icelandic Saxophone Quartet playing Thordur Magnusson´s Saxophonequartet at the festival Dark music days.

Saxophonequartet

Faker

another one with my buddy Peter Hanson on drums... oldy but a goody... i wrote this one on the school bus lol on my way to erin district highschool

Darn That Dream

Scott Hanenberg

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