NESP Forum

Love this.  Big fan of the impressionists.  Water Lilies and the Rouen Cathedral are two of my favorites.  I love how he addressed the same subject in different lights or on different days or even different years!    The Cathedral is an example of that. http://www.intermonet.com/oeuvre/rouen.htm

Here are two of my other favorites:

Amy, I attended an all-girls Catholic high school. Part of the curriculum for your first three years was a course called Humanities. The approach was that you studied history, and the art, music and literature of the time. So for art, we started out with cave drawings as freshman and worked our way through Warhol as juniors! It was a very intense course of study, but one I am grateful for. I think it is a much more interesting and fun way to learn. Knowing what is going on politically and economically at a time gives you a better understanding of why certain music, literature and art developed.

Our high school offered a humanities program as well. I loved our English teacher at the time. I constantly feel the "woulda, coulda, shoulda" and wish I'd done more and strived for more. I did whatever I did to get by in school - I took "college bound" classes - wish I'd taken more business classes. I took Botany. What do I do now that requires that sort of knowledge? Computer classes would have certainly helped me more!

My college major was Travel and Tourism. I really would love to work for a Chamber of Commerce. I think I need to just jump in with both feet somewhere and see where it takes me. Did I just high jack this thread?

This is the thread that can't be hijacked, Amy!

I am not so much a fan of impressionist painters as I am of impressionist musicians. Probably because right now I am sitting about half a block from the Florence Griswold museum and a ginormous collection of impressionist paintings! Oh, and there are several in the office staring at me. Landscapes, meh.

Now, pop on a Debussy record and I am a happy girl! I'll have to spend some time at lunch tracking down some of that to share. La Mer... so very, very sea-like. Duh. It was always fun stuff to sing, too, crazy intervals with a contrasting accompaniment underneath, drove me fricking insane! But challenging is good for a lazy soprano!

I took one Humanities class in college, and I agree that's the way to go, do the art, music and literature at the same time to see how they all fit together. If I ever have spare time :rofl: there are non-credit classes at galleries and colleges I'd enjoy taking.

We ended up having a humanities course in my high school when I was a senior... open to sophomores only, though, and it took up the two blocks that the kids would normally have spent on English and American History. And it was taught by two dipstick teachers who wouldn't know art or music if it danced around naked in the classroom. So I think I was better off just taking all my courses separately and mixing stuff up in my brain on my own! Actually, my ability to do that did me well in college, when I took Western Civ and History of Western Music in the same semester, and surprised both profs by writing essays about stuff that wasn't taught in their respective courses. Straight A's in both, and the Civ prof requested I take more of his classes. I was the only student in decades that enjoyed his lectures!

Now, I think I said something about music...

From NPR.org...

Morning Edition, October 14, 2005 - One hundred years ago Saturday, classical music witnessed a sea change — quite literally. On Oct. 15, 1905, French composer Claude Debussy's symphonic portrait of the sea, called "La Mer," premiered in Paris.

The way Debussy captured the ocean's color, light and mood — using the orchestra as his paintbrush — gave composers new ways to think about writing orchestral music.

With "La Mer," Debussy ignored the old rules about combining textures and sounds in symphony orchestra, and created a whole new world of sonic possibilities. To this day, notes Washington Post critic Tim Page, even conductors are divided on how to approach the piece.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story...Id=4957580 has streaming audio of three different orchestras playing different movements.

Another one I love... writeup also from NPR.org (excerpted)...

Igor Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring"
with Thomas Kelly

...

Harvard University professor Thomas Kelly suggests that one of the reasons that the Paris premiere of "The Rite of Spring" created such a furor was that it shattered everyone's expectations. The evening's program began innocently with a performance of “Les Sylphides.” However, as the follow-up piece, “The Rite of Spring” turned out to be anything but spring-like. One of the dancers recalled that Vaslav Nijinsky's shocking choreography was physically unnatural to perform. "With every leap we landed heavily enough to jar every organ in us." The music itself was angular, dissonant and totally unpredictable. In the introduction, Stravinksy called for a bassoon to play higher in its range than anyone else had ever done. In fact, the instrument was virtually unrecognizable as a bassoon. When the curtain rose and the dancing began, there appeared a musical theme without a melody, only a loud, pulsating, dissonant chord with jarring, irregular accents. The audience responded to the ballet with such a din of hisses and catcalls that the performers could barely hear each other.

Backstage at the premiere, Nijinsky shouted at the dancers while Diaghilev tried to suppress a possible riot by flashing the house lights. Stravinsky himself fumed at the audience's response to his music. If nothing else, the ballet's premiere managed to instill in the audience the true spirit of the music. As Thomas Kelly states, "The pagans on-stage made pagans of the audience." Despite its inauspicious debut, Stravinsky's score for “The Rite of Spring” today stands as a magnificent musical masterpiece of the twentieth century.

Bolded part -- don't that sound like rock 'n roll?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story...Id=9041627 has the link to listen to it, and more discussion.

You'd think they were writing about the Rolling Stones.
Good stuff.

My favorite college American history prof assigned a lot of novels.. I thought myself terribly clever by taking the American Lit class with the same novels.. One Great Gatsby paper went to two classes. T.S. Eliot could even be handed into religion class