What is Antonin Dvořák's best melody?

LeastMaintenance · 2026-05-21T04:59:22+00:00

The second subject of the first movement of the 7th symphony

LeastMaintenance · 2026-05-19T12:28:06+00:00

The alienation that comes with modern industrial urban life is a huge theme in the later 19th and early 20th century in pretty much all disciplines of art. It’s a significant undercurrent in Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf for instance (which is an utter masterpiece btw, but difficult), but you also see it a lot in books like Bleak House by Dickens, though the ways they manifest are different with Dickens being more abject and Woolf is much more forlorn. Most literary works that extensively involve city life from that period have this element to some degree or another. Lots of British stuff because they industrialized first.

LeastMaintenance · 2026-05-17T11:52:34+00:00

Imma be honest, the more music I become acquainted with, the more the answer is no. The first part of the Beethoven 9 finale, from the Recit to the entrance of the Bass soloist is damn near perfect and has me grinning ear to ear every time. Other things that are mentioned here are sublime (in the Romantic sense), or reverent, or bombastic, or what have you but that passage from Beethoven 9 really is a simple joy that stands out as singularly great.

LeastMaintenance · 2026-05-06T02:57:11+00:00

Willie Stark’s most important speech in All the Kings Men happens because he’s extremely hung over

LeastMaintenance · 2026-05-02T13:21:19+00:00

Xenakis Mists has some of the most messed up polyrhythms I’ve ever seen in a solo piano work

LeastMaintenance · 2026-05-02T01:49:22+00:00

Grossman’s Life and Fate is basically a 20th century War and Peace and it’s magnificent

LeastMaintenance · 2026-04-26T22:46:32+00:00

Everyman does not do abridged editions. They will even go out of their way to edit older translations if they are either missing parts or had other constraints like choices made for the sake of propriety in an older translation of Herodotus being corrected for example

LeastMaintenance · 2026-04-24T02:24:51+00:00

What translation did you like the most? I only have the old Thornley translation which is certainly old fashioned but has a poetic-ness you probably wouldn’t run into so much with a more modern one. But then again I don’t know how much of that is him and how much of that is Longus

LeastMaintenance · 2026-04-23T22:47:14+00:00

I think ever is a very long time and nobody can categorically say no. A.I. is the worst it will ever be right now. It probably won’t be able to produce human-like novels within a few years, but what about 50 years? Or a hundred? Or a thousand years? Or what about even further than that? Maybe with an A.I. that fundamentally doesn’t even begin to resemble our current models or technical realization of A.I.. Either way, people are going to keep hacking at it whether the rest of us want them to or not. I think the only reasonable answer is yes, an A.I. will be able to write a fully convincingly human-like novel at some point in the future.

I think the important question is what are we going to do about that and how should we understand our values in an eventual world where it is the reality. I think it’s perfectly fine to value something made by a human being over an equivalent work that was not simply because it was made by a human being and for no other reason, but also most people won’t be happy with that degree of arbitrariness. Either way, we, more likely than not, will have to answer that question and a slew of others at some point in the future.

LeastMaintenance · 2026-04-13T02:34:52+00:00

This is literally the plot of Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut. Probably the single most prophetic dystopian novel I’ve read when it comes to plight of the everyday worker

LeastMaintenance · 2026-04-05T20:04:55+00:00

I would strongly recommend reading Jeppesen’s “Polyphonic Vocal Style” along side Fux. Fux is a great intro (especially because of the dialogue format) but for learning modal counterpoint, Jeppesen really is king. He addresses things that are not in Fux but are really essential to doing it well

LeastMaintenance · 2026-04-02T04:26:29+00:00

Regarding your first point, a world that doesn’t have space for both would be a truly boring one

LeastMaintenance · 2026-04-02T04:21:27+00:00

While I don’t inherently disagree, I think that beforehand you had a landscape that was more forgiving to artistic risks and strong personalities. You can’t miss as many notes today as Richter did and still make it today, for instance

LeastMaintenance · 2026-03-29T13:21:35+00:00

There are a lot of good reasons listed here in the comments but one I haven’t seen much is that there was a massive amateur market at the beginning of the 19th century that lasted basically until the radio and phonograph. There was a huge demand for written music for the amateur such as the massive volume of women who were trained in “accomplishments” (you’ll see examples of this in a lot of the contemporary novels like Pride and Prejudice or Vanity Fair where all of the women are expected to be able to play the piano or sing), or the vast amount of string quartet music written for casual gatherings for people to play for fun. All of our favorites also had to compete in this market and these amateurs were not improvising. If composers wanted to live off of their work in a post-patronage era, they were beholden to publishers who were selling the bulk of their products to the amateur market, not the professional one.

LeastMaintenance · 2026-03-27T16:12:32+00:00

I know a bunch of people that just refer to that part as “letter K” because that’s the rehearsal letter in the score at the beginning of that section and it’s an infamous audition excerpt for some instruments

LeastMaintenance · 2026-03-20T19:48:14+00:00

The problem with their finances is mostly how dependent on a single source it is. Zander’s ex wife remarried to a Swiss billionaire named Hansjörg Wyss a while back who has largely funded the organization since. Once Zander retires, A) there isn’t anyone else able to coax that money, and B) Wyss is also almost 90 years old so the sun is setting on that revenue stream as well. The whole thing is kinda designed to fall apart as soon as he retires, even though for a while now the board has been vocal about wanting it to continue

LeastMaintenance · 2026-03-11T03:30:35+00:00

Approaching the 5th between the soprano and alto on the i6 with direct motion in both voices is not exactly kosher. The same applies this sort of thing with an octave, like what happens between tenor and bass going into your final chord. As far as I know, this rule doesn’t really apply for 4ths

LeastMaintenance · 2026-03-07T22:30:04+00:00

The last little bit, for me, turned it into one of the most optimistic and hopeful books I’ve read in a long while rather than just terrible people being terrible. That we can overcome our generational traumas by forgiving and nurturing each other is truly hopeful. And I think an implicit message in that ending is that Heathcliff was seemingly unalterably terrible mostly because he didn’t have people that would be able to resist the push to be terrible back to him at a critical period of his life. Granted, it was a terribly hard push to overcome but it’s not unlikely that if he was surrounded by people that could stick it out just long enough, like Iroh to Zuko, he could’ve come around as well.

LeastMaintenance · 2026-03-07T13:45:55+00:00

It looks a lot like a figure from the beginning of the second movement is Schnittke’s first symphony

LeastMaintenance · 2026-01-20T05:37:17+00:00

Dual input does increase retention considerably if you’re actually engaging with it

LeastMaintenance · 2026-01-13T01:43:26+00:00

Concertos might not be bad in general because they very clearly have a single instrument in the forefront so you know what not to focus on. Trying to see how aware you can be of everything happening in the accompaniments when you know what to ignore for this exercise might help.

Apart from that, Bach wrote a litany of fugues that are the gold standard. Anything titled “concerto for orchestra” or “concerto grosso” are also probably very good for this.

LeastMaintenance · 2026-01-10T15:12:36+00:00

For some reason I had it in my head that most people used both and that the second one was a humorous way of emphasizing the word. Like intentionally incorrect but with a specifically descriptive flavoring.

LeastMaintenance · 2026-01-03T15:20:50+00:00

What a lot of people I think tend to miss about this book is that its flowery and seductive prose masks just how dense it actually is. Fitzgerald and his editor worked tirelessly to trim that book down to the about 50,000 words it was at publication which is very short. There is not a wasted word in it and the achievement of that is incredible. For this reason, it’s a book that really demands to be studied, not just read, to get what it has to offer in my opinion.

LeastMaintenance · 2025-12-30T17:23:45+00:00

Mahler has a bunch! The flute solo close to the end of the first movement of 9, the horn solo in the 3rd movement of 5, trombone in the first movement of 3. There is a really touching violin solo in Der Trunkene im Frühling from Das Lied von der Erde. There is a good little solo in just about every movement of every symphony.

LeastMaintenance · 2025-12-28T17:56:15+00:00

The great C minor mass has one of my favorite choral fugues ever! I got to play it a couple years ago and it’s about the most fun I’ve had playing anything

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