Daily Music Feud: Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1
Jul 2nd, 2008 by Waffles
I am a fan of instrumental music. For as much as I like words, literature and poetry, there is something about the purity of a piece of instrumental music. It goes beyond other kinds of music, into the most undiluted form of abstraction. My favorite instrumental music is classical. When I listen, there is something fascinating in the fact that what I am listening to was written well over a century ago, and it’s still in existence today! Classical composers enjoy an almost immortality because of that.
When I was in my teens, I discovered Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto Number One. I think think the signature piece of that is the first movement. The french horns start it off, and the violins kick in, and then the piano just goes for the gold. It’s magnificent. Here, just try it. The video is from a Japanese orchestra, but this is the best quality piece I can find. To really get the full effect, you need to listen to it on CD or LP on a stereo turned ALL the way up.
In my melodramatic teenaged mind, this song embodied everything romantic in the world. I actually compiled an Instrumental Soundtrack of my Mind, and this was Track #1. At one point, I wrote out what each song on that list represented, and sent it to a friend of mine, but darn, I can’t even find the CD anymore, let alone the little bibliography that accompanied it.
Anyhow, Tchaikovsky is awesome, and this is my favorite piece of his. The power of the strings and the piano, all working together but doing totally different things is amazing. I’m sure if I had a musical background, I could use better words and descriptions, but I’m coming at this from a totally uninformed listener’s perspective.
It is a bit long, but please check it out.
Squee! This has actually been in my CD player the past couple days.
My music theory teacher at Northrop told us that if you really want to get a grip on what Romantic music essentially is, listen to a Tchaikovsky piano concerto.
And I completely understand the feeling of a connection to the past. It’s the reason weaklings linger in religion; witness the Catholic Church’s obsession with “perpetuity”, for example. And Richard Dawkins had an essay in which he related the story of a priest who was elevated to near-orgasmic heights at his laying-on-of-hands ceremony, which is supposed to extend back in a hierarchical chain to Peter.
That’s why art and the humanities are so important: They give us that link to the past, but without the parasitic power structures that want to attach themselves to it. Listening to, or playing, classical music really is an unchaining of the (metaphorical!) soul in that sense.