Sonic Asymmetry

Carl Orff: “Carmina Burana”

カールオルフ  –  「カーミナ・ブラーナ」

TIME COMMITMENT: 62 minutes

Whenever staged these days, this hellish, galvanizing riot of athletic singing is re-lived as a jostling cauldron of neo-medievalism.  But it cannot escape the cross-textual appeal it once held for authoritarian-minded listeners.  Escalading the walls of blistering cacophony, this choral mastodon of gargantuan proportions has carried its relevance well beyond the philharmonic.  Völkischer Beobachter, NSDAP’s mouthpiece, tainted the opera’s legacy by praising its “disciplined” approach (more on this controversy in the link below).  But much of its musical bequest remains apolitical.  French ‘zeuhl’ music is often said to be the love child of “Carmina Burana” and John Coltrane’s spiritual period.

MUSIC

INFO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmina_Burana_(Orff)

on the pseudo-historical controversy, read here:

A REFLECTION

My Soul.  Why should the imagination of a man

Long past his prime remember things that are

Emblematical of love and war?

Think of ancestral night that can,

If but imagination scorn the earth

And intellect its wandering

To this and that and t’other thing,

Deliver from the crime of death and birth.

William Butler Yeats: “Dialogue of self and soul”