The Bukowski/classical music link (1 Viewer)

I'm curious-- how many people here either first came to love classical music through reading Bukowski, or greatly expanded and deepened their understanding and enjoyment of said music through encountering his work?

I'm in the latter group. I could never thank Hank enough for the happily-non-stuffy schooling that he gave me in this incredible music across various eras and composers! From early childhood, I loved both reading and music, but Buk brought them together in ways which still reverberate in my life today.

On the literary front, I ordered three Bukowski books last night (though it's not at all my first time around with two of them!): Ham on Rye, which is my fave Bukowski work, period, Women (I've read much, if not most, of it in an anthology but decided to finally buy the book), and You Get So Alone At Times That It Finally Makes Sense (never read it, except for certain poems here and there, but can't wait to dig into it!).

On the musical front, two days ago, I ordered a mammoth classical CD/DVD set from my favorite living pianist, Maurizio Pollini. (My wallet will definitely need some time to recover from these literary and musical acquisitions!)

Bukowski and classical music-- as the years and decades pass, the more that I read and listen, the more I love 'em! :)

For anyone who is curious, here's a short video about the Pollini box set:

 
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Personally speaking, I've liked it ever since I was an infant, but never really had any in-depth knowledge of it. For instance, when I was being a little shit or refusing to sleep, my parents put it on the radio and it would calm me down.
I enjoy reading Buk's work in general, but also use it as a pointer to the good classical music.

Hope that makes sense because I just woke up. :p
 
I'm sure if u do some sniffing around you can find Buk's fav classical music in some sort of list. I've seen it but I'm too lazy to do the search.
 
Personally speaking, I've liked it ever since I was an infant, but never really had any in-depth knowledge of it. For instance, when I was being a little shit or refusing to sleep, my parents put it on the radio and it would calm me down.
Wow, it's very cool that you liked classical music from infancy!! Sadly, I wasn't raised in a household where I was exposed to it from an early age. My parents were rock, soul, and country fans, and I did love some of each of those genres. it wasn't until my adolescence that I even began to give classical a chance, and it wasn't until my early twenties that I came to deeply love it as an art form.

Growing up in a small town in the Deep South (U.S.), I painfully remember that boys were relentlessly ridiculed (at least, I was) for liking anything that the "other guys" didn't like, especially things that were considered "soft"-- and, partially for that reason, I avoided classical music, altogether, for too many years. Finally, when I was 13 or 14 years old, my Wagner-loving grandfather (who hailed from another part of the country, far away) insisted, that I sit down with him and watch the entire "Ring cycle" of Wagner's operas. At first, I vocally resisted, but very soon, I was taken it by this strange new artistic world, riveted and transfixed. That was the opening of a crack in a musical door, for me, for which I will always be grateful to my grandfather. Like you, I also use Buk to point me to the good stuff musically as well!
 
Pollini box set
Wow, that must be the most affordable Deutsche Grammophon box set I've ever seen at $150. I remember being a broke kid at the Tower classical store on Sunset, looking at the $600 price tag on a Deutsche Grammophon complete Mozart box and wondering if I could fit it down my pants and still be able to walk out with it.

I couldn't, as it turned out.

And I see Deutsche Grammophon has a new Mozart box that you can get for $400, so maybe the high prices are just for the "stars." Or because there are 4 times more CDs in the Mozart box...
 
Wow, it's very cool that you liked classical music from infancy!! Sadly, I wasn't raised in a household where I was exposed to it from an early age. My parents were rock, soul, and country fans, and I did love some of each of those genres. it wasn't until my adolescence that I even began to give classical a chance, and it wasn't until my early twenties that I came to deeply love it as an art form.

Unlucky for the parents, they had to put up with it even though they'd rather listen to whatever pop or rock station was playing what. haha
I'm in my teens now and somewhat like you in the respect that I've only started to go in search of composers, their stories, different pieces, yaddayaddayadda...and begun to appreciate it more.

welcome to the forum :)
 
And I see Deutsche Grammophon has a new Mozart box that you can get for $400, so maybe the high prices are just for the "stars." Or because there are 4 times more CDs in the Mozart box...

I´ll bet a box of classical music with a famous symphony orchestra is more expensive than one with a lesser known symphony orchestra. Of course, even boxes with famous symphony orchestras gets on sale, but that's a different story.
 
Wow, that must be the most affordable Deutsche Grammophon box set I've ever seen at $150.
Actually, mjp, nowadays, Deutsche Grammophone and other noted classical labels have many great box sets available for less than $150 (even from classical mega-stars such as Karajan)! Overall, as a '70s-80s "old-school" music lover, I can't help but see the all-but-utter-collapse of the record/CD business as a sad thing, but one of the silver linings in that collapse is that so many great and enormous CD box sets (especially classical ones!) are now available at ridiculously low prices!

Just last month, I was able to snag a 101-CD Warner Classics Herbert von Karajan set for $123 (with a sales discount, yes, but not a very large one-- the set was already cheap)! While the getting is good, there are many similarly priced sets that I hope to buy. Alas, I missed out on a huge Toscanini CD set of his complete albums for RCA... It had been selling for less than $200, but now that it's out of print, it's going for anywhere from $500 to $1,000-- far too rich for my blood (and my budget)!!
 
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On the musical front, two days ago, I ordered a mammoth classical CD/DVD set from my favorite living pianist, Maurizio Pollini. (My wallet will definitely need some time to recover from these literary and musical acquisitions!)
Pollini is a great artist; I came to know him through his recordings of Chopin. I actually met him once - my then-girlfriend and I waited backstage for autographs back in the 90s. He was a very pleasant man, with a very heavy Italian accent. He signed my CD booklet for his recording of the Chopin Preludes with a Sharpie.

I grew up listening to classical music. For what it's worth, one of the many reasons I enjoyed it was because it was not what the other kids listened to. I found most "popular" music to be idiotic, though I did broaden my musical listening substantially when I turned about 15. Prior to that, I only listened to classical music.

As to Bukowki and classical music, Hank's writing turned me onto Charles Ives - I'd never before heard of him until I read Bukowski.
 
AB, thanks for the reply! It's great that you were actually able to meet Pollini! I, too, first heard him through his Chopin recordings-- the Etudes, and then, the Preludes. That was around 1995-96 (university days), when I really, seriously, began to listen to classical music in more than a momentary way. To this day though, even after hearing so many other classical performances (of Chopin, and of countless other composers), both of those albums are still in my top ten classical recordings of all time.

There is a quality to Pollini's artistry that, at its best (to me, of course), is in the realm of the near-miraculous-- the spiritual. I have heard, more than a few times, from both professional music critics and everyday classical listeners (and I'm definitely in the latter camp), that Pollini's playing is "cold" and "mechanical," lacking in personal expression and emotion. However, I'm not ashamed to say, with the possible exception of Vladimir Horowitz, no classical performer has moved me to tears (and awe) quite as much as Pollini-- and the two obviously have such different approaches to music, but I dearly love them both!

I wish that I had grown up being exposed to classical music, but it just wasn't on my parents' radar. They did love many genres of popular music, so I came to a love of many different styles of music much earlier than other children whom I knew. (For example, when I was ten years old in 1983, I didn't know anyone else of my age who also loved Alice Cooper or early Jethro Tull!) It wasn't until my teenage years, though, that I even began to be open to giving classical music a chance. The loss was definitely mine! I'm so glad that that finally changed, in 1987, when I watched Wagner's entire "Ring" cycle, with my grandfather, on videotape! At first, I was reluctant, but within thirty minutes or so, I had become a convert (first, only to Wagner, but in time, to many, many other composers)!

Bukowski's writing played a part in introducing me to the wonderful music of Haydn, when I was a young man. You mentioned that Buk introduced you to the music of Ives. I'm still not very familiar with him. Are there any particular pieces and/or recordings that you would recommend to a novice?
 
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My pleasure, buklassical! Nice to run into another fan of classical music out in the wild!

Regarding Pollini, it certainly seems incongruous to me that a performer described as "cold" or "mechanical" would achieve much of his fame through the works of Chopin - a Romantic composer. Romantic music is generally defined as being devoted to the emotional and expressive aspects of music above all else. Personally, I find Pollini to be a wonderfully expressive player - if I didn't, then I wouldn't listen to him. Expressiveness and emotion are the two primary things I look for in a classical soloist.

I suppose that one has to be cautious of critics. If we all paid strict adherence to the opinion of literary critics, I'd imagine there'd be a lot fewer of us on a forum dedicated to Charles Bukowski, who seldom seemed to fare well with mainstream critics.

Wagner was one of my earliest classical favorites, too (though Beethoven was definitely the first). That said, the 18½ hours of the Ring cycle would almost certainly wear me down - like Bukowski, when it comes to Wagner I tend to prefer the "non-singing parts".

As to Charles Ives, I'll admit that I never really got into his music on any meaningful level. To my ears, his music is a bit too "20th century" - by that, I mean atonal and dissonant. I've listened to my share of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Hindemith, et al, but for the most part, their kind of atonal music doesn't fall easy upon my ears - here's a YouTube link to an Ives piano sonata that may illustrate my point a bit.
 

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