Music Notes

An hour last night spent with a disc of mazurkas from the Complete Chopin and the first copy of my subscription to Gramophone provided much needed respite from the horrors of an episode I'd like to but will never forget.
It would not be pleasant to go into too many details here, where I prefer to concentrate mainly on finer things, but it does involve a cat in the house and taking a lot of bedclothes to the laundry.
Gramophone doesn't have the CD glued to its front like the BBC Music Magazine, I think there are downloads, but more than compensates for that with the greater depth of its writing. Not as academic as I remember it some decades ago but a couple of grades up from the sometimes trite BBC product or the irreverent padding that I pass off as reviews here.
Initial impressions of Chopin very much favour the solo piano music that most of us will know him best by. The orchestral parts, post-Beethoven like all C19th composers can be characterized by the way they developed from his sound, are a bit too 'Romantic' but on the piano alone, he is an engaging companion.
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It's years since Music labels overtook Poems at the top of the index to this website and why wouldn't it. Originally intended to be about my poems, poetry and then literature and books in a wider sense, it has become obvious that music is more important or, simply, better. There is a way in which words are more limiting and escape from the hold of their associations, meanings and structures ever more difficult while music, of course, flies clear of language and one is more often in awe of those born with the innate talent to do it well.
It is nearly forty years since I introduced myself at a poetry meeting by saying I was a poet because it was easier than writing novels. That remains true now that I've actually finished a coherent 50 thousand word novel and realized the effort that was required to make a first draft of a feeble, cliche-ridden story of no literary merit compared to the delinquent discipline of lolling about putting together a few lines trying to avoid all the traps and claiming to be a creative artist.
Which is not to say one doesn't admire the greatest poets almost as much as any musician or proper writer. I hope that anybody within easy travelling distance of Portsmouth will come and see what goes on at Portsmouth Poetry Society next Wednesday when the subject under discussion will be Seamus Heaney. Since his death, I no longer know who is the greatest living poet in the language but during his lifetime there was nobody else whose language came so naturally with its own extra vitality.
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Meanwhile, it's unlikely that anybody is going to be able to explain to me the significance of the 50th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper., much coverage though it is getting. She's Leaving Home, yes, A Day in the Life. But otherwise, it's not the best album ever made, it's nowhere near the best album made by The Beatles. I can only assume that a few opinion makers once saw it listed in Rolling Stone as no.1 and thus assumed that was the right answer. I Wanna Hold Your Hand is better on its own than that whole album.