i heart bela bartok

First a personal message to Mike:

Since you are so crazy about music like
Bach's Sciliano and like the Flute - I'm
thinkin' that you are probably also fond
of Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune - which
frankly makes me want to p*ke. I have found
that Clair de Lune is one of those Pieces
that you either do or don't like - and often
there is no in between.

But I will say that I know that it is Extremely
Well Written and Absolutely Beautiful and since
I usually end up eating my Words I will most
likely be Playing it again - Sometime. : ]

Now I have had some exposure to other works
of Debussy - I think it's the Preludes and
I actually studied a couple of them not all
that long ago.

Unfortunately when I did a sweep of my music
- in order to define myself - I must have given
them away. I may want to buy them again but
here I'm going to talk about Bartok.
~~~

I believe that my attraction to Bartok's Piano
Music comes from my newly-found Love Affair with
The Abstract. Now Bartok certainly is not a full-on
Quirky Twentieth Composer to the extent that Others
are - but here is what I think:


Bartok - for me at least - is a Link or a Bridge
from the Masters such as Beethoven and Chopin - and
even Schumann and Schubert - to the Twentieth Century
Composers.


Looking through a Piano Book of mine today called
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY - A Repertory Of Piano Works
By Major Composers of Our Time - Selected and Edited
by Denes Agay - I saw names of Composers that I have
liked in the Past such as:

~Dmitri Kabalevsky

~Aram Khatchaturian

~Zoltan Kodaly

~Darius Milhaud

~Serge Prokofieff

~Maurice Ravel

~Dmitri Shostakovich

~Alexander Scriabin

and

~Igor Stravinsky
~~~

I need to be Honest here and say that I originally
studied some of the works of a few of these Composers
back in College - and I would like to talk about a couple
of them in particular - mainly Ravel and Scriabin -and I will
do so tomorrow.

But before I do - I am first going to say more about
Bela Bartok - in the Morning.