don’t fuck with stravinsky

No, seriously, don’t fuck with Stravinsky.  I mean, just look at him.  He’ll cut you.

I just got in from seeing and hearing the UVic Orchestra hurl themselves through Stravinskys’ Firebird and Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony.  Both were fantastic.  I think I prefer Stravinsky to Pyotr Ilyich, but it’s a near thing.  I did like, however, the positively sepulchral final movement of the Tchaikovsky.  More large scale works need traps like that.

On the subject of fantastic music, the results of “Best Music You Heard Today” project are in for the basement of the UVic Music Department.  They are as follows:
54 Total Pieces:
37% classical
28% rock
9% indie
5% jazz
5% soul
5% ambience
3% pop
3% folk
1% electro
(Please note that my genres are very, very, very broad.)

The most listed musician was Bach, followed by a tie for second place:  The Shaggs, Broken Social Scene, and Stravinsky.  (see?  Don’t fuck with Stravinsky)  Even more interestingly, a single person managed to skew the results towards rock and indie by about ten percent.  This is, of course, the Music Department, so these results are not surprising…but I’d be interested in seeing what I’d get if I wrote down “Favorite Music” instead of “Best Music”.  Maybe I’ll do that next year.  Or maybe do both at once.
The original plan was to contrast the Music Department answers with the answers from, say,  the Computer Science Building.  However, the CSC students have only managed to put down something like six items.  I can tell you, however, that there’s nothing even remotely classical about those six items.  This is not a surprising piece of data, but I feel it is an important one.

I would turn this into my post on music and memetics, but this is long as is.  Soon, I promise.