12 favourite symphonies

Others have been compiling lists of their most frequently played MP3s, something I can't provide. Instead, here is a list of my favourite symphonies, something I've been contemplating for several months. I know the absence of Mozart and Haydn from this list is inexcusable (and yes I do like them), but my tastes lie firmly in gushy Romanticism, and hell this is my journal. Here they are. Starting with the best:

1. Sibelius: Symphony No. 2 in D Major
   This has been my favourite piece of music since I was about 12. I would turn off all the lights and lie in the dark listening to it. It voyages through sunny hillsides and dark winter nights, progressing toward a majestic and haunting apotheosis, uncanny really.


2. Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5 in D Major
   Incredibly serene. During periods of my life subject to insomnia, I would play this at bedtime; as the final ethereal hush of strings gradually resolved, I would lose consciousness.
   
3. Brahms: Symphony No. 2 in D Major
   Clearly there's a pattern here. D Major is one of the sunniest keys, and this is one of my favourite feel-good pieces. The ending is sheer jubilation.
   
4. Dvorak: Symphony No. 9 in E minor, "From the New World"
   It's hard to choose from 7, 8 and 9, but this is an essential part of my personal history, the piece that introduced me to symphonic music. I received a recording from my brother when I was about 8, and the heroic theme of the fourth movement was one of the first tunes that ever got stuck in my head. Besides, the Adagio is a masterpiece.
   
5. Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2 in E minor
   Big orchestral sound, yum. The Adagio features one of the most poignant and unforgettable of all Romantic melodies.
   
6. Bruckner: Symphony No. 8 in C minor
   Okay, I love music the same as I like sex: long, passionate and slow. At the heart of this symphony is the Daddy of all Adagios, 25 minutes. Add the dramatic outer movements and we have 80 minutes of tempestuous lovemaking.
   
7. Rimsky-Korsakov: Scheherazade
   This is actually a symphonic suite, and features a solo violin representing the voice of Scheherazade. It tells the story of a king who married a virgin every day, sending the previous day's wife to be beheaded. Scheherazade persuaded him to let her live if she could tell a good enough story to keep him in suspense. She carried this on for one thousand and one nights, and in the end the king spared her. This is a masterpiece of descriptive music.
   
8. Schubert: Symphony No. 8 in C Major, the "Great"
   More feel-good music, this could have been the inspiration for the Energizer Bunny.
   
9. Mahler: Symphony No. 6
   Now for something completely different, a symphony of heroic proportions that ends in utter despair. But along the way, the slow movement takes us to a sublime mountain retreat.
   
10. Tchaikovsky: Manfred
    I like all six numbered symphonies, but the last three famous ones were overplayed when I was growing up. I first encountered Manfred as the ravishing, heart-wrenching title music of the BBC production of Anna Karenina, but didn't get to know and the entire composition until years later. This is another symphonic poem like Scheherazade.
    
11. Strauss: Ein Alpensinfonie
    One continuous movement relating a day in the life of a mountain, as a climber sets out at daybreak, reaching the top in time for a lightning storm, and returning safely home. It's brilliant.
    
12. Beethoven: Symphony No. 7 in A major
    I include Ludwig grudgingly. Like the Tchaikovsky symphonies, Beethoven's 5th, 6th and 9th were overplayed at my house. My parents weren't much interested in chamber or vocal music, so the symphonies got extremely tired. I discoverd No. 7 on my own. This has one of my favourite grand finales, those groaning basses under rising turbulence.

Well that took long enough. I'll have to post my favourite concertos another time.

Exploring beauty

Photo: Graffiti at an abandoned Canadian Tire store near Keele and Dundas, Toronto.

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"Women rate kindness, happiness, confidence, dignity and humour as powerful components of beauty, along with the more traditional attributes of physical appearance, body weight and shape."
~Joanne Richard, "The buzz on beauty" from the Toronto Sun on Canoe.com

"If we had only moonlight, shared, to remember, our storehouse would be unusually rich."
~Dorothy Freeman in a letter to her lover, naturalist Rachel Carson, 1961

"And so we come back to the word 'beauty'....Let's cling tenaciously to our conviction that this is the only reality worth our devotion."
~Tennessee Williams

"Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key."
~Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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The Toronto Sun article says women want to change the way beauty is defined, but is that possible? In the end, men tell them what's sexy: what body type, hair, eye and skin colour. Does happiness and humour really come across sexy? Gay men run into the same pressure to conform to a sexual ideal. Our lovers decide what's hot. It comes down to how the average man discriminates when given the choice of a big cock or an honest mind.

As artists we're concerned with the question of beauty. Maybe it's our job to redefine what's beautiful. But in our fascination with the visual, we keep reinforcing that beauty is a surface thing. How do we dig beneath? Literature and poetry go to a different level. Dare I say a more important level?

We live in a visual culture. For months I became absorbed in photography and ignored my writing. It's easier to make a clever image. I'm not saying it's easy to be a good photographer, but even bad images attract more response than good poems.

Nevertheless I'm pleased with the response to my posts lately. Knowing that someone else is reading—along for the ride—makes it possible to keep going, explore new provinces within mind. It's not easy to go alone.

Maybe loneliness is what it's all about. Of course it is. What am I saying? We're islands in a wide sea. We need to bridge the spaces, draw visitors to our lives.

It's one thing to write words that will appeal to people. It's another to write the truth. People rarely have an easy relationship with reality, tend to look the other way when someone tries to picture it.

So are we really concerned with finding beauty? A journalist is more concerned with truth, but the truth is relative, and no one would call the average newspaper story beautiful. Sometimes I have read things in newspapers that genuinely moved me. But those are not the stories that sell copies. It's the ones about who is bombing whom, who's lying and cheating, and which celebrity is sleeping with the other one's lover. Even here we are obsessed with a thin shadow of beauty. These are not beautiful people, and yet we idolize them. All it takes is the right boobs, biceps or chains of diamonds to transform a rogue into a star. Wealth always gets attention, too.

I am consumed with putting a few words together that will change the way people think. It's like exploring between layers of clouds, looking for answers to questions that people have been asking for millennia, but maybe we're asking the wrong questions. It all starts with driving, finding, digging, pursuing, putting your brush or pen to the page and excavating, finding the dull rock. Not a glint in its grain, and yet experience is the ore. We must stay in one place, indwelling, learning to taste and feel the texture of everything about it. We try ideas and see how they shape our lives for a while. Eventually we morph like nymphs, find a shred of truth and follow it to the next chapter, where we start indwelling something else.

We keep coming up against the face of things, but have to look beyond. Sooner or later we find a mirror that gives a fair reflection of ourselves, then we stop and learn everything we can before the surfaces shift and we lose our focus, lose sight of it once more.