Well, it's morning now and I slept over my disappointment, hoping that it wouldn't be so bad the next morning....Sorry... It's just as bad if not worse... I can only repeat my earlier statement: Three hours of total boredom.
It is interesting that there seems to be a relationship between the quality of modern music and its length. The more rhythmically and melodically boring a composition is, the longer and louder it gets.
In the early days of recording, when a 78 record could only accommodate 3 minutes of play, the most wonderful music was written. (I won't even name any of them, because you know them all... there was Cole Porter, Gershwin, Miller, and on and on... beautiful, melodic music... all, due to the technical limitations of recording carriers, limited to three minutes. Nowadays, compositions may last an hour or more... and they do... of if not nothing, certainly of very little.
So what else was there? A very poor imitation of Winston Churchill, poorly choreographed dance numbers and sloppily rehearsed dancers...
This was a very successful Olympic. Introduced by an imaginative and funny Opening Ceremony, then well organized athletic events in beautiful settings... Absolutely one of the very best that I have ever seen...
Why oh why was it then concluded with such a travesty of mediocrity?
As Christin put it so succinctly: "Every Minute was a wasted Hour."
Bertstravels
2 comments:
Well, unlike you, I listened to the reports of what the closing ceremonies were going to be so I knew to avoid it all together. They said it was going to be party concert featuring British music stars from the sixties onward. I knew it was going to be rock concert and I am not a fan of listening to a concert over my television speakers so I begged off. Although, I did catch a bit of Roger Daltry singing and frankly he could teach a thing or two to Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney of what an aging singer should sound like - or should I say, if you can't sing anymore, you should shut the hell up. Anyway, Roger can still carry it off.
So I didn't bother and if you watched it expecting something other than what they reported it was going to be - SUCKER!!!!! Maybe the austrian reporting didn't say; I should take that into account.
On another note - since when does the length of a piece of music dictate its worth? I recall a few epic classical pieces that went a tad past the three minute mark. I can only imagine how many repetitions of "Pennsylvania six five thousand" they WOULD have included in that jazz piece of drek if they could have recorded it for 10 minutes more.
"Jazz piece of dreck?" Pennsylvania 6 - 5000??? How dare you !!!!!
Dreck is what I heard during the closing ceremonies.
They may have told what this was going to be all about, and I didn't listen. I did kind of wonder when I saw all these elderly gentlemen from Sting, Rolling Stones and other bands of the 60s and 70s... Mind you, that's not to say that talent stops at a particular age. Beethoven wasn't a youngster when he composed the 9th...
Actually I never said that the duration of a piece determines its worth. I did say that now that you can record for hours on end, a lot of rubbish goes on and on and on....
Anyway, it's much better to talk about how great the Olympics 2012 were than ranting about how terrible (to my ears) the closing cerems were...
So there... bring on the World Cup of Soccer, the World Cup of skiing, so that we may survive until 2016 and Rio .......
Bertstravels....
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