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Cole Parker

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Cole Parker last won the day on March 13

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  1. I think we want as many visitors to the site as possible, and always have thought this was the main reason for serialization. I also applaud the fact that this is a free service to readers. Introducing a scheme to allow them to read ahead for money doesn't sit well with me. Obviously, some people couldn't afford to do that as easily as others, and that could cause problems. Too, why couldn't someone pay to read ahead, then mention what's coming in the forum, ruining the suprises and drama others would get reading the chapters as they were intended to be read? The way the site was designed works, and is still consistent with how Mike wanted it run. I'd say, don't mess with a good thing. C
  2. Responding to Altimexis: Richard Dreyfus played the second movement to his music appreciation class in the movie, Mr. Holland's Opus. It was just after his character had learned his son was deaf, so it had particular meaning to him. I love that piece. I love all of Beethoven's music, as well as music by Tchaikovsky, Greig and Rachmaninov. Although Bach's music is more mechanical and less emotional, I enjoy it nevertheless. He was, after all, a Baroque composer, as opposed to the Classical and Romantic composers that followed him. Beyond a doubt, Mozart was a genius and very prolific, but I find his music to be a bit formulaic. If you like Debussy, another great French composer worth mentioning is Saint-Saƫns. Gustav Mahler is another composer whose music has received more attention in recent years. : Funny, but I have the same reaction to composers that you do. Some Bach is wonderful, but muc of it I can only take a few minutes of. But no one else has ever come close to writing music like he did. It's favorite trick for composition instructors in colleges to assign students to write a short piece that sounds like Bach. They come back frustrated like hell. It sounds easy, they say, but they can't do it. I saw that Holland movie, but it was way too long ago for me to remember that he'd played that piece. It is a reamrkable piece. Try humming the melody of it and you'll see just how elementary it is. I love all the composers you mentioned, and even more. Mahler was considered almost unlistenable when I was young. Now, his music is in the standard repertoire. Tastes change and develop with time. Mahler was a genius. Long-winded, but a genious. I tend to favor the Romantic composers. Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F is a particular favorite of mine, but it's generally played only in pops concerts, whereas it's a true classical piece. Leonard Bernstein wrote some symphonies that I'm not all that fond of, but his musicals, particularly West Side Story, are memorable. Philip Glass is worthy of mention as a great 20th century composer, but his music treads a fine line between minimalist and monotonous. Perfect description of Glass's music. Minimalistic music drives me nuts, and I turn it off quickly. It's awful to my ear. Same thing over and over, chaning maybe one note in a chord now and then. I'm glad that phase didn't last long. There are wonderful composer working today. You have to mention John Williams, although I always say I like his movie scores better than his concert music. The music of the 50's was before my time, although I do have an Essential E lvis album in my collection. I didn't care for him or understand people's obsession with him, but he did perform some memorable songs such as Love Me Tender. I have all of the Beatle's albums in high-res audio. The originals have some of the worst stereo mixing possible, with the voices coming from one speaker and the instruments from the other. Imagine that - playing guitars on the left side and singing on the right? The recent remasters are much better. I'm not sure how I feel about the use of AI to recreate John Lennon's voice from an original recording though. The use of AI is a very slippery slope. I was in high school when Elvis hit the airwaves. Yes, he did have some beautiful ballads. But there were several male singers with great voices back then. I think Elvis became the big star he was for the personna he played more than his actual singing. So, yeah, I have very broad musical tastes and have spent more money than I care to think about purchasing enough high-res downloads to listen continuously for nearly half a year. Even the best streaming services don't come close. At least I'm not as crazy as the fanatics who scour record stores and the internet and spend $500 on original pristine copies in vinyl. With narrower tastes, think of how much money you've saved, Cole. I didn't actually save it. I have well over 200 CDs of classical work, composers from John Adams to Richard Wagner. Just bought different ones from the ones you bought. With the technical changes in my lifetime, I've gone from records to tapes to CDs, often buying stuff I have in other media. Annoying. Perhaps someday I'll be able to download a French horn duet by Freddy and James. I'd hope so, except they're fictional. C
  3. Beethoven's 7th is an amazing piece. It truly shows the man's greatness. The second movent is one of the few pieces in the genre that is all rhythm with basically no melody. How could he do that and still make the movement hypnotizing? Astounding. C
  4. Any author can do this now if he wants, completely outside the scope of a website. I personally enjoy the feedback of readers, either emails or forum coments. Once the story is in book form, my understanding is that feedback is negligible or completely absent. I don't know the why of the serialization of stories with a day or two or a week or more between chapter postings. Ever since I started reading and writing online, this has been the way story sites have operated. I too would rather have the entire story available to read at my own pace. Is it possible it was done as it is now because many authors posted a chapter as it was written, and there was a pause then while the next chapter was being written? I think that was sometimes the case. If the site does get some sort of remuneration from the number of hits it generates, that would be a reason to do it this way as well, but I haven't seen that. I know a writer who has used Amazon and now has three books self-published. As of now, there has been zero feedback from any purchaser and only very modest sales. Talk about a moitivation killer! C
  5. I've always regretted my lack of appreciation for popular music. Like tomatoes. Growing up, I hated raw tomatoes. Yet I saw everyone else loving them, and realized I was the one missing out. I would have liked to enjoy them. I couldn't. Everyone liked the popular music of the age, but when you've grown up listening to Wagner, Brahms, Beethoven, Dvorak, Rachmaninov and the like, I just didn't get it. It's funny, but if I go back and listen to the popular music of the 50's now, I find it quite tuneful; nothing like the pop music of a few years ago and today. I do realize I'm limited by what I'm not fond of. But what can you do? Trying to force yourself to like something you don't doesn't work. I do like the Gershwin piece. His Rhapsody in Blue is just one of the classical pieces he wrote, combining classical and jazz styles, and they all are good. I think it's the underlying classical form they're written in that make them approachable to me. Most jazz, though, I simply don't get. Too free-form for me, I think. I look for a melody line and it's usually not there. But again, I'm the one missing out. The more things you like, the richer your life is. C
  6. My prejudices, sure. They're mine, and I take full ownership of them. I don't like cooked carrots, either. We all have our likes and dislikes, and people who don't share our specific ones wonder what's wrong with us. C
  7. And my knowledge of popular music is, I'm sure, much less than yours of the classical genre. I was in high school when the Beetles became a smash in the country. I never could understand why. C
  8. Steve, You've probably got the wrong time frame on when the $75 was listed. Yes, today, and even in the 1990s, major orchestra players made more than that. But there was an earlier time when that was good money indeed, especially for women. You've never heard of Dennis Brain? Or Barry Tuckwell? Odd. Herman Baumann would be less of surprise. There aren't a huge number of notable horn soloists, but there are a few now and were a few back then. There are many concertos written for piano and violin, fewer for cello. Fewer still for horn. But you'd be amazed at how many there are. Here's a list of horn concertos by well-known composers. It leaves out concertos by other, lesser-known composers; that list is even longer: Bach, 1, Quantz, 4, Telemann, 6, Vivaldi, 2, Danzi, 1, Michael Haydn, 2, Joseph Haydn, 4, L. Mozart, 1, W.A.Mozart, 4, Bellini, 1, Franz Strauss, 1, Gliere, 1, Hindemith, 1, Jacob, 1, R Strauss 2. C
  9. Sounds suspiciously like a religious element. C
  10. Throw in some time travel and you'll have a winner.
  11. I see that grin your avatar is wearing, and can't read what you wrote here without thinking a similar grin was on your face when you wrote it.
  12. Lovely! We've missed these! C
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