HT to
On an Overgrown Path for putting in a good word about McCabe's box set of the Haydn piano sonatas
I've been a Haydn fan for at least thirty years. Paradoxically, perhaps, I started to get into Thelonious Monk around the same time I started to get into Haydn. I don't feel there's any tension between the two, both were considered idiosyncratic in good ways by their contemporary admirers. Neither composer was considered to have "chops of death" as pianists but that didn't stop them from composing music that has stood the test of time in their respective fields.
Give me Haydn's monothematic sonata forms and continuous variation movements with Thelonious Monk's musical vocbulary and, I submit to you dear readers, that that is a path to a viable musical future. Notice I said "a" path, not "the" path. The convergence of Haydn with Monk is, in a nutshell, the kind of musical convergence I've been striving to cultivate all my life, even though they were both pianists and I am but a lowly guitarist. Heh, the convergence even works in the sense that Haydn was steeped in a Catholic liturgical culture and Monk played music in Pentecostal settings. So there's that convergence, too, and I suppose that makes a kind of personal sense to me, too, because I grew up Pentecostal and ended up Anglican but have had no desire to reject the best music I heard in my Pentecostal years. J.S. Bach and Blind Willie Johnson all the way.
