Dancing to Liszt's Transcendental Etudes

[cherub_rocker1979]

Check this out:

https://www.abt.org/education/archive/ballets/transcendental_etudes.html

https://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1083/is_n11_v69/ai_17491546

[stevie]

liszt's etudes are often about nothing other than raw savage rape

does this ballet deliver? i doubt it

[g_s_223]

Hmmm, I dislike the title more than the concept. Stick to pure French, or pure English (Transcendental Studies). What we have is Frenglish, our equivalent of Franglais.

[cherub_rocker1979]

Hmmm, I dislike the title more than the concept. Stick to pure French, or pure English (Transcendental Studies). What we have is Frenglish, our equivalent of Franglais.

Don't you know that in the English language we borrow all kinds of words from other languages, like oeuvre, deja vu, tempo, piano, etudes, cliche, etc.

[ahinton]

Don't you know that in the English language we borrow all kinds of words from other languages, like oeuvre, deja vu, tempo, piano, etudes, cliche, etc.

This is very true. Remember the old chestnut that runs something like "the English once went out to colonise certain parts of the world, but the English language has gone out determined to colonise every square inch of it"; indeed, I have heard Catalans speak of the inevitable creeping spread of English language usage as "the English cancer" (although now that English has replaced Spanish as the first foreign language taught in Spanish Catalan schools, that seems a bit like accepting cancer as inevitable - and, given the high quality of state healthcare in that area, this apparent complacency might seem understandable).

What's so nice about this (the fact, not the Catalan analogy, of course) is that, while the English language continues its zealous missionary takeover, the English themselves have openly and shamelessly raped and pillaged whatever other languages they choose whenever they choose for their own purposes - hence the passing into common English parlance (there's a case in point that just slipped out!) of certain foreign words such as those that "cherub_rocker" mentions. It was once said, for example, that the French "le weekend" was a case of England's southern neighbours getting their own back, but it is rather more likely that it was the French slavishly accepting that steamrollering English example of taking from anyone else's language whatever might just happen to seem convenient at the time.

We would, however, be doing the French a gross disservice were we to seek to undermine their understanding in such matters; de la Rochefoucauld was long ago credited as saying (in French, of course) that "language was given to Man to conceal his thoughts". Surely there is no finer language than English within which to express multiplicities of meaning and with which to be evasive while at the same time being unequivocal; for example, as I once felt obliged to say to someone (and it would have sounded far less effective, I think, in any other language), "you simply cannot necessarily even trust ××× to be economical with the truth". My own expansion of de la Rochefoucauld's statement, however (and which hopefully resonates more in a music-oriented forum such as this one), is "musical language was given to Man to conceal the thoughts that he could not even manage to conceal by means of the most adroit use of English"; infinitely clumsier, of course, but that seems not to detract from its veracity.

Best,

Alistair

[ahinton]

Check this out:

https://www.abt.org/education/archive/ballets/transcendental_etudes.html

https://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1083/is_n11_v69/ai_17491546

It may be a matter of some passing interest that one of the performers listed in the first of these URLs bears the surname Tcherkassky!

Dance and Transcendental Studies can find themselves thrown together in all manner of circumstances, it seems. Those who have been following the thread on the recently released first CD (on the BIS label) in an ongoing series to contain the entire cycle of 100 Transcendental Studies by Sorabji played the Swedish pianist Fredrik Ullén may also be interested to know that three of them were choreographed and performed as a dance piece entitled "Houses", to Mr Ullén's performance, in the Dansens Hus in Stockholm in November 2003; it ran for three performances on successive days, but I have not seen it so cannot comment further.

Best,

Alistair