Alcohol + Pete + Shostakovich = ?

 I came home drunk last night (this morning) and wrote a brief diatribe on twentieth century symphony then somehow had the sense not to post it... And now in the clear light of sobriety I change my mind. Enjoy:)

"Dude, Here’s the thing with a lot of the twentieth century composers of classical music. They were in such a mood of  “my art is so damn brilliant you can’t even understand” that part of the era’s aesthetic became being really unintelligible. So you take something like Mahler or Shostakovich and listen to his symphonies and you realize that when he rails hard in that music he fucking rails SO hard, but then when he goes off the deep end and gets all introspective he goes so far beyond what’s cool to anyone but himself.  Like take Shostakovich 8^th symphony: I guarantee that this piece would absolutely dominate your mind if you sat down and really engaged your ears and brain with the entire thing, but I also guarantee you wont even be able to stay awake until that point because there’s so much ‘weird’ shit that would bore you before then.  It’s like there was Penderecki and there was Shoenburg and this is what falls inbeetween. Same goes for Mahler, if you can make it all the way through one of his symphonies to the epic finale scherzo movement it will blow your mind, but I guarantee you you WONT make it all the way through.  He has a symphony where it's written in the score that the horn players fucking stand up in the finale so that they can have maximum force. like a boss..   BUT the thing with Shostakovic is that he had to play the delicate balancing act between appealing to Stalin’s taste and appealing to the peoples’ taste and that balancing act became an art in itself."