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Dear Romy, this morning, after a long time away from listening, due to an explosion of lead acid batteries in my rustic house, which left me with a detuned ear, the high D of my flute sounded like an out-of-tune E flat, imagining that a fortissimo from a Bruckner symphony was a cracker of noise inside my brain. This led me to listen to music with few harmonies and jazz and some chamber music where low sounds predominated. Having said this as an excuse, I have accidentally entered this post in which Bruckner and Mahler are compared or put in the same box.
Music is a psychoacoustic process that gradually educates sectors of our cerebral cortex, I only feel this, I have not read it, I am an intensive care doctor, still active, soon to retire. Tired. However, the phenomenon of music is, I believe, the most important thing in terms of experiences that I believe go beyond the simple cortical interpretation by our brain. I have been listening to music since I was a child and I have gone through all the musical currents, reaching dodecaphony, which I still cannot experience as art. When we say that Bruckner is better or worse than Mahler, we are making a comparison of two different currents, Mahler is the inexorable continuation of Wagner, it is possible that in another period of my life I would not have understood it, the same happened to me with Anton. They are different styles, I am not a musicologist and I cannot speak of the complexity that they developed but I can assure you that Gustav is something sublime, overflowing and very, very exciting. The climates that are achieved with his music are of a higher dimension. But on the other hand, I can assure you with my hand on my heart, that this is a passage of my existence, perhaps on another, a different day with previous experiences, which I cannot establish a correspondence to make them coincide, something changes inside, and Bruckner appears again. Or the genius of Hamburg, the romantic Brahms, the musician above all others. And at some unexpected moment the genius of Leipzig emerges again, performed on piano for example. So to be able to affirm that one is better than another you have to be very prepared, I think you would have to be an orchestra conductor or a musician. Although the definitions would come from the theory and analysis of harmony and/or counterpoint. Regarding Bruckner on LP it is a bottleneck, the dynamic range of a symphony cannot be extrapolated to an LP.
Anyway, I take this opportunity to greet you and other readers of this post to which I will surely return soon.
Esteban
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