Rock’n’roll BDS-hole Roger Waters’ new endeavor:
Pink Floyd legend Roger Waters is adding another brick to his wall of musical accomplishments: narrating and adapting Igor Stravinsky’s classic modern fairy tale The Soldier’s Tale.
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According to a press release, this project is but the latest in a string of forays into the world of high art for Waters. “Both here and in other works Waters certainly feels an affinity with this moment in the history of music whenever he has to decide how atonal to make his music. How radical should it be? And how is music related to the Classical and Romantic tradition? This is arguably the most important question that progressive music has to ask itself today.”
Waters’ choice of The Soldier’s Tale is serendipitous, give that “he has wanted for a long time to engage more deeply with the work of a composer whose weight and occasional inaccessibility may perhaps have much in common with” his own music.
Despite sounding awfully pretentious, Waters is also comfortably dumb; he has chosen to honor Igor Stravinsky, who was the antithesis of this BDS-hole, to the point he wrote a piece (Abraham and Isaac) in honor of Israel!
When the Israel Festival Committee asked Stravinsky for a new work, he decided to set the story of Abraham and Isaac to a text in Hebrew, a language with which he was not familiar. The philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin, who was a friend of the composer, helped Stravinsky to understand the sounds and structure of the text. Work was begun in 1962 and the score, which is dedicated to the people of the State of Israel, was completed on 3 March 1963. The work was premiered on 23 August 1964 in Binyanei Ha’Ooma, Jerusalem, by Ephraim Biran, baritone, and the Israel Festival Orchestra, conducted by Robert Craft
Ok, this isn’t really my musical taste, but, hey, he honored us, so I’ll honor him:
I only wish Waters had decided to narrate and adapt Abraham and Isaac, without knowing why it was created!
Hat tip: Jason
