Quotable

Another mood-upper for me was receiving, at long last, my copy of Louis Andriessen and Elmer Schoenberger's book The Appolonian Clockwork, recently (and mercifully) re-issued by the Amsterdam University Press. I wrote about this a while back, apropos of Kyle Gann's rave about it, and now am finally well into reading it. Found one hysterical quote (in a book full of quirky insights and funny brilliance), apropos of Stravinsky's final large work, the Requiem Canticles:

"Requiem Canticles is the Requiem for the Requiem. After that, every composer that writes a liturgical Requiem for large choir and orchestra, preferably in his old age, will seem like a taxidermist. He will be stuffing a skeleton with ersatz meat and then be putting a black top hat on it. Then he will say: here, this is a man. But he will be wrong. It is no longer possible. Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles is Berlioz's Grande Messe des morts, shrivelled to an aphorism."