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Bruckner

Embrace "Boredom" - Listen to Long Music

Embrace "Boredom" - Listen to Long Music

I think we all want to come out of this undifferentiated sea of snackable, viral content, back and forth messages, contextless tweets, and seemingly meaningless work tasks, and move in the direction of books, records, marathons, no-tech camping trips, meditation retreats, long form journalism, 5000-piece puzzles, baseball, writing cabins, undistracted 2-hour coffee with a friend, and of course a night at the symphony or theater…. So in that context, though I hate to use a cliché, I think we need long form music—classical being one example—now more than ever, in this one particular way:

Bruckner Gets Naked

Bruckner Gets Naked

I think one of the reasons I find this so appealing is that I didn’t initially discover Bruckner through his symphonies. My initial vector was through singing his motets in college. So, I think I never formed my mental Bruckner totem around his orchestrations but rather around his harmonic language, expressed in a capella choral music, as a tool to focus on reverence for The Divine, for The Higher Ideals, and for Our Better Nature. In a word, God. 

Jordan Randall Smith is the Music Director of Symphony Number One.