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The True Essence and Spirit Of Music

Music looks like a fabulous stumbling block. It is a figure formed by pairs of notes played live, followed by a series of descendent chords. It evokes a sense of threat. Fear is accompanied by amazement when eighth jumps appear that resemble sobs. The music seems to stumble and the grotesque is superimposed on the fantastic. One thinks it could be the score of a late nineteenth century composer and it could be the performance of a group of progressive rock. It's both. It is Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky who, thanks to the 70s version of Emerson Lake & Palmer, has become a symbol of an era in which the crazy and dangerous, bold and contested idea of ​​making rock on the classical repertoire was practiced.

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It is a story that asks a question about how far you can go, about what is morally acceptable to make a composer's music. And it is a story that continues. In the version proposed by a group of Italian musicians who does not believe in the contrast and hierarchy between cultured and in cultured, Pictures of an exhibition becomes a symbol of the fruitfulness of the anti academic approach to written music.

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Keith Emerson discovered Modest Mussorgsky's most famous work

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In the autobiography Pictures of an Exhibitionist, Keith Emerson puts it this way. It was the spring of 1970 and he, "Jimi Hendrix of the organ," fought with a growing state of anxiety. After the end of the Nice, he worked with Greg Lake to form a trio. He had not yet found a drummer and had time available. One evening, walking through London with his wife Elinor, he bought two tickets for a concert at the Royal Festival Hall. "After the interval the orchestra set off with a heroic and glorious sonority, weaving a tapestry of pieces that always returned to the original theme. By the time the last magnificent and noble chords echoed through the hall, I was already standing to applaud. What was that song called? I looked at the hall program.

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Keith Emerson was not the only one who did not know

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Pictures of an exhibition has entered into history in the version arranged in 1922 by Maurice Ravel with great decorative taste   too sweet and too little Russian, according to the pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, who put his hands in the 80s of twentieth century. The original piano is unknown to most or considered as a draft. Modest Mussorgsky composed him in St. Petersburg in June 1874, inspired by the posthumous exhibition of his friend's paintings, architect and illustrator Victor Hartmann.

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