Let's talk music, no genre boundaries

I have not yet listened to Phillip Glass’s "Akhnaten, but I have heard other Phillip Glass pieces that have that spiritual quality. And, of course, in jazz we can hear pieces that entertain and others that appeal to a more spiritual aspect of humanity.

 

 

i felt that  Glass Akhnaten is  not just a beautiful piece of music...

We dont lack beautiful piece of music anyway...

 I was spell bounded by the way he succeeded to recreate something of the Ancient Egypt spiritually using rythms  and words in a way no modern opera never dare to go ...

I read about Egypt a masterpiece on the Luxor temple i paid 125 Canadian dollars in 1978 ... A fortune for a book if you use the inflation index but well worth it...

This book was an initiation to the deep symbolism of Egypt in two huge books... it gives even to me a key for mathematics understanding when i was young and in need of it...

Philip Glass genius shine through this spiritual opera  almost a kind of non christian  oratorio which is a "felt change in consciousness" (Barfield)   when listening to it...

 As an aside it is the piece of music i used,with the astonishing Lotte Lenya version of the three penny Opera of Weil to test my sound quality ( "out of the head" effect of my AKG K340 hybrid and his bass tones)  when i needed to do it ... ( i dont need to test anything  now  )

@mahgister 

How did you rid yourself of the need to test your system? I hate when I'm listening to music and rather than enjoying the music listen to one piece of equipment or the other. How did you rid yourself?

@stuartk 

I’m posting the first movement of Weinberg’s 21st Symphony conducted by Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla. I think he is a modern composer that has enough traditional groundings that he might resonate with you. It’s called Kaddish. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-6ek2xa6Cc

@mahgister 

How did you rid yourself of the need to test your system? I hate when I’m listening to music and rather than enjoying the music listen to one piece of equipment or the other. How did you rid yourself?

 

I learned how to optimize my 4 systems  one by one... The first one in a bigger room  takes me a few  years of learning , mainly acoustics experiments..

After that in few months with the basic understanding of electrical,mechanical & acoustical  working controls devices and basic tweaks i was able to set and optimize my actual smaller room and smaller system, and my Top headphone and my secondary headphone...

There is no relation between the S.Q. of a system/room before and after his optimization process... No relation...

Most people buy and plug their system,  their only optimization means and tools are upgrades of the gear...( they ignore the three working dimensions optimization process if not completely partially especially the acoustics)

But optimization work with what you already own if the synergy bwetween pieces of gear is relatively good... Because if you dont know how to makes the better with what you already own you will not be able to optimize the new upgrade either...

My small speakers, modified and optimized are satisfying now, i disliked them when i bought them by the way...

My headphone systems the main one the hybrid K340 and the lesser sextett K240 are done also and optimized by modifications and good synergy choices...

I dont need to listen critically now at all...My systems reach their peak level performance after optimization..

 There is better gear system here by far in great numbers but many are not optimized...

A non optimized system  at any price will not reach his peak working  level...

I am glad and happy with the "minimal  acoustical satisfaction threshold" i reach with a low cost system...

I dont had the budget nor the money to optimize a costlier system... To beat my 1000 bucks system will be easy  and i will reach almost high end ( the maximal acoustical satisfaction threshold  with 15,000 bucks but my wife will kill me ... I am retired and in a small dedicated room, it could be better in a bigger room which  i dont own anymore anyway...)

I am not frustrated at all , my goal is reached the day i learned how to optimize anything at any price..

I now live with what i can afford with no envy, proud of the way my peanuts cost system could sound so good...

 This week i listened for 2 days only Vivaldi "i Musici" complete recording of Vivaldi non stop in ecstasy because the sound  was good enough for me to hear the music  without being bothered by sound trade-off  defects...

I then dont need to do critical sound listening anymore...

I will do critical listening again  if i must optimize another system/room one day... But i am 74 and i dont think i will had a new room and a bigger budget for audio ( it must be 15,000 bucks to really beat my actual system for good in a bigger room with a Choueiri DSP )

 

For many "critical listening" is a fate and a malediction that curse their enjoyment of music because their critical listening is about the gear piece defects  they just bought and they are not acoustically informed to use critical listening as a tool for optimization and tuning ... I learned critical listening when i used it as a tool to tune my 100 Helmholtz resonators in my first bigger dedicated room.. When it was done after a full year of work the result was stunning.. After that no critical listening was needed...

I used critical listening again in my last and actual room but now it is done...(it was way easier in this smaller room ) 

Critical listening when informed is a gift and a tool, not informed by acoustics it is a curse and a recipe for frustration in an upgrade wheel without end...My budget never could afford without end upgrades...

 

 

By the way it was in the course of reading about acoustics few years ago to learn how to set my system /room right that i discovered the recent acoustical science discoveries about human hearing .. ( i posted an article in my above posts )

Then i discovered why and how musical time is not reducible to physical measured time  (linear Fourier measures) ...

Then i understood  something i never understood about the way great musicians and maestro use musical time...(it is very clear if we listen Furtwangler use of musical time compared to some others maestro as maestro Gergiev pointed to in an article i read.My main example is Schuman 4th symphony, because it was my Schumann work of choice)

 I am also interested by acoustics and linguistic (speech) and the way poets use  the time dimension of speech and also its history and evolution..