Customer Reviews

Standing Stone

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is truly the work of a musical genius. I am no expert by any means when it comes to classical music, especially modern 'classics'. (Kind of an oxymoron...modern classics). But anyway, I do know good, well-written music when I hear it, and this is both of those things. For those people, like myself, who need some info on the music to help us understand and enjoy it to its full extent, this album comes with a 48 page book that includes the list of the 4 different movements, an introduction written by Paul, the poem that Paul wrote to help keep him on track throughout the writing of this music, an indepth essay all about the music and storyline, paintings done by Paul, and loads of photos. Even people who are not too fond of classical music, surely will be able to enjoy this...it is truly accessible to all...the informative book helps make it so. But above and beyond all else, is the music...truly an experience!

Influences leap to mind while listening to "Standing Stone," like Holst's "The Planets," and Prokofiev's "Alexander Nevsky."

Right up front: I'm not a rigorous student of classical music. The effect of a modern orchestra expressing a story set in ancient times resembles that of a period film score. There isn't enough singing to call it an opera, and the poem is a libretto only in broad terms. Still, rather than being "pure music," there is a storyline loosely connecting the movements. Paul's artwork is intriguing, and Linda was a good photographer. It's also important to remember that Jeremiah was a bullfrog - I don't believe that can be overstated.

A stumbling block is the lack of a distinct instrumental refrain or melody to anchor the music start to finish. The long patches of low volume and little melodic activity reinforce the feel of a film score. Also, you gotta turn the volume up to 9 to hear half the album.

"Standing Stone" has its strengths. When McCartney does focus on melody, you get stirring pieces like "Sea Voyage" in Movement II, and "Messenger" in Movement III. Several tracks flirt with the John Williams method of running a major-key melody over minor-key bass and vice versa. During the main character's travails, there are effective, atonal washes of music and voice.

"Standing Stone" was dismissed as a vanity project among those who wanted "Liverpool Oratorio Part II." While not structured enough to please classical purists, nor lively enough to sustain its full 70+ minutes, this CD is an intriguing glimpse of the other side of a musician who has spent about 40 years showing the world how to write a catchy song.

I have this racked with my classical recordings. It *is* a symphony, if not a stereotyped one. When listening to a lot of classical and modern-classical pieces I haven't heard before, I can crack my husband up by predicting turns in the music before they happen. I can't do that with Standing Stone. It's not in the least hackneyed or formulaic. This is programme music, music that tells a story (the booklet gives you the entire poem by McCartney that forms a text for the composition), and it does its job wonderfully well. Each section is crafted to create in the listener's head almost an inevitable picture. The second cut (each movement is divided into cuts at major changes, which I wish more symphonies would do!), "growth music," especially stays with me for days after listening to it, though the "storm at sea," the "battle music," and the finale do to a lesser degree. Unusual percussion, a large choir, and some innovative use of the usual orchestra give Standing Stone a twist off the ordinary textures of a symphony, as well. In the first cut, the "creation music," every instrument is played open - no fingering - for a truly primitive but urbane sound. In short, if you want something both accessible and novel, give this one a try!

My high school marching band played selections from "Standing Stone" last year. Our season was great and it was all due to the music of McCartney. Many of the band members purchased Standing Stone in mid season to hear it first hand, but many did not like it. It wasnt as intriquing as it is when a full band (not orchastra) plays it. The strings should be shoved aside and be replaced by some clarinets. It would have changed the whole mood.

An insipid `50's pop song called "He" proclaims that "He [God] alone decides/Who writes a symphony," and there is a notion pervading the lower recesses of popular culture that the symphony represents the pinnacle of musical art. In point of fact, few symphonists take dictation from God, and there is no particular honor in perpetrating a bad symphony.

Musicians generally understand a symphony as an orchestral work, the first movement of which is in sonata form. By this--standard-- definition, "Standing Stone" is NOT one (nor, so far as I can see, does it claim to be). So what IS "Standing Stone"?

Symphonies commonly have four movements, as "Standing Stone" purports to. Each of "Standing Stone"'s, however, subdivides into smaller autonomous units which do not share musical material. We have really, then, nineteen separate movements strung in a series, most of which, though fairly amorphous, we might loosely characterize as "song form" movements. Most orchestral song form movements do not involve the use of voices, but since these do, and since these voices presumably constitute a sort of crutch, we can go further and call "Standing Stone" a collection of nineteen songs without words-just not a particularly good collection of songs without words.

(An oxymoron, by the way, is properly a rhetorical or literary device, not just any contradiction in terms. In other words, it is by definition deliberate.)