Contrasting Periods :: The Joy of Kitsch :: May

May

Filed Under Composition, Travel, Music on Thursday, May 31st 2007

Kitsch is good, in small doses. For example, I really like Cape Cod kitsch, but dislike “Wild West” and Native American kitsch (and if you’ve ever been to Cherokee, North Carolina, you know precisely what I mean!) I’m not a big fan of the Valentine’s Day excess, but actually do quite like the Easter Bunny nonsense.

One of the things I like about our little apartment in Burgas is that when we first moved into the place a few years ago, Marta’s parents left us some shelves in the kitchen filled with a bunch of kitschy items. The coffee mugs are particularly goofy, but they are now an integral part of our annual month living here and I can’t imagine taking them down.

To keep this blog somewhat on course, I will say that occasionally there are one or two bad (or clichéd) ideas that stubbornly manage to remain in my music simply because familiarity had made these passages less objectionable (sort of like dodecaphony.) I wonder if this is what happened to Smetana at the end of Vltava and that perfect (-ly kitschy) authentic cadence that punctuates the end of that piece…

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