“Campanella” is a famous and very popular piece for violin by Niccolo Paganini (Paganini means “Pagans” in Italian).

For me personally, however, this piece has always been a musical absurdity: No matter how hard you strain your ears and musical imagination, you can’t hear any bells or bells or even bells in a single note (Campanella is a small bell)! Not to mention that the violin CANNOT reproduce the bell ringing at all.

Franz Liszt arranged it for the piano, which immediately makes it possible to hear the striking of the bell or the chiming of the bells, but they cannot be heard in the piano performance either!

And, here, at the beginning of Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, the bells are clearly audible!

So THIS particular beginning could be called the “Campanella”. And this violin piece by Paganini is a kind of fantasy on free themes that have nothing to do with the bell.

In the final chorus of Mikhail Glinka’s opera “Ivan Susanin” (“A Life for the Tsar”) The bells are ringing loudly.

In the opera “Khovanshchina” by Modest Mussorgsky, in the symphonic suite “Dawn on the Moskva River” or “Morning of the Streltsy Execution”, the heavy chime of orchestral bells can also be heard announcing the upcoming mass execution. The musical duet is a very talented contrast: The cheerful sounds of the horn – “cockerel singing” – greetings to the coming dawn and the heavy gloomy sighs of the church bells, announcing something completely different …

In the famous “Aria with Bells” from Delibes’ opera Lacme, their chime can also be clearly heard!

But Paganini doesn’t have the slightest sound that even sounds like a bell!

Similarly, with his “Perpetual Motion” or “Perpetual Motion” (“Moto perpetuo”). Again, the music is dancing, at a very fast pace, but the “perpetual motion machine” does not necessarily have to be that fast. Some kind of “eternally” rotating wheel can turn quite slowly, or the “eternal” dropper rotating the “mill” wheel will also not “work” quickly, or the ball mentioned in one of my notes also does not take off and spins at such a rapid pace.

Or, again, somehow the magnets I have already mentioned, which swing elastically on a thread under the influence of variations in the geomagnetic field (and these are really “perpetual motion machines” that will work as long as fluctuations in the Earth’s magnetic field exist!), do not oscillate with such a frequency.

In general, it is noticed that it is worth getting involved in some kind of stupidity, often outright absurdity and idiocy, in the herd consciousness, and that’s it – FOR the AGES!

As the unforgettable Lelik-Papanov said: “If a person is an idiot, it’s for a long time!”

For example, “classical music”. I don’t know which fool came up with this term, but it’s been hammered into the herd consciousness. like a nail without a cap!

In my opinion, this is just another nonsense.

Music, like any other work of human consciousness, can be either talented or incompetent. That’s all!

And there is no “classical music”!

If a certain work is written incompetently, be it a sonata, symphony, concert, aria, song, IT WILL REMAIN incompetent, regardless of which musical genre it belongs to. And anyway, if it’s talented, then it’s just TALENTED!

Moreover, even in a small passage, you can often see what happened to the composer while he was writing a certain work.

In Arkady Ostrovsky’s idiotic song “How Steamships are Escorted”, the orchestral intro – “overture” sounds in the style of Bach polyphony, but after a few seconds Inspiration deserted the composer, and he began to concoct another stupid cheap thing.

In the talented film “The Bremen Town Musicians”, in Gennady Gladkov’s song “There is nothing better in the world Than for friends to wander around the world”, there is a micro-bite, clearly more talented than the rest of the silly song. There is a simple transition from the upper octaves to the lower ones, a well-known technique, but very successful in this particular place!

Again, Inspiration fluttered into Consciousness for a moment, and flew away. And the composer continued his work as a “professional CRAFTSMAN”!

Isaac Dunaevsky’s overture in the idiotic film “Captain Grant’s Children” is truly talented music, unlike the silly “Once upon a Time there was a captain” and “Well, sing us a song, merry wind.” These mediocrities have NOTHING to do with a really talented overture.

Giuseppe Verdi’s aria in Rigoletto by Gilda, who tells her father about her meeting with a certain beautiful young man (the Womanizing Duke of Mantua), has ONE BRILLIANT NOTE in the orchestral introduction that sets the emotional tone of the entire aria, although it doesn’t go any further!

And when some incompetent “composer” recognized by “Experts” shows off something in pseudo-innovative dissonances and musical somersaults, his opuses do not become “CLASSICAL MUSIC” in any way, because they are mediocre mediocrity! Unless you can call it a “classic” example of mediocrity!

There is no classical or non-classical music.

There is music like any other created by humans, talented or mediocre!

Tertium non datur!

I remind you that I am not a musicologist or musician in any way. I am expressing my personal opinion based on the experience of subjective perception.

12 III 2025