Classical Music is for Ponces #1

WARNING: This post is a foretaste and warning of several to come that will deal with classical music and will be of no interest whatsoever to anybody at all except Gyppo, and maybe not even him.

I'm required to write a post with this title after having unfairly maligned the good folk of the Heavy Metal Community and then poured scorn upon our Jazz Brethren. Now, I listen to a fair amount of classical music when I get the chance, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's not for ponces, as I shall now demonstrate:

I'm a big fan of Bartok, and living in Transylvania - the great Hungarian, composer, ethnomusicolgist and piano student botherer was born nearby and did much folk music collecting here - means I can hear a lot of his stuff either on Romania's excellent TV Cultural channel or at this town's Hungarian Opera House. The other day his 6th String Quartet came on the TV, and Mrs Dilo was with me. She doesn't enjoy this stuff too much but always knows when to keep her council. Rather than let her flip over to MGM Movies I decided to sit it out. For me it's a splendid piece, the last he wrote in Hungary before fleeing to America from the encroaching Nazis, whom he despised, and it seems to me a return to the folk music elements present in his 1st string quartet but which were then increasing abstracted in later ones. Now, to try to justify my choice of viewing I said this to Mrs D:

"Heh, listen, you can hear the noises and rhythms of the Transylvanian countryside here!"
{pause}
"Is that a chicken? It sounds quite agitated."
"No, it's a 'Bartók pizzicato', where the string is pulled so high that it slaps back onto the finger board. Errr, maybe it represents a turkey."
"We didn't have turkeys until recently. It's a duck."
"Can't be a duck, duck's coming later in the 4th movement (gulp)."
"And that is Uncle Tavi's dog, the one with no teeth?"
"Well, that was a leitmotif depicting an architypal Transylvanian dog, of which Uncle Tavi's dog is indeed an example. I thought the viola player did it rather well."
"She missed a lot of notes in the last section."
"No, that was supposed to sound jangly; in fact, ha ha, sometimes it's amusingly referred to as the Ode to the Dacia 1300!! (double gulp) It was quite ahead of it's time."
"As was the Dacia 1300 Lux Super with its twin wing mirrors and heated rear windscreen when it first appeared in 1970?"
"Exactly! Oh, I'm so glad you're enjoying this as much as I am."

I was winging it - how much longer could I last? Luckily it's a fairly short piece. But the fact I could say such nonsense without ever having farmed a piece of land in Transylvania clearly marks me out. Ponce.