Listen ETs, music on Mozart's birthday

Yes, this is good stuff. I will tell Xenon for sure.

(Virtuosity) Who's the greater musical genius, Beethoven or Mozart? The Fifth Symphony is hard to beat, dramatic as it is, but "Rondo Alla Turca" is a Mozart masterpiece that just might. Of course, it's dark apples to bright oranges.

Was it a huMAN invention or an EThereal inspiration? It's Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's birthday today, Dec. 17th, and we are listening to the exquisite Turkish March.

Wolf-Am-Mo was a classical musician and composer who had no need of shooting wolves as he could tame any savage beast with just his music. His piano compositions are breathtaking. otherworldly, too good for just this planet. The whole solar system should be able to hear him.

In fact, he is so good that this planet takes him for granted and might forget him. Not so Los Angeles, which has KUSC.org (91.5 FM) to remind us on the air and online, thanks to the generous support of special philanthropists and ordinary donors to the radio station.

• Mozart via Rob Radley, March 28, 2022; text and birthday wishes from Wisdom Quarterly

Siccas Guitars (sicccasguitar.com/ohguitar.com)

Fazıl Say: Turkish March (Türk Marşı)

(Fazıl Say) Nov. 11, 2015: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 11 in A-Major, K.331 III. Alla Turca – Allegretto. The last movement, Alla Turca, popularly known as the "Turkish March," is often heard on its own and is one of Mozart's best-known piano pieces.

Mozart himself titled the rondo "Alla Turca." It imitates the sound of Turkish Janissary bands, the music of which was much in vogue at that time.

Various other works of the time imitate this Turkish style, including Mozart's own opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail.

In Mozart's time, the last movement was sometimes performed on pianos built with a "Turkish stop," allowing it to be embellished with extra percussion effects.

The form of the rondo is A-B-C-D-E-C-A-B-C-coda, with each section (except the coda) being repeated twice.

• Recorded during rehearsal at Enka Kültür Sanat. Video by Mustafa Toygun Özdemir

Composing is always a form of improvisation -- with ideas, with musical particles, with imaginary shapes -- and it is in this sense that the artistic itinerary and the worldview of the Turkish composer and pianist Fazıl Say should be understood.

For it was from the free form with which he became familiar in the course of his piano lessons with the Cortot pupil Mithat Fenmen that he developed an aesthetic outlook that constitutes the core of his self-conception as a composer.

Fazıl Say has been touching audiences and critics alike for more than 25 years in a way that has become rare in the increasingly materialistic and elaborately organized classical music world. Concerts with this artist are something else. They are more direct, more open, more exciting. In short, they go straight to the heart because the same may be said of his compositions.

(But the real question is, Will the extraterrestrials like it? It might not make a bit of the difference to them, so we'd better stick with playing an analog (rather than digital) version of the original for them or as close as we humanly come to it, which will almost certainly mean finding some young Asian prodigy, preferably a child who just has a knack for the song and no understanding of the context.)