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The Gaggle Music Club: Edvard Grieg's Holberg Suite

This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Edvard Grieg's Holberg Suite, Op. 40.

Edvard Grieg (1843–1907) was Norway’s most celebrated Romantic composer. Drawing on native folk melodies and dances, he merged them with European Romantic idioms (especially Mendelssohn, Schumann and Chopin).

Grieg was not a prolific composer of large-scale works. Instead, his gift lay in the miniature: lyric pieces, songs, chamber music and works with an intimate, poetic tone. However, Grieg could also do character and color, as shown in orchestral works such as the Peer Gynt suites.

Composed in 1884, the Holberg Suite was commissioned to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754), a Danish-Norwegian playwright and satirist often called “the Molière of the North.”

Grieg decided to pay homage to the era of Holberg rather than to illustrate his life or works. The result is a Neoclassical suite, adopting the stylized forms and gestures of Baroque dance music—a nostalgic musical re-creation of Holberg’s 18th-century world.

Grieg originally composed it for solo piano and only later arranged it for string orchestra.

The Holberg Suite is one of Grieg’s finest orchestral achievements, and among the very few works in which he steps outside Norwegian folk tradition to embrace cosmopolitan musical homage. Interestingly, Grieg was among the first to experiments with historical stylization — a rare venture into Neoclassicism before the style became widespread in the 20th century. It's hard not to miss the strains of Stravinsky's Pulcinella here. Though Grieg was no modernist, the Holberg Suite comes across as a Romantic forerunner of the 20th century’s backward-glancing stylistic innovations.

Grieg’s Holberg Suite is a charming homage to the past, unmistakably colored by Grieg’s lyrical voice. It combines Baroque formality with Romantic expressiveness, and is today one of the most beloved string orchestra works in the repertoire.

This is a recording by the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, with artistic director Pekka Kuusisto.

00:21:03
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October 01, 2025
TG 1978: E.U.'s Plan To Override Hungary's Objections In Order To Get Ukraine In

George Szamuely discusses the latest European Union ruse to ignore its own rules, not to mention the strong objections of Hungary, in order to get Ukraine in as a member.

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Live Chat
September 29, 2025
Monday Night At The Movies: "The Wicker Man" (1973)

Join Gagglers for "The Wicker Man"!
The screening starts at 3 p.m. ET sharp.
Share all of your thoughts, comments and criticisms on the Live Chat.

01:33:08
September 28, 2025
The Gaggle Music Club: Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements

This week's selection for The Gaggle Music Club is Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements. Completed in 1945, the symphony is one Stravinsky's most important late works. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society, the symphony premiered on Jan. 24, 1946 at Carnegie Hall, conducted by Stravinsky himself.

Often called Stravinsky's “first American symphony,” the composition shows his neoclassical language at its most taut: sharp orchestration, motor-like rhythms, lean textures.

Although Stravinsky often denied overt programmatic meaning in his music, he later admitted that the Symphony in Three Movements was a “war symphony.” The first movement, for example, was inspired by newsreel footage of wartime scorched earth tactics. Its violent rhythms and jagged piano writing reflect mechanized destruction. The final movement was inspired by Allied military advances, including the crossing of the Rhine in 1945. The march rhythms and the relentless drive exude a sense of military ...

00:23:14
Monday Night At The Movies

Please choose which one of the following 8 movies you would like to have screened next Monday, Oct. 6.

The theme is "memory, time and discontinuity."

Please continue to vote after Oct. 6, so that we can determine the runner-up. The runner-up will be screened on Oct.13.

This is low even for Zio standards

BREAKING: 🇺🇲🇮🇷 The United States BLOCKS Iran from 2026 FIFA World draw over Israel

The United States just denied visas to Iran’s national football delegation, stopping them from attending the 2026 World Cup draw.

This includes the federation president, head coach, and seven senior staff.

https://substack.com/@josealnino/note/c-162364617?r=o786d
TikTok is the latest victim of Israel's assassination program.

Why do these people sound indistinguishable from Biden's?

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Dominic Michael Tripi
@DMichaelTripi
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NEW: FBI Director Kash Patel says social media is out of control and that the US government must intervene to address “clickbait” & misinformation.

I have been thinking about this. People who are claiming to be patriots / patriot adjacent and also are pro-Israel in any sense are simply pro-Israel. Patriotism is a cover. It simply isn’t possible to be both. https://substack.com/@josealnino/note/c-162363799?r=o786d

14 hours ago
January 21, 2023
More Leftie Than Thou
"Jacobin" Magazine Celebrates A Strike Against Ol' Blue Eyes

Here at "The Gaggle" we have very little time for the "more Leftie than thou" school of thought--that's the approach to life according to which the only thing that matters is whether you take the right position on every issue under the sun from Abortion to Zelensky. No one in the world meets the exacting standards of this school of thought; any Leftie leader anywhere is always selling out to the bankers and the capitalists. The perfect exemplar of this is the unreadable Jacobin magazine. 

The other day I came across this article from 2021. It's a celebration of trade union power. And not simply trade union power, but the use of trade union power to secure political goals. Of course (and this is always the case with the "more Leftie than thou" crowd), this glorious, never-to-be-forgotten moment on the history of organized labor took place many years ago--in the summer of 1974 to be exact. Yes, almost half a century has gone by since that thrilling moment when the working-class movement of Australia mobilized and prepared to seize the means of production, distribution and exchange. 

Well, not quite. Organized labor went into action against...Ol' Blue Eyes, the Chairman of the Board, the Voice; yes, Frank Sinatra. Why? What had Sinatra done? Sinatra was certainly very rich, and he owned a variety of properties and businesses. But if the Australian trade union movement were, understandably, searching for the bright, incandescent spark that would finally awaken the working class from its slumber there were surely richer, greedier, more dishonest, more decadent, above all more Australian individuals it could have discovered. Australia was never short of them. Rupert Murdoch immediately springs to mind. Why Sinatra?

 

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