An Odd Thing About Mozart

I've listened to classical music most of my life and a considerable amount of that has been Mozart.  For years I've been able to listen to Mozart and discern when he's being dark and when he's being more playful or lighthearted.  Yesterday, however, is the first time I've listened to a choral work of his and heard...sarcasm??? Mockery???

This was very surprising to me and made me wonder if my interpretation of the music I hear is more in tune with my mood or if the music tunes my mood.  Sarcasm is not something I've ever really heard in choral works.  Specifically, the Kyrie and Laudamus Te portions were almost mocking in their tone and movement.  I don't know if it was intended and if so who was being mocked: the church, god, his sponsor?  It was almost as if Mozart was saying, "I'm writing this because you want it but I'm so much better than this."  Even that isn't quite what I heard.

Anyone ever hear this in other classical works?  It's a curious thing and now I'm going to be on the lookout for more of it.

Do You Care???

So I wanted to start blogging and it occurs to me that it may not matter what I think or say except to me. That, however, will not stop me from putting down what falls/dribbles/oozes out of my mind since I need a place to collect "brain droppings" (thank you, George Carlin).

I work in software as a "software architect" and so am very close to technology and how it evolves and advances. Yet I find that I have become something of a "neo-Luddite." The longer I've worked creating software systems and fixing other people's problems, the more I've convinced myself that technology hasn't really added anything positive to our society. If anything, I believe it has removed things that were once precious and replaced them with things that appear precious on the surface but are not capable of standing up to close scrutiny.

Please disagree with me - I would like to be persuaded otherwise! What I hope to explore in this blog is what I think about technology and how it has made us less as a society. Along the way, I hope that my examination will also show me how it has made us more than we were; but today I'm not confident. So please, post your critiques and disagreements. And please, don't get personal: opinions are personally held but they are just opinions and not great truths or even profound ones. Perhaps we'll even come to some understanding of how to take where we are now and make something really good out of it! That would be (for me, anyway) the best outcome.

Being a blog, it will also be a place to explore bizarre and other things that I may think are interesting, weird, unexplainable, and completely off-topic. So bear with me.