Canetti devoted thirty-eight years to investigating the most intimate mechanisms of human behaviour. The result of nearly four decades of uninterrupted work was Crowds and Power, a visionary essay published in 1960. More than twenty years later, Canetti was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, and his books have since been regularly translated and reprinted in Italy. This fortunate fate, however, was not shared by the dazzling musical tribute to Crowds and Power and its author created in 1986 by the ROVA Saxophone Quartet: The Crowd. For Elias Canetti. To be precise, the double vinyl album originally released by Hat Hut in the Hat Art series was later compressed onto a single CD. Both editions have long been out of print, and the 1992 reissue, somewhat oddly, completely reshuffled the original track order. Whichever version one prefers, neither is currently available except through YouTube, which is hardly a substitute for […]
Rova Saxophone Quartet: Mass and Power
One of the most compelling albums by the four Bay Area “troubadours” was inspired by one of the great intellectual monuments of the twentieth century: Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power.
