Good riddance

The conductor Kurt Masur died today.  Some will remember him because they own his mediocre recordings.  I will remember him as the pompous asshole who, in 1996, embarrassed the New York Philharmonic by stipulating that a work commissioned by the orchestra from Elliott Carter would be performed only if he (Masur) personally approves it.

The Old Man and the Piano

Dialogues for Piano and Chamber Orchestra (2003) was one of two Elliot Carter's compositions conducted by Lorin Maazel during his tenure as music director of the New York Philharmonic.  (The other was Variations for Orchestra.)  Given Maazel's well deserved reputation as a superlative technician, it is not surprising that his June 2006 performance of Dialogues, with Pierre-Laurent Aimard as the soloist, is technically flawless.  Alas, technical polish alone does not guarantee  a musically satisfying performance; and in this case the orchestral playing (starting with the almost freakishly detached phrasing of the opening Engish horn solo) struck me as being too chilly and aloof to do justice to the playful and sunny aspects of Carter's music.  (Perhaps the very closely balanced and rather 'internetish' sound quality is also partly responsible for this impression.  The recording came to me without any information about the broadcast's source and method of capture.)
     Still, Maazel offers a fascinating alternative to the more humane performances conducted by James Levine (with Aimard and Boston Symphony) and Daniel Barenboim (with Nicolas Hodges and Berlin Philharmonic).  I thought that adding this New York broadcast to my blog on December 11 would be a fitting way to celebrate Carter's 107th birthday.

A cure for the common cold

Well, maybe not a cure but, in my case at least, a very effective remedy: the gentle and surprisingly sweet Clarinet Quintet composed by Elliott Carter in his 99th year.

Recorded live in Strasbourg on July 3, 2013, the affectionate performance by Armand Angster and Ardeo Quartet made me forget not only my sore throat and clogged sinuses, but also my earlier encounters with the studio recording by Charles Neidich and the Juilliard Quartet for whom this piece was originally written.

When musical America sided with Hitler and Stalin

LIFE Magazine, Nov. 22, 1943, reporting on the fee for first performance rights paid by Columbia Broadcasting Corporation for Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony

The first performance rights fee of $10,000 [1] paid in 1943 for Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony may not seem impressive in relation to a single concert fee of $3,000-4,000 commanded in the 1940s by top performers like Vladimir Horowitz and Jascha Heifetz [2].  However, when compared to the typical first performance fee of $100 paid at that time for the music of American composers [3], the Shostakovich fee seems downright astronomical.

I have never encountered an explanation of this shocking disparity, but I am sure it cannot be explained by supposing that the princely sum paid for Shostakovich's symphony was a deliberately over-generous show of support for the music's role as a symbol of  struggle against Nazism.  Such an explanation would be doubtful for at least two reasons.

Diversity at work

... Stravinsky, Hindemith ... I have issues with them, but they’re not the same issues that I would find with the so-called contemporary composers of the late 20th century.  Elliott Carter, it was kind of pathetic what he was doing after 80 or 90 years.
The American composer George Walker speaking about his musical contemporaries, "In the life's coda, master composer George Walker has a symphony in mind", Geoff Edgers, The Washington Post, August 22, 2015.
____________

I congratulate The Washington Post for allowing a black composer of serious music to prove to the world that, in America, one can be a certified asshole without being an uneducated white Republican voter.

Why stop with Shakespeare?

The American Association for the Advancement of Learning has decided that the mathematical language of physics is too difficult for today's students to understand.  In order to attract more students to science majors, the Association recently announced that, over the next three years, it will commission 36 physicists to translate all of basic physics into plain English, so as to make the discipline accessible to the widest possible audience.

     A typical example of proposed translations considered by the Association is the differential equation known as Newton's Second Law of Motion

 

translated as

If you push harder, the damn thing will move faster.

_________________________________

The above announcement would be easy to dismiss as yet another absurd and unfunny mental burp of Boom's deranged mind if it weren't for this very real news item in today's New York Times:

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has decided that Shakespeare’s language is too difficult for today’s audiences to understand. It recently announced that over the next three years, it will commission 36 playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English.  ...  Other venues, including the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the University of Utah and Orlando Shakespeare Theater, have already signed on to produce some of these translations.  (James Shapiro, "Shakespeare in Modern English?", The New York Times, October 7, 2015.)

Since 'modern English' beloved by 'today's audiences' is rapidly becoming Twitterglish, I expect the announced translations, when published, to look something like this:

How is my fantasy about translating physics into 'accessible English' more absurd than this reality?

Ivan the Queer

The 2013 Russian law against propaganda of so-called non-traditional sexual relationships criminalizes distribution of visual and reading materials

... causing minors to form non-traditional sexual predispositions, notions of attractiveness of non-traditional sexual relationships, ... or imposing information about non-traditional sexual relationships which raises interest in such relationships.

As with most things Russian, there is a palpably surreal aspect to this piece of legislation.  After all, this is the country where propaganda posters and photographs of political leaders from its still cherished Soviet past include images like these:

√2 hates π

And why not?  Although √2  and  π are both irrational real numbers, the former is a lowly algebraic number while the latter is transcendental.  Surely that is enough for √2  to envy and hate its much hyped competitor!

Before you decide that I have completely lost it, let me point out that the above ascription of emotions to numbers is no more imbecilic than ascriptions of emotions to temporally organized pitches (along with durations, timbres, and amplitudes) which constitute a piece of music.  A recent example of this dimwitted psycho-musicology can be found in The Guardian (Sept. 24, 2015) where one Kate Molleson had this to say about the music of the Spanish modernist composer Christobal Halffter (italics mine):
   
He lived in Spain during the Franco regime and his music burns with the desire for non-violence and human rights.

Why a newspaper that employs competent and perceptive music critics like Tom Service would give space to vacuous babbling of a fucking retard like Ms Molleson is beyond me.  But so long as Ms Molleson continues to receive regular paychecks from The Guardian, I hope she gets to write on other subjects as well.  This way the world may learn that because Isaac Newton was abandoned by his mother at the age of three, his laws of motion burn with the resentment of parental neglect.  Or that because Alan Turing was gay, his mathematical model of computation - the Turing Machine - burns with the desire for handsome young men.

The future of critical thinking

A few days ago I had to give my students a very informal explanation of the notion of logical possibility: an entity or a state of affairs is 'logically possible' if its description does not involve a logical contradiction.  As usual, I started with a trivial example.  I said:

"I'll tell you the beginning of a story - just a couple of sentences - and then I'll stop and ask you if I should continue because you accept the beginning as describing something that is possible.  So, yesterday I was at a garage sale where I saw a coffee table in the shape of a square circle, i.e., the shape that is both a genuine square and an honest-to-goodness circle.  I bought this coffee table and brought it home."

Then I stopped and asked if I should continue.  One student, a cheerful young woman, immediately raised her hand and declared "No!"

   "Good," I said encouragingly. "Now tell us why not?"

   "Because who on earth would want to buy such a weirdly shaped coffee table!"

There is no such thing as female orgasm

There is no such thing as female orgasm.  I've had sex with dozens of women and it never happened.

Few people (especially women) would fail to see the joke in the above argument.  Yet the same faulty logic, which takes limited subjective experiences as completely reliable indicators of objective general facts, seems to defeat the sense of humor in many music critics faced with evaluating the merits of new music.  Consider, as representative examples, the following excerpts from three different music critics reviewing new or very recent music (italics are mine):

Hitler loved 12-tone music

If you will insist that, as a matter of fact, Hitler did not like 12-tone music, you are an over-educated imbecile who clings to a hopelessly outdated notion of truth as somehow rooted in facts.

Ovid is already fucked. Mozart is next...

Here is an excerpt from an Op-Ed piece in the last April issue of Columbia University's daily newpaper Columbia Spectator:

During the week spent on Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” the class was instructed to read the myths of Persephone and Daphne, both of which include vivid depictions of rape and sexual assault. As a survivor of sexual assault, the student described being triggered while reading such detailed accounts of rape throughout the work. However, the student said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text. As a result, the student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation.
     [The Multicultural Affairs Board] proposed that the [University] issue a letter to faculty about potential trigger warnings and suggestions for how to support triggered students. ...that there should be a mechanism for students to communicate their concerns to professors anonymously, as well as a mediation mechanism for students who have identity-based disagreements with professors. Finally, the [University] should create a training program for all professors, including faculty and graduate instructors, which will enable them to constructively facilitate conversations that embrace all identities, share best practices, and think critically about how the Core Curriculum is framed for their students.
____________________________
This expression of Fascist Infantilism, typical of today's American universities, made me wonder how long it will take before Mozart's Don Giovanni is dropped from Music Appreciation courses.  Why would music professors want to jeopardize their jobs by "triggering" survivors of domestic violence with Zerlina's famous aria "Batti, batti":

Beat me, beat me, dear Masetto,
beat your poor Zerlina!
I’ll stand here like a little lamb,
to await your blows.
You can pull out my hair.
Pull out my eyes,
and I’ll still gladly kiss
your dear hands.

Come to think of it, the so-called trigger warnings will have to be slapped on just about every opera in the standard repertoire, which obviously makes this emotionally harmful art form unsuitable for today's college students.

I suspect that many of the same students, who run to the Dean's Office in tears as soon as they encounter the word 'nigger' in a Mark Twain novel or a slight of womanhood in a Renaissance painting, will enthusiastically shake their bodies later in the day to Rihanna's  glorification of kidnapping, torture, and sexual degradation in her new song Bitch better have my money.  Which, of course, is as it should be.  After all, Rihanna is hot (hey, the camera zooms in on her crotch every five seconds!), while Ovid, Caravaggio, and Mozart are boring, stuffy, and offensive relics of the oppressive, patriarchal, white male hegemony.
 

Fiddlers under the same roof

In the last three decades or so music critics have frequently complained (or at least noted) that the arrival of the jet age and the fall of the Iron Curtain have pretty much erased the distinctly national characteristics of music making.  Musicians and ensembles around the world, we are told, tend to make music in much the same "international" way regardless of whether  they hail from Moscow, Prague, Paris, or New York.

To me the empirical basis of such claims remains elusive.  Recordings of orchestral music from an earlier era suggest that styles of music making depend almost entirely on conductors.  Conductors who were trained within the same geographical borders (e.g., Klemperer, Walter, Furtwangler, Strauss, Karajan) and worked with the same orchestras (e.g., the Vienna or the Berlin Philharmonic) interpreted the same compositions in ways which differed from one another so much as to make the idea of a 'national style of music making' vacuous at best.   And when some of these conductors moved to other countries (e.g., Klemperer to London, Walter to New York) their ways of music making crossed the borders along with them.  The only empirically meaningful difference between performances of, say, a Mozart symphony conducted by Bruno Walter in New York, Vienna, and Paris in the 1950s is that the standards of execution maintained by the French orchestra were abominably low, those of the Vienna orchestra barely adequate, and those of the New York orchestra were at the highest level.

"Me Tarzan, you Jane" English wins...

The syntax in this headline from USA TODAY convinced me that in  today's America the words "journalist" and "fucking retard" have become synonymous.  I wonder if such degradation of language in mainstream media is exclusively an American phenomenon...

Texas teen who cop pulled gun on at pool party speaks

The face of evil

Meet Philipp Nedel, the remastering engineer for the 2012 DVD issue of "Horowitz in Vienna" - the first DVD release of the recital previously available 'officially' only on a VHS stereo tape.  Since I have a copy of that VHS tape (in a pirate DVD transfer from Japan), it took me only a few minutes of listening to Mr. Nedel's work to appreciate the remarkable consistency with which major classical labels (in this case Sony) entrust restoration of historically invaluable recordings to incompetent and evil motherfuckers like Mr. Nedel and the issue producer Robert Russ.  (Unfortunately the latter's photo could not be found on the web.  Perhaps Mr. Russ suspects that the quality of his work makes it prudent for him to do what he can to remain maximally anonymous.)

Mother-in-law's ultimate revenge...

I still remember mother-in-law jokes I heard as a kid growing up in Russia.  Many were predictably homicidal:

A man stands on a high floor balcony, holding an older woman just over the railing.  
The man says, "Ivan shot his mother-in-law.  Fyodor strangled his.  But I am letting you go."

A few were downright surreal:

Late at night.  A room in a communal apartment.  Mother-in-law sleeps in the corner partitioned off from the rest of the room by a curtain.   
     Son-in-law loudly whispers, "Mother!  Mother!"
     Awaken mother-in-law responds from behind the curtain: "What?  What is it, Vasili?"
     "Mother, would you like some fish?"
     "Sure, I'd love some, Vasenka."
     "Then get up and fry some."
     "But Vasenka, we don't have any."
     "Then shut the fuck up and sleep!"

No wonder I was startled when I saw the news item below.  Truly a metaphysical case of the ultimate revenge...

Mother-in-law's tombstone topples on Pennsylvania man, killing him

Reuters March 30, 2015 6:48pm EDT

A Pennsylvania man was helping decorate his mother-in-law’s tombstone on Monday ahead of the Easter holiday when it suddenly toppled over, pinning him underneath and killing him, a cemetery caretaker said.
The 400-pound stone fatally injured Stephen Woytack, 74, of Scranton, said Edward Kubilas, caretaker of St. Joseph’s Catholic Cemetery in the eastern Pennsylvania town of Throop, just outside of Scranton.

Cute puppies sell anything...

I have nothing against cute boys and girls exploiting the advantages of their phenotype, be it in modeling or in soliciting sugar daddies on Craigslist.  But when it comes to serious music, I would expect a musician's success to be based on more artistically relevant factors than just 'cute puppy' looks.  Which, of course, makes me a hopeless imbecile - a depressing self-assessment, true, but amply justified by the meteoric career trajectory of the Canadian-born, still very young,  and singularly mediocre pianist Jan Lisiecki (b. 1995).

Charles Rosen was right...

Those who dismiss contemporary art music on the grounds that it has failed to attract a large public conveniently forget to ask whether attracting a large public is an accurate (or even meaningful) measure of the music's aesthetic merits.  History shows that it is not. 

Rrrrreading the news

Sept 12, 2014

Tulsa, Oklahoma

Man died in a fatal accident early Friday

Man died in a fatal accident early Friday

Man died in a fatal accident early Friday

Can one survive a fatal accident?  Or die in a non-fatal accident?
     Well... since Fox News, especially in places like Tulsa, Oklahoma, caters to America-loving microcephalic neanderthals (presumably to counter-balance MSNBC, which caters to America-hating hydrocephalic imbeciles), I didn't think much of that sorry linguistic encounter and have completely forgotten about it until yesterday, when I came across  this:

06 Mar 2015

Angry mob lynches rape suspect to death in India

Lynch to death?  Where do they get such illiterate journalistic retards to write headlines for a supposedly respectable British newspaper?  And where do they find editorial mongoloids who approve such headlines?

Whoever these dimwits on both sides of the Atlantic are, let's hope they will soon be assassinated to death by murderous killers, and their lifeless cadavers buttfucked in the ass by villainous evil-doers.

The famous problem of Heraclitus

From a materialist butcher shop

Plato's career change

How to make it to the age of ninety-seven?

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970), one of the great philosophers of the 20th century, shares his secret.

More homicidal than Taliban and Somalian pirates!

Somalian pirates kill four Americans

(The Telegraph, Feb. 22, 2011)

Taliban kill seven Afghan police

(Los Angeles Times, Dec. 21, 2014)

New Year rice cakes kill nine in Japan

(BBC Radio 1 Newsbeat, Jan. 5, 2014)

Homicidal rice cakes? Couldn't the imbeciles at BBC News have worded the headline in a saner way, e.g., "9 choke to death in Japan while eating New Year rice cakes"?  Oh well...