...have a dormant blog?
Perish the thought.
I'm a bundle of nerves this morning about the bundle of nerves that's peeking through where a shell of a wisdom tooth sits. It'll be gone in a couple of hours, I think. Blogging seems like a productive alternative to fretting, or at least--neutrally speaking--a more public venue for it.
I've been reading much more than I've been writing, and I've actually tried a novel experiment lately: drafting, outlining, redrafting, editing, re-outlining, etc. It's foreign to my thought process, but what the method lacks in "AHA, I've got it!" brilliance, it gains in cogency and slow/steady progress.
Last weekend, I went to the American Musicological Society conference in Philadelphia. This was my first AMS, and a wrap-up seems redundant--if you're interested in the AMS conference, you've probably already read Dial M or something like that on it, or you were there--because conference wrap-up blog-posts are a fairly predictable genre on the whole. I should have dealt with my dental issues beforehand, because I had a frankly miserable time for non-professional reasons. Professionally, I had a two-sided realization: 1) There are many smart people doing many smart things; and 2) I can do that. I mean, not the hardcore 13th century stuff, I definitely couldn't do that, but there were many papers where I realized, "Hey, I could have thought that up, researched it, and made a handout for it during that slow week I had in August."
The key, though, is that I didn't and they did, and so I should and I will. Even though I have three papers in the pipeline for coursework this semester--a medieval music literature review that I've mostly done, a meat-and-potatoes analysis of Mozart's C-minor fantasie, and a gendered reading of Cherubini's Medea that seems to write itself--I started putting down the gritty sourcework for a Randy Newman paper that will have many moving parts but move headlong from musical elements to the entire Superstructure. Trust me. I begin by discussing this Norman Mailer book that I bought the week it came out, because it was already an artifact, and I trusted it would be history pretty soon. When I finish this paper (Christmas, hopefully?), you will never look at George Harrison the same way again--I hope, at least. I take a side trip in the musical style of Roger Waters as well, with the literary offerings of Gore Vidal and--I'm debating, should I even touch Chomsky? that's a recipe for an exploding project--a few Marxisms du jour. I trace a particular curmudgeonly strain through the essays and musical stylings of ca. 1973- ca. 2008.
To sum up: I had been trying to be groundbreaking in seminar papers all throughout graduate school, and to churn out pro forma extra-curricular work. I've since decided to reverse my MO, and not lose too much sleep over trying to turn logic over its head when I should just be getting a clear handle on different historical periods for the purposes of teaching.
Now I have an appointment with an oral surgeon. Yikes!
Monday, November 23, 2009
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Schubert's Ich Grolle Nicht and Wilco's Hummingbird
Because it sure ain't Schumann's. If you're familiar with with Wilco, I find the piano style and tempo to be uncannily reminiscent of Hummingbird:
I've just started work on a performance analysis of Fischer-Dieskau's 1976 recording of Ives' Ich Grolle Nicht setting, where DFD's phrasing borrows the structure of Schumann's setting rather than Ives' score. Mistakenly searching for Schubert and Ich Grolle Nicht, I discovered this gem.
My favorite moment of this performance? At 1:05, the mid-phrase terror that slips into the tenor's voice as he gets lost on a long tone during an inconvenient page-turn, and seems to be sight-reading.
I think it has all the makings of an undiscovered kitsch classic. Let's meme this to notoriety.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Never fear! This is not an abandoned blog.
This isn't a vacant or dormant blog, except that it sort of is.
For months, I've been thinking about various albums, thoughts, events, books, magazine articles, memes, blog posts, trips, cute things my dog does, what it's like to teach a college class with two weeks or two hours notice, what Mendelssohn said about the keyed trumpet*, the challenges of trying to learn two languages at once when English gives me much trouble on its own and the like. With each of these, I think, "Wow, that would make a great blog post!" I've started some, and many of those are saved as drafts so when life slows down--say, late December--and I get really bored, I can start posting them all at once and it will seem like a very exciting life that I lead. (But I'll have to excise references to the beautiful weather, all the walking I've been doing, the farmer's tan I'm getting, or my time-sensitive jig will be up.) But of late, I've started putting my research into--get this--Word documents! I've also been doing voracious reading that's really not typical of me. I'm a slow reader, seldom finish books, and have been tearing through them (relative to my normal pace, anyway). I won't say which books yet, because then I'd have to comment on them, and this would become an actual post, and I wouldn't get up in time tomorrow to do my menial job, which is to enter standardized test answers into an excel file or type up transcripts of focus groups.
Since I posted last, I've been to Boston twice (once for a musicologist friend and friend friend's wedding in Southern Maine, and again last weekend for my good friend and her husband The Cantor). I bought too many books, which I'm burdened by reading. I hate gravesite pictures--almost as much as I hate one-room house birthplace tours ("and here is where Herbert Hoover's mother kept her skillets...")--but along my theme of American music, I'll share my twitpic of a really boring William Billings plaque I found across the street from the Steinway shop next to Emerson College alongside the Boston Common on Sunday. Enjoy.
It's positively scintillating.
*"I must not forget to mention that the trumpeters, one and all, blow away at those infernal keyed trumpets, which always seem to me like a pretty woman with a beard; they are also without the chromatic tones and sound shrill and unnatural.”
For months, I've been thinking about various albums, thoughts, events, books, magazine articles, memes, blog posts, trips, cute things my dog does, what it's like to teach a college class with two weeks or two hours notice, what Mendelssohn said about the keyed trumpet*, the challenges of trying to learn two languages at once when English gives me much trouble on its own and the like. With each of these, I think, "Wow, that would make a great blog post!" I've started some, and many of those are saved as drafts so when life slows down--say, late December--and I get really bored, I can start posting them all at once and it will seem like a very exciting life that I lead. (But I'll have to excise references to the beautiful weather, all the walking I've been doing, the farmer's tan I'm getting, or my time-sensitive jig will be up.) But of late, I've started putting my research into--get this--Word documents! I've also been doing voracious reading that's really not typical of me. I'm a slow reader, seldom finish books, and have been tearing through them (relative to my normal pace, anyway). I won't say which books yet, because then I'd have to comment on them, and this would become an actual post, and I wouldn't get up in time tomorrow to do my menial job, which is to enter standardized test answers into an excel file or type up transcripts of focus groups.
Since I posted last, I've been to Boston twice (once for a musicologist friend and friend friend's wedding in Southern Maine, and again last weekend for my good friend and her husband The Cantor). I bought too many books, which I'm burdened by reading. I hate gravesite pictures--almost as much as I hate one-room house birthplace tours ("and here is where Herbert Hoover's mother kept her skillets...")--but along my theme of American music, I'll share my twitpic of a really boring William Billings plaque I found across the street from the Steinway shop next to Emerson College alongside the Boston Common on Sunday. Enjoy.
It's positively scintillating.
*"I must not forget to mention that the trumpeters, one and all, blow away at those infernal keyed trumpets, which always seem to me like a pretty woman with a beard; they are also without the chromatic tones and sound shrill and unnatural.”
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Dave Douglas Brass Ecstasy, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble
So Dave Douglas's new album, Spirit Moves, is a real beauty. Released two weeks ago on Douglas's own Greenleaf label, Douglas's Brass Ecstasy is a compact and funky unit that mixes trumpet (Douglas), trombone (Luis Bonilla), french hornist Vincent Chaney, the inimitable tubist Marcus Rojas, and Nasheet Waits on drums. The tunes are often harmonically straightforward (compared to some of Douglas's more extended outings) and resonate on a certain New Orleans vibe, but they are never simplistic, and the New Orleans sense of counterpoint gets a compelling facelift.
Like many composers of his generation (also--what's with the jazz world's labeling of anyone who isn't 60 yet as a "young" musician?!) Douglas is exploring texture, vibe, rhythm, and groove rather than compulsively overloading his tunes with extensions and licks. I don't often get all ravey about a recording instantly (actually, that's a lie: I get all evangelical about recordings I like the second I hear them, which is part of why I started this blog), but for the last week, I've been finding small little charms in these arrangements, that can sound more intimate than--and much larger than--five men depending on the context.
Too bad I downloaded this on iTunes. These tunes are so great that a forward-thinking brass quintet/quartet might want to tackle them. I'm thinking of picking up the charts: for $40, you can download the sheet music and recordings from Greenleaf. This way, you can support great music on the one hand, learn it from the inside, and not be tempted to email Dave Douglas's manager to see if you can get a copy of the charts. (I haven't done this, but know of more than a few jazz stalkers out there...)
The album starts off with an arrangement of Rufus Wainright's This Love Affair that sounds like a most impassioned dirge version of St. James Infirmary for which Bach wrote the inner voices. Much of this has to do with Wainright's original harmonization--here's a video of it:
It's a very beautiful tune, but with Dave Douglas and Brass Ecstasy, it takes on a certain ritualistic quality, and--on the climactic turnaround--Rufus Wainright's beautiful melodic figures soar in Douglas's high range, which of late has sounded so easy and soaring that it's like the most moving infomercial for the Caruso method. And the voicing of the ensemble makes what was affecting in Wainright's hair-raising. Pay special attention to the french horn lines:
Here's another video with Douglas discussing how the group functions as a chamber ensemble, followed by "The View from Blue Mountain," a latin piece with a six-feel. Pay particular attention to how much harmony (and how richly the harmony) jumps out when there's no comping instrument:
My other favorites on the album? Orujo, a syncopated romp with some in-the-pocket french horn offbeats; The Brass Ring, that moves out of a lovely chorale into an impossibly slow, tight vamp midway; Great Awakening, an allusive kaleidescope of hymnody (I heard aspects of Just a Closer Walk and Silver Bells, but I'm probably missing a few obvious ones) that's Douglas's funniest tune since Elk's Club; Mister Pitiful, the Otis Redding tune; Bowie, a funky nod to the legendary Lester.
A bit before I picked up Spirit Moves, I read a Sasha Frere-Jones piece in the New Yorker on the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. A true band of brothers--sons of AACM co-founder/Sun Ra trumpeter Phil Cochran. I just picked up their label debut on iTunes and have been sorting through it. It's great groove music, almost all insistent, in minor key, very tight, and more ahead-of-the-beat than today's crop of New Orleans-style brass bands (which you shouldn't expect them to sound like). They're doing their own thing, and have a keen business sense after parlaying street success (literally--in Times Square, and on Chicago's South Side) with web word-o-mouth and now a successful European tour being chronicled in a frank, funny, and frequently updated blog.
"We could set up in a blackout, on a boat, plane, wherever." Love it. Reminds me of Green Eggs and Ham.
Don't expect jazz, per se: these are tunes to grab you, shake you, and put you down again in time for you to catch your train, but it's all very, very tight and a new direction. If you follow them on the web a bit, you'll find out that they--like Douglas, and the AACM, for that matter--are very commited to taking control of the commercial aspect of their music. I suspect we'll be seeing a whole lot of them in the future. Go to their myspace for clips.
If I had to recommend one download from their new album so far, it would probably be Jupiter, an irresistible space-age vamp that lays out a bit longer that some of their other tunes and sounds like the bridge from the theme from Shaft looped by Roy Hargrove overdubbing himself and playing against his own delay--except that it's all acoustic and tight. I'm sure a national tour is right around the corner, so stay tuned.
More later.
Like many composers of his generation (also--what's with the jazz world's labeling of anyone who isn't 60 yet as a "young" musician?!) Douglas is exploring texture, vibe, rhythm, and groove rather than compulsively overloading his tunes with extensions and licks. I don't often get all ravey about a recording instantly (actually, that's a lie: I get all evangelical about recordings I like the second I hear them, which is part of why I started this blog), but for the last week, I've been finding small little charms in these arrangements, that can sound more intimate than--and much larger than--five men depending on the context.
Too bad I downloaded this on iTunes. These tunes are so great that a forward-thinking brass quintet/quartet might want to tackle them. I'm thinking of picking up the charts: for $40, you can download the sheet music and recordings from Greenleaf. This way, you can support great music on the one hand, learn it from the inside, and not be tempted to email Dave Douglas's manager to see if you can get a copy of the charts. (I haven't done this, but know of more than a few jazz stalkers out there...)
The album starts off with an arrangement of Rufus Wainright's This Love Affair that sounds like a most impassioned dirge version of St. James Infirmary for which Bach wrote the inner voices. Much of this has to do with Wainright's original harmonization--here's a video of it:
It's a very beautiful tune, but with Dave Douglas and Brass Ecstasy, it takes on a certain ritualistic quality, and--on the climactic turnaround--Rufus Wainright's beautiful melodic figures soar in Douglas's high range, which of late has sounded so easy and soaring that it's like the most moving infomercial for the Caruso method. And the voicing of the ensemble makes what was affecting in Wainright's hair-raising. Pay special attention to the french horn lines:
Here's another video with Douglas discussing how the group functions as a chamber ensemble, followed by "The View from Blue Mountain," a latin piece with a six-feel. Pay particular attention to how much harmony (and how richly the harmony) jumps out when there's no comping instrument:
My other favorites on the album? Orujo, a syncopated romp with some in-the-pocket french horn offbeats; The Brass Ring, that moves out of a lovely chorale into an impossibly slow, tight vamp midway; Great Awakening, an allusive kaleidescope of hymnody (I heard aspects of Just a Closer Walk and Silver Bells, but I'm probably missing a few obvious ones) that's Douglas's funniest tune since Elk's Club; Mister Pitiful, the Otis Redding tune; Bowie, a funky nod to the legendary Lester.
A bit before I picked up Spirit Moves, I read a Sasha Frere-Jones piece in the New Yorker on the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. A true band of brothers--sons of AACM co-founder/Sun Ra trumpeter Phil Cochran. I just picked up their label debut on iTunes and have been sorting through it. It's great groove music, almost all insistent, in minor key, very tight, and more ahead-of-the-beat than today's crop of New Orleans-style brass bands (which you shouldn't expect them to sound like). They're doing their own thing, and have a keen business sense after parlaying street success (literally--in Times Square, and on Chicago's South Side) with web word-o-mouth and now a successful European tour being chronicled in a frank, funny, and frequently updated blog.
"We could set up in a blackout, on a boat, plane, wherever." Love it. Reminds me of Green Eggs and Ham.
Don't expect jazz, per se: these are tunes to grab you, shake you, and put you down again in time for you to catch your train, but it's all very, very tight and a new direction. If you follow them on the web a bit, you'll find out that they--like Douglas, and the AACM, for that matter--are very commited to taking control of the commercial aspect of their music. I suspect we'll be seeing a whole lot of them in the future. Go to their myspace for clips.
If I had to recommend one download from their new album so far, it would probably be Jupiter, an irresistible space-age vamp that lays out a bit longer that some of their other tunes and sounds like the bridge from the theme from Shaft looped by Roy Hargrove overdubbing himself and playing against his own delay--except that it's all acoustic and tight. I'm sure a national tour is right around the corner, so stay tuned.
More later.
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
It's a tempting offer, but I think I'll pass (but while you're at it, si'l vous plait, pass me my tempting offer!)
I woke up this morning with a very, very promising offer from amazon. Alas, I can't believe I had the willpower to turn it down:
 |
Dear Amazon.com Customer, As someone who has purchased or rated music by Duke Ellington, you might like to know that New York, March 1959 is now available. You can order yours for just $950.00 by following the link below.
Album Description
This product is manufactured on demand using CD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply. Track Listings
Sincerely, Amazon.com
We hope you found this message to be useful. However, if you'd rather not receive future e-mails of this sort from Amazon.com, please opt-out here. Please note that product prices and availability are limited time offers and are subject to change. Prices and availability were accurate at the time this newsletter was sent; however, they may differ from those you see when you visit Amazon.com. (c) 2009 Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Amazon, Amazon.com and the Amazon.com logo and 1-Click are registered trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. Amazon.com, 1200 12th Ave. S., Suite 1200, Seattle, WA 98144-2734. Reference 12380820 Please note that this message was sent to the following e-mail address:petergillette.... | |||||||||||||
In other Amazon.Com news, I didn't have the willpower to turn down the new (now 5 vol.) release of Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music, $127. But here's what I did:
If you buy it via amazon.co.uk, it amounts to $107 (USD) after shipping. So, unless you're in a hurry (and if you're going to read all 3,856 pages before school recommences in the fall, I understand that).
But even though the American release date still reads as June 22nd, the US site is still taking preorders and the UK site doesn't even have an option to buy it anymore. Am I still getting my books that I ordered?! GAH! WHERE ARE MY BOOKS?
Or are the Oxford Music Editors just spending some time away from their families "on the Appalachian Trail," so to speak?
UPDATE: An oh-so polite, oh-so British email from a fine customer servant from amazon.co.uk:
That's good news, as long as my bargain price is still locked in. Maybe it's finally at an affordable level to be used as textbook material (though that really wasn't its intention). I wonder what an entire Taruskinbrand curriculum, a Norton competitor, would look like. In particular, it would be interesting to see what sort of gutsy (provocative?) choices he would have in a hypothetical companion CD. The "authentistic" battle is now the stuff of history (and indeed, I was about five when "historical" went out the window), but a companion box set or--if pigs could fly--an OUP-sponsored Taruskin iMix might be a nifty bit of cross-promotion and a harmless, proverbial grenade that could liven up the discussion on the AMS-listserv. American Musicology's most prestigious mode of, uh, colloquy has somehow become even more dull and ingrown of late.
Would some senior scholar please write something shocking (or at least bracing), if only to liven up my inbox?
UPDATE: An oh-so polite, oh-so British email from a fine customer servant from amazon.co.uk:
Please accept our apologies for this inconvenience, but "Oxford History of Western Music:: 1 (Oxford History of Western Musc)" appears to have been a surprise sellout.
When you placed your order #XXXXXXXXXXXX, we believed we had access to more copies - we then discovered that every one of our distributors had rapidly sold out.
Major distributors have thousands of copies on order from the publisher, all apparently awaiting the next print run. As soon as more copies become available, we'll be able to dispatch them to our customers.
That's good news, as long as my bargain price is still locked in. Maybe it's finally at an affordable level to be used as textbook material (though that really wasn't its intention). I wonder what an entire Taruskin
Would some senior scholar please write something shocking (or at least bracing), if only to liven up my inbox?
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Middle C, Sort Of
So, I was on a gameshow last night on Iowa City cable access. Uh, if you really want, you can digg it?
I remember quite some time ago talking to another TA (I don't remember who, or even if they were a music TA) about how weird it is to write on a board--how odd spelling is, or music notation, when it's giant and right in front of your face. With that caveat, music fans may want to skip to 17:50, where I get a question I (or, you know, a third-grader) should slam out of the ballpark, but I only sort of get it right.
Which begs the question of the century in music pedagogy: do they make whiteboard rostrums? Yes, I know there are whiteboards with music staves already on them, but there's just something about the thought of seeing a teacher line up five pieces of chalk, each broken in its own weird way, that gets lost in this new age of markers.
Of course, who's ever been in a classroom that had two working dry erase markers, let alone five?
I remember quite some time ago talking to another TA (I don't remember who, or even if they were a music TA) about how weird it is to write on a board--how odd spelling is, or music notation, when it's giant and right in front of your face. With that caveat, music fans may want to skip to 17:50, where I get a question I (or, you know, a third-grader) should slam out of the ballpark, but I only sort of get it right.
Which begs the question of the century in music pedagogy: do they make whiteboard rostrums? Yes, I know there are whiteboards with music staves already on them, but there's just something about the thought of seeing a teacher line up five pieces of chalk, each broken in its own weird way, that gets lost in this new age of markers.
Of course, who's ever been in a classroom that had two working dry erase markers, let alone five?
What did I learn about myself? (A bulleted list)
- I'm a big giant nerd
- I don't know anything about beer.
- I don't know anything about science.
- I'm utterly reliant on a calculator for even basic arithmetic
- I'm super nerdy.
- I talk with my hands.
- I make funny faces.
- I fidget.
- I talk with my hands, a whole lot.
- I make funny faces, a whole lot.
- I fidget, a whole lot.
- I'm nerdy.
- I need to brush up on the British new-wave.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Update; Cage and the Abstract Expressionists; Art; Languages; Books in Brief
Greetings, music blogosphere! Or, "Salve, blogosphere!" I've been away for some time from everyday internetting, mainly out of internet fatigue--and research fatigue--but (to paraphrase Flight of the Conchords) also mainly because of my laptop's DC jack, which has been undergoing an intermittent fail ever since Easter, and it has been enduring joint custody with lengthy, unsupervised visitation by its other putative parent--an electronics manufacturer whose name rhymes with Just Lie.
Since then, I've taken a three-week course in Contemporary Art history. It went very well, and I wrote a research paper on Cage and art the art world where I viewed his embrace of chance not as a reaction to integral serialism but as a reaction to abstract expressionism. His late 1960s performance piece Mureau (an excerpt of which is apparently available here in ringtone form? caveat emptor)--and his 1970s chance-derived prints from Thoreau--in a sense took the archetypal American Romantic and dismembered his words and images.
Cage was closely involved with figures like Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell in the early 1950s (to say nothing of Robert Rauschenberg), and--for a musician who was developing a damning critique of The Great Artist and attacking Beethoven at every turn as the fifties progressed--what, say, Clement Greenberg claimed on behalf of the Abstract Expressionists intersects compellingly with where Cage was headed, albeit in the other direction. Here's Greenberg from a 1947 essay (viewable in context via googlebooks):
Just as in "the Ives myth" (which has now been under deconstruction for as long as it was under construction proper, making it very nearly a straw man these days--the myth has myths and countermyths and a whole constellation of counter-countermyths), Greenberg's artists fall under the Thoreauvian paradigm of isolation; or, to use a more politically charged word with some recent musicological and critical cachet, mavericks. It's them against the world, in a romantic struggle against isolation and underappreciation. If Beethoven is the root of German romanticism, certainly Concord is the root (or a root) of America's romantic impulse and--even while spurring on a love for nature and the like--removing the transcendental content from Thoreau and leaving him as a banal collection of sounds and dismembered image is at once a celebration and critique. But then, that's the fun with Cage: to experience bits of Thoreau as if it were an environment in and of itself. That was the point of Thoreau, after all, wasn't it?
This really was my first experience writing about Cage, and everything that bothers me in Cage scholarship--or conversations about Cage--I did within the first five minutes of starting to type. All of the sudden Cage's humor vanishes into this ether of mystical paen, paradox, or resistance. Just as I've always hated, I of course started reading Cage's early writings and letters into his later, more radical aesthetic, viewing his endpoints as inevitable outgrowths of earlier ideas. (Leta Miller doesn't do this, which is why she's one of my favorite scholars to read, and I happily polished off her smaller Lou Harrison book written with Fredric Lieberman in an unadvisedly late night a couple weeks ago.)
Pitfalls and generalizations aside, I've been reading (and listening to) quite a bit about Cage lately. On the listening front, I've been checking out some of the Arditti albums, listening ever more closely to the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, and have been especially fond of the ACO disc The Seasons, which includes The Seasons, Concerto for Prepared Piano, Suite for Toy Piano (also included in a stunning Lou Harrison orchestration that, at times, blurs the line between Cage and populist Copland), and a brooding, contemplative realization of 74, one of the "number" pieces.
I've been sampling everything from the excellent Cambridge companion, to this absolutely stunning Walker Art Center book of interviews with Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, and Bill T. Jones, to the recent Tony Conrad history, and--most of all, lately--Martin Duberman's wonderful, compelling, readable, thorough history of Black Mountain College, published in 1972 but reprinted a couple of months ago. It's interesting--every summer, I place a handful of books into Darwinian conflict, and one wins out--in this case, Duberman's. It's a very compelling, self-conscious attempt to assess the impact and structure of one of America's most unorthodox, defunct, and influential academic communities.
I did quite a bit of extracurricular reading while taking art history, although I did have to study hard for the slide exams, but all of the sudden this week, I'm having to face my fears, academically speaking: language.
Foreign language has oddly never come easily to me. I have a great ear, and a fantastic memory, but not for forms. I have some background in Latin, but I did a really awful job as a Latin student in undergrad. Now, I'm taking a French reading course each morning (which is so concise and unfussy that I'm wondering why undergraduates don't learn that way) and redoing intensive Latin in daily three-hour sessions. Yes, it's confusing, but I'm very relaxed in the summer, and so far have been able to stay on task much more easily. My high school guidance counselor actually recommended Cornell College to me eight years ago during my college search, because there are block classes, and she identified that that's how I learn best. You know what? She was right. I'll be halfway done with two languages this summer, and--having never traveled abroad--am planning on applying for a DAAD language study grant for summer 2010, hopefully allowing me to get back in time to take the second half of the French reading course. It feels good to confront these weaker areas of my mind, jump into it, and see that I could feasibly complete coursework by June 2011, and then launch into a genius dissertation that will change the music world forever, about--[message truncated]--
Since then, I've taken a three-week course in Contemporary Art history. It went very well, and I wrote a research paper on Cage and art the art world where I viewed his embrace of chance not as a reaction to integral serialism but as a reaction to abstract expressionism. His late 1960s performance piece Mureau (an excerpt of which is apparently available here in ringtone form? caveat emptor)--and his 1970s chance-derived prints from Thoreau--in a sense took the archetypal American Romantic and dismembered his words and images.
Cage was closely involved with figures like Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell in the early 1950s (to say nothing of Robert Rauschenberg), and--for a musician who was developing a damning critique of The Great Artist and attacking Beethoven at every turn as the fifties progressed--what, say, Clement Greenberg claimed on behalf of the Abstract Expressionists intersects compellingly with where Cage was headed, albeit in the other direction. Here's Greenberg from a 1947 essay (viewable in context via googlebooks):
What we have…is the ferocious struggle to be a genius, which involves the artists downtown even more than the others…Alas, the future of American art depends on them. That it should is fitting but sad. Their isolation is inconceivable, crushing, unbroken, damning. That anyone can produce art on a respectable level in this situation is highly improbable. What can fifty do against a hundred and forty million?
Just as in "the Ives myth" (which has now been under deconstruction for as long as it was under construction proper, making it very nearly a straw man these days--the myth has myths and countermyths and a whole constellation of counter-countermyths), Greenberg's artists fall under the Thoreauvian paradigm of isolation; or, to use a more politically charged word with some recent musicological and critical cachet, mavericks. It's them against the world, in a romantic struggle against isolation and underappreciation. If Beethoven is the root of German romanticism, certainly Concord is the root (or a root) of America's romantic impulse and--even while spurring on a love for nature and the like--removing the transcendental content from Thoreau and leaving him as a banal collection of sounds and dismembered image is at once a celebration and critique. But then, that's the fun with Cage: to experience bits of Thoreau as if it were an environment in and of itself. That was the point of Thoreau, after all, wasn't it?
This really was my first experience writing about Cage, and everything that bothers me in Cage scholarship--or conversations about Cage--I did within the first five minutes of starting to type. All of the sudden Cage's humor vanishes into this ether of mystical paen, paradox, or resistance. Just as I've always hated, I of course started reading Cage's early writings and letters into his later, more radical aesthetic, viewing his endpoints as inevitable outgrowths of earlier ideas. (Leta Miller doesn't do this, which is why she's one of my favorite scholars to read, and I happily polished off her smaller Lou Harrison book written with Fredric Lieberman in an unadvisedly late night a couple weeks ago.)
Pitfalls and generalizations aside, I've been reading (and listening to) quite a bit about Cage lately. On the listening front, I've been checking out some of the Arditti albums, listening ever more closely to the Concert for Piano and Orchestra, and have been especially fond of the ACO disc The Seasons, which includes The Seasons, Concerto for Prepared Piano, Suite for Toy Piano (also included in a stunning Lou Harrison orchestration that, at times, blurs the line between Cage and populist Copland), and a brooding, contemplative realization of 74, one of the "number" pieces.
I've been sampling everything from the excellent Cambridge companion, to this absolutely stunning Walker Art Center book of interviews with Merce Cunningham, Meredith Monk, and Bill T. Jones, to the recent Tony Conrad history, and--most of all, lately--Martin Duberman's wonderful, compelling, readable, thorough history of Black Mountain College, published in 1972 but reprinted a couple of months ago. It's interesting--every summer, I place a handful of books into Darwinian conflict, and one wins out--in this case, Duberman's. It's a very compelling, self-conscious attempt to assess the impact and structure of one of America's most unorthodox, defunct, and influential academic communities.
I did quite a bit of extracurricular reading while taking art history, although I did have to study hard for the slide exams, but all of the sudden this week, I'm having to face my fears, academically speaking: language.
Foreign language has oddly never come easily to me. I have a great ear, and a fantastic memory, but not for forms. I have some background in Latin, but I did a really awful job as a Latin student in undergrad. Now, I'm taking a French reading course each morning (which is so concise and unfussy that I'm wondering why undergraduates don't learn that way) and redoing intensive Latin in daily three-hour sessions. Yes, it's confusing, but I'm very relaxed in the summer, and so far have been able to stay on task much more easily. My high school guidance counselor actually recommended Cornell College to me eight years ago during my college search, because there are block classes, and she identified that that's how I learn best. You know what? She was right. I'll be halfway done with two languages this summer, and--having never traveled abroad--am planning on applying for a DAAD language study grant for summer 2010, hopefully allowing me to get back in time to take the second half of the French reading course. It feels good to confront these weaker areas of my mind, jump into it, and see that I could feasibly complete coursework by June 2011, and then launch into a genius dissertation that will change the music world forever, about--[message truncated]--
Sunday, May 10, 2009
Dane Rudhyar Archival Project
So, it's 9:30 PM on a Sunday night, and I'm writing a paper for my History of Music Theory class. After batting around many Charles Seeger-related topics (since I bought "Tradition and Experiment in the New Music" earlier this semester), I found I didn't really have a focus.
So, I decided to broaden my scope and focus my point all at once. So, I'm writing on the compositional treatises of Seeger, Henry Cowell (this blog's namesake), and Dane Rudhyar to show how "oriental" ideas were used to undercut Germanic ideals. It's not a very striking, original idea, but it is interesting to see how American composers felt a colonial burden (even as America was becoming "colonialist" in its own right).
I could go to the library, but I already did tonight, and it's too crowded. Luckily I found, of all things, a fully digitized book from 1921, The Relation of Ultramodern to Archaic Music by a Skryiabinite, Katharine Ruth Heyman (courtesy of Stanford), and this compelling, brand-new study of Chinese music in ultramodern New York by Nancy Rao that appears in the current issue of The Journal of Asian American Studies.
But what of Rudhyar? He's a curious fellow who, to quote Tony Asher, just wasn't made for these times. Like many fans and students of "ultra-modern" American music (roughly put, the kind of experimental music that was popular and cutting-edge in New York and San Francisco during the late-1910s to the early-1930s), I first encountered Rudhyar from his cogent and thoughtful treatment in Carol Oja's prize-winning Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s, some of the finest cultural history written during the last decade. In Oja's footnotes, I learn of a spat Rudhyar and Seeger had in the pages of Eolian Review in 1923, a publication my university's library doesn't have.
Never fear--the Dane Rudhyar Archival Project is here! As an early American exponent of astrology, Rudhyar has amassed an, er, "cult following." Need an article from the Eolian Review? Here we go: "What is an octave?"
There's something for you astrological folks as well. If you're the type of person who can ask the question "Does Uranus Rule Astrology?" with a straight face, eat up!
But seriously: Rudhyar is a fascinating figure, and presents an alternate path for American music, a spiritualized path that proceeds not from form but from intuition. The idea that "intuition" provides a governing logic (but wait--here I am talking about logic) grates against our musical containers and academic jargon. Rudhyar's idea about music is that every second has you in its grips in ways that you can't quite understand, in ways that overcome attempts to intellectualize, in dissonant waves that shape and alter consciousness. In short, it's pretty heavy.
Anyway, my point is, because I own too many books (including Oja's, Seeger's, Cowell's, and--I don't even remember where I found it--a 1923 Paul Rosenfeld collection), I can continue to research in my PJs without going to a crowded library--through the magic of obscure digitization.
And what does this blog post prove? It proves that even though I don't have to leave the house, I can still distract myself from research.
So, I decided to broaden my scope and focus my point all at once. So, I'm writing on the compositional treatises of Seeger, Henry Cowell (this blog's namesake), and Dane Rudhyar to show how "oriental" ideas were used to undercut Germanic ideals. It's not a very striking, original idea, but it is interesting to see how American composers felt a colonial burden (even as America was becoming "colonialist" in its own right).
I could go to the library, but I already did tonight, and it's too crowded. Luckily I found, of all things, a fully digitized book from 1921, The Relation of Ultramodern to Archaic Music by a Skryiabinite, Katharine Ruth Heyman (courtesy of Stanford), and this compelling, brand-new study of Chinese music in ultramodern New York by Nancy Rao that appears in the current issue of The Journal of Asian American Studies.
But what of Rudhyar? He's a curious fellow who, to quote Tony Asher, just wasn't made for these times. Like many fans and students of "ultra-modern" American music (roughly put, the kind of experimental music that was popular and cutting-edge in New York and San Francisco during the late-1910s to the early-1930s), I first encountered Rudhyar from his cogent and thoughtful treatment in Carol Oja's prize-winning Making Music Modern: New York in the 1920s, some of the finest cultural history written during the last decade. In Oja's footnotes, I learn of a spat Rudhyar and Seeger had in the pages of Eolian Review in 1923, a publication my university's library doesn't have.
Never fear--the Dane Rudhyar Archival Project is here! As an early American exponent of astrology, Rudhyar has amassed an, er, "cult following." Need an article from the Eolian Review? Here we go: "What is an octave?"
There's something for you astrological folks as well. If you're the type of person who can ask the question "Does Uranus Rule Astrology?" with a straight face, eat up!
But seriously: Rudhyar is a fascinating figure, and presents an alternate path for American music, a spiritualized path that proceeds not from form but from intuition. The idea that "intuition" provides a governing logic (but wait--here I am talking about logic) grates against our musical containers and academic jargon. Rudhyar's idea about music is that every second has you in its grips in ways that you can't quite understand, in ways that overcome attempts to intellectualize, in dissonant waves that shape and alter consciousness. In short, it's pretty heavy.
Anyway, my point is, because I own too many books (including Oja's, Seeger's, Cowell's, and--I don't even remember where I found it--a 1923 Paul Rosenfeld collection), I can continue to research in my PJs without going to a crowded library--through the magic of obscure digitization.
And what does this blog post prove? It proves that even though I don't have to leave the house, I can still distract myself from research.
Saturday, May 9, 2009
Albert Fine's fluxfilms (from 1966)
I'm determined to make this the web's Albert Fine hub.
Fluxfilm No. 30, Dance. (I'm not sure, but the figure in the film is probably James Waring, for whom Fine wrote at least two chamber pieces as accompaniment. One in particular--for oboe and two flutes--is quite lengthy and blends free cadenzas with free counterpoint, and might be worth editing some day.)
I really enjoy Fluxfilm 24 ("Readymade"). What I like about it is that in Fine's composition notebook (er, stave notebook), even in his most experimental period between 1964-1966, he experimented with minimalism, dissonance, rhythmic freedom and the like almost invariably through the lens of more-or-less formalized 2-voice counterpoint. (Here, Philip Glass recalls how exacting Fine was as a teacher, in the strict vein of Boulanger.)
Here, on film, this readymade--is it an upside-down image of a two-legged table?--functions against itself in two voice counterpoint, as if it were a single pitch sampled and set against itself.
Fluxfilm No. 30, Dance. (I'm not sure, but the figure in the film is probably James Waring, for whom Fine wrote at least two chamber pieces as accompaniment. One in particular--for oboe and two flutes--is quite lengthy and blends free cadenzas with free counterpoint, and might be worth editing some day.)
I really enjoy Fluxfilm 24 ("Readymade"). What I like about it is that in Fine's composition notebook (er, stave notebook), even in his most experimental period between 1964-1966, he experimented with minimalism, dissonance, rhythmic freedom and the like almost invariably through the lens of more-or-less formalized 2-voice counterpoint. (Here, Philip Glass recalls how exacting Fine was as a teacher, in the strict vein of Boulanger.)
Here, on film, this readymade--is it an upside-down image of a two-legged table?--functions against itself in two voice counterpoint, as if it were a single pitch sampled and set against itself.
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Sheet Music on the Web: Trends and Trials
First, there's a strange "flame war" going on in the musicological discipline--sort of--following this molotov cocktail of an article that used the AMS's year-old resolution against the use of music in torture as a pretense to--ironically? who knows--bemoan the state of music in the academy, and occasionally--ironically? who knows--equating petty intermural politics with torture--ironically? who knows. The resolution itself provoked some fierce debate on blogs and list-servs way back when. The whole thing is rather silly--except that it's not, except that it is--and I took a break from my Finale transcriptions to comment here, if anyone cares to read my two cents.Speaking of Finale transcriptions...
As I'm in a Music Editing course right now, I'll pass along web notice of some very hip things going on in the Society for Seventeenth Century Music. From their pathbreaking online, refereed scholarly journal for well over a decade, the Society has now turned its sights (OR, WAIT FOR IT..."SITES") to editions. The Web Library of 17th Century Music has amassed a fairly impressive repertoire to date, and these editions are--would you believe it?--supervised by professional scholars and carefully screened, just like a real publishing house. What's more, you've got to love notices like this on a website:
CONDITIONS FOR USERS: Users may download editions, reproduce them for personal use, and perform them in non-profit settings, provided proper acknowledgement is given to both the editor and to the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music. Permission for performance in professional (for profit) settings must be negotiated directly between the performers or their agents and the editor. The editor remains the owner of all rights to the edition.Some works are licensed under a Creative Commons
How many works of obscure seventeenth-century music are ever performed for profit, anyway? The WLSCM fulfills a need for scholars as well. How many credible editions by overlooked (justly or not) composers never see the light of day because of the capital required to launch such a project? Kudos, 17th-Century nerds! If you're interested, check out the Guidelines for Contributors.
Even happier e-news of the music-printing variety: G. Schirmer publishing has launched a nifty new app that is, surprisingly, not being marketed (to the best of my knowledge) as an institutional subscription service: Schirmer on-demand. Downloading a reader, secure scores can be accessed for perusal and printed for a limited number of times. I haven't downloaded the reader yet (because my computer's still in the shop), but received prompt, personal replies from their friendly tech-support folk reminding me to.
Just this morning I received an email update telling me that the following pieces were added to the available scores (which number around 500) :
John Adams
The Chairman Dances
Grand Pianola Music
Harmonielehre
Harmonium
Shaker Loops
Ernst Bacon
Ford's Theatre: A Few Glimpses of Easter Week, 1865
Samuel Barber
Andromache's Farewell
Antony and Cleopatra, Two Scenes
Canzonetta
Commando March
Fadograph of a Yestern Scene
A Hand of Bridge
I Hear an Army
Medea, Ballet Suite
Medea - Cave of the Heart (original ballet)
Must the Winter Come so Soon (from 'Vanessa')
Nocturne
Second Essay for Orchestra
Serenade for String Orchestra
Sure on This Shining Night
Symphony No. 2
Vanessa (vocal score)
Avner Dorman
Spices, Perfumes, Toxins!
Gian Carlo Menotti
The Boy Who Grew Too Fast
A Bride from Pluto
Chip and His Dog
The Death of the Bishop of Brindisi
The Egg
Errand Into the Maze
Fantasia
For the Death of Orpheus
Goya: Suite
The Hero
Introduction, March, and Shepherd's Dance (from 'Amahl and the Night Visitors')
Jacob's Prayer
Labyrinth
Landscapes and Remembrances
Lucy's Aria (from 'The Telephone or l'Amour a Trois')
Lullaby (from 'The Consul')
Martin's Lie
Missa O Pulchritudo
Monica's Waltz (from 'The Medium')
The Most Important Man
Muero porque no muero
Oh llama de amor viva
Shepherd's Chorus (from 'Amahl and the Night Visitors')
The Singing Child
William Schuman
Casey at the Bat
The Mighty Casey
Newsreel in Five Shots (for orchestra)
Prologue
Symphony No. 6
It's always refreshing when a company recognizes how end-users experience their product and sensibly caters to those needs, while protecting their bottom line. By letting conductors, scholars, students, Artistic Directors, and even educated connoisseurs peek in on these rental-only scores, they can more fully become "repertory pieces," they could get performed more often, and I don't that study-score sales ever were brisk for these works. (I'd like to see Ernst Bacon's Amazon.com ranking!)
[UPDATE: ERNST BACON'S AMAZON.COM SALES RANKING IS "#485,771 in Music" .]
Although A-R Editions and other specialty music printers count on libraries as revenue streams for high-end critical editions, perhaps a secure-pdf subscription service would be an even greater revenue stream, and one that is in line with academic trends of online-repositories. (To reiterate, Schirmer's service is free, but I think there would be a market for a legit-subscription service.) Music publishing has been under siege ever since the mimeograph machine was invented, and recently there have been some debates (speaking of stale musicology controversies) as to how much free content is too much free content. Works that can be posted securely to course websites, even with restrictions, in compelling and trustworthy editions will be studied more often and more steadily than those that need to be scanned by hand, or are odd ca. 1900 performance editions of the sort on the IMSLP.
On top of all that, my twitter friends all tell me, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos virtually threatens to put music-stand manufacturers out of business. (All the articles I read talked about newspapers being obsolete, but...I have a slightly different perspective.) I wouldn't be surprised if something like a backlit Kindle would catch on in places like pits on Broadway or in expensive opera houses, where capital is more comfortable (in normal years), and where cuts and transpositions often proliferate during the run of a show, in a workshop stage, or with the arrival of a new singer with a different range. Of course, for this to work in operahouses, Ricordi would almost certainly have to get on board, and this doesn't seem like their kind of project. But who would have expected Supertitles 50 years ago?
And could there be a computer program that could count my rests for me? Please?
So, while the age of paper isn't dead--there are some thoughts that can best be had in ink, by hand--someday you'll have to say goodbye to your precious sketch-studies; in thirty years, musicologists will be defragging discarded zip drives, scanning registries, and looking for any stray temporary files of the .mus variety.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Merry Christmas, Al (A Detractor)
I've been blogging my research on an obscure-musician-turned-obscure-Fluxus-artist, Albert Fine, here and here.
It's difficult to talk about Fluxus historically because so many Fluxus artists (in the broad sense) made histories part of their artwork. And straightforward diaries (we-did-this-and-then-this-and-so-and-so-was-there) and letters are part of the art too, not concerned with facts per-se. The typical historical records of the time, then--The New York Times, for instance--aren't very helpful either for the who-what-where-when, because of how fringe things were.
I've been getting into Fine's papers, his music, his letters, and corresponding with whatever living associates I can find via the googles, who have been very helpful! But for some reason, while I spent quite a long time searching Boston newspapers, I never really searched the NYT. When you're really getting into something, trying to understand its dimensions and such, perspective goes out the window, something left for the end of the project. Luckily, the Times' art critic, John Canaday, left a fascinating witness statement for the prosecution.
Canaday, from what I can gather (not being an artist or art historian) was greatly distressed by the collapse of technique in art, by the rise of conceptualism and the amateurism expressed by the less adept among the abstract expressionists, the worst of whom showed "exceptional tolerance for incompetence and deception." (That phrase, via wikipedia [I'll admit], comes from his very first September 1959 column.)
[PARENTHETICAL PARAGRAPH: Conceptual and performance art have become such an axiomatic feature of the sixties in the popular and critical vocabulary that it's hard to recognize just how transgressive they were. That's also a danger of being "in" criticism, to some extent, and losing perspective: I walked through a quiet library last night listening to the mash-up release of David Tudor's Rainforest II (an electronic piece that sounds like--you guessed it) and John Cage's Mureau, which takes segments of Thoreau's journals and recomposes the syllables according to chance procedures. I actually blog John Adams' reaction to hearing this piece read at Harvard here, towards the end. I bought this at the Amazon MP3 store for a dollar per track--$1.98 in all--a couple weekends ago out of curiousity. It's a very tedious release, to be sure, but I might have been the first person to download it there, because I see it's back to $13.98, and each track is "Album only." Last night, though, I was studying for a massive post-1960 listening exam in an avant-garde music class. While there's no Cage on it, this worked well as a pallette cleanser. But walking around in the quieter corners of the library, I got some funny looks as a strange voice bellowed nonsense over the sound of tropical birds drowning in sine-tones. Far-out is still far-out.]
Back to Fine: So, I found Canady's December 24, 1966 review in the Times here (Proquest subscription), and--since it's just one segment of a longer article--I think it's within the bounds of fair use to reproduce both paragraphs on Albert Fine. First of all, it's notable that this musician had a solo-show as an artist. Second of all, whatever happened to Christmas spirit? Third of all, I wonder what happened to the show--which was open through January 12th--as a result of this review? To someone who would appreciate Fine's art, Canady's scathing review might be the best advertisement. The review is a run-down starting with the Paul Sachs collection of "masters" (including Rembrandt [yes, Rembrandt] and Picasso and Matisse at) at MOMA. Fine is several column inches lower, and the whole thing reminds me of one of my favorite movie scenes:
It's difficult to talk about Fluxus historically because so many Fluxus artists (in the broad sense) made histories part of their artwork. And straightforward diaries (we-did-this-and-then-this-and-so-and-so-was-there) and letters are part of the art too, not concerned with facts per-se. The typical historical records of the time, then--The New York Times, for instance--aren't very helpful either for the who-what-where-when, because of how fringe things were.
I've been getting into Fine's papers, his music, his letters, and corresponding with whatever living associates I can find via the googles, who have been very helpful! But for some reason, while I spent quite a long time searching Boston newspapers, I never really searched the NYT. When you're really getting into something, trying to understand its dimensions and such, perspective goes out the window, something left for the end of the project. Luckily, the Times' art critic, John Canaday, left a fascinating witness statement for the prosecution.
Canaday, from what I can gather (not being an artist or art historian) was greatly distressed by the collapse of technique in art, by the rise of conceptualism and the amateurism expressed by the less adept among the abstract expressionists, the worst of whom showed "exceptional tolerance for incompetence and deception." (That phrase, via wikipedia [I'll admit], comes from his very first September 1959 column.)
[PARENTHETICAL PARAGRAPH: Conceptual and performance art have become such an axiomatic feature of the sixties in the popular and critical vocabulary that it's hard to recognize just how transgressive they were. That's also a danger of being "in" criticism, to some extent, and losing perspective: I walked through a quiet library last night listening to the mash-up release of David Tudor's Rainforest II (an electronic piece that sounds like--you guessed it) and John Cage's Mureau, which takes segments of Thoreau's journals and recomposes the syllables according to chance procedures. I actually blog John Adams' reaction to hearing this piece read at Harvard here, towards the end. I bought this at the Amazon MP3 store for a dollar per track--$1.98 in all--a couple weekends ago out of curiousity. It's a very tedious release, to be sure, but I might have been the first person to download it there, because I see it's back to $13.98, and each track is "Album only." Last night, though, I was studying for a massive post-1960 listening exam in an avant-garde music class. While there's no Cage on it, this worked well as a pallette cleanser. But walking around in the quieter corners of the library, I got some funny looks as a strange voice bellowed nonsense over the sound of tropical birds drowning in sine-tones. Far-out is still far-out.]
Back to Fine: So, I found Canady's December 24, 1966 review in the Times here (Proquest subscription), and--since it's just one segment of a longer article--I think it's within the bounds of fair use to reproduce both paragraphs on Albert Fine. First of all, it's notable that this musician had a solo-show as an artist. Second of all, whatever happened to Christmas spirit? Third of all, I wonder what happened to the show--which was open through January 12th--as a result of this review? To someone who would appreciate Fine's art, Canady's scathing review might be the best advertisement. The review is a run-down starting with the Paul Sachs collection of "masters" (including Rembrandt [yes, Rembrandt] and Picasso and Matisse at) at MOMA. Fine is several column inches lower, and the whole thing reminds me of one of my favorite movie scenes:
Albert Fine (Grand Central Moderns, 8 West 56th Street): Presenting itself as avant-garde, this is the stalest, dreariest little show of the year. The only interesting thing about it is the question as to how a sensible dealer could ever rationalize a reason for hanging it, and why a critic who to the best of his knowledge is still in his right mind finds himself bothering to review it. Mr. Fine, who is 34 years old and holds an M.S. degree in conducting from the Julliard School of Music, has gathered together on one wall some detritus (example, a dried banana peel) and other unexceptional objects (example, a shirt cardboard) and has mounted each one crudely within uniform dime-store frames. As a weekend assignment in a freshmen art laboratory section, this display might get a bare passing mark as a demonstration of what Dada was doing 50 years ago.
The rest of Mr. Fine’s exhibition involves a certain amount of painting and drawing (or, at least, the use of the brush, the pencil and the pen) and here he flunks miserably. He is the total amateur, totally lacking in imagination, totally devoid of any technical skill, and totally fooled, it would appear, as to what he is doing. One thing alone justifies the exhibition, and it is not an argument ordinarily proposed as a justification: Mr. Fine’s pretentious infantilism demonstrates the quality of a section of our culture that has lost all respect for itself but doesn’t know it yet. To Jan. 12
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