Without music to decorate it, time is just a bunch of boring production deadlines or dates by which bills must be paid. --Frank Zappa  A somewhat wide-ranging item to start with: who would be the greatest literary critic of all time? Interesting discussion. One name that comes up is Northrop Frye a really outstanding Canadian literary critic that no-one reads any more. I suppose the equivalent in music would be Donald Francis Tovey, a truly great music critic that probably no-one reads any more. * * * What I'm reading these days. Two books: Very easy to read, but difficult to understand ..read more

If scruffy protestors invade the shrines of high culture, I guess this counts as asymmetrical culture war: The Usual Grotesques So there I was, in the middle of the opening night of Tannhäuser at the Metropolitan Opera, when the shouting started. “Climate protesters,” or “climate activists”—the usual grotesques—were shouting “No opera on a dead planet,” and other such inanities. They placed themselves around the theater, timing it so that when one was arrested, another started shouting somewhere else. I counted five interruptions, though the first press reports say there were only four; did I ..read more

 In quotes because it is the title of a brief song-cycle by Leonard Bernstein: This is by way of introducing this essay: Who Doesn’t Like Music? Nabokov, For Starters I don’t doubt that for some listeners, music delivers profound, transcendent experiences. It does it for me, and probably for you, too. But music is also tremendously overhyped. Every day, heaps and heaps of superlatives are shoveled onto it by people who, in truth, did not feel what their words tell you they felt. They heard a record/went to a concert and had a pleasant time, whereupon they tell you that their mind e ..read more

The New York Times has an excellent article on the new music string quartet: For New Music, There’s No Quartet Like JACK The group formed in the heady atmosphere for new music at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., in the early 2000s. The players in the original lineup — Richards, Otto, the violinist Ari Streisfeld and the cellist Kevin McFarland — were united by decisive encounters with the work of the German composer Helmut Lachenmann, a master of sonic extremes. Lachenmann traveled to Toronto to coach three of the JACK members in his first quartet, “Gran Torso,” and the gr ..read more

Cover of Levit, Beethoven, Late Sonatas  One of the things I have admired about Igor Levit is how he launched his recording career: with four double CD sets. The five late piano sonatas by Beethoven, followed by the six partitas of Bach, followed by a collection of three variations: the Goldbergs of Bach, the Diabelli of Beethoven and the big set by Rzewski (actually, that's three CDs) and then the Preludes and Fugues in all the keys by Shostakovich. Whew, after that, a lot of pianists would just retire. This is what you record at the end of your career, not the beginning. Anywa ..read more

"It is not possible to step into the same river twice" --Heraclitus Why? Because πάντα ρει, "panta rei," "everything flows." We might not think everything flows, but we certainly think that some things flow, rivers, for example. Oh, and music. Yes, music definitely flows which makes the idea of musical structure a very peculiar one. Music is like a river in that it flows through time, always changing (and even if it is not changing, your perception of it is changing). If you can't step into the same river twice (different time, different water) then you perhaps cannot hear the ..read more

New edition of Tárrega Yuri Temirkanov: As head of two of Russia’s leading musical institutions, the Kirov (later, Mariinsky) Opera and Ballet Theatre (1976-88) and the Leningrad (later, St Petersburg) Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he was principal conductor for more than three decades from 1988, Yuri Temirkanov, who has died aged 84, was at the forefront of music in the Soviet Union for nearly half a century. I saw Temirkanov conduct the St Petersburg Philharmonic in a concert in Valencia a few years ago. In that post I said: I mentioned that the Saint Petersburg Philharmonic o ..read more

I'm just going to share a few images for the heck of it. First up, a lovely watercolor of a frog by a long time reader to whom I am grateful. I just got it framed. I was out looking at some vineyards and took this photo of the sky: Standing on a terrace in front of some 17th century churches: A colleague walking in a Day of the Dead procession: A sculpture at the entrance of a new hotel: Finally, a light-hearted piece I wrote a number of years ago ..read more

A really interesting interview with literary agent Andrew Wylie in the New York Times: When Ruthless Cultural Elitism Is Exactly the Job. Over the years, the Wylie Agency’s clients have included Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Martin Amis and John Updike. (All of whose estates, along with those of other luminaries like Borges and Calvino, are now represented by the agency.) Wylie’s roster of contemporary authors includes Sally Rooney, Salman Rushdie and Karl Ove Knausgaard among its blue-chip multitude. (Several New York Times journalists are also represented by Wylie.) Such voracious acquisit ..read more

As I look across the room, this is what I see: This is part of one shelf of my CDs. I don't actually feel I "have" a recording of a piece of music unless I have the CD. Like previous physical manifestations, the wax cylinder, 78s, vinyl LPs and, shudder, cassette tapes, it represents the durability of recorded sound. A year or ten years from now they will still be there. Streaming music, which is fast replacing the CD, has enormous advantages, of course. With it you have access to nearly everything. But at the same time, it also has something of the ephemeral nature of musical performance: h ..read more