This is, apparently, the kind of question you might have to answer if you are a philosophy student at the Sorbonne: Is Beauty limited to perception? This is exactly the kind of question that philosophers in the Austro-Anglo-American analytical tradition really hate. Oh, by the way, the name of that philosophical stream would be simply "Anglo-American" if it were not for one single figure: Wittgenstein. He started out influenced by Frege, but then went to Cambridge and studied with Bertrand Russell so now he is a huge part of the analytical stream. But back to the question: This is looking at t ..read more

I cannot hear the music of existence I have not been given the power to imagine it --André Frénaud (1907 - 1993) Is this the End of Days or the Beginning of Days: Jerry Seinfeld is reading Marcus Aurelius. "... he talks a lot about the fallacy of even thinking of leaving a legacy—thinking your life is important, thinking anything’s important. The ego and fallacy of it, the vanity of it. And his book, of course, disproves all of it, because he wrote this thing for himself, and it lived on centuries beyond his life, affecting other people. So he defeats his own argument in the quality of this ..read more

 Here is a performance I have not seen before ..read more

Dark Academia is not a cult, no, really. Here, listen to this guy:  It's a collection of aesthetic ideas that include fountain pens, journaling, traditional academic disciplines and values, fine literature, architecture and, of course, classical music. One of the things that got the trend started was this novel by Donna Tartt: The Peter Weir film Dead Poets Society is also an influence: I'm not sure that representative musical examples have been chosen, so let me make some suggestions. One that comes to mind is the ballet Giselle which featured in an episode of Angel, the Buffy the Va ..read more

 A Shostakovich quartet bookended by two quartets by Weinberg ..read more

YouTube used to be much, much better than it is now, even though now it has many times as many clips. The problem now is that the advertisements are more and more ubiquitous and annoying. But even worse than that is that the majority of the clips seem to be very scam-like. The image luring you to view the clip often has little or nothing to do with the actual content; the claim of the title is often wildly exaggerated and so on. But, there are still some pretty good items. One I ran across this morning is a very brief and very clear discussion of why Ludwig Wittgenstein is an important thinker ..read more

MEA CULPA! I FORGOT TO POST THIS THIS MORNING!  The artist can mislead the public more easily than can a man of any other profession, for setting aside the affinity of the herd for all that is superficial, a sort of halo surrounds the painter; he profits by a number of institutions very favourable to mediocrity, which give a certain importance to the métier as such, and are readily turned to account by the adroit --Julius Meier-Graefe (1867 - 1935) This quote is from 1904. * * * I've always been fascinated with Leonard Cohen, and not just because he was a fellow Montrealer: Leon ..read more

I've been listening to the Symphony No. 8 of Bruckner quite a few times lately. The main reason is that a performance of the piece by the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Riccardo Muti on August 15 is the finale of my visit to Salzburg this summer and I want to become really familiar with the work. And, if you are wondering, nope, no tickets are available, it is sold out. Yes, already. So don't tell me that classical music is dying--only in some places. I have always rather liked Bruckner ever since singing in the university choir in a performance of his Te Deum. Sure, I fell under the spell o ..read more

I taught myself how to write by writing letters to the editor of the Globe and Mail in Toronto. You had to address an issue of the day in pithy and original prose and not exceed 800 words. I got so that I could get quite a few letters published. And now, in the limited world of musical discussion on the Internet, I think I have achieved beatitude. Yesterday Rick Beato put up a particularly wacky video titled "What Is Wrong With Everyone?" Here it is: Assuming that the comments are sorted according to Top Comments the first comment you will see is this one, attributed to Speusippus: I was qu ..read more

I'm reading Edmund Husserl's book The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness right now and he is a turgid writer--one suspects that all phenomenologists have to attend a special class in inspissated prose. In any case, noticing that the Brave browser now has an AI component I decided to put it to the test so I asked: Summarize Edmund Husserl's phenomenology of time The reply: Edmund Husserl, a prominent philosopher, described phenomenology of time as a study of the structures of experience and consciousness. He believed that time is experienced as a continuous flow, which he called "i ..read more