Sounds & Fury

Proud To Be An American This July 4th

We Americans have special reason to be proud this July 4th as we, by democratic process, have elected as our president a genuine modern-day philosopher who, in the words of Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, has shown himself to be our "philosopher in chief" as well as our chief executive.

The first part of Obama's Cairo teach-in combined the best of rhetoric and philosophy. In the shrewd tradition of Isocrates and Aristotle, the president softened up his audience in Cairo University's ornate auditorium by quoting the Koran and dispensing rich praise. He related how Islamic culture had given us "the order of algebra, our magnetic compass and tools of navigation, our mastery of pens and printing, our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed."

[...]

[H]e imparted rules for philosophical discourse: "We must say openly the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors. There must be sustained effort to listen to each other, to learn from each other, to respect one another, and to seek common ground." At its core, his teaching was ethical and political, using the intellectual tools of logic to illuminate hypocrisy and contradiction: "None of us should tolerate these extremists," he said. "They have killed in many countries. They have killed people of different faiths — but more than any other, they have killed Muslims. Their actions are irreconcilable with the right of human beings, the progress of nations, and with Islam. The holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind."

Without weighing the pros and cons of American egalitarianism, Obama simply affirmed that "a woman who is denied an education is denied equality." Countering Machiavelli without mentioning Madison, he spoke straight to the prince: "You must maintain your power through consent, not coercion; you must respect the rights of minorities, and participate with a spirit of tolerance and compromise; you must place the interests of your people and the legitimate workings of the political process above your party." Weaving the ethical, political, and pragmatic together, Obama told Palestinians that if they forswear violence and take the high road, à la Gandhi and King, they will get their state.

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link.)

Featured Past Post #81 (Administrative Note)

It's that Wagner time of year again (the 2009 Bayreuther Festspiele opens 25 July with a revival of the 2005 Peter Schneider production of Tristan), and so, as we do each year at this time, we've put up on our right sidebar as our Featured Past Post our April 2005 post, Elegy, the content of which is even more valid today than when we first wrote it. The state of affairs it outlines is bleak, but, sadly, an honest — and accurate — assessment nevertheless.

Is It For Real, Or Is It Clever Skewering?

We were not in the least surprised that Tom Service, the intellectually and musically challenged classical music critic for The Guardian, took in earnest and swallowed whole the content of the new website, Musoc.org. It is, after all, no more than we would have expected of him.

When, however, an intellectually sharp and musically savvy classical music critic such as Anne Midgette, chief classical music critic for The Washington Post, does the same, we begin to wonder about our own assessment of Musoc.org's intent. With its cleverly shaped and ambiguously parodic treatment of the classical-pop cultural wars in the domain of music, it seems to us that the site's content (presumably a multi-author effort none of the authors of which are identified or credited by name, and might in fact be the work of a single individual) is giving point to the at-bottom silliness of the argument(s) by its ultimate reductio ad absurdum, categorical treatment of the matter (see, for instance, this FAQ, and this page of Definitions).

But, then, perhaps it's just our unwillingness to accept that any serious championing of classical music could, in absolute dead earnest, be that woodenheadedly and mindlessly categorical in its zeal to champion the genre. It's, after all, not only entirely unnecessary, but works against the very thing it purports to champion.

On Sales Spiels

Julia Keller, cultural critic for the Chicago Tribune, in a piece on the function and effect of the use of place names in fiction, opens with the following lede graf:

Salesmen have a trick. It's a well-known trick, but even though you know it's coming, it really works: They use your name over and over again in their spiel. Hearing your name operates as a sort of verbal aphrodisiac.

Oh yeah? Well, it may work that way for Ms. Keller, but for us it has a rather different effect. Whenever we're assaulted by that sales technique no matter what's being sold, a commodity or an idea, our first response is to say to the perpetrator, quietly and absent any trace of anger, (actually say, not just think of saying), "If you repeat my name just once more, I'm going to rip your tongue out of your face — through your nose!"

This has the effect of instantly throwing the pimp off his game, and the spiel — and the pimp — are gone within a matter of seconds.

Works like magic.

A New Find (For Us)

We were introduced recently to the work of a now deceased artist whose name was previously unknown to us: pianist Friedrich Gulda who died in 2000. The introduction was by way of a Deutsche Grammophon CD entitled, "Gulda Plays Bach", and for us it was a startling find as Gulda proved to be that rarest of 20th-century pianists: a pianist who uses the piano to perform Bach exactly as that instrument ought to be used, which is to say absent all trace of anachronistic and inappropriate largely Romantic pianistic devices which for more than a century now have defined first-rate, expressive piano playing. (For more detail on what we mean here, see this S&F post starting with the graf that begins, "So, beyond the business of the repeats and the self-invented embellishment, what was it I found so ultimately disappointing about Schepkin's reading [of the Goldberg Variations]?".)

We may be biased on this point, but we can't help but think that Gulda's Bach performance as heard on this CD as it relates to pianistic technique was influenced largely by the Bach readings of Glenn Gould even though their interpretations of the works in question are by no means the same or even similar. To state in the proverbial nutshell the principal common difference between the two would be to say that Gulda's interpretations are pitch-perfect true to both the letter and spirit of the scores, while Gould's go one transcendent order of magnitude beyond, the for the most part almost uncanny "rightness" of his readings so compelling that one is forced ultimately to abandon all ordinary critical criteria and say helplessly (and somewhat lamely) that Gould seems to have had some sort of mystical direct connection to the innermost musical mind of Bach himself, divining there what's impossible for any composer to notate on the cold, hard pages of a score.

That having been said, we cannot recommend too highly this CD of Gulda's Bach performances which includes the English Suites Nos. 2 and 3, the Italian Concerto, the C-minor Toccata (BWV 911), and an early Bach work, the Capriccio "On the departure of a beloved brother" (BWV 992). As an added bonus, there's also included a Prelude and Fugue written by Gulda himself which is modeled on Bach but is strictly a 20th-century work that's quite jazzy from beginning to end; a fun piece that displays a not inconsiderable gift for composing on Gulda's part.

For The Benefit Of Those Who Track S&F Via Feed Readers

An interesting update has been made to this S&F post.

Asagohan (Breakfast)

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 8:54 AM Eastern on 19 Jun. See below.]

Perhaps it's not entirely out of place on this Bloomsday to direct your attention to this video and remark that, good-fun stunt though it may be, there's something curiously right about this performance of the (abbreviated) first movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5.

(One of the YouTube commenters explains, "My Japanese friend Ami has said that they are arguing about what to eat for breakfast: 'asa gohan' is Japanese for 'breakfast'. Apparently some want pure rice, others? rice with vegetables and mushrooms etc.")

(Our thanks to Chris Foley of The Collaborative Piano Blog for the above YouTube video.)

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Update (8:54 AM Eastern on 19 Jun): Here's a video of the classic 1950s Your Show of Shows sketch done by Sid Caesar and Nanette Fabray that embodies the very same idea as Asagohan. We wonder, Did the creator(s) of Asagohan know this classic TV sketch, or was it the music itself that suggested the very same idea to him (them) as it almost certainly did for the creator(s) of the original Your Show of Shows sketch?

Inquiring minds want to know.

16 June 1904

 

Weird (Administrative Note)

Apropos this from a post of ours from August 2007:

[T]here's not a single entry on this blog — be it 100 words or 1000 in length — that has not been edited, typically several times, subsequent to its posting. Such edits are never noted unless they change matters of substance or correct factual errors, but they've been done nevertheless.

And so, if you read a newly posted entry on Sounds & Fury and discover questionable syntax, lame or infelicitous language or phrasing or clear typos, read the entry again some 48 hours later. Chances are that the clear typos will all have been corrected, and what you found questionable or lame or infelicitous first time round is questionable or lame or infelicitous no longer.

Just as a point of interest (and for the record), according to our MS Word statistics, this measly 180-word entry has had more changes in wording made to it (but not substance which has remained unchanged) after first publication (including changes made just today) than any other entry on S&F since S&F's inception. We're certain there must be a reasonable explanation for that, but we'll be damned if we can suss out what that explanation might be.

Weird.

Brief Comment On Jürgen Flimm's Production Of Strauss's Salome

[Note: This post has been edited extensively as of 1:53 PM Eastern on 12 Jun to add missing detail, and to make more temperate our initial too-extreme expression of contempt in calling the production "imbecile".]

We for the first time saw via PBS the Met's HD film of this Met production, and, Konzept-wise, everything about it was pointless, predictable, and lame. Salome is a work about private and perverse obsessions pervaded by a mystic, brooding miasma of spiritual decadence and evil, but the stage was so cluttered by a pointless, modern-day, detailed set (apparently an outdoor, man-made oasis adjacent to or part of the desert mansion of a decadent, 20th-century super-rich) — a set that seemed designed expressly to cause maiming bodily injury to any singer who made the slightest misstep — and peopled by an equally pointless drinks-in-hand gaggle of decadent, modern-day tuxedoed and gowned supernumeraries milling about seemingly in search of something to do, that the pervasive, brooding, mystic context that informs and conditions the work was all but lost entirely right from the get-go.

Something needs to be done about this sort of ham-fistedly metaphorical Eurotrash. It really, truly does. It needs doing away with — permanently and forever.

(Oh, in case you were wondering, Mattila was superb as always, the pointless Konzept notwithstanding.)