Sounds & Fury

What's Wrong With This Picture?

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 8:53 AM Eastern on 30 Jun. See below.]

The following are part of German-born director Elke Neidhardt's justification of her rewriting of the stage action and updating of the setting of Mozart's Don Giovanni in an Opera Australia production to be premiered at the Sydney Opera House on 5 July. All quotes have been taken from articles in Opera Australia, The Australian, and The Sydney Morning Herald.

• To create [opera] productions [today] that resonate with contemporary audiences, directors, perhaps more so than conductors, have to stay tuned to the spirit of the [contemporary] age. Audiences used to film and television will not, and should not, accept traditional [i.e., the composer's original] treatment of old material.

• [Today] it's virtually impossible to have that [viz., the coming to life of the Commendatore's statue in Don Giovanni] — you cannot portray that kind of miracle [today] unless you give a [today-acceptable] reason.

• [O]ffending a statue[!] is not good enough [reason for the downfall and demise of Giovanni]. That would be pretty hard to sell today.

• When watching Don Giovanni, audiences are required to believe in God and revenge and hell; in the notion that if we are not good boys and girls, we will be punished. Who buys into that today?

• In my treatment, [Giovanni is] a playboy who parties and beds women and takes drugs — these people exist more now than then

• Judged by the values of our own world, Giovanni is not that bad. He is thrilled by the conquest and he is not interested in forming relationships with women, but that is really all one can hold against him. Men who will not commit to relationships are common today — I don't think he deserves the demise he gets.

• You cannot do nodding, walking statues in the year 2008. You would be laughed off the stage anywhere else in the world except in Australia.

Oh? Is that a fact (may be applied to any or all the above).

Self-serving, self-involved, postmodern vandal!

(Our thanks to down-under blogger Sarah Noble of Prima la musica, poi le parole — who, in her excellent preceding linked post, displays more temperance on the subject than we're capable of mustering — for the links to the Australian press articles from which the above quotes were drawn.)

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Update (11:08 PM Eastern on 29 Jun): The above post brought the following aggrieved response posted to the Opera-L eMail list:

Oh please - enough of this prejudice. I mean prejudice in its etymological sense of pre-judging. This production has not even opened but is condemned.

This is such a common tendency on this list - judging productions on little evidence other than the written word. It seems to me there are so many self-appointed guardians of 'what Verdi/Wagner/ Mozart etc etc wanted'. Yet they were all theatrical and operatic progressives - concerned with meaning being conveyed to a contemporary audience.

Extending meaning to our time seems to be such a horror for some people. Any theatrical work only finds meaning in the minds of its audience.

Thankfully I live in a city where a 'conventional' production is greeted with the same outrage as avant-garde productions in the USA. We Europeans (not all of us I know - but opera often attracts a more conservative audience for all sorts of reasons) actively welcome re- interpretation. The houses are full on a diet of re-interpretation. Berlin audiences on the whole know their operas - but attract new audiences through radical re-interpretation.

Again and again on this list there is the same contempt evinced for 'Eurotrash' production - principally from the USA. I have asked this question before and never been answered - Are we all masochists in a city like Berlin?

Go to your conventional productions and enjoy them. We enjoy ours. You are not even seeing them but object often on the basis of a short clip on Youtube - do you want to dictate production styles for the world at large?

Cultural imperialism must have its limits.

Our posted response to those remarks (which we here reprint without further comment) read:

From Elke Neidhardt's own ignorant, even imbecile, remarks (those quoted in my S&F article), one is perfectly justified in prejudging her new production of _Don Giovanni_ to be yet another grotesque piece of Eurotrash, and yet another instance of the egregious, self-serving, _Regietheater_ vandalizing of yet another near-perfect opera masterpiece. Your perverse notion that these loathsome _Regietheater_ productions are simply efforts to "[e]xten[d] [the operas'] meaning to our time" is as ignorant and imbecile as anything Ms. Neidhardt had to say, for in every case -- no exceptions -- the "reinterpretations" produced by these pernicious _Regietheater_ vandals succeed only in trivializing and circumscribing meaning, never in expanding it, or in making it more "relevant". And that, at bottom, is the crux of the argument against these postmodern vandals and their _Regietheater_ travesties.

Update 2 (8:53 AM Eastern on 30 Jun): More from Opera-L in response to the above post.

I was going to change the Subject line to "When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth!" but decided to keep to the rules of the class. I will also hate myself the next day for wasting my time in such a useless effort, but.....

The idea that an opera, after it has been produced, cannot be interpreted by another artist in a different light is simply stunningly flaccid. Fact One. The composers did it themselves during their lifetimes: "You want a BALLET in my Tannhauser?!?!" (Gulp) "When do you need that by?" "My Lucia rewritten in French and changed?!?!" (Gulp) "And you need that when?" All composers (who had their operas performed) have the same history of easy compliance in making their operas audience friendly.

Second, artists were always adapting their image to the audience of the time (note to file: the baby Jesus was not actually born in Tuscany) but regarded the story itself as eternally relevant.

There is no intellectual argument that opera was meant, at the time it was composed, to be something to hang in the Louvre with guards around. It was not valid then and it is not valid now. Mozart, for example, by using Beaumarchais, was risking trouble because his plays were not just "pushing the envelope" but actually revolutionary. There were poor sods behind bars in the Chateau du Vincennes for much less! (In the newly refurbished donjon, you can see their graffiti still preserved.) If the regime had not been so tired and corrupt, it might have turned bad for our Salzburgian.

To which we responded (again, here reprinted without further comment):

My congratulations to you on invoking just about every lame straw man invoked by the "progressive" defenders and champions of Eurotrash to discredit both the person and the opinions of all those who take an opposite view of the matter.

Let me be as brief as possible in my response by saying that the creators of operas neither need nor require partners or collaborators once the work is finished. What the creators of operas need and require are gifted *servants* of which the director is one; servants who will faithfully and as free from distortion as possible *translate* the creator's work from its form on the printed page into its most effective and evocative concrete physical form onstage so that the work becomes apprehensible to an audience in a theater as its *creator* envisioned it, which vision is embodied fully in the score itself (music and text). When a director steps beyond the bounds of faithful translator he steps into territory in which he has no proper place nor any business being, and by so doing does a gross disservice to the opera, the opera's creator, and the audience alike. In short, a director is doing what he ought to be doing only when he and his work are perfectly transparent middlemen -- that is, transparent vis-a-vis the sense and spirit of the creator's original _Konzept_.

Does this mean or even imply that the opera director ought to be a slavish, unimaginative lackey? Not by a long shot. Perhaps the most effective and evocative staging ever of Wagner's impossible to stage _Ring_, for most pertinent example, was done in the early 1950s by Wieland Wagner, and that staging was the very antithesis of slavish and unimaginative.

To put the matter in the proverbial nutshell, all will be well if the opera director adheres rigorously and assiduously to what I've rather immodestly labeled The A.C. Douglas Opera Director's Prime Directive: Thou mayest do any bloody thing thou wilt in order to realize a dramatically and aesthetically effective and evocative translation of the score (music and text) into its concrete physical realization on the stage so long as what thou doest is consonant with the score at every point, and contradicts or diverges from it at none.

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius. Why, in comparison with him, [Joseph Joachim] Raff is a giant, not to speak of [Anton Grigorevich] Rubenstein, who is after all a live and important human being, while Brahms is chaotic and absolutely empty dried-up stuff.

—Diary entry by Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 9 October 1886.

(From Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)

Featured Past Post #64 (Administrative Note)

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Trashed Category Now Restored (Administrative Note)

Our TypePad-trashed category, Opera (mostly Wagner and Mozart), has now been restored by TypePad with all its posts intact, and can now again be accessed from the right-hand sidebar and from our Archives page.

Oh Yeah? Sez You.

There's no gainsaying another's personal response to a work of art no matter how benighted one may feel it to be. One can simply shake one's head, shrug one's shoulders, and move on.

Or write a blog post about it.

Blogger and Orange County Register classical music critic Tim Mangan of The Arts Blog has this to say about Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

If I could grab hold of a piece of music and give it a life-ending chuck, I’d choose Carmina Burana. Why? Because its music is longwinded and repetitive, its mood is maudlin and manipulative, its view of life is (overly) sentimental and tragic. The Nazis loved it, too.

Oh yeah? Sez you. We say (and say in more detail here):

[We] confess to having an ongoing, undiminished, and fairly mindless fascination with Orff's Carmina Burana. Its unrelenting ostinati; its primitive, propulsive rhythmic drive; its unsubtle tonic-dominant harmony sans any trace of chromatic coloring — in short, its very "dumbness" — is what seems to attract. It's a sort of invigorating mind-rester: primally engaging, and no thought required.

[...]

One critic would have it that Carmina is "toxic" music that will make Nazis of all who succumb to its primitive charms. A more idiot notion can hardly be imagined, and no more attention should be paid it than should be paid the notion that one who is not master of his domain, to borrow the Seinfeldian locution, will go blind as consequence. And so what if Orff himself was a Nazi as has been alleged. If true, that's Orff's reputation's problem, not [ours] or yours — or Carmina's.

We're tempted to say more, but, then, what more can one say in response to the opinion of a professional classical music critic who, in respect of his above quoted comments on Carmina, thinks Wagner's Tristan und Isolde shares some of those same qualities, but escapes the same censure because "the music is way better"?

Not much.

Of Interest To Classical Music Newbies

If you're a classical music newbie looking for a blog addressed specifically to your needs and concerns for introductory information on the field, then you should look in on The Horn, a newly opened blog written by former French horn player Robert Berger. Mr. Berger's passionate devotion to classical music, and to introducing classical music to those who've had limited or no experience of it, is evidenced in all his posts, and they make informative and engaging reading.

So, for all you classical music newbies out there, do stop over and give Mr. Berger's new blog a read.

Off-Message Political Observation

David Brooks, Conservative columnist for The New York Times, opines that Barack Obama has something of a "split personality":

On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes. [...] He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

Mr. Brooks then goes on to give the necessary pertinent examples.

What I found odd about the entire piece is why Mr. Brooks — one of the most politically savvy guys on the planet — would waste so much as a column inch pointing out this "split personality." Every politician — that is, every successful politician — is an ambitious, Machiavellian Fast Eddie under the skin. It's a given. He (or she) has to be in order to succeed. Our democratic election process practically requires it. What that election process doesn't require — in fact almost discourages — is that other side. You know, the "too intelligent" side.

I ask you, How can that given Fast Eddie be "too intelligent" to occupy the office of President Of The United States, the most powerful office in the world? The very idea is mind-boggling. And what's amiss with that "too intelligent" Fast Eddie also being a "high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier...capable of thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now"?

Not a damn thing I can think of.

I confess I've voted in a federal election exactly once in my life — in 1960 when I enthusiastically cast my vote for that other "too intelligent," "high-minded ... speechifier ... capable of thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now": John Fitzgerald Kennedy. When he was murdered, my hope for America was murdered along with him, and no candidate since then seemed capable of filling the void.

Until now, that is.

I further confess that, this year, even if the Democrats nominated Mickey Mouse as their candidate in Denver come this 25th of August, I would go to the polls for the first time since 1960 come November, and cast my vote for him. But as things stand now, and barring anything really untoward being revealed between now and then, I can go to the polls this November and cast my vote for the Democrat candidate with a perfectly clean conscience and a new sense of hope for America. It's not that I agree with everything Mr. Obama has to say. It's rather that it's become crystal clear to me that he has what it takes to be a genuine leader, even a great leader: a charismatic, riveting podium presence; a sharp, intuitive, and practical political sense; and clear-eyed, imaginative intelligence to spare. Those are the three fundamental and unacquirable gifts. Whatever Mr. Obama might lack in specific expertise and detailed insight can be rented or bought as needed whenever and wherever required.

Cheer up!, America. Things are looking up.

Extracts From A Schimpflexikon: One Of A Series

I confess freely that I could never get any enjoyment out of [this composer's] last works. Yes, I must include among them even the much admired [last] symphony, the fourth movement of which seems to me so ugly, in such bad taste, and ... so cheap that I cannot even now understand how ... [the composer] could write it down. I find in it another corroboration of what I had noticed already in Vienna, that [this composer] was deficient in esthetic imagery and lacked the sense of beauty.

—Composer and conductor Louis (Ludwig) Spohr in Selbstbiographie (1861) on Beethoven and the fourth movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 9.

(Adapted from Nicolas Slonimsky's, Lexicon of Musical Invective)

Not Our Fault (Administrative Note)

Sounds & Fury was down for about four hours today (17 June) due to TypePad doing some more messing about with its application and servers, and not due to anything done (or not done) by us. We do hope that TypePad gets its act together PDQ, and becomes once more an application that can be trusted as in days of yore.

Our apologies to those readers who tried to get through today but found their way blocked.

There Oughta Be A Law

The peripatetic Danish opera blogger, Ms. Mostly Opera of Mostly Opera, has posted a detailed series of posts cum production photos on the Kasper Bech Holten Ring cycle done for the Royal Danish Opera in 2006 (dubbed by them, "The Copenhagen Ring") the DVD of which is to be released next month.

Needless to say, the production is yet one more entry in the Regietheater sweepstakes (as we feel atypically charitable today we'll refrain from employing our usual designation for such Konzept productions), and — judging from Ms. Mostly Opera's detailed descriptions and the numerous production photos as well as Mr. Bech Holten's own explanation of his Konzept — also needless to say, it's yet one more egregious postmodern trivialization of Wagner's timeless cosmic tragedy, this time the Ring as a kind of early to end of 20th-century Forsyte Saga with Brünnhilde, not Wotan, as a latter day Soames Forsyte.

Jesus!

When, Oh when will these vandalizing Regie-midgets get it through their pointy-headed, self-important, self-involved heads that one cannot improve on the original Konzept of the Ring's creator (N.B., his Konzept, NOT his mise en scène), but can only ineluctably diminish or make to look ridiculous this sublime work of transcendent genius by their mundane, "today-relevant" intrusions.

There oughta be a law.

Literally.

Featured Past Post #63 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("On Conducting”) is now up on the right sidebar.

Silly-Season Question

As we've entered the three-month silly season, it seems an appropriate time to ask the burning question, In all of literature — either the book or a movie made from the book (the difference as it concerns your answer can be huge) — which real-world (as opposed to comic-book-world, fantasy-world, or sci-fi-world) fictional character would you most want to be?

On second thought, not really a silly-season question after all, is it. For nothing could be more succinctly and spot-on revealing, both to others and to one's self, of the true inner you — the you you long to be, but know you never really can — than one's truthful, earnest answer to that question. Answering it truthfully and in earnest can be a quite scary proposition, actually. And answering it truthfully and in earnest publicly, downright terrifyin'.

As the case may be, here's the deal. I'll show you mine if you show me yours. Use the comments section below to post your truthful, earnest answer, and why you would most want to be that character. Or post your answer on your own blog. If you choose to go the latter route, please leave a link to your blog post in the comments section below. Time limit: one week from today, after which time, if there are any takers, I'll post my truthful, earnest answer as an update to this post.

Anyone game?

16 June 1904

 

Is Your Brain Being Reprogrammed?

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:27 PM Eastern on 16 Jun. See below.]

Writer Nicholas Carr is experiencing an unsettling problem. Without his assent, he feels his brain's neural circuitry is being remapped and his memory reprogrammed. And what dastardly agency is responsible for this most disturbing process? The Internet.

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going — so far as I can tell — but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

[...]

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances — literary types, most of them — many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. "I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader," he wrote. "What happened?" He speculates on the answer: "What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?"

RTWT here.

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Update (2:27 PM Eastern on 16 Jun): And here's a corollary to the above.

Rich Is Rare

A rare creature it is today within the professional classical music critical fraternity who can do well-informed snark with eloquence and style in a classical music or opera review, and possesses the courage to commit it to print.

Case in point:

MAGDA DOES JOAN: La Rondine is with us again, Puccini’s elegant snore, with Marta Domingo’s tinkerings in place to confuse what is already inadequate in the dramatic resolution and with Michael Scott’s Coney Island Merry-Go-Round of an Act-Two stage set to cheapen and vulgarize even further what is already wrong-headed and simply clumsy in Signora Domingo’s "conception and direction." Speculations, however cynical, as to why impresario Plácido tosses this directorial bone to his wife from time to time don’t work this time, since Plácido is also in town, conducting the last few performances of Tosca.

Marta’s most blatant tinkering is to allow her heroine — mere moments after her Ruggero, having discovered the seedy details of her past, throws a hissy fit of the sort that any exuberant loverboy might throw from time to time and recover from an hour later — to hook onto a passing tsunami and disappear, Joan Crawford style, into the billowing wave. The dramatic timing is completely wrong; a suicide scene in any other Puccini opera — Madama Butterfly for one — takes up a fair proportion of the act; this one goes wham-o, with music Marta has dug up from somewhere. Granted, the opera’s ending as composed (and laboriously revised) by Puccini is hardly thrilling: the heroine Magda bathed in melancholy resignation; at least the timing is right. Marta Domingo’s evasive justification for the suicide, as printed in the program, is so much baloney. And that placid expanse of ocean in Michael Scott’s set design looks as capable of churning up a tsunami as my backyard fishpond.

We rest our case.

RTWT here.

A Brief Side Trip

The self-study of psychoanalysis has been something of an on-and-off preoccupation of mine that began when I was in my teens and continues to this day. And let me be very clear right at the outset here that when I speak of psychoanalysis I'm speaking exclusively of the writings and theories of its creator, Sigmund Freud, and not those of his followers and successors nor of the simplifications and bastardizations of psychoanalysis that call themselves psychoanalysis today, nor of any number of a myriad of other psychologies and psychotherapies that go by any number of other names but still refer informally to their disciplines as psychoanalysis.

My study began not at the beginning, so to speak, but at a little past the middle, also so to speak, with my reading of Freud's slender volume, The Ego and The Id (1923). So riveted was I by what I read that I went on to read everything of Freud's on which I could lay my hot little hands — everything, that is, except those writings intended by Freud to be introductory texts on psychoanalysis for the non-specialist: Five Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1910), Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1916-17), and, New Introductory Lectures On Psycho-Analysis (1933). Why I skipped the reading of those elementary volumes (i.e., elementary compared with Freud's theoretical and metapsychological writings intended for professionals) is something of a mystery to me as they were among the most readily available. But skip them I did, and for reasons equally mysterious have just this past week taken up reading the latter two and found myself astonished anew by Freud's lucidity of explication of even the most difficult material, and by his disarming candor concerning what psychoanalysis understands about the structure and dynamics of the human psychic apparatus and what it doesn't yet understand, and which types of pathological disturbances of that apparatus psychoanalysis is competent to deal with therapeutically and which not.

Also astonishing in the light of the ready availability of these volumes is just how appallingly ignorant of the fundamental theoretical concepts of psychoanalysis are so many of today's most strident critics of psychoanalysis, including those with professional credentials who ought to know better (see this 2004 S&F post for more on this). It's almost as if (perhaps precisely as if) those critics had a professional or personal investment in showing the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis to be the mere effusions of a sexually obsessed, imaginative 19th-century writer of speculative essays rather than the fruit of the rigorous investigations of a brilliant and relentlessly self-critical physician whose discoveries of the structure and dynamics of the human mind were light-years ahead of their time even though they had to be arrived at using the limited technical methods and processes at their discoverer's disposal, and be expressed by him metaphorically using the limited technical language of the time in order to be communicated at all.

But not to worry. Strident critics notwithstanding, Freud and the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis will ultimately prevail, and those strident critics recognized for the ankle-nipping lilliputians they so clearly are.

Trust me.

Wuorinen On Brokeback

When it was announced a day or so ago that bad-boy postmodernist opera impresario Gérard Mortier had commissioned bad-boy serialist Charles Wuorinen to compose an opera for the New York City Opera based on brilliant writer Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, we first did a sharp intake of breath, and then — most curiously for us, all things considered — nodded our head in assent. It'll work, we decided.

Following are some thoughts on the matter by the commissioned composer himself in answer to questions put to him by Peter Dobrin, one of the classical music critics of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Why did this project appeal to you?

Well, it has the potential to be a very dramatic thing — operatic doomed love and tragedy, the conflict between love and duty if you will. It’s just the basic material out of which many operas and tragedies can be made. It’s just that the circumstances are updated to our time.

Have you done any work on it yet?

We don’t yet know whether Annie Proulx will do the libretto, so I haven’t done anything directly. We have had a few preliminary discussions and I have a number of other works to get out of the way. I see starting in earnest beginning in 2009.

What will determine whether Proulx does the libretto?

It’s a question of time. We are all very busy. I don’t want to speak for her. I think she wants to, but there may be practical considerations that may get in the way.

What if she doesn’t do the libretto? Would you write it yourself?

We have some other ideas in mind. I doubt I would do it. It’s not a wise idea generally speaking.

What are the big challenges in this project, at least as you see them now?

Without knowing what form the libretto takes it’s difficult to be specific. I think that I would like to have a somewhat larger role for the wives of the two principal characters than in the current story. For questions of vocal balance and for theatrical aspects as well.

Have you thought about structure? Will it follow the film or the original story?

No, I think it will follow the story. The film has its own character, and I am not partial to referencing the film. One thing the film fails to do is to make quite clear the degree to which the landscape, the mountains, the effect it all has on the characters. It’s a very hard and unforgiving environment in which these people have to function and it does prevent them from taking the kind of escape routes they might otherwise have. I know that Annie Proulx is very much engaged by this question, not just in this story but in others that come from the same collection. I want to make sure that we have elements of menace in the landscape clearly delineated.

And that last is the key both to Proulx's story, and to why we decided a score by Wuorinen will work.

RTWT here.

Worldwide Compendium

We've just been made aware of what turns out to be a valuable online classical music resource. It's a new website called Classical DJ, and the name is most apt. Classical DJ is a worldwide compendium of online commercial (broadcast) classical music radio stations neatly organized and hyperlinked for your convenience. We've added Classical DJ to our exclusive listing of Culture Sites on our left-hand sidebar.

(Note to those contemplating eMailing us to announce the existence of a new website or blog and requesting a link on Sounds & Fury in exchange for a link to S&F on the new website or blog.

Although we're most gratified when linked to by others, we don't engage in link trading on S&F. We almost dumped the eMail that came to us announcing the above website as it suggested such a link exchange. If you have a new website or blog that you think would be of interest or use to S&F's readers, by all means let us know about it. If we think the website or blog worthy of a listing on S&F, we'll list it. If not, not, regardless of whether you post a link to S&F on your website or blog or not. We trust we make ourselves clear.)

Alan Rich's New Blog, So I've Heard, Is Now Online

The new blog of venerable classical music critic Alan Rich, So I've Heard, is now online and logging reports direct from the Ojai Festival. Time for everyone to update their blogrolls, then click over to So I've Heard to read what Mr. Rich has written, and to welcome him to the classical music blogosphere.

A Political Conundrum

Now that it's (all but) certain that Barack Obama will be the Democrat nominee for the office of President come November, and keeping in forefront of mind that it's of the utmost importance come November that Washington be as thoroughly cleansed as possible of every last vestige of the criminally incompetent and right-wing loony Bush Administration, its supporters and sympathizers, and its attendant bureaucracy, the very best running mate Mr. Obama could have by his side is none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton (do I have to explain why?). Once having achieved the office of President, however, the very worst Vice President Mr. Obama could have by his side is none other than...Hillary Rodham Clinton (do I have to explain why?)

What to do, what to do?

Beats me.