Sounds & Fury

More Bad News From Academe

As if there already weren't bad news sufficient, here's more bad news from academe courtesy of a tenured professor.

Higher education for too many undergraduates at too many liberal arts colleges has become a puffy sofa nestled with down pillows. For a few bucks and in a few hours, students can take a test and learn that they are language disabled, or mathematically disabled, or for a few bucks more, both. Students increasingly ask me during advising sessions if a class is tough or hard, or if the professor assigns a lot of reading, because they need to “lighten their load.” “I want to take a class with Professor So-And-So. I have a lot on my mind, and I don’t want to stress out.” “Don’t worry,” I say, “you won’t.”

This comfy zone of mediocrity extends beyond the classroom. “Student life” largely serves to debilitate the notion of a genuine, deliberative, academic community. Rather than fuel cerebral discussions with activities for the mind, resident advisors and their adult supervisors plan activities that redefine anti-intellectualism. There is Sensitivity Day, Tolerance Day, and Wear [insert color here] Day, and a host of other events that are aimed at “inspiring.” Dorm life is supposed to be cool, fun and engaging. For me, it was simply a place to sleep.

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

Bless You!, Martin Bernheimer

The venerable and almost always right Martin Bernheimer on Bernstein's Mass:

On Friday, Marin Alsop led a cast of hundreds in a noble, possibly futile, attempt at aesthetic resuscitation. The object of her loving labour was Bernstein’s Mass. Profoundly showbizzy, pompously pious and pretentiously trendy, it was a mess when it inaugurated the Kennedy Center in 1971, and it still is a mess.

Word!

RTWT here.

Finally!

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 11:48 AM Eastern on 29 Oct. See below.]

Finally! A major American MSM daily — the first to do so — grasps the ineluctability — and common good business sense — of what's been staring them and every other ink-on-paper daily in the country in the face for the past five years or so.

The Christian Science Monitor said Tuesday it will become the first national newspaper to drop its daily print edition and focus on publishing online, succumbing to the financial pressure squeezing its industry harder than ever.

Come April, the Boston-based general-interest paper — founded in 1908 and the winner of seven Pulitzer Prizes — will print only a weekend edition after struggling financially for decades, its editor announced Tuesday.

[...]

"Obviously, this is going to help with our costs, but it also enables us to put much more emphasis on the Web and basically put our reporting assets and our editorial assets where we think growth will be in a very tough industry in the future, which we think is the Web," said Editor John Yemma, who was The Boston Globe's multimedia editor before he moved to the Monitor in June.

RTWT here.

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Update (11:48 AM Eastern on 29 Oct): More here.

Sound Of The Times

I had a revealing but fairly depressing experience recently; one that should have been neither revealing nor a surprise, but oddly — and somewhat interestingly — was both.

A young, casual acquaintance of mine, an untrained but enthusiastic aficionado of classical music, knowing of my past history as a card-carrying audiophile, invited me to his home to audition his newly purchased and set up stereo system for which, he assured me, he had spared no expense in assembling the best components available. Knowing how attached most audiophiles are to their equipment and how sensitive they are on the subject, I tried firmly but gently to decline the invitation, but in the end my curiosity got the better of me and I accepted.

Bad decision.

This young man, a late twentysomething, proved to be a true child of his era as I suppose are we all, for what he had assembled was, to not put too fine a point on it, a sonic horror; an exemplar of the iPod/MP3 sensibility writ loud and large.

Although a concertgoer, this young man seemed to have a total mental disconnect between the sound of live music in an acoustically first-rate concert hall and its reproduction via recording. What seemed most important to him, and what he was most excited about, in his newly set up stereo system was its ability to effortlessly achieve undistorted SPL levels on a par with those achieved in live performance in the concert hall, especially where it concerns frequencies below 125Hz, no matter how grotesque and inaccurate such SPL levels sound within the acoustic space of a home listening room. Overall accuracy of reproduction, including that elusive but all-important back-to-front transparent layering of acoustic perspective, was of no concern to him. While such unconcern makes no nevermind if what one is listening to is a reproduction of a performance by some rock-and-roll band, it simply won't do when a reproduction of a performance by even a small chamber group, much less a full symphony orchestra, is under consideration.

Within the first three minutes or so, I understood what I was dealing with, knew there was nothing for it, and decided my best and most prudent tactic was simply to affect to listen attentively and vaguely admiringly, and then make my exit as quickly as was politely practicable.

Given all in the world today one has to be depressed about, surely the deadening or absence of refined acoustic sensibilities where reproduced classical music is concerned ranks, or ought to rank, somewhere near the bottom on the scale of importance.

But, somehow, it doesn't.

A Brief Note On Music Composed For Film

In a post on the Classical Music & Opera Forums, a member wrote:

Regarding film scores: if they garner less respect (in general) [as music], it's because the external constraints are so much more severe, so that purely musical considerations -- especially considerations of structure -- have to take the back seat (if they're even allowed on the bus at all). To begin with, the composer has to fit the music to a scene precisely x.y seconds long, and if the music is to illustrate the action, then the emphases (beats, accents, phrase climaxes) have to fall precisely in time with visual cues within those x.y seconds. Not much room for sonata form here!

We elaborated a bit on that by pointing out that it's not so much a question of structure or form, but rather a question of narrative.

Every piece of stand-alone music traces out, from beginning to end, it's own perceptible, coherent musical narrative absent which what's written is gibberish, not music. But unless a composer has a collaborative arrangement with the filmmaker such as that between Eisenstein and Prokofiev, in Nevsky most especially, where the film, from its very inception — shot by shot, even frame-second by frame-second — was created at the same time the music was being written and vice versa, a film composer simply cannot think in those terms. The controlling narrative is the film's narrative always, and the film composer, who typically doesn't enter the creative process until the film is in its finished, final-cut form, must work his music to precisely fit that film narrative which leaves him all but powerless to create music with its own, stand-alone musical narrative. In fact, to the extent the film composer writes music with its own, stand-alone musical narrative, to that same extent will that music fail as music for the film for which it's being written.

The hallmark of a first-rate film composer is that his film music is never experienced as a thing in itself unless one consciously turns one's ear to hear it in that way, but instead is experienced as an inseparable and organic part of the very fabric of the film itself. Bernard Herrmann had a particular genius for this, and his film scores have never been equaled much less surpassed by any other film composer of our experience. (Kubrick's brilliant use of already written, stand-alone music in his films is a prominent exception to this rule. But only a Kubrick could pull off that little trick so effectively and make that stand-alone music seem an inseparable, organic part of the very fabric of the film itself.)

Gee, What A Surprise

We suppose this appalling report was intended to be a surprising and shocking revelation:

Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later. That figure is from a study cited by Clifford Adelman, a former research analyst at the U.S. Department of Education and now a senior research associate at the Institute for Higher Education Policy. Yet four-year colleges admit and take money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!

Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave the campus having learned little of value, and with a mountain of debt and devastated self-esteem from their unsuccessful struggles. Perhaps worst of all, even those who do manage to graduate too rarely end up in careers that require a college education. So it's not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you're likely to meet workers who spent years and their family's life savings on college, only to end up with a job they could have done as a high-school dropout.

No surprise or shock whatsoever. Merely another ineluctable consequence of our mindlessly equalitarian postmodern culture.

Since the Sixties, a college "education" after graduation has, for most high school students, taken the place of a saner era's far more sensible and hugely more useful vocational school education; an education that would actually prepare most high school students for a life's work more suited to their intellectual capabilities, and of far more benefit to society as a whole. As it largely was in saner eras, a college education is, or ought to be, an undertaking reserved for a society's intellectual elite exclusively irrespective of that elite's ability to pay which last was, sadly, not often the case even in those saner eras the availability of scholarships notwithstanding.

Also not surprisingly, colleges themselves have exploited our culture's mindlessly equalitarian postmodern idiocy in respect of a college education for all. It's the money, of course. Idiots and geniuses pay the same, and there are far more idiots than geniuses. As the article concludes,

Colleges should be held at least as accountable as tire companies are. When some Firestone tires were believed to be defective, government investigations, combined with news-media scrutiny, led to higher tire-safety standards. Yet year after year, colleges and universities turn out millions of defective products: students who drop out or graduate with far too little benefit for the time and money spent. Not only do colleges escape punishment, but they are rewarded with taxpayer-financed student grants and loans, which allow them to raise their tuitions even more.

RTWT here.

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

The Straw Man Cometh — Yet Once Again

Depending on one's mood at the moment, it's either annoying or comical to encounter one or both of the current favorite straw men set up by certain champions of pop culture in the so-called "Culture Wars" as it concerns so-called high and pop culture in the arts generally, and music in particular.

The first of these is the Graying Audience For Classical Music straw man (for a neat trashing of this straw man, see here); the second, the straw man of the flawed and ill-considered attempts by out-of-touch, old-fogey, snobbish high-culture types to "convert" younger people to their way of thinking about music. As one of the usual suspects, an indefatigable champion of pop culture, lately put this last:

Younger people (which by now means people 40 or younger...) don't make distinctions between high and popular culture, or at least not distinctions of value. That includes what used to be thought of as high culture values, like being thoughtful, noncommercial, deep, or (more simply) serious.

People in the older culture can ignore this, or try to fight it, but that's dangerous for them. They simply cut themselves off, not just from contemporary life, but from a lot of thoughtful, noncommercial, deep, and serious art. And if they're trying to make converts for high culture, than they lose bigtime, because their case won't seem plausible to the people they're trying to reach. It's a very bad strategy — obviously! — to go to smart, educated people, and say, "Listen to our music, because yours is trash."

The very notion that "people in the older culture" give so much as a rat's ass about "mak[ing] converts for high culture" among the "40 or younger" crowd (the "smart," "educated" young crowd referred to above, not the primary- and secondary-school young) is nothing short of risible. Other than misguided champions of pop culture, the only people who concern themselves with attempts at such purblind, circle-squaring exercises are well-paid marketing suits and the commercial and managerial high-culture interests who pay them to find ways to put more butts in seats.

Misguided champions of pop culture have the curious notion that it's somehow a bad thing to "make distinctions between high and popular culture" even though it's blazingly clear that not only are there clear distinctions between the two, but a vast gulf that, in one direction — from pop to high — is all but unbridgeable for the overwhelming majority of those who've not been specially schooled when very young to prepare them to be able to understand and appreciate the complexities of things high cultural, music in particular; complexities almost by definition all but totally absent from things inhabiting the pop cultural domain, again, music in particular.

One is sorely tempted to assign or speculate on the tendentious motives behind that perverse sort of thinking on the part of these misguided champions of pop culture. But identifying those motives would, ultimately, serve no useful purpose. It's more than sufficient to simply recognize the perversity and wrongheadedness of that thinking, and accordingly dismiss it from consideration entirely.

God Bless Sarah Palin Redux

Yessir. God bless Sarah Palin! She's John McCain's gift to the American people, and the best thing he could have done for his country this election year as she's the final nail in the Republican coffin.

Do you doubt our word? Have a look at this hilarious "preview" of Ms. Palin ensconced in the Oval Office. As you move around the page hovering and clicking on the hot spots, be sure to give the door a few successive opening clicks, for behind it lurks a small stash of goodies.

Rock on, Sarah!

(Our thanks to Peter Czipott for the link.)

Heads-Up

In conjunction with the release of the paperback edition of his award-winning book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has announced a new expansion of the book's companion blog, The Rest Is Noise, to include a newly compiled audio-illustrated Glossary and a newly expanded Audio Guide to help sharpen readers' appreciation of what's discussed in the text.

Neato supplements to a neato book.

Sounds & Fury Top 50 Classical Music Blogs: 3rd Quarter 2008 (Jul-Sep)

For the past five days the Google Backward Links counts for our testing sample of 30 classical music blogs have remained constant which indicates that Google's Backward Links update for September 2008 has now propagated throughout all Google servers and has finally stabilized. Why this updating required three weeks for Google to complete rather than the typical few days to one week is a mystery to us. But there has been no buzz whatsoever in the SEO techie community to indicate a fundamental change in Google's procedure, nor of anything untoward about this latest Google update. We therefore now feel confident in posting our S&F Top 50 rankings for the 3rd quarter 2008.

Accordingly, below is Sounds & Fury’s quarterly ranked list of the Top 50 Classical Music Blogs for the quarter ending 30 Sept 2008. Eligibility for consideration for listing and a detailed explanation of the methodology used in compiling the ranked list as well as a key to reading the list’s entries can be found here. Of our list of 139 classical music blogs, 100 were eligible for consideration in this quarter's rankings. An alphabetical listing of all the classical music blogs considered eligible for inclusion in the S&F Top 50 for this quarter can be found here. If you know of any classical music blog(s) that meets the S&F Top 50 eligibility requirements but is not listed there, please leave the name and link of that blog(s) (the FULL link, please, so that it's clickable) in the comments section of that alphabetical listing. Do NOT leave the name and link in the comments section of this post as it will be missed when the time comes for collecting and evaluating such names and links. The comments section of this post is for your general comments, corrections, questions, and suggestions, and will remain open for the current quarter only.

We trust you’ll find the S&F Top 50 an informative and useful resource.

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Blogs Eligible For Inclusion In The S&F Top 50 — 3rd Qtr 2008

[NOTE: If you know of any classical music blog(s) that should be included in this list but isn’t, please leave the name and link of that blog(s) (the FULL link, please, so that it's clickable) in the comments section below which will remain open until the close of the current quarter at which time all recommendations will be reviewed. Accepted recommendations will be included for consideration for ranking in the S&F Top 50 rankings for the next quarter.]

A View from the Podium
Adaptistration
AfriClassical
An Unamplified Voice
ANABlog
Arts Addict
Cello Centered
Cellogeek
Cellomania
Cincinnati Pianist Blog
Classical Convert
Classical-Drone
Classically Hip
Collaborative Piano
Coloratur...Aaah
Countercritic
Daily Observations
David Duff's Classical Blog
David’s Waste Of Bandwidth
Deceptively Simple
Dial “M” for Musicology
Eric Edberg
Erling Wold
Felsenmusick
Fugue State
Gavin Plumley
Gertsamtkunstwerk
Hella Frisch
Holde Kunst
Hughsung.com
Intermezzo
Ionarts
Iron Tongue of Midnight
James Roe
Jason Heath's Double Bass Blog
Jasonweinberger.com
Jessica Duchen’s Classical Music Blog
Klang 440
Letter V
Life's a Pitch
Listen
Mahler Owes Me Ten Bucks
Mind the Gap
Monotonous Forest
Most Of The Shebang
Mostly Opera
Musical Assumptions
Musical Perceptions
My Favorite Intermissions
Mysteries Abysmal
Nico Muhly
Night after Night
Nimble Tread
Northwest Reverb
Oboeinsight
Of Music And Men
On an Overgrown Path
On The Record
Opera Chic
Out West Arts
Parterre Box
Philly Opera Fanatic
Planet Hugill
Plink, Plonk, Plunk
Podium Speak
PostClassic
Prima La Musica poi le parole
Renewable Music
Roger Evans Online
Sandow
Score Desk
Sieglinde’s Diaries
Slipped Disc
So I've Heard
Soho the Dog
Sounds & Fury
South Florida Classical Review
Sticks and Drones
The Cello Geek
The Detritus Review
The Gathering Note
The Horn
The Listening Sessions
The Omniscient Mussel
The Opera Tattler
The Penitent Wagnerite
The Rambler
The Rest is Noise
The Reverberate Hills
The Stark Raving Cello Blog
The Transcontinental
The View From Here
The Violin Blog
The Well-Tempered Blog
The Well-Tempered Wireless
This Blog Will Change the World
Through These Ears
Viola in Vilnius
Wagner Opera
Yarnplayer's Cello Blog

Featured Past Post #70 (Administrative Note)

Apropos the Met's new production of John Adams's Dr. Atomic, a new Featured Past Post ("A Brief Note On Adams's Dr. Atomic”) is now up on the right sidebar.

Oh Dear

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 11:23 AM Eastern on 21 Oct. See below.]

This is not encouraging:

The composer's [Richard Wagner's] great-granddaughter, 30-year-old Katharina Wagner, has a lot on her plate. She has just taken over the Bayreuth opera festival, together with her half-sister Eva Wagner-Pasquier, winning a drawn-out power struggle with her cousin [Nike Wagner]. At the premiere of her uninspiring "Rienzi" in Bremen on Oct. 11, it was easy to imagine that all this had distracted her.

Set in 14th-century Rome, "Rienzi" is an epic seven-hour drama describing the rise and fall of a populist leader whose power goes to his head. He promises peace and delivers bloodshed, until finally the people turn against him. Later in life, the composer himself was a little embarrassed about the work which made him famous overnight (he was 29 when he conducted the premiere in Dresden in 1842.) Katharina has thankfully given us a four-hour version. It still feels long.

She has also turned it from drama to farce, especially the first two acts. Megalomania becomes vanity, violence becomes impudence in her interpretation. Rienzi is a preening, prancing, buffoonish showman, a media politician with a penchant for kitsch and an out-of-control ego. Part Liberace, part Silvio Berlusconi.

But, then, we hardly expected anything more — or different — of Katharina.

RTWT here.

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Update (9:16 PM Eastern on 13 Oct): Different voice; same assessment.

Update 2 (11:23 AM Eastern on 21 Oct): And yet another voice, but essentially the same assessment if more kindly put.

A Heads-Up

We would like to call your attention to a blog wherein can regularly be found some of the best and most enjoyable writing in the classical blogosphere, but which blog for some strange and puzzling reason has never placed on our past but now (at least temporarily) suspended S&F Top 50 classical music blog rankings. We speak of This Blog Will Change the World written by "Canadian organist, Anglican, aspiring polymath, McLuhan disciple, and radical positivist," Osbert Parsley (also the name of "An English Renaissance composer (1511-1585) associated with Norwich Cathedral and known almost entirely for his church music").

Click over and read. Your time will be amply repaid.

S&F Top 50 Notice Update (Administrative Note)

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 2:56 AM Eastern on 15 Oct. See below.]

Since our 5 October notice concerning the pulling of our priorly published 3rd quarter 2008 S&F Top 50 rankings, we've been checking Google's Backward Links counts for a selection of some 30 classical music blogs, and they keep changing almost from day to day, some by small swings, some by large (for instance, the count for Sounds & Fury has come up variously as 2380, 2830, 1910, and at last check is showing 2820; and Night After Night, which for more than a week appeared to be in what is called the "Google Sandbox" with both its PageRank and Backward Links stripped, at last check has had its PageRank restored, and is showing 2690 for its Backward Links count).

We at first thought the reason for this was simply that Google's (roughly) monthly Backward Links update had not yet propagated completely throughout Google's thousands of servers and so had not stabilized. But this almost daily change in count suggests something else and something more fundamental is going on, and we can't suss out, nor can we find authoritative information on, just what that something else might be. Until (and unless) we are able to find such authoritative information to make a determination as to whether it positively or negatively impacts the use of Google's Backward Links count as the basis of our S&F Top 50 rankings, we are suspending publication of our quarterly Sounds & Fury Top 50 Classical Music Blogs rankings indefinitely or until such time as we're able to find a useful replacement which, at this writing, seems nonexistent (Technorati's so-called "Authority" number is a bit of a joke, and thoroughly useless for this purpose).

To those who found the S&F Top 50 a useful resource, our apologies.

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Update (2:56 AM Eastern on 15 Oct): Google's Backward Links counts have finally stabilized. Accordingly, our 3rd quarter 2008 S&F Top 50 rankings can now be published.

Dancing About Architecture?

Most of you have, we're sure, heard the old saw that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. It neatly and succinctly expresses the futility of attempting to convey the essence of one artform in the language of another, for if that were indeed possible, one or the other would be largely superfluous. Yet writers about music have never actually bought that notion, and some have even managed to disprove it — if not entirely, to a fairly convincing degree. The widely acknowledged modern-day master of this neat little trick is The New Yorker's music critic, Alex Ross; a trick he manages to pull off in just about all his writings on music, and now perhaps most famously in his award-winning first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. But there are others as well. Witness this by New York Magazine's Justin Davidson:

Is it possible that after decades of adulation, (Leonard) Bernstein could still be underappreciated? Perhaps all that love has done him a disservice. The Establishment is so thickly populated by Bernstein’s apprentices that they make it difficult to hear his music for what it is. I don’t mean his adrenalized interpretations of other people’s scores, delivered in storm-tossed style, or the evergreen Broadway shows; those remain vivid and ever present. I mean, rather, his application essays to the pantheon of Western genius. Those big concert-hall scores with the Judeo-Christian titles — Jeremiah, Kaddish, Mass, Chichester Psalms — are still touched by the pall of disappointment that shrouded his career as a composer. His critics accused him of committing derivative mush; his champions lobbed back a fusillade of hyperbole. Bernstein’s symphonic works are, like their maker, grandly imperfect. They go on too long, they wail, they trudge, they grow murky, and they cry out for an editor who could tell Bernstein no. But they also do something miraculous: They grow fresher with age. Maybe now that he’s been gone for a while, we can sit down and listen.

Not so fast. The opening-night party at Carnegie Hall, which chief Bernstein apostle Michael Tilson Thomas emceed with his usual charm, practically embalmed the legend in snappy respect. The Symphonic Dances from West Side Story trotted neatly along, tossing confetti of brass. Yo-Yo Ma showed up for an intense “Meditation No. 1” from Mass, Dawn Upshaw hop-skipped jauntily through “What a Movie” from Trouble in Tahiti, and a pleasant time was had by all. In an era dominated by a lugubrious avant-garde, Bernstein was a wizard of joy. But that suite of polite performances made me want to run home and listen to the final two minutes of Fiesta, a sensational CD of Latin music detonated by Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela. The disc ends with the West Side Story “Mambo,” which erupted from my speakers in a raucous tumble of rhythms. The performance taps a subversive wildness that runs through even the most beloved numbers.

RTWT here.

S&F Top 50 Notice (Administrative Note)

For reasons known only to Google, the propagation of its monthly (roughly) Backward Links updated index throughout Google's thousands of servers which typically takes something on the order of a few days to a week after it begins, still hasn't propagated completely and become stable for this past month (i.e., end of the 3rd quarter). Consequently, we've deleted our prior posting of the S&F Top 50 for the 3rd quarter of 2008 as just about every single number has changed, and the numbers are still changing. When this Google Backward Links update has finally propagated completely and stabilized, we'll then recompile our S&F Top 50 rankings for the 3rd Quarter of 2008, and re-post it. We apologize for any problems the now deleted prior posting may have caused.

More On The Plain Dealer-Rosenberg Affair

Joshua Kosman, classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, adds his voice to the virtual flood of critical commentary on the squalid Plain Dealer-Rosenberg affair, and it's the most trenchant commentary yet. Begins Mr. Kosman:

Newspaper writers know a lot of ways to lose our jobs. We can cut ethical corners by taking money or gifts from people we write about. We can plagiarize, invent sources, file stories from places we haven't been — the list goes on.

A couple of weeks ago Donald Rosenberg, the longtime and deeply respected classical music critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, found a new one. He attended concerts by the Cleveland Orchestra and wrote what he thought about them.

Now, you might suppose that that was more or less the job description, but you'd be wrong. Rosenberg's task, as his editors conceived it, was to attend concerts by the Cleveland Orchestra and write complimentary things about them — and particularly about the orchestra's music director, Franz Welser-Möst.

RTWT here.

(Our previous posts on this matter can be read here and here.)