Sounds & Fury

Whither Classical Music?

John Simon, the often reviled but brilliant literary, theater, music, and film critic whose acerbic, barb-tongued, (too-)often just plain nasty commentary has appeared in such wide-ranging publications as The Hudson Review, The New Leader, The New Criterion, National Review, New York Magazine, Opera News, The Weekly Standard, and Bloomberg News and who now writes his own blog Uncensored John Simon has up on that blog a new article titled "Whither Art?" the "art" of the title referring to the fine arts generally but painting in particular.

As we read the article it struck us that were one to substitute classical music along with mutatis mutandis adjustments everywhere painting is referred to, pretty much everything Mr. Simon has to say would read just as on-point. (In fact Mr. Simon himself suggests just that in one brief sentence in one brief paragraph: "The problem for most arts is that so very much has already been done in them, propelling more recent practitioners into horrible distortions, obscure byways, or downright dead ends. This is true also in music, otherwise we would have been spared Stockhausen, Cage, Glass and their likes." See also our August 2004 S&F entry titled "Whither Genuine Art?".)

Writes Mr. Simon:

As I have often said and sometimes written, the history of art extends from Anonymous to Untitled, from when only the work mattered to where only the name in the signature does.

What reminds me of this is a reproduction in The New York Times (10/16/12) of an untitled painting by Franz Kline, which, at the forthcoming auction, “is expected to bring $20 million to $30 million” and make me sick to my stomach. I recall a time, long ago, when Kline yelled at me at a party, “You are full of shit!”, and I replied, “Maybe, but at least I don’t smear it on canvas and peddle it as art.”

Art today is the result of a tacit conspiracy among artists, art historians, art critics, art dealers, nabobs who don’t know what to do with their money, and all the people who don’t know anything about art. And why shouldn’t it fetch that much when the article about the Kline painting notes that one by Clyfford Still, resonantly entitled “1949-A-No. 1” went for $61.7 million? Even Clyfford with a Y should raise a cautionary eyebrow.

Read the full text here.

Whatever Became Of The Breastplates?

The excellent Wagner-dedicated website The Wagnerian has up a chapter excerpt from author David Littlejohn's 1992 book The Ultimate Art: Essays Around and About Opera titled "Whatever Became of the Breastplates?" that comments in brief on stagings of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen from Wagner's own staging at Bayreuth in 1876 down to the present day (or rather, the present day as of 1992). For Ring newcomers especially (but by no means exclusively) the chapter makes for most interesting reading and closes with the following thought, even more salient today than when it was written:

Chaos, as Wagner himself sometimes suggested, is likely to be the rule, rather than the exception, in our world (and in productions of Der Ring des Nibelungen that try to reflect or comment on that world) until another cruel divine order emerges to force things back into unity. Rings devoted to the evils and collapse of Eastern European communism are surely on the drafting boards already, now that Rings devoted to the evils and collapse of capitalism and fascism are becoming routine. Be grateful if you have the opportunity to see a contemporary Ring that is as compelling to look at as it is to listen to; thoughtfully (not narrowly or spitefully) of our time; on the whole generous to Wagner, rather than mean-minded and reductive; one that makes provocative sense, and still seems to grow out of the music, which is (fortunately) larger than all of these postmodern Konzepts put together.

Read the full text here.

A Brief Wagner Corrective

Although it hardly meets the burden of its title, Alex Ross's newly posted article for The New Yorker's Culture Desk section, "The Case For Wagner In Israel", is a brief but incisive commentary that ought to be read by all whose understanding of Wagner is mired in the pop image of this complex artist as a composer of music characterized by "grandiosity, bombast, anything that makes a loud noise and goes on for a very long time," as Mr. Ross put it, and that he was Hitler’s favorite composer.

The artist who fired the imaginations of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Mann, Cather, Kandinsky, Isadora Duncan, and Eisenstein, among hundreds of others, cannot be summed up in a few adjectives.

[...]

Wagner must take some of the blame for the reductionist image that prevails in the public mind. It was his spiteful anti-Semitism that has caused so many people to draw a straight line from the “Ring of the Nibelung” to Hitler.

Read the full text here.

Georg Solti: "Musical Colossus"

Next month marks the centennial of the birth of one of the world's all-time great conductors: Georg Solti. To mark the occasion the Brit daily The Guardian ran a fine (if a bit overstated in places) 5000-word tribute by writer Ed Vulliamy titled "Georg Solti: The Making Of A Musical Colossus" (can you imagine our National Newspaper Of Record — or any major American daily, for that matter — devoting that many column-inches to such a subject in their regular pages?).

Next month marks the centenary of the birth of the conductor, musician, visionary, jester, husband and father who bore witness to, and embodies, his time, the core of the 20th century, and whose genius — a word too liberally used nowadays — not only towered over the music-making of his lifetime but radically changed it in ways that are only now becoming clear.

[...]

[H]e made music of magic and quality, entwining power and clarity, that no other interpreter of his time — not even Karajan, Jansons, Ancerl, Böhm or Bernstein, in what is rightly considered music's golden age — could match. In the studio, Solti revolutionised the science and art of recorded music so as to democratise it at the highest — still unsurpassed — level of atmosphere and sound quality. And in concert, Solti is the only name one can speak in the same breath as those that dominated the generation that preceded him — astride both the second world war and the iron curtain — Evgeny Mravinsky in Leningrad and Wilhelm Furtwängler in Berlin. Solti was the true heir to their legacy on record, and their way of electrifying live performance through blending restless and rigorous perfectionism with explosive spontaneity.

Read the full text here.

Heather Mac Donald Goes Baroque

When thinker and writer Heather Mac Donald feels moved to write a piece on opera classical music-lovers are sure to be richly rewarded by its reading even if, going in, one has no interest at all in whatever particular thing Ms. Mac Donald has chosen to write about (on coming out we assure you one's interest will be more than a little aroused whatever that particular thing may be).

This time, for the quarterly magazine City Journal, Ms. Mac Donald has chosen to write about two opera productions given in New York earlier this year: Telemann's Orpheus presented by New York City Opera, and a new original pasticcio opera titled Enchanted Island put together for the Metropolitan Opera by British playwright Jeremy Sams who also wrote the English libretto for the new work. Wrote Ms. Mac Donald about these two productions:

Few Baroque operas (and all by Handel) have clawed their way from oblivion to the margins of the standard repertoire, a source of chagrin to anyone who loves the period or simply hungers for broader musical experience. The Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera offered radically different solutions to this lacuna earlier this year. NYCO revived an unknown opera by Georg Philipp Telemann in a beautiful and expertly performed production at El Museo del Barrio. The Metropolitan Opera crafted an entirely new work from music by eight Baroque composers, set to a new libretto in English.

The Met’s venture was the riskier proposition, bound to trigger grumbling among Baroque aficionados who resented the missed opportunity to stage an historical work. But while the revival of existing operas such as Telemann’s Orpheus at NYCO contributes more to our musical knowledge in the long run, the Met’s Enchanted Island must also be counted a resounding (and insufficiently appreciated) success.

Read the full text here.

The 12 Commandments

We've just come across a posting by theater critic, playwright, and author George Hunka on his blog Superfluities Redux titled "The Complete Critic’s Qualifications" wherein he reiterates theater and drama critic Harold Clurman’s 1964 list of the so-called "12 commandments" for theatre and drama critics and comments on same. It struck us that those 12 commandments are equally valid for classical music critics (classical music including opera of course) and so herewith reprint that list below, mutatis mutandis.

Besides having cultivated taste, feeling and a talent for clear observation of all classical musics:

1. The critic should know the greater part of historical and contemporary classical music as written and performed. Added to this, he must be conversant with general literature: novels, poetry, essays of wide scope.
2. He should know the history of classical music from its origins to the present.
3. He should have a long and broad concert- and opera-going experience — of native and foreign ensembles.
4. He should possess an interest in and a familiarity with the arts: painting, theater, architecture and the dance.
5. He should have worked in classical music organizations in some capacity (apart from criticism).
6. He should know the history of his country and world history: the social thinking of past and present.
7. He should have something like a philosophy, an attitude toward life.
8. He should write lucidly, and, if possible, gracefully.
9. He should respect his readers by upholding high standards and encourage his readers to cultivate the same.
10. He should be aware of his prejudices and blind spots.
11. He should err on the side of generosity rather than an opposite zeal.
12. He should seek to enlighten rather than carp or puff.

Mr. Hunka remarks of the original list that "of contemporary critics, and judging only by what they publish under the guise of criticism, I can count the number of both online and print reviewers who meet [these] qualifications on the fingers of one hand."

Word!, re, the above list.

Peter Gelb, Take Note

[NOTE: This entry has been edited as of 10:49 AM Eastern on 21 Apr to reinstate in the opening graf a critical conditional clause mysteriously gone missing.]

In our long-running and continuing war against Eurotrash Regietheater, we've often remarked, both here and elsewhere, that at the root of the problem when the staging goes bad in those rare cases where the Regie is actually making an honest effort to reimagine the concept of the opera's creator rather than blatantly foisting his or her own pea-brained Konzept on an innocent public while hijacking the opera creator's music and text to his or her own purpose is that the Regie is taking his cues from the opera's text rather than its music, and that such a process is a lethal error on the Regie's part. It was therefore gratifying to read the following from stellar singer-actor and intelligent musician Jonas Kaufmann in a piece today for The New York Times by classical music critic, book author, and opera scholar Peter G. Davis:

Too many directors arrive at the opera house these days knowing little or nothing about music. Most come from the spoken theater, focus only on the text and don’t understand how to give the music its space [we would have said, "give the music its due"]. It may seem obvious to you and me, but a brilliant theater director does not automatically translate into a brilliant opera director. If I am a crack racecar driver, that doesn’t qualify me to be an ace pilot as well.

I sometimes feel that directors devise all these elaborate concepts because they don’t trust the power of the music and are terrified of boring the audience. Opera is a truly magical art, but the magic originates primarily in the music that we singers [we would have added, "and the conductor and orchestra"] work so hard to communicate.

Yes indeed.

Peter Gelb, take note.

Cutting Peter Gelb Some Slack

In a piece for The New York Times this past Tuesday, Times chief classical music critic Anthony Tommasini reported on an interview he had with Peter Gelb, General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera, the interview carried out at Mr. Gelb's invitation. In that interview, Mr. Gelb yet once again defended the Robert Lepage staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen:

Peter Gelb has both raised expectations and invited criticism by calling Robert Lepage’s $16 million production of Wagner’s Ring cycle for the Metropolitan Opera revolutionary. He used the word again in a recent interview at his office, as he spoke of the “trials and tribulations” of executing Mr. Lepage’s “superhuman,” technically daunting concept in a repertory theater “against amazing odds.”

[...]

Despite the technical problems and the stinging barbs the production has received from many critics, Mr. Gelb sees the Lepage Ring as emblematic of his mission to bring the latest theatrical thinking and technology to the Met. “Over all for me, on balance, I think it’s a remarkable experience,” he said. Yet even he is a little worried: “I reserve final assessment until I see how it all works out technically, when presented complete in the space of a week.”

To be fair to Mr. Gelb in the matter of his defenses of the Lepage Ring, he at present finds himself in a seriously difficult position: he has to defend his original decision on this staging against the reality of now having on his hands a clear white elephant — a multi-million-dollar white elephant; by far the most costly production in Met history.

Back at the planning stages of the project, the Lepage staging must have looked like it would be THE perfect solution for the Met: a staging that used spectacular — yes, even "revolutionary" — new technology to present Wagner's Ring the way Wagner himself conceived it. In one fell swoop, Mr. Gelb must have thought, it would satisfy both "progressives" and "traditionalists" and the Met would be the beneficiary in terms of critical accolades and ticket sales. Unhappily, things didn't work out that way. Neither "progressives" nor "traditionalists" were satisfied, and the critical response from all quarters — both print and digital, professional and amateur — was largely anything but enthusiastic.

The problem Mr. Gelb faced in the planning stage was that, because of the nature of the staging, it was difficult, if not entirely impossible, to make anything even approaching a trustworthy assessment of the staging until it was fully a fait accompli, and so, at the time, he had to rely almost exclusively on how the thing looked on paper, so to speak; a hugely risky gamble given the costs involved; a gamble that, as things turned out, Mr. Gelb lost — big time. But, as always in the arts, and particularly in the performing arts, no risks taken is a prescription for stagnation, and so perhaps we all — and that very much includes us — should cut Mr. Gelb just a modicum of slack when it concerns his desperate if impotent defenses of this failed staging. We all can afford to give him that much.

The Last Word

I so do want to believe that Christopher Hitchens did in fact dictate this postmortem piece to Washington Monthly editor Art Levine. It's positively delicious and, in spirit (NPI), pure Hitchens.

An excerpt:

At the end, the manner of my “passing,” as the pious so delicately refer to death, was as much a disappointment to the dewy-eyed acolytes of god-worship as it was to me, although for rather different reasons. For more than a year after I publicly announced in June 2010 that I would begin chemotherapy for esophageal cancer, the stupidest of the faithful either gloated on their subliterate Web sites that my illness was a sign of “God’s revenge” for having blasphemed their Lord and Master, or prayed that I would abandon my contempt for their nonsensical beliefs by undergoing a deathbed conversion. The vulgarity of the idea that a vengeful deity would somehow stoop to inflicting a cancer on me still boggles the mind, especially in the face of the ready explanation supplied for my illness by my long, happy, and prodigious career as a smoker of cigarettes and drinker of spirits

RTWT here.

Somewhere, Christopher must be smiling — on several counts.

The Conductor's Prime Directive

New York magazine's classical music critic Justin Davidson tries his hand(s) out on the podium as a conductor and writes about it in an article for New York titled, What Does a Conductor Do?. In that article Mr. Davidson quotes trenchant advice to conductors from world-renowned Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink; advice that, laconic as it is, should be taken by every conductor as his(her) Prime Directive when standing in front of an orchestra in either rehearsal or performance. It says that conductors should always remember when waving their arms and hands about on the podium that "the musicians are very busy with playing. You should not distract them."

Sage advice indeed.

Well Worth Your Time

Here is a marvelous — and considering the venue (a major mainstream newspaper: The Philadelphia Inquirer), astonishing — multimedia feature on Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music, among the most demanding and exclusive music conservatories in the world and easily the most demanding and exclusive in the nation. The feature is entitled, "The Curtis Factor", and it can be read and viewed here.

Well worth your time.

Heather Mac Donald Nails It Yet Again

Heather Mac Donald (no, that's not a typo; that's how she spells her name) — perhaps the best writer on opera on the planet and an inveterate enemy of Regietheater as it's mostly practiced today in opera houses worldwide (see her previously S&F-linked 2007 article, "The Abduction of Opera") — has nailed the critical idiocy surrounding the Met's new production of Don Giovanni and given what is easily the most detailed and trenchant review of that production extant.

The Metropolitan Opera has just opened a searingly erotic Don Giovanni, yet the New York Times has dismissed the new production for its “timidity.” Other members of the New York press corps are even more contemptuous. The New York Observer sneers that the “new Don Giovanni is worse than bad: it’s nothing.” And the New York Post calls the staging “dreck.” What has inspired such critical contumely? The riveting production is a faithful rendering of the opera’s music and libretto.

RTWT here.

Why Are We Not Surprised?

Composer Steve Reich on his personal pantheon of predecessor composers:

Beethoven was a great, great composer, whom I admire enormously. But for me, music history basically begins with Gregorian chant then goes to the end of 1750 with the death of Johann Sebastian Bach. Then it goes on without me paying much attention until Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky, Bartok and so on. The entire classical and Romantic period is filled with geniuses that I don't listen to and from whom I've learned absolutely nothing.

Why are we not surprised?

On Hearing Bach In A Berlin Subway Played On An Accordion

We are halfway up the steps of the Gleisdreieck platform when I hear a tune that I know like breathing. It’s Bach’s A-minor fugue for organ, BWV 543, twisting in the air. But before you get too anxious about where this is going, let me add that the lines of monumental fugue pouring down the refuse-strewn steps are coming from an accordion. And [my wife] Jane and I know the performer. We’ve been hearing this guy for the last three months. He’s been following us around town like a musical stalker, little snippets as the U-bahn doors open briefly at stations up and down the U9 and U2, chords swelling from the far side of impenetrable crowds mobbing the platforms at Zoo or Alexanderplatz. He’s the phantom of the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe, and the songs from his subway squeeze box form a ludicrous soundtrack to this city, this time of year, this late in history: pretty, archaic tunes familiar from countless films, melodies that might coax harried commuters to cough up half a euro.

[...]

He’s up there, in the passage by the ticket machines, seated on a little stool, his back against the oily tiles like he’s some kind of indigent addict. Everything about him shocks me. First of all, he looks about fifteen. He’s a blond, crew-cut, scrofulous, anemic, and slightly lankier E.T. His instrument is an old Russian chromatic-button bayan, a massive thing that must be half his weight. The waterfall of sound issuing from the intricate machine is better than good. It’s pure architecture, big enough to fill this train station with the hint of more livable worlds. The chords form a map of forgotten possibilities, and the long, braided fugue subject unfolds as painfully as any sound you might pick to accompany this scarred place.

He heads into the home stretch, that phantasmagoric cadenza. As his arm extends, cuffing the drooping bellows like it’s a willful pet terrier trying to break free, all I can think about is putting him in a story.

[...]

[T]his Russian busker will never have any stage grander than the bowels of Central European mass transit systems. The guy plays the accordion, for God’s sake. He’s looking at subway stations and wedding receptions for the rest of his life. It doesn’t matter in the slightest if it sounds, down in those resonant tunnels, fuller than the organ in the Berliner Dom.

[...]

My brain seizes on a line from Broks, the story-telling neuropsychologist that my German students struggled with: “Great music cancels the distinction between the external world and our inner life.” And nothing in evolutionary biology can explain why it does this to us. “Experience is a first-person business,” Broks says. “Science operates in the third person.” Music is — what? A surprise counterpoint between the two. I’m sorry, but in Berlin, pretty Berlin, in the spring, as we stand there listening to the Russian busker play Bach, when nothing in me is strong enough to survive the annihilating past, this music makes me want to know what happens next.

A train from Ruhleben thunders in to the platform and disgorges its content. People walk past this one-man band at varying speeds, each making complex real-time cost-benefit analyses, calculating the trade-offs between net present enjoyment and future arrival. The accordionist lays into the bass of Bach’s tremendous final pedal point, herding the profusion back towards tonic. My wife and I stand transfixed. For as long as it takes this man to reach the final cadence, we are here, anyhow, going nowhere, present to the endless unlikelihood of existing at all.

—Novelist Richard Powers from his essay, "What Does Fiction Know?"

Worthwhile Reading

Here is a lovely illustrated essay on the waltz by attorney (yes, you read that right) George M. Wallace of the blog A Fool In The Forest titled "Bearing Valse Witness" that's well worth your time reading.

An excerpt:

Does anyone still compose a waltz? Well, the form did not die, certainly, even as Ravel was busily vivisecting it. To the north, in Denmark, Carl Nielsen was busily constructing the first movement of his Symphony No. 3 (aka the Sinfonia Espansiva) around a grand, driving waltz theme that recurs at intervals, over the objection of the sections around it. (Some enterprising choreographer could construct a fine dance from that movement, if not the entire symphony.)

Nielsen composed his symphony in 1910 and 1911, conducting the premiere in 1912. His waltz, therefore, falls in the middle of Ravel's composition process: begun after Ravel started his Valse in 1906 but completed prior to the outbreak of the war that so influenced Ravel's final version. While rumors of war can be detected in the brass and percussion — they become explicit in Nielsen's 4th and 5th symphonies of 1916 and 1920-22 — the Espansiva is a fundamentally optimistic piece, particularly in its final two movements.

Teachout On Kushner

We're not much of a fan of culture and drama critic Terry Teachout whose blog, About Last Night, we long ago removed from our S&F Culture Blogs listing as we found it mostly devoid of any real content its entries almost exclusively (and totally shamelessly) of the advertisements-for-myself sort and therefore useless as meaningful contributions to the cultural blogosphere not to mention genuinely annoying in themselves.

Mr. Teachout, as we suspect most of you know, is principally the drama critic for The Wall Street Journal and the chief culture critic for Commentary magazine. As we have only passing interest in the theater we don't often read his WSJ columns, and as his writings for Commentary have largely to do with music about which we find him something less than perceptive and enlightening when the subject is classical music, we don't often have occasion to read his writings for that journal either except when they're linked by a source we follow regularly and whose judgment we trust. Such a link was posted today by the still indispensible Arts & Letters Daily to a fairly lengthy Teachout piece in Commentary not on music but on playwright Tony Kushner which piece shows what a first-rate, perceptive, and enlightening writer Teachout can be when writing on matters about which he's truly knowledgeable and about which he has something of genuine value to say. Following, an excerpt.

Part of the reason why Kushner is so admired by elite opinion makers is that he is, as Newsweek pointed out, the living embodiment of their unanimously held views on a wide range of political and social issues.

[...]

The supremely high esteem in which Kushner is held in bien-pensant circles was demonstrated in May when the board of trustees of the City University of New York voted to deny him an honorary degree, citing his belief that Israel was “founded in a program that, if you really want to be blunt about it, was ethnic cleansing. . . . I have a problem with the idea of a Jewish state. It would have been better if it never happened.” The response of the cultural establishment to the board’s decision was so reflexively and overwhelmingly negative that CUNY’s executive board voted a few days later to overrule it and confer the degree.

As it happens, the uproar at CUNY took place at the end of a theater season during which Kushner was omnipresent. In October, the Signature Theatre Company mounted the first New York revival of Angels in America, which played to full houses throughout its long run. Seven months later, the Public Theater gave the New York premiere of The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures, Kushner’s first new full-length play in a decade. But unlike the Angels revival, which was greeted with the usual lockstep praise, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide received unexpectedly mixed notices — albeit mostly of the cautious kind in which the reviewer takes care to make clear his otherwise extravagant admiration of the author. Even so, it was evident from the reviews that Kushner’s new play was felt to have fallen well short of Angels.

In fact, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide and Angels are of a piece. Like Kushner’s other plays, they are the work of a flawed artist ill served by the indiscriminate esteem in which his work is held — and whose problematic style may at last have reached the point of diminishing critical returns.

RTWT here.

Delicious

This closing graf of a fairly lengthy negative review in The New Criterion by writer Joseph Epstein of a new book by academic Stanley Fish ranks among the most delicious (and devastating) literary coups de grâce we've ever had the pleasure of savoring. Wrote Mr. Epstein:

I seem to have written more than three thousand words without a single kind one for How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One. To remedy this, at least partially, let it be noted that, at 165 pages, index and acknowledgments and biographical note on the author included, it is a short book.

RTWT here.

Alarmingly Intelligent

John (Coolidge) Adams is a composer whose prose is as well-made as his music. He's also alarmingly intelligent as witness the disarming opening of the Commencement Speech he delivered to the Julliard graduating class after being awarded an honorary degree by that institution.

I have to say that being a composer invited into a public gathering is always an anxiety-producing experience. No matter how casual or at ease we composers may appear on the outside, there is always that little homunculus sitting on our shoulders, muttering cryptic and often insulting remarks and reminding us that, no matter how much we’ve composed or no matter how grand the honor we may be receiving, “you’ll never be as good as Bach.”

Worth your time reading the entire Speech all the way through, especially if you intend making a life in the arts your life's work.

It's About Bloody Time

We've heroically and in seeming isolation been fighting a lonely war on S&F almost since Day One: the war against unnecessary and illogical punctuation even though such punctuation is decreed in practically all U.S. style books of our acquaintance. Like, for instance, the rule that periods and commas are always placed within, never outside, any quotation marks. Sometimes that makes logical sense, and sometimes not. For instance, it never makes sense to include either a period or a comma within quotation marks if the quotation marks are used to indicate, say, a book's title, as in, say,

We find Mr. Jones's new book, "My New Book", to be a crashing bore.

Including that second comma within rather than outside the quotation marks as we've above done simply makes no sense. That second comma is NOT part of the book's title, and therefore has no place within the quotation marks that set off that title.

Well, it appears our isolation in such matters is perhaps at last coming to an end. Ben Yagoda, in an article for Slate, writes:

For at least two centuries, it has been standard practice in the United States to place commas and periods inside of quotation marks. This rule still holds for professionally edited prose: what you'll find in Slate, [T]he New York Times, [T]he Washington Post — almost any place adhering to Modern Language Association (MLA) or AP guidelines. But in copy-editor-free zones — the Web and emails, student papers, business memos — with increasing frequency, commas and periods find themselves on the outside of quotation marks, looking in. A punctuation paradigm is shifting.

RTWT here.

Shape and Ring

In a review of Stanley Fish's newest book, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, written for the The Book, the online book review section of The New Republic, Simon Blackburn, the Bertrand Russell Professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and a Research Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, had this to say:

For Fish a great sentence is like a great athletic performance. It is an example of something done supremely well, so well that it cannot be bettered. Other similar feats will come along, but only to stand alongside it. What exactly is done in such a performance? There is no single answer, indeed no finite answer since there is no limit to the things that can be done with words. But it is what Conrad called the “shape and ring” of sentences, the perfect adaptation of form to achievement, that Fish wants to share.

It is wrong to think that the sentence is a mere slave, whose function is to bear content, which, while being the really important thing, is also something that could equally have been borne by another. Change the shape and ring, and you change everything. The balance, the alliterations, the variation, the melody, the lights glimmering in the words, can work together to transform even an ugly thought into something iridescent....

[...]

Do shape and ring matter? Perfection always matters. Without the sensitivity Fish admires, we would not only have no great literature. We would also have had no Gettysburg address, no Churchill, and no Martin Luther King, Jr. If we cannot move peoples’ souls, we cannot move their ways of living either: “Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who writes its laws.”

Quite right — all of it.

RTWT here.