Sight and Sound Movie List: La Winters

Asterix and Cleopatra (1968, Rene Goscinny, Lee Payant, Albert Uderzo dirs.)

When I was a kid, my mom painstakingly taped movies off of the Disney Channel, then cut out the relevant movie info from Disney magazine and taped that to the cassette envelope, so I could always know what I was watching. When I was in middle school, I decided to tape every episode of X-Files possible and when I ran out of blank tapes, I started using the tapes she made me. I feel terrible about this even now. However, Asterix and Cleopatra was my favorite and it escaped the fate of the other tapes. It's so odd, part musical, part bizarre fake history, plus the most awesome sound effects.

Idiocracy (2006, Mike Judge)

One of my favorite comedies (along with Super Troopers), Idiocracy has stuck itself in the back of my mind. I suspect the world it shows may actually be the future (Extra big ass fries! Costco Law School….) so why not laugh at it before it's our reality?

Perfect Blue (1997, dir. Satoshi Kon)

Can I call this a horror movie? I guess so, as it's insanely creepy. Being unable to escape someone, plus having your life stolen, is a great combination.

Spirited Away (2001, dir. Hayao Miyazaki)

This is my favorite Miyazaki movie, with Ponyo as a close second. I love the way the movie treats the fantasy world as a living, breathing place with room for a human child as a servant. The crazy events seem commonplace to the characters.

The Fifth Element (1997, dir. Luc Besson)

So what if the plot makes no sense? I will be disappointed if the future does not include flying ramen stands.

The Rock/Face Off/Con Air (1996/1997/1997 dir. Michael Bay, John Woo, Simon West)

In middle school, my mom joined Columbia House for a month, got the five free movies, and then quit. The Rock was one of the ones I picked off the list, along with Con Air and Face/Off (plus Forrest Gump and that Sally Field movie where Kiefer Sutherland kills her daughter). Those three together (minus Forrest Gump and Sally Field, though I rewatched Eye for an Eye on Netflix and it's not half bad) are my personal action movie favorites, and I know them word for word. All of them also feature Nicolas Cage, who is at his grumpiest in Con Air. The Rock is the best of them, with completely overblown stunts, Sean Connery as old James Bond, and Ed Harris as the excellent, sympathetic antagonist (can't stand calling him a villain).

The Weather Man (2005, dir. Gore Verbinski)

Speaking of Nicolas Cage, this movie pairs him with Michael Caine as his father. Cage plays a disrespected, disheartened weather man trying to make it onto a big news show, while his much cooler father suffers from cancer. The movie documents Cage's mid-life crisis, which he attempts to fix with archery lessons.

The 10th Kingdom (2000, David Carson & Herbert Wise dirs.)

This TV mini-series was clearly meant to be some kind of trilogy, but I guess there isn't a market for long live-action modern day fairy tales. If you enjoy a cheesy fantasy movie, give it a shot. A girl named Virginia goes through a portal in Central Park into the 9 Kingdoms, where the evil queen commences to hunt her. Oh, and her father the plumber is there, and a cute werewolf, plus trolls and a beanstalk and Ann Margret as Cinderella.

The Omen (1976, dir. Richard Donner) 

I love a good horror movie, preferably non-torture porn. While Japanese horror creeps me out to an extent that I have trouble sleeping, supernatural horror just feels like a treat. The creepy child trope, also done well in Pet Sematary, is perfect here. Plus, the bombastic Satanic music is so overdone and excellent.

Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011, dir. Sean Durkin)

This last one is not a comfort movie, but is one of my recent favorites. Elizabeth Olsen, younger sister of the Olsen twins, is great as a girl who leaves a commune/cult and attempts to fit in with her rich older sister and her husband. The swimming scene early in the movie shows just how hard it is for her remember social norms. When she becomes paranoid that the cult has followed her, the movie goes from awkward to creepy. Olsen is wonderful to watch, as is John Hawkes (from Winter's Bone and Deadwood) as the charismatic, unsettling cult leader.

The Shawshank Redemption (1994, dir. Frank Darabont)

Probably my actual favorite movie, and I'll watch it whenever it's on TNT. Also one of many Stephen King movies that I love, including Pet Sematary, The Shining, Storm of the Century, and Cujo.

Pan's Labyrinth (2006, dir. Guillermo del Toro)

In one of the best films I've gotten to see in theaters, Ivana Baquero as Ofelia is just haunting and great. And of course, parts are terrifying and definitely show up in my nightmares.


Good luck bugging Der Huber...




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Friday Playlist #16: Random Vaguely Bluegrass Themed Edition

Will The Circle Be Unbroken  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7h0dpiM9c0k

Man of Constant Sorrow http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08e9k-c91E8

I'll Fly Away http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdRdqp4N3Jw

Midnight Moonlight http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VrqGnA7xgCg

Thank God I'm a Country Boy http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqb0em452CM

Bird on a Wire http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rb1rse0fKs

God's Gonna Cut You Down http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IStlBOX9F4o

I Shall Be Released http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqJJdiG61jo

After the Gold Rush http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tii--VSDCrc

Advanced Playlist:

Appalachian Spring: http://www.youtube.com/user/eleninamyers/videos?query=appalachian+spring

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Dancing in the Streets

Martha and the Vandellas. Amazing.

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800 Words: My Cultural Heresies - History (part 1)

-          Harry Truman was entirely justified in dropping the Atomic Bomb. The war in the Pacific showed no signs of ending, and the historical evidence that Japan was on the verge of surrender is specious indeed. The two atomic bombs killed 210,000 people – an horrific death toll. The other option was an invasion of the Japanese mainland, which could have easily resulted in another million deaths on either side. One of Japan’s highest wartime officials, Kido Kochi, later testified that in his opinion, the atomic bombs saved another20 million Japanese lives.

-          Britain should never have gotten involved in World War I. Even if a response to German aggression was entirely justified, they should have just let the Germans get what they want and let bygones be bygones. Any amount of continued monarchy and imperial overreach would have been preferable to the seventy-five years of reverberations which World War I caused on the European continent.

-          There is currently a more than 50% chance that Barack Obama will lose the next election. That may change, but if what seems likely eventually happens, it will be an absolute shame. In time, he will be vindicated as one of the great figures of history – unfortunately, perhaps one akin to Walther Rathenau in Weimar Germany, who tried everything to save his country from the gathering storm before it was too late, even as his most fervent supporters deserted him. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, may be another Herbert Hoover, elected because he was an extremely intelligent businessman, but utterly without the vision it takes to find solutions to the precariousness of America’s economic situation  – which currently resemble nothing so much as 2008 Greece.

-          The French, Russian, and Iranian Revolutions were doomed from the very beginning. None of them overthrew their governments with any serious plans in place for enacting a liberal rule of law, and in each case the liberals thought that they could manage and minimize the extremist forces with which they worked to topple their moderately authoritarian regimes. It was therefore inevitable that the most totalitarian forces would rise to the top because they were the most ruthless and willing to commit more heinous crimes than anyone else to establish their rule. Let that be a lesson to the liberal revolutionaries of Egypt and the other liberal revolutionary parties of the Middle East – you may one day be misty-eyed for the good old days of Mubarak.

-          For all the terrors and over-reach which Vladimir Putin has visited on so many people, some of which we probably don’t even know about (the 2010 airplane crash in Smolensk which killed nearly the entire Polish ruling government seems almost too unspeakable to have been an accident), one has to give the devil his due. Neither America nor Turkey gave as much freedom to as many citizens 20 years after overthrowing an Empire’s rule.

-          African and Asian territories under 19^thcentury British imperial rule should have considered themselves insanely lucky. Colonialism is a tragic fact of history, and one in practice long before Western Europe implemented it (and will be long after Western Europe ceases to exist as a prosperous part of the world). Had the British not arrived first, those territories could have been under the jurisdiction of the French, the Spanish, the Germans, the Portuguese, or worst of all – the Belgians. The British built roads, educated their subjects, prohibited slavery, and had many figures at the highest levels of government who stood up for maintaining human rights in their colonies (often unsuccessfully). British imperial governments, relatively, did not pursue violence against their subjects unless the subjects resisted rule. Compare this to Belgian rule of the Congo, where enacting slave labor was considered a privilege and duty of the White Man, and the colonial subjects were kept in conditions of famine and disease-ridden squalor when they were not conscripted into slavery or kept in concentration camps. During the 25-year reign of Leopold II, as many as 10 million West Africans died senselessly.

-          Considering oneself lucky to live in a relatively lenient authoritarian state should never be mistaken for condoning it. The true great men of history are the figures who maximize gains in liberty even as they realize they must make all sorts of heinous compromises in order to enact it. It gains neither a country, a leader, nor his party anything to stand on principle against the winds that will tear them all asunder. Along with a passion for justice must come a cold-hearted realism which recognizes that politics is the art of the possible. This is why truly great leaders are so rare in history – to have the mixture of warm and cold-heartedness, and to hold on to both when given the reins of near-absolute power is a nearly impossible task.

-          There is no party in any country who did more to establish more liberty for more people than the Democratic Party of the 1940’s, 50’s, and 60’s. Between 1941 and 1965 they enacted the liberation and rebuilding of Western Europe, all the while forcing Western Europe to rescind their colonial holdings, and all that in addition to ending segregation laws in the American South. If America and Western Europe are still prosperous, we owe it to the liberal Democrats of that era. Tragically, our freedom came at all sorts of terrible prices, as freedom inevitably does – giving up Eastern Europe to Stalin, dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, and keeping good relations with military dictators around the world. Those of us lucky enough to be born into a free country with a good economy ought to realize that someone paid a terrible price, perhaps a price not worth paying, so that we are born into liberty and privilege.

-           The great American liberalism of a half-century ago has utterly shattered and may very well be beyond repair. The student revolts of the late 60’s were an incredibly dumb rebellion of entitlement by a spoiled student class which flattered itself into thinking that by resisting the draft and occupying student buildings they were acting altruistically to build a better world when in fact they were born into a world that was better than any the world had yet known. By acting as they did, however insignificant their actions seemed to the world stage, the disproportionate reaction to them of the American public set off a chain reaction that destroyed the postwar liberal consensus long before its time. The end result of the 60’s was half-a-century of conservative Republican rule and all the income disparities, neo-imperial foreign policy, and spiraling national debt that goes with it. Most of those liberals who did not join the progressive/protest movement become, in a sense, neoconservatives who were poisoned by as much resentment at the state of the country as their liberal foes. When neoconservatives saw the rebellions of the young, they decided that the country had gone much too far in allowing for civil liberties – to a point at which liberty was exploited, and they reacted accordingly: first Nixon, then Reagan, then the Bush dynasty. While I have absolutely no patience with the delusions, the resentments, or the militancy of the neoconservative movement, I can’t pretend I don’t understand why they believe what they do. Rather than join them, I despair at their overreaction and their utopian desires for America. Conservatives made America what it is today, but every liberal who stood on principle rather than make the compromises it takes to create change has done his/her part to create contemporary America.

-          A person’s feelings about the State of Israel are a stunningly reliable barometer for the person’s general connection with reality. I could explain this theory at length, but it comes down to this: the moment a person starts frothing at the mouth about how the “Israel Lobby” controls American foreign policy, I assume they eat their own feces too.

…to be continued at some point.

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800 Words: Why Early Music Sucks

When classical musicians say ‘Early Music’ they mean something different than other people. To the average American, early music probably means before The Beatles. No doubt, some Americans hear the term Early Music and assume you mean anything before Thriller. But to classical musicians, Early Music will always mean BB: Before Bach.

Bach as we know him today is an invention of the 19^thcentury, not the 18^th. He was the first classical musician to earn mass appreciation long after he died. In his own day, he was a well-respected composer better known throughout musical Germany for his temper and the brilliance of his organ improvisations. But I wonder if anyone who heard his music in his own lifetime would have guessed that so many musical experts would come to view him as the colossus who towered over all music before or since. In the decades after his death, only a select few musical connoisseurs (including Mozart and Beethoven) appreciated him for the giant he was. It was not until 1829 when Felix Mendelssohn performed his St. Matthew Passion in Leipzig to a packed church of listeners who openly wept that Bach began to attain his current reputation. Bach was perhaps the first composer to be more valued by another era than he was by his own. The reason for this is that the directness of communication in Bach’s music, the spiritual solace, and the massive profundity fit like a glove to the values and longings of 19^th century Europe, yet it was almost completely out of step with the 18^th century Europe of Bach’s day. Indeed, there are some decent reasons to doubt that Bach meant for his music to have the qualities which the 19^th century so valued in him. According to the constant protestations of academic researchers, Bach’s music had been played for 150 years with forces too large, tempos too slow, rhythms too ponderous, and profundities too vast. According to them, Bach’s music should not cry out for the plight of the world, it should dance.

Is what they say true? And would that make Bach a lesser composer if it were?

As I’ve said in previous posts, the problem with the ‘academic’ manner of performing Bach is that it strips him of everything which made Bach’s music inflame hundreds of millions of imaginations. In such performances, he is no longer a giant, he is a second-rate Telemann. Even if it is authentic to what Bach wanted, it is not authentic to what his listeners desperately need.

But then again, the 19^th century’s Bach is not our Bach. And the 19^th century’s Early Music, is not our Early Music. Most people do not believe that we live in an era in which art exists to permit mankind to scale the heights of spiritual uplift – most people believe that religion or drugs do that much better. Most culturally active people don’t think they need Bach in the same way they once did, and like so much else which seemed profound to their grandparents, it seems to them boring and bombastic.

In most places, most places in America and Europe at least, Art no longer exists as a means to ‘better oneself.’ If you believe the Frankfurt School, that notion apparently died at Auschwitz, and professors influenced by them have been spreading Adorno’s idea to upper class students ever since. Even the music to which Baby Boomer professors listen seems too earnest for a generation taught to believe that self-betterment is a relative term. In today’s cultural world, with all its niches and options, the greatest indicator of artistic quality is its novelty: How new is it? How different? How original? And if you’re a little sentimental: How unique? Music and art can no longer save your soul, so it’s now just a commodity to be prized like a car or an i-phone. As it turned out, Adorno’s fears were entirely justified. But what he never could have forseen was that he was one of the primary causes of his fears coming to fruition!

It’s silly to even mention novelty when discussing the classical music world, which by definition prizes the old and battle-tested. But today’s classical music world, such as it is, is as much a part of our time as any other genre. We the classical music lovers of today prize newness and innovation as much as anyone else, and since – by definition – we can’t offer as much that is new, we offer more that is old.

And since it is far closer to the ethos of the contemporary world, early music is in some ways a much healthier culture than any other of the classical music world’s stale parts. Traditional symphony orchestras are lucky to retain their music directors for ten years, but period ensembles seem to keep their directors for life. Traditional performers can barely get a recording contract, yet there seems to be a new batch of recordings from the latest ‘visionary’ in the Early Music world every month. The fervor which greets performances of the great romantics (Chopin, Verdi and such..) is a mere nub of the popularity they experienced a century ago, yet many major opera houses now have as much Handel on their schedules as they do Wagner.

Why is this?

There simply aren’t enough new composers in our world to compete with all the innovation of the world’s bands, DJ’s, and performance artists…but there were… And if we can attract some new members into our ‘elite’ clique by opening our 1000 year back-catalogue, let’s do it,...or so we reason. It won’t matter if we have no idea how to perform it, and it won’t matter that until we do, all of it will sound somewhat alike. Even if it does sound alike to anyone who listens to it for more than an hour, it allows us to perform all sorts of completely new old instruments with new old sounds. It allows us to show that one particular era had different concepts of harmony and counterpoint than another, and therefore it allows us to contribute a little more to our modest part of the world’s multicultural rainbow.

I sometimes meet music lovers who are passionate about Early Music. I completely respect their right to be so, I just have trouble believing them. No doubt, this is obscenely hypocritical. I’ve spent most of my thirty years on this earth explaining to other people that yes, I’m absolutely serious when I say that I love and am obsessed by classical music, and you’re a douche for ever questioning that. To deny that other people can be equally passionate about a part of classical music which I don’t understand is more than a rudeness too far, it’s a slightly obscene form of retribution in which I get to discriminate against a minority within my own minority. I understand that people love Early Music, and that there is much to love within it. It’s just that I could scream.

Yes, the harmonies can be gorgeous, the rhythms can be invigorating. But after a couple decades of singing in choruses, and after a few years of directing them, I’d be hard-pressed to name fifty pieces of pre-Bach music which display a vision individual enough to describe without either resorting to theoretical music terms or generic descriptions about how the piece is ‘spiritual’ or ‘earthy’ or a half-dozen similarly boring adjectives.

This is by no means akin to saying that pre-Bach music is somehow lacking in greatness, or that mankind before Bach had not yet evolved to the point where it was capable of making great music. It is to say that we have lost so much of the oral tradition from these eras, and so few of the subtleties in their performance styles are accounted for, that we have no idea how to make a compelling authentic performance.

Authenticity has been a much-contested word in classical circles for the better part of a century. What is an authentic performance? Should performers always be absolutely true to the letter of the score? And if they are, have they done the entirety of their duty to the composer? It’s at least a question worth asking for living or recently dead composers for whom there is ample testimony for precisely what they want. But the further back the text goes, the less testimony there is. And the less testimony there is, the less the ‘authenticity’ question makes sense. When it comes to music pre-Beethoven, experts can’t even agree on the proper pitch. How the hell are performers supposed to recreate what the composers heard and wanted when they don’t even have the barest outline of what it sounded like?

It’s a cliché at this point, but the only authenticity is good musicianship. A boring performance can always hide behind the thought that perhaps the composer wanted it to sound as boring as they made it. But just as all classical musicians must ask themselves, Early Music performers still have to ask: if no listener is inspired, who cares what the composer thinks? It’s certainly a question asked more often now than the Early Music scene ever before did, but they still don't ask it often enough.

If Monteverdi heard his madrigals sung without any humor or sense of drama, he’d recoil in horror. If Handel saw the four-hour uncut snoozefests to which opera audiences are subjected – sung by so many wobbly voices with bad technique, accompanied by undramatic instrumental playing and faux-shocking stagings, he’d throw his hands up and probably issue a moratorium on his operas being performed. Even today, long after the authenticke brigade claimed to learn its lesson, performances and recordings of this music are hardly less dull than they ever were.

If we want Monteverdi and Machaut to capture the public imagination the way Bach once did, we have to stop trying to be true to their era and instead be true to our own. We need creative responses to this music that puts us squarely in our own day – not theirs. We need Dufay music videos and Ockeghem remixes. We need ways to approach English Renaissance which are deeper than simply recording Sting and his f-cking lute. We need musicians of vision who can translate this music for a public who will understand it instantly when they hear it played in their own language. We need today’s performers to do for for Josquin what Mendelssohn did for Bach. After all, if Bach were played in a truly authentic manner, we’d probably be listening to choirboys whose voices constantly cracked, violinists who always lose their place, and continuo which continually plays the wrong chords.

In the next day or two I'll  post of a list of recordings of early music which I love as much as any other type of music and precisely what makes them great. It's just a shame there aren't more of them!

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800 Words: My Cultural Heresies Part 1: Classical Composers

A list designed to be wrong and regretted tomorrow...

-          Most pre-Bach music, no matter how great, is nearly unlistenable. Performers and musicologists still do not have access to good enough research techniques to understand what made the music great, and all the prattling on about this Jesus fellow gets a little tiresome. If the world reverts to another medieval age in the next hundred years, music lovers will probably find it easier to listen to. As it stands, much of this music is quite pleasant, and utterly indistinguishable from one another.

-          Never in my life have I ever understood the appeal of Josquin.

-          Choral madrigals (secular) are almost invariably more interesting than choral motets (sacred).

-          Thomas Morley is inane.

-          Tallis, Byrd, Gibbons, and the other motleys from the English Renaissance are interesting the way ingenious primitive video games are, when you play with them you’re astounded by the technique, but it's so difficult to get to the next level that you give up in frustration. Thomas Weelkes is preferable to any of them, but even few Rennaissance mavens would call him a great composer.

-          Mozart’s childhood feat of copying out the Allegri Miserere from memory, while astounding, is not as mindblowing as all that. It’s a pretty simple piece of music.

-          Palestrina makes beautiful sounds, unfortunately it’s the same sound 5000 times over.

-          Gesualdo is nowhere near as innovative as musicians describe him.

-          Monteverdi is the first composer whose music is reliably awesome. But even he gets monotonous sometimes.

-          I feel sorry for any era in which Lully is considered the great composer.

-          Scarlatti sonatas are fun, not great. Ditto Couperin’s keyboard pieces.

-          More than five minutes of Purcell generally puts me in a diabetic coma.

-          Vivaldi was a much more interesting composer after being taken up by the period instrument crowd.

-          Bach is a much more boring composer after being taken up by the period instrument crowd.

-          Bach, Wagner, Schoenberg, Messiaen, and Glass are all half-great composers. Utter geniuses of musical organization and all capable of stultifying boredom.

-          Bach is the Aristotle of music. His music provides models to later composers of how to write music because nobody’s yet come up with better solution. But it’s only a matter of time before some musician does.

-          I listen not only to Bach but also to Telemann, Buxtehude, Froberger, and Pachebel, and wonder to myself how a society could put so little value on a sense of humor.

-          Handel is a very great composer of towering imagination. Nevertheless, anyone who performs him uncut deserves a restraining order.

-          Anyone who refuses to improvise in Handel deserves a restraining order.

-          Anyone who refuses to re-arrange Handel’s orchestration (to say nothing of pre-Handel music) should be given a restraining order.

-          Gluck wrote spectacular scenes, terrible operas.

-          Haydn, not Bach, is the foundation of all music that comes after him.

-          Mozart is exactly as great as everybody says. But his early works sound like they were written by an eight-year-old.

-          The opening movements of Mozart piano concertos can be really boring.

-          Mozart and Beethoven issued in a Golden Age of music that, whatever other glories music has, has ultimately never been bettered before or since.

-          On the whole, Beethoven is better when you follow the metronome marks.

-          Beethoven’s 9^th is based on a really ghastly piece of poetry.

-          Beethoven’s late quartets are the most approachable music imaginable.

-          Rossini is delightful. But somebody needs to take a Battle Axe to William Tell.

-          I love Schubert, but that guy really needs to develop thicker skin.

-          I have no interest in either Bellini or Donizetti. Many would say the problem is me, not the music. I think they’re wrong.

-          Berlioz is awesome. But for all his literary pretensions, the pleasures of his music are almost completely vapid.

-          In the generation of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt, Verdi, and Wagner, the greatest composer was Schumann.

-          Mendelssohn’s travel music is like the diary of a 20 year old who thinks the world is interested in his every thought (irony duly noted).

-          Chopin's music is exquisite in small doses. But there is no emotion in Chopin’s music that youporn would not take care of.

-          Schumann’s insanity made a greater composer of him than any other musician of his time.

-          There are three Liszts:  slam-bang virtuoso, old visionary, and intellectual/religious poseur. The first is awesome, the second is interesting, the third is unbearable.

-          I don’t understand the big deal about the Met’s new production of the Ring Cycle and how awful it is. Most Ring Cycles suck because the music isn’t all that well-composed to begin with.

-          The only Wagner opera I would listen to for pleasure is Die Meistersinger.

-          Verdi is a great composer, but there are full hours of his music which I’d rather spend at the bar than listen to.

-          There are four operas of Verdi that are riveting form beginning to end: Aida, Otello, Falstaff, and the Requiem.

-          Bruckner is awesome – even if his technique sucks.

-          The mass appeal of the Viennese Waltz is only explicable when you realize that it’s a German person’s idea of fun.

-          Brahms is amazing – it’s his performers that suck.

-          If I ever met Saint-Saens, I’d have to resist the urge to punch him in the face.

-          Whatever else Tchaikovsky was, he remained a manchild his whole life, and his greatest music is seen through the eyes of children.

-          Had Verdi and Wagner died early, it would not have been half the tragedy it was to lose Mussorgsky and especially Bizet so young.

-          In this era of giants, the most remarkable among them are Beethoven, Schumann, and (maybe) Mussorgsky.

-          After Mozart, the greatest of all opera composers is Leos Janacek.

-          Puccini, on the whole, wrote better operas than Verdi.

-          The giants of twentieth century composition are (in descending order) Shostakovich, Mahler, Janacek, Richard Strauss, Puccini, and Ives, (Britten, Bartok, Stravinsky, and Schnittke get honorable mentions). From Elgar and Debussy onward, all others are ultimately of second rank at best.

-          Mahler was a great composer through his whole composing life. But his early music really is better.

-          Strauss’s Alpine Symphony is an absolutely first-rate piece of music by any standard.

-          Strauss was as great a composer as he was awful a philosopher. I can’t escape the feeling that when he created his programs, he was completely joking.

-          Had Gershwin lived longer, and had Bernstein not taken the job at the New York Philharmonic, they would have become giants equal to the aforementioned half-dozen.

-          Sibelius is a wonderful composer, but his music would have been better if he got out of the house more often.

-          Carl Nielsen is a fine composer, but stop trying to make the Nielsen revival happen. It won’t.

-          Ravel is a better composer than Debussy.

-          Debussy, great as he can be, is ultimately where classical music went wrong.

-          It will be a sign of a better world when Ralph Vaughan Williams is better appreciated.

-          Alexander von Zemlinsky is absolutely not underrated. Neither is Busoni or Franz Schrecker or Franz Schmidt or Egon Wellesz or Walter Braunfels or Hans Gal or Ernst Toch or Berthold Goldschmidt. These are all purveyors of second-rate gigantischemusik. Just because a composer writes for a large forces does not give him large vision.

-          Ditto all the British symphonsts people keep trying to revive.

-          Stravinsky launched a career-long battle to kill his own talent – adapting new styles rather than express what he truly was. As a result, he can be nearly as boring as the Bach/Wagner/Messiaen axis – but unlike them, he was not a natural bore. He had to come by his boredom honestly.

-          Bartok wrote music as great as can be written by a man who clearly had Asperger’s.

-          Berg should have grown a pair and told Schoenberg to go f*ck himself.

-          The influence of Webern on music for the last sixty years tells us everything we need to know about the screwed up priorities of classical music today.

-          Ernest Bloch threw away a first-rate talent to write second-rate Jewish musical kitsch.

-          Prokofiev and Hindemith are tacky, synthetic composers who compensate for an utter lack of interest in humanity with excessively flashy technique.

-          Carmina Burana is sickening from first bar to last. It’s a piece of Nazi propaganda adopted as an anthem by the most upper class members of the flower-power generation and preserved in the public imagination by movie trailers.

-          Poulenc never wrote music quite as great as someone with his talents should have.

-          Aaron Copland wrote good music for about a dozen years, and wrote crap on either side of that line.

-          I don’t know how Aaron Copland developed his great period. There were at least half-a-dozen American contemporaries who were just as talented.

-          Aram Katchaturian is a scandalously underrated composer.

-          How screwed up is classical music in our era? The greatest composer of the last century is Shostakovich, a composer trapped inside a totalitarian regime.

-          Olivier Messiaen, like Bach and Wagner before him, writes beautiful music with a noxious whiff of bullshit about it. But compared to his followers, he was the personification of great music.

-          Elliott Carter has spent the better part of a century creating music that nobody will ever care about.

-          Conlon Nancarrow is interesting, but interesting is different than good.

-          Lutoslawski was a much more interesting composer in the 50’s. His turn to modernism was disastrous.

-          The only composers of the original Darmstadt generation worth listening to are Ligeti and Berio.

-          Ligeti is best when he’s pranking away. Berio is best when he’s cutting and pasting other people’s material.

-          Gyorgy Kurtag is better than either, including at their own games.

-          Xenakis is fun, but he probably didn’t intend his music to be fun.

-          I look forward to getting to know the Henze operas better. I still think I won’t like them much.

-          The rest of the Darmstadt school is the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the musical public.

-          Boulez and Stockhausen are decent musicians who mastered the art of publicity far more than they ever did composition.   

-          Morton Feldman’s primary objective is to bore the audience.

-          Sofia Gubaidulina is a composer we all want to like, yet nobody seems to.

-          Alfred Schnittke is the only composer of the past fifty years who has nothing to fear in comparison to the giants of the past.

-          Rubber Soul is better than any classical composition of the last fifty years save late Shostakovich.

-          No amount of pot will make Terry Riley sound like a great composer.

-          Holy Minimalism is stupid.

-          Philip Glass is a truly gifted composer. He’s put that gift in the service of writing some of the most boring great music ever written (and a lot of the most boring bad music).

-          Steve Reich’s early music was dumb as hell. But he keeps getting better and better as he ages.

-          Calling Louis Andriessen the greatest living composer, as a surprising number of experts do, is akin to calling Elgar the greatest living composer a hundred years ago. It’s a perfect judgement for the fashions of today, and will seem utterly dumb in a mere ten years.

-          Even if he isn’t a giant on the level of Beethoven or Shostakovich, John Adams writes some fantastically great music.

-          No one would know who John Luther Adams was if he didn’t share John Adams’s name.

-          Kaija Saariaho may one day soon join the Bach/Wagner/Messiaen club as a great composer of less-than-great music.

James MacMillan is an authentically great composer. But even now that hes over 50, it remains to be seen if he's in the Schnittke class.

Thomas Ades is improving and becoming ever-more expressive, but for most of his career he didn't show much ability past musical irony.

Nico Muhly seems poised to become the Next Big Thing in American music, but his music pales just as Ades does next to his contemporaries in the non-classical world.

-          Osvaldo Golijov’s compositional block is an absolute tragedy for music.

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800 Words: Why Religion Always Wins - Part III

(Orson on Chartres…go to 1:09)

“…Our religion is not yet a horrible restless doubt, still less a far horrible composed Cant; but a great heaven-high Unquestionability, encompassing, inter-penetrating the whole of Life. Imperfect as we may be, we are here, with our litanies, shaven crowns, vows of poverty to testify incessantly and indisputably to every heart, That this Earthly Life and its riches and possessions, and good and evil hap, are not intrinsically a reality at all, but are a shadow of realities eternal, infinite; that this Time-world, as an air-image, fearfully emblematic, plays and flickers in the grand still mirror of Eternity; and man’s little Life has Deities that are great, that are alone great, and go up to Heaven and down to Hell….”

Thomas Carlyle - Past and Present, writing about the 12th century.

Everyone with the opportunity should go to the great churches of the Middle Ages. Don’t just go to those Renaissance Italian Duomos which glitter like affirmations of gorgeousness against Lutheran austerity. Go to the French eglises, go to Notre Dame, go to Chartres, go to Saint-Michel da Aiguilhe, buildings from the era when eternal affirmation seemed like the ultimate progress – from an era when there no doubt was entertained that human progress was on the side of God Himself. Imagine yourself a Parisian peasant of the 13^thcentury, preserved by the Cloth in deliberate squalor and shit, told that your miserable existence is but a brief trial before the glories that await you in exchange for your complete submission to their will. Your life is toil and grime, yet from the moment you first gaze upon Notre Dame, a cathedral your grandfather or his brothers died building, you know that your life has none but the greatest purpose and meaning. If God can grant something so beautiful, so heavenly as Notre Dame to our world, then how grand and glorious must Heaven itself be?

The great Italian Cathedrals are conservative statements. They preserve a particular Christian tradition against the encroachment of a new dogma. But the great French churches are progressive statements of eternity itself. In this era when Western Man lay perpetually in darkness, when the light of truth was sequestered in monasteries – preserved for the few who could intercede to a deity who seldom shows mercy on behalf of a wretched laity.

For the essence of belief is not belief, the essence of belief is doubt. The fervor of a person’s belief is directly proportional to his insecurity – finding in God that which he can’t provide for himself. Religious fervor was the acme of progress in the Late Middle Ages because out of the chaos that was Europe after Rome and Byzantium, no institution but the Church could provide unity of purpose. Thanks to the Church, scholars all throughout the European world spoke the same language and could therefore exchange ideas more freely than ever before. The literature and art of the age was rife with symbolism, and since all men shared the same belief, the symbols were universally recognized for what they represented. Wars of this era were no longer merely blood feuds, they were matters of honor, determiners of dynastic succession, and fulfillment of religious obligation – holy missions of nobility ordained to reinstate the world’s proper order. And no matter how bloody the war, or how hypocritical the blessing, the clergy could bless both sides in their cause, and because they spoke with the word of God, they could not be contradicted – even if they contradicted themselves. Make no mistake, there was an era when suborning one’s personal will to a mass movement was truly progress for mankind, but it is 800 years in the past.

But that has not stopped the endless yearning of mankind to be eternal. We have been trying to recapture the tantalizing simplicity of this vision ever since. From the moment the world first encountered Dante’s horrible vision of a world with only three choices, our artists tried to find ways of recapturing the utter simplicity of Dante’s vision. Milton seeks to justify the ways of God to Man, Goethe sells Faust’s soul to the devil in exchange for a moment of perfect simplicity, Dostoevsky demonstrates that only Alyosha Karamazov’s submission to the Will of God and his Perfect Church will provide a life of purpose and meaning. Even in our own centuries, we can see the striving for this transcendental simplicity, from Bob Dylan’s yearning to find the answer blowing in the wind, to Don Draper’s wish to create a perfect American family, to Charles Foster Kane’s Rosebud – they may not be religion, but in each case they are the same longing for the pure, undivided self.

It should strike us as ironic that these great anonymous Cathedrals of the Middle Ages - which were created purely as temples to the Glory of God, with no thought as to the glory of man - were mankind’s greatest shelter, and we have not found a more welcoming shelter since. The agony of doubt which disturbs us did not disturb Medieval Man. However unlikely, we at least have to allow for the miniscule possibility that mankind has never been happier than it was during a period of abject squalor, with no doubts as to what life held in store. The boundaries of good and evil were clearly demarcated, and those with particularly evil intentions could generally find a clergy, somewhere, to sanctify their malevolence. The isolation and loneliness of every man’s private moments was not felt in an era of such unity.  There was a deity who saw your problems as they were happening and would reward you for your travails. Man had no divided self, and life, with all its messy emotions and entanglements, was a mere rehearsal. For the true life has no division, no complexity, no confusion. In the true life, there is merely Paradise, Purgatory, and Perdition - and reading Dante is the closest we will get to understanding their worldview.

But even the vision of Dante is presumptuous to the medieval mind. To the average 13th century Christian, it would be very near the ultimate heresy for a mere man to claim foreknowledge of the afterlife's contents and assign people to their stations - that is the job of Christ Himself. To understand the purity of his vision, all we have is those churches - those massive upward bridges to the divine, in which no light is can be let in except by reflected sunlight and fire.

I'm looking forward to France this summer...

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