Monthly Archives: July 2010

Movie Goodies

I suppose all of us have a private corner of our listening life that is devoted to something a bit off the beaten path, perhaps something we’re not quite so eager to drop into a tony discussion about the merits … Continue reading

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The Teapot and I

Tea preparation involves a bit of necessary ritual. I suppose one could be a pig about it all, throw a cup of water into the microwave and then drop in a teabag. But how gauche, how unimaginative, how unperceptive. Settling … Continue reading

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The Rhetoric of Blippity-Bloop

When Shostakovich visited America and Europe as part of a Soviet delegation in 1959, he was repeatedly asked about his opinion of the then-accepted modernist avant-garde of atonal academic serialism. Here is one such response, given to a Polish journalist … Continue reading

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Crabby Old Bags

The other night I awoke abruptly after a particularly awful dream that had percolated up from who knows where in my subconscious. It was a memory, not a dreamscape construction, replaying in vivid detail a dreadfully unpleasant woman for whom … Continue reading

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A Continuing Vitality

I never ceased to be amazed how people can look at abundance and see privation. Who Murdered Classical Music? shout the writers of doomsday screeds. Declining revenues! cry the big arts institutes. Aging audiences! wail the statisticians. But all of … Continue reading

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Dmitri’s Ugly Duckling

Writing an article about a great beloved masterwork of the Western musical tradition is one thing. Writing about a piece that practically nobody knows is another. Writing about a piece that has been run over and left for dead is … Continue reading

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Ferde Grofé Saves the Day

I was relieved when I realized that I needn’t fret about the implications of Michael Daugherty’s music. And I was most definitely fretting there for a while. My knickers were getting into knots. I had the willies and the heebie-jeebies. … Continue reading

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When Commentary Crosses the Line

Talk about your itty-bitty profession: we classical music commentators make up a huddled little clutch indeed. Every city of any size or pretensions to gentility contains a few of us, but compare our paltry numbers with—oh, I don’t know—dentists. Imagine … Continue reading

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Early Departure

A halo descends on select groups of people. Assassinated presidents, for example: to be sure, Lincoln and JFK deserve theirs, albeit for different reasons. But it’s harder to remember much about Garfield or McKinley except for their having been abruptly … Continue reading

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The Trade School That Went to College

Conservatories used to be a lot easier to figure out. The grandfather Neapolitan schools—San Onofrio, Turchini, Loreto, and Gesu Cristo—operated under a basic assumption that they were training young men to play an instrument, sing, or write music. Period. To … Continue reading

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