Friday Miscellanea

The Guardian has a very entertaining article up about all the classical music humor found in Monty Python. The occasion is a series of shows the original members are putting on in London. Here is the delightfully incongruous sketch where a renowned contemporary composer is interviewed, mostly about the origins of his entirely irrelevant nickname, "Two Sheds":

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Apparently not all great musicians are also great human beings. Some of them have very ordinary failings, at least if this account is true. Many of the comments seem to support it. A sample:

Until today I can not understand why Isaac Stern spent so much time and effort in order to destroy me…I really can not understand it at all…after all I was not even a violinist.

And I was a dedicated piano teacher to his children for eleven years.

The only possible explanation that he had a powerful need to control other people’s lives. Same as Caesar with thumb up but mostly down. Instead of practicing his great violins in his gorgeous Studio on 81st Street and amazing country house in Connecticut,  he spent all day on the phone and in meetings, practically betraying his profession. As Horowitz told me many times: “Isaac just plays out of tooon (tune).”

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Here is one more weird item. "Weird Al" Yankovic, everyone's favorite parodist, has a video out that is a take-off on Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines". The schtick? This one is called "Word Crimes" and it is a compendium of all those grammatical mistakes people keep making:

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Horrifying news: dubstep violinist Lindsey Stirling has 500 million page views on YouTube. Here is the story on Norman Lebrecht's site. And here is one of her videos:

Vivaldi meets Yanni? I dunno, but maybe we should just call her a pop violinist and be done with it.

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It is generally known that Led Zeppelin took a lot of their early song ideas from other people. Here is a list of seven songs that were partly plagiarized. Other than the intro to "Stairway to Heaven" that is...

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I sometimes complain that aesthetics is something actively avoided these days. Here is the critique of an English professor that ends with this beautiful quote:

Like many academics now, he’d rather cut his tongue out than admit in public that he thinks a book is good or bad.

And most music critics would be the same regarding a piece of music!

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And finally, a huge article in the Wall Street Journal about Matthew Aucoin whom they dub "the next Leonard Bernstein." There are some excerpts in the article, but not much on YouTube except this amateur video of a suite for strings: