Just to round things out today, here is a delightful concerto movement by Vivaldi:
Wednesday, July 16, 2025
What I read this year, part 2
- Handbook of Poetic Forms ed. Ron Padgett 208 pp
- Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky trans. Pevear & Volokhonsky 580 pp
- The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness Husserl 126 pp (I didn't read the appendices)
- From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life Jacques Barzun 802 pp
- From Plato to Wittgenstein: Essays G. E. M. Anscombe 246 pp (only read 2/3)
- Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo Plato 154 pp
- The Bacchae Euripides (Kindle)
- The Iliad Homer trans. Fagles 614 pp
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding John Locke (abridged) 133 pp
- Anatomy of Criticism Northrop Frye 354 pp
- Explaining Postmodernism Stephen Hicks 266 pp
- A History of Philosophy volume V Modern Philosophy: The British Philosophers from Hobbes to Hume Frederick Copleston S. J. 394 pp
- The Divine Comedy: Inferno and Purgatorio Dante 581 pp
- The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years Bernard Lewis 408 pp
Did AI Just Nuke Popular Music?
Rick Beato certainly has the evidence:
Yes, a complete neophyte can sit down with some AI programs and in a couple of minutes "create" a new, superficially plausible pop song. What can we draw from this? As Rick says, this is no substitute from actually learning how to play an instrument and, probably more important, learning how to create, invent, discover (whatever the appropriate verb is) music. I've been ranting against computer derived music for years, but this is a kind of nadir. My view for a long time is that much pop music, at least the commercially successful stuff, is little more than an industrial product. As Rick comments in a different video, no, pop stars do not even write the lyrics to their songs, so they are in no way a personal expression. I rather doubt that most pop music could even be considered an aesthetic object. It's more of an acoustic equivalent to valium or, in the case of heavy metal, amphetamines.
Let's get that stuff out of our ears by listening to some Bach.
Professor Timothy Jackson Vindicated
The dispute between Professor Philip Ewell and Professor Timothy Jackson has come to a conclusion with a massive out of court settlement in favor of Jackson.
More than four years after suing the University of North Texas for punishing him in a spat over alleged racism in classical music, distinguished research professor Timothy Jackson accepted a $725,000 settlement with the taxpayer-funded school in a legal fight that pitted embattled state Attorney General Ken Paxton against former state Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell.
The parties filed a joint stipulation of dismissal earlier this month, signed by Paxton's office as counsel to UNT and Mitchell as co-counsel to Jackson. The settlement also gives back Jackson the music theory journal he founded and edited and even reduces his teaching load.
We have certainly discussed this case and these scholars before on the blog. And now, presumably, we are even able to discuss the work of Heinrich Schenker without being banished as supporters of racism!
Tuesday, July 15, 2025
Mexican Culture
Even though I live in Mexico I don't post much about it, mostly because it was not one of the original themes of the blog. But occasionally... Mexican culture is very different from English Canadian culture, though not so different from Quebec culture. Men kiss women on the cheek as a typical greeting, for example in both Quebec and Mexico.
The other day I ran into an interesting example. One of the strengths of Mexico is its excellent artesanal beer. I had one the other day, very similar to Guinness stout though labeled "dark lager."
Aqui, se vive a sangre fría
In English:
Here, you live the cold blood
Yeah, that's a reflexive verb that doesn't translate very well. And on the side of the label is this:
A sangre fria, sin piedad, destápame, moja de mi tus labios, saborea las maltas de mi depravación. Déjame inundarte de mi crueldad y acabar dentro de ti.
In English:
In cold blood, without mercy, uncover me, wet your lips from me, taste the malts of my depravity. Let me flood you with my cruelty and end up inside you.
I think I could pretty well guarantee that no Canadian beer company would put that on their label! But it captures an element of Spanish/Mexican culture. We also find it in the Day of the Dead celebrations which to Anglophone sensibilities are rather macabre.
Oh, and the name of the company is "Deadly Sin."
Sunday, July 13, 2025
Another Concert from Wigmore Hall
Some of the finest chamber and solo concerts consistently come from Wigmore Hall in London. Here is a very fine example of an extraordinary program for chamber orchestra by 12 Ensemble:
EINOJUHANI RAUTAVAARA, STRAVINSKY, IISABELLA GELLIS, MESSIAEN, RAVEL, what's not to like?
Saturday, July 12, 2025
What I Read This Year: part 1
Over the last year I have drifted from doing a lot of listening to instead doing a lot of reading. A couple of years ago I read a lot of poetry and philosophy. Since then my interests have broadened out. Consulting my journals I come up with the following list, in rough chronological order, of books I have read from June 2024 to November 2025.
- Art in Theory 1900 - 2000 eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood 1,200 pp.
- "S" J. J. Abrams & Doug Durst 450 pp.
- The Cambridge Introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin - Ken Hirschkop 180 pp.
- House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski just the first 340 pages.
- The Gulag Archipelago - Alexander Solzhenitsyn abridged 500 pp.
- Dictionary of the Khazars -Milorad Parić 335 pp.
- The Mexico Reader - eds. Joseph & Henderson 736 pp.
- The Cambridge Companion to Bruckner ed. John Williamson 260 pp.
- The Unknown Masterpiece -Honoré de Balzac 44 pp.
- The Poems - Catullus trans. Peter Whigham 228 pp.
- Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments - Sappho trans. Aaron Poochigian 93 pp.
- Metamorphoses - Ovid trans. David Raeburn 636 pp.
- Essays on Music -Theodor Adorno 679 pp.
- Frank Lloyd Wright text 100 pp. the rest photos
- Arnold Schoenberg - Charles Rosen 105 pp.
- Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire - Jonathan Dunsby 75 pp.
- Pierrot Lunaire: Rondels Bergamasques - Albert Giraud 117 pp.
- The Human Comedy: Selected Stories - Honoré de Balzac 415 pp.
- Gargantua and Pantagruel - Rabelais trans. M. A. Screech 1,041 pp.
- Selected Writings - William Hazlitt 358 pp.
- Fables - Alexander Theroux 411 pp.
- Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert trans. Lydia Davis 311 pp.