Today's Listening

 A really lovely Portuguese song:

Some unassuming Buxtehude on clavichord:

Guitarists will know this as the gigue to the 4th Lute Suite:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRk3THXxeHk

Sokolov and a Schubert Impromptu:

I guess all my regular readers realize that whenever I put up a musical performance there is a socio-politico-logico subtext. Absent any actual words of course. The subtext here, as it often is, is that posturing, pretentious, pandering, pseudo enthusiasm is both awful and seemingly the norm these days. Please, not!

Healthcare in Mexico

As you can tell from the paucity of postings, it has been One Hell of a Month! It rained heavily and was overcast for nearly all of the past month. This is bad for doing photoshoots and for showing houses. Then, a week ago, I came down with a nasty bug: sore throat, very bad cough, headache, body aches and difficulty sleeping. I couldn't take any days off because I had clients. Yesterday morning I got up and it was worse than ever. At 8:30 I emailed my doctor with the symptoms. Fifteen minutes later (!) she emailed back saying that we needed to test for COVID and Flu. By noon a male nurse was at my house doing the tests. The results were available in just a few minutes: negative for both. So what I had was a bacterial infection of the throat. He had with him the appropriate antibiotic and I immediately took the first one. It is now the next morning and I am about to take the second pill (one pill a day for seven days). Already there is a real improvement. I mentioned to the nurse that I wished this kind of service was available in Canada. He just looked at me quizzically: "Why not?" Ah yes, why not indeed!

The cost of this extremely prompt service including the home visit, tests and antibiotic? $1,590 MXN or $86 US.

I don't know what the psychic cost of the long waiting lists in Canada comes to--about forty weeks for an MRI, even longer to see a specialist--but I'm sure it is significant. As soon as my doctor emailed back I started to feel better.

Looking for a visual for this post, it's been so rainy that I hardly have any. Here is one taken from my terrace of a fullish moon just after dawn:

 This might be a suitable piece of music:

Nothing Funner than Vivaldi

Just to round things out today, here is a delightful concerto movement by Vivaldi:

 

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

The last I am just finishing now. Not counting Kindle, a total of 4,866 pages. Total for the year: 13,513 pages. Take that, W. H. Auden! From the age of eleven when I discovered my first, tiny, municipal library, I have read several books a week--at a guess, between three and five. Nowadays I read more serious and longer books, so I might be down to one or two a week. Even less in the case of challenging reading such as The Iliad or Crime and Punishment. Philosophy is a special case as it has to be read much slower and often, several times.

Over the last year I have read, not counting light fiction, thirty-six books from 126 pages to over 1,200 pages. That's 260 pages a week or perhaps the equivalent of one book. Mind you, I'm not counting light fiction. I probably read a couple of those in a week.

What about comprehension? In the case of Sappho or Catullus it is probably around 90 to 100%. In the case of Anscombe, a leading pupil of Wittgenstein, around 20%.

Of the books above, the most difficult reads were certainly Anscombe and Husserl. Dante and Dostoevsky were no walk in the park and Copleston was pretty dense. The moderate reads were Homer, Lewis, Barzun and Frye. No what you might categorize as easy reads. The Platonic dialogues were not difficult, but I have read them several times.

Depending on your interests, I could recommend all of them with the exception of the book on poetic forms by Padgett. This was written as a handbook for teachers in the public education system which likely accounts for its lo-cal, thin gruel content. If you want to know stuff, read Frye.

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!

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."

At the bottom of the label is this slogan:

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."

 

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?

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.

One of the most feared at the time and later renowned courses in English Literature was that offered by W. H. Auden in 1941 at an American university. It had a reading list of thirty-two books for a total of some 6,000 pages. Here is the list. Lots of challenging stuff on that list. But if you add up the books I have read in the last six months it comes to 8,647 pages. And I think it is certainly as challenging as Auden's. The year previous I read large volumes of Chinese and French poetry (in translation), the Iliad, and eleven books by and on Ludwig Wittgenstein. This year I read Dante's Inferno and Paradiso--second half of the year so it's not on the list yet.

In the above list, the hardest reads were the Art in Theory collection, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Adorno and Fables by Theroux. The easiest reads were Solzhenitsyn, Sappho and Flaubert. The most enjoyable were Dictionary of the Khazars, Sappho, Catullus and Rosen's book on Schoenberg. The poorest quality book, in my opinion, was Dunsby's book on Pierrot Lunaire. Several of the books (Solzhenitsyn, Flaubert, Balzac) would tie for the best quality.

I will list the books in the second half of the year in a separate post.

Today's Listening: Jean Rondeau plays Mozart

 

Yes, you can play Mozart on harpsichord.