A Little Kanye

After I put up "Every Hour," a cut from the new album Jesus is King from Kanye West, a commentator asks "what is Kanye actually doing on that song?" which was gospel choir plus piano. Here is a live performance of another song from the album, "Closed on Sunday" which gives a pretty good idea of how this music is working. Kanye is singing and there are three percussionists, three keyboard players, six brass players and a whole bunch of other folks singing backup.

Friedrich Gulda: Beautiful Eccentric

Friedrich Gulda is a wonderful pianist, one of my favorite players. Decades ago I owned his box of vinyl LPs of the Beethoven piano concertos with the Vienna Philharmonic and I still think it is the best recording. I have his box of the Beethoven piano sonatas on my shelf and his Bach Well-Tempered Klavier--the latter I have described as being for those people who find Glenn Gould's Bach too romantic!

Anyway, I just ran across this film of him playing Mozart in Munich in, I think, 1995. Could you imagine any of today's stars playing a concert wearing that shirt?

Why do I call him a beautiful eccentric? He once faked his own death just to publicize a concert.

Friday Miscellanea

I hate to brag, but this blog just passed 1.5 million page views the other day. So, yahoo and here is the champagne:

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This study seems pretty straightforward: Recognition of favorite songs almost instant, researchers find.

"Our results demonstrate that recognition of familiar music happens remarkably quickly," study senior author Maria Chait said in a school news release.

"These findings point to very fast temporal circuitry and are consistent with the deep hold that highly familiar pieces of music have on our memory," Chait added.

And if you played the beginning of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, classical listeners would know it within half a second as well.

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Ok, I have to admit that Norman Lebrecht has a gift for the catchy headline: HIDING WILLY: MET BANS DICK FROM AKHNATEN CINEMA RELAYS.

We hear that the daring moments of full-frontal male nudity in the forthcoming Philip Glass opera will not be allowed to leave the house intact when Akhnaten gets a live screening on November 23.

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This reminds me of Kanye's Sunday Services: Divine transports.

the French sociologist Émile Durkheim ... observed that social activities create a kind of buzz that he called effervescence. Effervescence is generated when humans come together to make music or perform rituals, an experience that lingers when the ceremonies are over. The suggestion, therefore, is that collective experiences that are religious or religious-like unify groups and create the energy to sustain them.

The explanation is resurfacing in what can be called the trance theory of religious origins...

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This sounds like it might be really interesting: Rock, Pop, and the Development of Avant Garde Music After World War II.

These discourses established new frameworks of judgment for musics entwined in the commercial marketplace, distinct from numerical popularity and long-standing taste formations perpetuated through the educational institutions of the ruling classes. Popular music aesthetics did much more than invert or blur the line between high and low culture. Instead, it provided the grounds for a thorough fracturing of those two positions into a new, intricate system of orders and relations.

Uh-huh. Well, we know this is a scholarly publication, at least.

“Any person in today’s music scene knows that rock, classical, folk and jazz are all yesterday’s titles,” Coleman wrote in the liner notes to 1977’s Dancing in Your Head. “I feel that the music world is getting closer to being a singular expression.” Although persistent (and novel) asymmetries in prestige and resources would continue to disenable that singular expression, the late 1960s moment differed substantially from earlier ones such as Third Stream, because the latter, as George E. Lewis explains, “failed to realize or support the complexity of black musical culture’s independent development of a black experimentalism that, while in dialogue with white high culture, was . . . strongly insistent upon the inclusion of the black vernacular.”

And they really are incapable of actually making a comprehensible point. I think the problem with this kind of "discourse" is that the terms have hidden or ambiguous meanings. For example, in these brief excerpts I would very much need these terms to be defined pretty precisely:

• "frameworks of judgment"
• "taste formations"
• "invert or blur the line"
• "system of orders and relations"
• "singular expression"
• "asymmetries in prestige"

And I would likely challenge each of those definitions as being an unacceptable ideological position or assumption. Yep, that's how it works.

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Darn, am I going to have to buy a turntable again? Gen Xers, millennials and even some Gen Zs choose vinyl & drive record sales up.

Vinyl sales have been surging in the last few years, as CD sales stay flat and digital downloads decrease. In the United Kingdom, data from 2016 reveals that vinyl LP sales revenue surpassed that of digital downloads. And in the United States, LP sales are on par with the sales of CDs.

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Economist Tyler Cowan interviews music historian Ted Gioia about music as cultural cloud storage, which is quite a cool idea.

To Ted Gioia, music is a form of cloud storage for preserving human culture. And the real cultural conflict, he insists, is not between “high brow” and “low brow” music, but between the innovative and the formulaic. Imitation and repetition deaden musical culture...

 Couldn't agree more.

What people don’t understand is that, for most of history, music was a kind of cloud storage for societies. I like to tell people that music is a technology for societies that don’t have semiconductors or spaceships. If you go to any traditional community, and you try to find the historian, generally it’s a singer. Music would preserve culture; it would preserve folklore.

Well, nowadays, we rely on cloud storage to be the preserver of these same things. And I think there’s a strange shift. Both we rely on the cloud to preserve our music, but also, we no longer rely on music to preserve our culture. This is potentially a dangerous thing because it could create a situation where our musical lives grow more and more distant from our actual social lives with the people around us in our larger community.

Read the whole thing for a lot of very interesting observations about music, technology and culture.

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How about some new music? Here is a song for voice and violin by Lisa Bielawa, who is, I assume, also performing the voice part. The violinist is Jennifer Koh.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=15&v=V1LvEJL4ef0

Or you can go to the Violin Channel.

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Returning from a research trip to Vienna for her new book, blogger Jessica Duchen complains Is Beethoven actually trying to kill me?

I came home from Vienna on Friday evening sick as the proverbial dog and barking like one. I was already unwell when I set off the previous Sunday; charging around the city, trying to see everything, walking about 7 miles a day during a nasty cold snap, did me so little good that I wondered if Beethoven is trying to kill me. 

Nevertheless, it was worth every second, because this trip will radically transform the atmosphere of IMMORTAL. Seeing what's available of the pleasant yet very plain apartments that the composer lived in, then visiting the former residences of his princely patrons in a grand city centre where palace piles up next to baroque palace, hammers home the desperately divided nature of that society. Among his chief supporters, Prince Kinsky's extravaganza is phenomenally OTT; Prince Lobkowitz's odd corner block is rather more tasteful (it is now the Theatre Museum, which is handy); and those are just two examples, neither of them the most extreme.

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Since we are on Beethoven, for our envoi let's listen to a piece the theme of which Schoenberg (and others) refer to as the perfect example of the musical "sentence," a particularly important kind of theme-type in music history. This is the Piano Sonata, op. 2, no. 1, dedicated to Joseph Haydn.

Those first eight measures are as perfect a theme as anyone ever wrote.

Art Without Art?

I am confronted with an aesthetic challenge this morning and I want to deal with it in the fairest manner possible. There is an article in the Wall Street Journal this morning titled ‘Lost Wisdom Pt. 2’ Review: From Personal Tragedy, an Artistic Triumph by Mark Richardson, their "rock and pop music critic." The review is of a new album by Phil Elverum. It is not so much the review that I find troublesome, but the album itself. Here is how Mark describes it:

Following the 2016 death of his wife, artist Geneviève Castrée, from cancer, which happened shortly after the birth of their first child, Mr. Elverum has used Mount Eerie as a platform for exploring loss and grief with an almost unbearable level of detail and intimacy. His 2017 album, “A Crow Looked at Me,” which focused exclusively on her passing and the wrenching aftermath, placed highly on many year-end polls and set the emotional tone for his subsequent releases. While it may sound like you need to know the details of Mr. Elverum’s story to appreciate his music, actually the opposite is true—the words he sings provide all the required information, and the songs stand on their own.

Now I have to say that this is a truly awful tragedy and since I have not experienced something so traumatic myself, I can only empathize. I have lost both my parents, but that was certainly not as piercingly painful as the tragedy of losing both wife and child in short succession. All that being acknowledged, now we have to listen to the music itself. The new album is not yet available, but the previous one A Crow Looked at Me is on YouTube with the lyrics. Let's listen:

I suppose when it comes to art and aesthetics I am something of a traditionalist. I wasn't born that way, it was something that evolved over quite a few years. There is a real internal tension I have that I suppose comes from two different psychological traits: one is openness to experience and the other is orderliness or conscientiousness. I am pretty strong in both these traits and relatively low in politeness and agreeableness. So when I work, on the one hand I am open to all the possibilities, but on the other hand, I have to transform these possibilities into something that has aesthetic coherence.

The problem I have with the music of Phil Elverum is that while it is painfully candid about his tragic experiences, it seems to me to lack the transformation into art. It is simply a man talking about his experience, but while that experience is communicated, it is not transformed or transfigured by art. I would like to know what a literary critic would say about the lyrics. For me, the music seems clumsy, amateurish, without any attempt to work with the music materials. All the songs have a dreary sameness. Oddly, they seem depressingly low-key. The poignancy of the lyrics is not reflected in the music. Whatever the words are saying, the accompaniment is the same fingerstyle folk guitar underneath a drooping melody with no direction. All this is rhythmically dull and lifeless.

Is this art? Well, not good art, certainly. What troubles me is that there is no attempt to make art out of personal experience, no interest in musical structure or aesthetics whatsoever. Bear in mind I am not trying to make an inappropriate comparison with songs by Schubert or Schumann. Not at all. But this is feeble compared to great song composers like Bob Dylan or Tom Waits who do create music with great musical character. There doesn't seem to be any of that here. The songs just begin and end randomly and there is no attempt to make each song have its own character.

What do my commentators think?

Scorsese on Cinema

Just a couple of weeks ago Martin Scorsese (supported by Francis Ford Coppola) caused a bit of a dust-up by questioning the aesthetic validity of the Marvel films. I mentioned it in a Friday Miscellanea. As that came in the form of a brief answer to a question, Scorsese has followed up with an essay elaborating his point: Martin Scorsese: I Said Marvel Movies Aren’t Cinema. Let Me Explain.

In the past 20 years, as we all know, the movie business has changed on all fronts. But the most ominous change has happened stealthily and under cover of night: the gradual but steady elimination of risk. Many films today are perfect products manufactured for immediate consumption. Many of them are well made by teams of talented individuals. All the same, they lack something essential to cinema: the unifying vision of an individual artist. Because, of course, the individual artist is the riskiest factor of all.

I’m certainly not implying that movies should be a subsidized art form, or that they ever were. When the Hollywood studio system was still alive and well, the tension between the artists and the people who ran the business was constant and intense, but it was a productive tension that gave us some of the greatest films ever made — in the words of Bob Dylan, the best of them were “heroic and visionary.”

Today, that tension is gone, and there are some in the business with absolute indifference to the very question of art and an attitude toward the history of cinema that is both dismissive and proprietary — a lethal combination. The situation, sadly, is that we now have two separate fields: There’s worldwide audiovisual entertainment, and there’s cinema. They still overlap from time to time, but that’s becoming increasingly rare. And I fear that the financial dominance of one is being used to marginalize and even belittle the existence of the other.

For anyone who dreams of making movies or who is just starting out, the situation at this moment is brutal and inhospitable to art. And the act of simply writing those words fills me with terrible sadness.

From my point of view, this process, whereby the individual aesthetic vision is slowly replaced by formulas and thrills, market research, computer-generated imagery and what are little more than live action cartoons, resembles the way that certain kinds of popular music have driven both other kinds of popular music as well as classical music out of the marketplace. I think this works through a slow-acting kind of deception. The first artists in a new form such as cinema are experimental and base their work on what is authentic human nature to them. But over time, certain little formulas are discovered that have a particular effect on audiences and over time, the formulas take over the art form. This is true whenever aesthetic or human values are replaced by monetary ones because at the end of the day, the formulas pull audiences into the theaters. For a good review of what kind of formulas we are talking about, review a number of trailers for recent films. They are thickly larded with just those formulas that market research and focus group testing have revealed to have an immediate impact.

I think there is a cycle here: innovative creativity is slowly replaced over time by stultifying regurgitation of formulas. As these become dominant, the whole field becomes ripe for the next wave of genuine creativity. In this sense, I suppose I am more optimistic than Scorsese. If we look at the recent history of popular music we see the phenomenon repeated several times. The Beatles were a huge creative leap over their immediate predecessors, but were followed by a great deal of formulaic repetition. Disco, grunge, heavy metal and other forms made the occasional splash before all was washed away by rap and hip hop. Those genres as well as the repetitive diva ballad ones have now become moribund. So when Kanye West released his new album Jesus is King the other day, a fusion of gospel and hip hop, it made quite a splash. Whatever you may think of Kanye, he is most certainly his own man and every album he releases makes some kind of creative point. Listen to this, the first cut on the album, for its creative use of a gospel choir and dynamic jazz/boogie woogie piano:

Uncommon Truths

This won't be philosophy exactly, but that seemed the closest tag. I am nearing the end of Malcolm MacDonald's book on Schoenberg and he sums up like this:

Schoenberg, then, was essentially a religious composer. I mean that in the widest sense ... Almost all Schoenberg's vocal works deal in some fashion with the relation of the individual to the inner and outer worlds..to the spirit and to the collective, to humanity at large and, beyond that, to the yet larger, eternal world of religious conviction and speculation ... Schoenberg would have placed far more importance on this aspect of his work, than on his intellectual achievements as a constructor of systems. In his music he sought to reassert the traditional romantic and religious values of European civilization. In this sense he was a conservative composer.

But because such a reassertion was not just aesthetic but ethical in intention, it inevitably involved an attack on the bogus traditionalism and intellectual inertia of the decaying society in which he found himself; and in this sense his approach was a critical, even revolutionary one.

That is certainly not how I understood Schoenberg for most of my life in music. I think the turning point for me was a couple of years ago when I was in Madrid for a couple of weeks and the opera then being performed at the Teatro Real was Schoenberg's Moses und Aron. Seeing that wonderful production and being in the theatre full of 2,000 or so people enjoying that music made a fundamental change for me not only in how I saw Schoenberg, but how I saw music.

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A number of years ago my half-brother-in-law (long story) told me that everyone should have a hobby and a job, but you should switch them every few years. He was an interesting fellow. Not only did he work for IBM for many years, in his spare time he built and flew his own ultralight helicopter.  I seem to have several jobs and hobbies, but I'm not always sure which is which! For example, I spend a lot of time creating posts for this blog, but since it pays nothing, it is obviously not a job. I spend much less time managing my investments, which do pay. In connection with that, I just ran across an absolutely fascinating article in the Wall Street Journal about the most successful investor in history--and I would bet you have never heard of him. Over the last thirty years he has averaged 66% a year! He runs a fund with very high fees: 5% of the principal and 20% of the profits every year. But even after that, the average annual return is 39%. Good lord, that means that you double your money every 21 and a half months. You may have heard of George Soros, Warren Buffet and Peter Lynch. Well, this fellow beats all of them. His name: Jim Simons. How did he do it? Big data quantitative analysis going back to the 1700s. I don't know if his fund is open to new investors or what the minimum is, the name of the fund is Medallion so you could look it up. But I can suggest a quite simple and effective investing strategy: just buy an exchange traded fund that tracks the Standard and Poor's 500 index. That's it. If you are older, put part of your investment into a bond fund. That really is it. And it beats 90% of the active money managers out there. Not Jim Simons, of course!

UPDATE: Just for fun I checked out the Medallion Fund and, you are going to enjoy this, investment is by invitation only! In other words, the only people who can invest in the fund are invited to do so. Never heard of that before, but hey, there is lots of stuff I don't know.

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 Here is another uncommon truth: the problem with a lot of public policy is simply that it is one-size-fits-all, top-down, dreary proceduralism run by faceless bureaucrats. Even if the policy is really well designed your life is still being at least partly run by those faceless bureaucrats who probably have a much better pension plan than you do because, hey, they are in charge. I have a kind of instinctive revulsion to this sort of thing. It partly comes from my father who had a bit of an obsession about authority, but it is partly from my own experience. I once had a job on the other side of the fence where I was collecting educational statistics and bullying high school principals if they did not deliver the numbers in the approved form. Sure, that was fun, but it is no fun being on the receiving end. How could you possibly want to have your health care delivered by a government agency? Sure, it's "free" if you live in Canada where they have a single-payer socialized system. But is it free? The average family pays about $4,000 a year in taxes to pay for the system and that figure is from years ago. And as I mentioned a while back, the minimum wait for an MRI in British Columbia is 41 days. And the maximum you might have to wait is 244 days. Here, in a private system, I got an appointment the next day and the cost was $150. No faceless bureaucrats involved. Now where I live there is a problem with cartel violence and the lack of a lot of government "services" but whereas there might be a 0.1% chance of me being the victim of cartel violence, if I lived in Canada there would be a 100% chance of my life being at the mercy of faceless bureaucrats and suffering my financial health being drained away by absurd taxes.

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You want another example? Here is a classic one. With all the best intentions, a "common core" curriculum with standardized testing was designed by experts to improve public education in the US. The results?

For the third time in a row since Common Core was fully phased in nationwide, U.S. student test scores on the nation’s broadest and most respected test have dropped, a reversal of an upward trend between 1990 and 2015. Further, the class of 2019, the first to experience all four high school years under Common Core, is the worst-prepared for college in 15 years, according to a new report.

That's from The Federalist. Also:

Common Core is a set of national instruction and testing mandates implemented starting in 2010 without approval from nearly any legislative body and over waves of bipartisan citizen protests. President Obama, his Education Secretary Arne Duncan, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Bill Gates, and myriad other self-described education reformers promised Common Core would do exactly the opposite of what has happened: improve U.S. student achievement. As Common Core was moving into schools, 69 percent of school principals said they also thought it would improve student achievement. All of these “experts” were wrong, wrong, wrong.

This is a perfect example of "one-size-fits-all, top-down, dreary proceduralism run by faceless bureaucrats." Education is when a student goes to a teacher to learn stuff and the teacher responds to the student's needs. A fixed, standardized curriculum is precisely the opposite, about as useful as pushing on a string. I once had a new guitar student ask me what I was going to teach him. It was as if he were interviewing me for the job! I hadn't heard him play yet so I said "I have absolutely no idea what I am going to teach you or if I am going to teach you anything at all." He was really nonplussed by this so I explained. "I teach the student, not some abstract curriculum. I will listen to you play and from that I will derive an idea of what you know and don't know and need to know. That's where I will start." That's education. Everything else is posturing and job-creation for education bureaucrats.

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That's my rant for the day, so let's have some music. Here is the Suite for Piano, op. 25 by Schoenberg. This is his idea of neo-classicism!

Friday Miscellanea

Here is an article about the problem of singers losing their voice and how surgery may not be the best answer: Why Do Stars Like Adele Keep Losing Their Voice?

There is no precise data on the number of performers who have gone under the knife over the years. But several surgeons told me they estimate that vocal cord surgery has been performed on thousands of pop, rock and classical singers, as well as on theatre and stage musical stars. Cancelled shows reverberate across social media and hit a struggling music industry hard. When Adele pulled out of her remaining two Wembley shows this summer, nearly 200,000 tickets had to be refunded. It’s unclear if she will ever tour again.

After Adele’s 2011 surgery, Zeitels became something of a celebrity. Occasionally, a reporter asked him if Adele was cured for good. He made no assurances, but told Channel 4’s Jon Snow that her surgically repaired voice “sounds smoother now than before”.

While the media was celebrating this miracle surgery, one woman in the music industry raised a dissenting voice. According to Lisa Paglin, a former opera singer turned voice coach, Zeitels had simply found a temporary fix; in the not too distant future, Adele would once again be forced off the stage and back into the operating theatre. It was a prediction that Paglin and Marianna Brilla, her coaching partner, were willing to stake their reputations on. The rash of vocal injuries silencing our most promising young talents, they argued, is too big a problem to be solved by microsurgery.

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 Norman Lebrecht, who usually delights in scandal, seems to have come around to Plácido Domingo's side: MUSIC JOURNALISM FACES A POST-DOMINGO BACKLASH.

Every day, my social media feed carries messages of support for Placido Domingo, the singer whose US career was derailed by mostly unnamed female accusers. Many of the messages are from young female musicians. 

These messages have persisted and increased in recent weeks, while newspapers have gradually lost interest in the Domingo story. The people who support Domingo are aware of the reports about Domingo. They simply don’t believe them, nor do they trust the journalism that produced this furore.

Many colleagues of Domingo’s post daily messages of support. Today’s pack includes fond waves from tenors Piotr Beczala and Javier Camarena. They don’t trust AP’s reporting, either.

Nor does the Vienna State Opera, which will feature Domingo in a livestream this weekend, greatly increasing its online footprint.

What we are witnessing in the post-Domingo environment is a widening gulf between the media industry and the world of opera.

Where this will lead no-one can tell, but what was once an easy dialogue has been coated in frost and we hear that some media organisations will not be welcome in certain opera backstages from here on.

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I think that Lola Astanova may have just won the performing costume contest over Yuja Wang and Slipped Disc has the clip.

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I haven't ranted about pseudo-science for a while, so let's look at this article in Forbes: What Makes Music Enjoyable? It’s Complex, But Measurable.

Who is to say what people find predictable or unpredictable? To try to answer that question, researchers from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, found a new way to study predictability in music. 

They used a mathematical model to determine how predictable or unpredictable a musical fragment is. Then they asked volunteers to listen to different pieces of music and rate how much they liked them, and learned that the most well-liked music has a somewhat intermediate level of predictability.

As is often the case with these sorts of studies, there is a bit less there than is promised.

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I just discovered Jay Nordlinger's article on the 2019 Salzburg Festival over at the New Criterion: He mentions street musicians--I saw a hammer dulcimer player myself, but mostly, as it is a very big festival, we seem to have attended different concerts. He mentions the Enescu opera:

I will give you a sampler of the festival itself, the festival proper—beginning with an opera. It was Œdipe (“Oedipus”), by Enescu. George Enescu, you remember, was the Romanian composer—and violinist and pianist and conductor—who lived from 1881 to 1955. He lavished great care on his opera (his sole opera). He worked on it, off and on, from 1910 to 1931. The opera did not have its U.S. premiere until 2005. It is an opera very much worth hearing and seeing. The score is a blend of Romanticism and Modernism. There is a lot of intelligence behind it, musical and otherwise. There is nothing showy about it; it is not a crowd-pleaser, though it may be a crowd-satisfier, depending on the crowd. Sometimes, it is dream-like, hypnotic, reminding me of Pelléas et Mélisande, the Debussy opera (1902). There are also shades of Salome and Elektra (the Strauss operas, 1905 and 1909), with their exoticism. (The second of these operas, of course, is another Greek tale.) Yet Œdipe is its own thing.

Here he is on a piano recital and again, he attended one I didn't:

The Salzburg Festival always offers a slate of piano recitals. Many of the same pianists are invited back, summer after summer. Five of them this year were Pollini, Sokolov, Kissin, Levit, and Volodos. Let me tell you about the last of these, Arcadi Volodos, the Russian pianist born in 1972. If he is not the best pianist in the world, he is unsurpassed. Who might tie him? Grigory Sokolov, for example.

At Salzburg, Volodos played a recital whose first half was all Schubert—Volodos is a devotee of Schubert, like many a profound and songful pianist. He began with the Sonata in E, D. 157. This sonata is unfinished, missing a last movement. You recall that Schubert left a symphony unfinished, too. He was careless that way. The recital moved on to the Moments musicaux, a set of six, D. 780. I could go through Volodos’s playing piece by piece—almost bar by bar—but let me speak in general terms. He has nearly unerring taste. He plays in a singing line (where appropriate, as it often is). He commits no wrong accents. He gets the most out of the music—whatever it is—without forcing anything on it.

Nordlinger tends to be a bit chatty, but it is worth reading the whole, long piece. It seems we didn't attend one concert together. I think he came for the last two weeks while I was there for the first two weeks. Ah well, it is back to Salzburg next year for me and this time, more opera!

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 We  haven't said much about philosophy for a while so let's have a look at this piece in the Times Literary Supplement: Why bother with philosophy?

Is philosophy relevant to anyone outside academia? Those of us who believe in what has come to be termed “public philosophy” say yes. But the answer is not without its complications. For some time, philosophy has been an activity that has primarily taken place within universities, following the specialization model of the natural sciences. The vast majority of academic philosophers work within a subset of a handful of specialized areas. Philosophers specialize in epistemology or metaphysics the same way that physicists might focus on particle physics or condensed matter theory, producing research papers – the fundamental unit of academic distinction – equally unreadable to the uninitiated.

Unfortunately most of the rest of the article is behind the paywall, but let me weigh in on why bother with philosophy. Philosophy is simply an intellectual discipline that is pretty much essential to most people's lives and certainly any society's. It is essential because it is the one discipline that really does teach critical and objective thinking. Others may claim to, but usually don't. Supposedly philosophy is no longer worth bothering with because its essential lessons and practices have been incorporated within the operating procedures of all the other fields and specialties. Psychologists and sociologists don't need philosophy because they already know all that stuff. If only! The truth is, if more people would simply be acquainted with the most basic ideas in just one philosophical area, epistemology, the world would be a far better place. Epistemology can be summed up pretty easily: how do you know what you think you know and is it at all reliable? If people stepped back and took a look at their basic assumptions and evaluated them for their validity, just think how differently elections would go.

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Browsing around for items for the miscellanea I ran across one of my favorite things about Montreal: it is a city devoted to the pleasures of life. Things like Schwartz's smoked meat sandwiches, the greatest sandwich ever invented:

And the superb Montreal-style bagel:

And for the seriousness with which they take the consumption of fine wines. Every week in the Montreal Gazette, Bill Zacharkiw publishes a column on recommended wines in different price ranges. This week it includes a crisp sauvignon blanc from France, a well-oaked Spanish blend, a bubbly from Nova Scotia (!) and a well-aged Lebanese cabernet sauvignon. Most weeks he also publishes another article on wine. This week it is about a favorite practice of mine: seeking out lesser-known and cheaper neighbors of famous appellations.

* * *

Christian Henson gives a tutorial on how to create orchestral scores for movies and tv shows without actually, you know, knowing harmony or how to read music or other stuff like that. He does have a point about creativity though.

* * *

We almost got through a whole Friday Miscellanea without a single political item. Yay! But wait, maybe we should mention this one: Eastman to Remove Koreans from Top Orchestra For China Tour. Update: Tour postponed.

China refused to issue visas for Korean students, forcing Eastman to either remove them or cancel their tour. Eastman has shockingly chosen to go with the former.

Even more stunning, the students in the orchestra themselves voted overwhelmingly to go ahead with the tour by leaving their peers behind. Under such tremendous pressure from their fellow students and school administrators, the Korean students could never have voiced any objections that they may have had.

There have been countless times in history where musicians have been called to stand up for their colleagues in the face of discrimination. In the Civil Rights era white jazz musicians would refuse to tour when their black colleagues were unwelcome. In World War II, which musicians chose solidarity with their colleagues and which chose collaboration is forever linked to their legacy.

As of Tuesday night, however, Eastman rethought the issue and decided to cancel the tour after all.

* * * 

I think that brings us to our envoi for the day. It is time to put up some George Enescu. This is his Sonata for Cello and Piano no. 1 in F minor, op. 26: