Now what I am reading

There was enough interest in my last "what I'm reading" post to encourage me to offer another. First, a set of books I am re-reading that I first read over fifty years ago:

This nine-volume history of philosophy, in my opinion the clearest, fairest and most balanced, was written in the 1950s and reprinted ever since. I started reading it as an undergraduate after taking my first philosophy course, but only got as far as the volume on Kant. I just hit a wall! Now I am re-reading this volume with the British empiricists because I am rethinking the problems of the relationship between consciousness and the material world.

I just read John Ciardi's excellent translation of Dante's Divine Comedy. I enjoyed the Inferno, but the Purgatorio less and less and stopped before the Paradiso. I am following it with possibly the most striking and unique book of poetry I have ever encountered:

Knit Ink contains two books of poetry, Slate Petals and Stray Arts and two shorter "chapbook epilogues." The first thing to note about those odd titles is that they are all palindromes! We know of palindromes from phrases like "Able was I ere I saw Elba" something Napoleon never said. A palindrome reads the same forward and backward. Bach did some in music. I even did a song as a palindrome. But palindromes in literature are much harder than in music where the cancrizans or "crab" canons are quite common. Anthony Etherin in this compendium takes the palindrome to heights never before seen. The very simplest example is a haiku in palindrome form. I have been trying for days to write one, but, good lord, it is nearly impossible. Here is an example from the book:

Slam ice, dynamic.

A bad loch: Cold abaci.

Many decimals....

Try it! I first read a few of the opening poems and failed to notice any of these structural constraints. Then I discovered that after each book the author explains how each poem is structured. But he does more than just construct nearly impossible palindromes. Here is the description of the poem Colourscape:

An ottava rima (ABABABCC) in iambic pentameter, intersected by a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic monometer--such that the third metrical foot of each line of the ottava rima belongs also to the sonnet. It is preceded by an anagram-poem.

AGH! Since I suspect you don't believe this was possible, here it is:

There are a hundred other structural innovations including experiments with triolets, ottava rima, villanelles and a host of things there are no names for. This is poetry as pure structure and the miracle is that they are also aesthetically fascinating even though meaning is sacrificed.

And I just started this book today, though I first read it thirty-some years ago:

Certainly the best work of literary criticism I know of though disperaged by current English departments.

Today's Listening: Leo Brouwer in Moscow, 1981

One of the great tragedies of the guitar since WWII was the curtailed performing career of Leo Brouwer due to an injury to a right hand finger. Mind you, it probably resulted in a lot more compositions.

 

Musical Rooms

I ran across an interesting clip on YouTube I want to share with you. Initially it was because it was the very unusual case of a classical guitarist playing a transcription of a piece by Olivier Messiaen. But while watching and listening I realized first, that I didn't really think the transcription worked that well--replacing a singing cello line with a guitar tremolo doesn't quite work--and what I really found interesting was the room where the recording took place.

Realize for a moment the profound differences between a visual artist's studio and a musician's studio. Here is a typical artist's studio:

There is a profusion of materials and workspaces and tools. Compare that with the lovely space where guitarist Edith Pageaud is recording;

(Even though I don't think this transcription quite works, her other recordings are very fine. Have a listen to her Scarlatti, for example.)

I'm reminded of the cover of a Gustav Leonhardt album from years ago. He is seated at a harpsichord in an austere white room containing only bookshelves. An ideal musician's studio is a lot like a monk's cell but with a musical instrument and possibly a chair.

Doesn't this tell us something about the nature of the musical art form versus painting and sculpture? Music is essentially ethereal, evanescent while the visual arts are material. Yes, of course, musical instruments and concert halls, not to mention musicians themselves, are material, but the music itself is nothing more than pressure waves in the air. Invisible and instantly evaporating.

Music, the soundtrack of our lives

There are things about living in Canada I miss, like hiking in the Victoria, BC area. There are a wealth of beautiful places to see, from the ocean-side to the mountains and all the forests in between. There are video clips on YouTube where you can get a bit of a sense of it. Here is a good one:

Yes, beautiful natural surroundings, but after a while I had to turn it off. Can you guess why? Yep, the soundtrack. My recollection of the pleasures of these kinds of experiences always include the silence of the forest, broken by birdcalls and the soughing of the wind in the trees. The freshness of the air, the colors, smells and textures of the woods. But here, we have this damnable, repetitive, pounding soundtrack that seems to be ubiquitous in every video like this. Why? For me, it ruins the experience entirely. Nowadays you can't venture in any public space without suffering this kind of soundtrack. It varies to classic rock sometimes, or smooth jazz, or easy listening melodies. More and more, though, it seems to default to this kind of moronic, motoric thumping.

There are certainly other music choices one could make that would be less aesthetically dissonant, but they are rarely made. Here is one without the intrusive soundtrack, but instead with have an intrusive narration--useful if you are about to embark on one of these hikes. But what's wrong with silence, or the ambient sounds?

Anyway, that's my rant for the day! You're welcome.

Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated

Not my death! No, that's classical music talking. I just read a fascinating essay by "Ben" on substack. It's hard to excerpt, so here is a big chunk:

In addition to doing more focused listening than in the past, I often listen to classical radio in the car and try to guess what composer or era they’re playing, with uneven success. It’s a nice way to apply my knowledge that I learned from Greenberg’s course.

As with almost all music, seeing it live is better. Like I said above, I traveled for the Spoleto (mostly) classical music festival in Charleston and saw some great stuff: Haydn’s The Creation, Beethoven’s 3rd, Mahler’s 5th, plus some well-curated chamber works. Our local symphony director has a soft spot for Romantic music and he’s helped turn me around on some of it.

I do need to get better at re-listening to classical albums to let them sink in via osmosis in the way that I often do with popular music, rather than focusing and giving them one thorough listen and then moving on to the next. I realize I’m often expecting them to fully land or not in that one listen. But many of my favorite popular music albums didn’t click on the first or second listen and I need to make room for the same experience with this music.

I am, though, starting to see the benefits of giving that kind of focused attention to a canonical corpus and returning to it periodically. I’m developing a decent knowledge of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas. On classical radio, I heard a spellbinding recording of the third piano sonata, second movement by Lang Lang (below). It’s my favorite movement of Beethoven’s early piano sonatas, in the era when he still mostly sounds neat and Mozart-y. But this movement is a sort of foreshadowing of the deeper emotional territory he would mine later in his career.

I think that classical music is a small, though aesthetically powerful, niche that some as in this essayist, only discover later in life. It is fascinating to me that so many who do explore classical music keep coming to the same very short list of composers: Beethoven, Bach, Haydn, Shostakovich. True, you can broaden out in a host of directions--in my case I have been exploring Bruckner--and I was pleased to see a real tribute to Léonin and Pérotin in this essay. But Beethoven, Bach, Haydn and, somewhat surprisingly, Shostakovich, are the bread, butter, meat and potatoes.

Classical music's fortunes, based on sales statistics, go up and down over the decades but it seems that there is a 3% core audience that is always there. At the moment, however, they are not much interested in avant-garde, post-modern or other progressive musics. Some 20th century composers such as Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich and Bartók seem to have inched their way into the core canon and three cheers for that. Ten years ago I was saying to pianists, why don't you play the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues? It seems this is slowly coming to pass.

 

Non-Friday Miscellanea

 

Church in historic Puebla

I just got back from spending Easter weekend in Puebla, a city of 3.3 million people midway between the port of Veracruz and Mexico City. Very important historically and a center of pre-Columbian religion. Here is a very popular image of the church of Los Remedios with the volcano Popocatépetl in the background. Of course, when you are actually there it doesn't look like this due to a prevailing haze:

But it's there. And that church was built on top of a very ancient pyramid so large it covers a couple of hectares. The name of that pyramid? Tlachihualtepetl! Indeed, in contrast to where I live, all the names in the region, apart from Puebla itself, are Nahuatl.

* * *

Here is an interesting post where economist Tyler Cowan recounts his history with philosophy:

I was drawn to the Great Books series, most of all the philosophy in there.  I figured I should read all of them.  So of course I started with the Dialogues of Plato, which occupied my attention for a long time to come.  Aristotle was boring to me, though at the time (and still) I felt he was more correct than Plato.

I also, from the beginning, never bought the argument that Socrates was the mouthpiece of Plato.  In my early view (and still), Plato was the real genius, and he upgraded the second-rate Socrates to a smarter figure, mostly to make the dialogues better.  The dialogic nature of Plato shows is true genius, because any single point of view you might find in there is quite untenable.

My favorite dialogues were the classic ones, such as Crito, Apology, Phaedo, and Symposium.

* * *

 I've been engaged in a philosophical quest myself over the last year or so. I am re-tracing the history of philosophy to see exactly how we got to wherever we are now. Here is an interesting contribution: Are We Really Living in a Materialist Age?

When we look back on history, we find in almost every culture some belief or other that commanded near-universal respect—that even acquired a kind of intellectual invulnerability—despite now seeming to us absurd. When future historians look back at our age, I think they will count reductive materialism among such beliefs.

Reductive materialism is the view that all of reality can be explained by, and ultimately reduced to, the purely physical. Whatever cannot be accounted for in this way—consciousness, morality, free will, feelings—must be illusory. As the biologist Francis Crick likes to point out, this includes even you: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”

Yes, indeed. I find the traditional gods to be implausible and I'm afraid that includes the Jewish and Christian one as well. But I also find the idea that all reality is, is the whirl of atoms in the void to be equally implausible. Reading Bishop Berkeley, he makes a plausible argument that not only cannot everything be reduced to the merely physical, in actuality, all there is, is spirit, consciousness! The problem of consciousness is not only not about to be "solved" as scientists claim, it is more monumental than ever. JMHO.

* * *

Here's a thumbsucker from the Atlantic: Do You Actually Know What Classical Music Is? Does Anyone?

I’m a composer and conductor in the field that’s broadly known as Western classical music, a term that’s routinely applied to radically different idioms across more than 1,000 years of musical history. Within this huge array, you’ll find the engulfing sonorities of William Byrd’s choral music; the intimate revelations, too private for words, in chamber works by Franz Schubert and Anton Webern; the majestic topography of Jean Sibelius’s orchestral landscapes; and, more recently, a multitude of works by composers as different from one another as Chaya Czernowin, Tyshawn Sorey, and Thomas Adès.

The unruly and elusive entity known as classical music does not sound like any one thing, and the sheer abundance of the tradition might invite the conclusion that trying to define it at all is a hopeless exercise. But that would be a mistake, especially at this moment.

It would be more interesting if it didn't start out the way a thousand other essays on the "problem" of classical music have.

* * *

This is one of the most positive news items I have seen recently: Wigmore Hall says it no longer requires public funding

The classical music venue in London has raised £10m to become financially self-sufficient and will voluntarily withdraw from Arts Council England’s portfolio.

Celebrated classical music venue the Wigmore Hall has succeeded in its aim to raise £10m and will no longer require Arts Council funding, its director John Gilhooly said.

In April 2026, the London venue, which will be celebrating its 125th anniversary, will voluntarily take itself out of the Arts Council England (ACE) portfolio. It currently receives £344,206 a year.

Last year, Gilhooly launched a fund which aimed to make the Wigmore Hall financially self-sustaining in “an uncertain public environment for classical music in the UK”.

Given the unreliability of all government these days, this might be a good policy for private citizens as well.

* * *

Now for some music. All from Wigmore Hall. Here's one definition of classical music: what they play at Wigmore Hall.

 

 

 

What I'm currently reading

 "Truth and beauty are in this alike, that the strictest survey seats them

both off to advantage. While the false lustre of error and disguise

cannot endure being reviewed or too nearly inspected."

--George Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, p.43.

This was one of the readings, and a memorable one, from my first-year philosophy class. I just recently realized that the Tractatus Logic-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein can be understood as an answer to the problem posed by Berkeley. It is so hard to read because it is nowhere indicated that it is the answer to an unstated question.

Decades ago I read a novel by Alexander Theroux, Darconville's Cat, which has received considerable critical attention. All I can remember of it now is the phrase "the imperscrutable winds of autumn." I remember this because, at the time the word "imperscrutable" appeared only in the Oxford English Dictionary of which I had the compact edition, sadly no longer available. Now you can look it up on the internet: "imperscrutable, adjective. Not capable of being searched out; inscrutable."

One evening I walked past a second-hand bookstore in Montreal and noticed prominently displayed the three volumes of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary which I would have liked to replace my compact edition of the OED which I had foolishly lent to a recorder player and never got back. I stepped inside the bookshop and inquired of the owner, a very large fellow ensconced behind the counter, if he would sell me the dictionary for half price if I could name three words that were in the OED but not in the Shorter. I did actually have in mind two other words of which that was the case, but I don't recall them at present. He gave me a long, measuring glance and said, "no." I should have proposed that if I could not name the three words I would purchase the set for double the asking price. If he had said no to that, it would have been a real compliment!

The thing about Alexander Theroux, as true of the newer book, Fables, as of his earlier work, is that he has a truly stunning vocabulary. It seems he has read everything, starting with the OED. Fables is a collection of, yes, fables and I find words on nearly every page that I have to look up. And some are only in the OED. If searched, an entry will come up, indicating that the word is in the OED, but not supplying a definition. Some examples:

• snools
• frokin

Taken from just the first couple of fables. If a word is only in the OED, the likely reason is that it hasn't been used in a book since, oh, the 18th century. Some other words, obscure, but in other dictionaries:

• schinocephalic
• oarage
• umbles
• suckets
• prinking
• sneaping
• Lapiths
• figpeckers
• hekatoncheirs
• scowring

And so on. Those examples came from the first twenty-two pages. And it was a pain typing them out because spell-correct tried to intervene in nearly every case.

Alexander Theroux is the only author, by the way, who sends me to the dictionary on virtually every page. The only author! I have a pretty hellacious vocabulary myself. Apart from his vocabulary, he is well worth reading. Writers like Saul Bellow and Robertson Davies have praised him highly. I find his fables uniquely fascinating. He is the brother of the travel writer Paul Theroux.

Speaking of vocabulary, I am reminded of the most absurd political slogan ever: "Don't immanentize the eschaton" which William F. Buckley Jr. used when he ran for mayor of New York in 1965, finishing third.

I'm almost stumped for a suitable envoi. About the closest I can get is this piece: La Couperin by Forqueray because the favorite composer of the recorder player I mention above was François Couperin.