Friday Miscellanea

I wish I could think of a way of doing a similar representation of contemporary music:

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News from the world of competitions: "Why no Gold Medal violinist at this year’s Tchaikovsky Competition?"

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One of the Hot New Things in music is supposedly the group with the misspelled name Chvrches:

Like most pop music it consists of All The Usual Clichés and Formulas. Apparently pop musicians are no longer capable of imagining music that does not have a rigid backbeat, dreary melodies and the Procrustean bed of strict four-bar phrases.

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I'm going to take what might seem a surprising position on this issue: "A Facelift for Shakespeare." So much vocabulary has shifted since Shakespeare wrote, four hundred years ago, that about 10% of his language is simply incomprehensible to us. The solution is to replace that 10% with words we will understand. Now, of course, there can be serious objections. A lot of Shakespeare depends on very subtle wordplay. For example, nearly everything that the Nurse says in Romeo and Juliet is an obscene pun. But we miss virtually all of it! So an effort to make more of Shakespeare immediately comprehensible to us makes sense to me. As long as we can still get the original to refer to, of course.

Here is an example from the article:

Besides, this Duncan 

Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been 

So clear in his great office, that his virtues 

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against 

The deep damnation of his taking-off.

This sounds like the English we speak, but what does it mean to “bear one’s faculties”? Or to be “clear” in one’s office? And why would there be damnation in Duncan’s “taking off”? Taking off where? To lunch?

Here is that same brief passage as rendered by a teacher named Conrad Spoke, who produced what he calls a “revolutionary 10% translation” in the interest of “allowing every student to make contact with the original text”:

Besides, this Duncan 

Hath borne authority so meek, hath been 

So pure in his great office, that his virtues 

Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against 

The deep damnation of his knocking-off.

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Brian Eno is asking us to rethink culture: "Arts seen as a luxury in the UK, says Brian Eno." Eno is responding to comments made by Education Secretary Nicky Morgan:

She said that as little as a decade ago, young people were being told that maths and sciences were the subjects you did if you wanted to go into a specific career, such as medicine, pharmacy or engineering.

''If you wanted to do something different, or even if you didn't know what you wanted to do, then the arts and humanities were what you chose, because they were useful, you were told, for all kinds of jobs.

''Of course we know now that that couldn't be further from the truth. That the subjects that keep young people's options open and unlock the door to all sorts of careers are the STEM subjects - science, technology, engineering and maths," she said.

There are some half-truths in this, of course, but it is often the case that a narrow focus on just these kinds of "practical" subjects can lead to being over-specialized. You could find yourself working in an entirely different field from what you trained for and lacking general critical skills. Brian Eno's thoughts, as reported, at least, seem remarkably shallow however:

In his lecture, Eno said arts and culture are worth pursuing for reasons that are not just economic, arguing that they should play a central role in people's lives in a world of rapid change.

Eno said: "I think we need to rethink how we talk about culture, rethink what we think it does for us, and what it actually is. We have a complete confusion about that. It's very interesting."

Oh, right, that's just the kind of thing that will get people rethinking....not! Here is the problem: yes, the arts and culture are crucial to any civilized society because they are central to the very idea of civilization. They perform a host of functions such as maintaining civilizational confidence, cultivating creativity, offering models and mirrors of society, defining humanity and inhumanity, playing out moral dilemmas and many, many other things, none of which are part of STEM subjects. The arts are qualitative studies while the STEM subjects are quantitative. But the arts and culture are being systematically undermined and diminished by critical and cultural theory that attacks the author, the masterwork, the very idea of aesthetic quality itself, and replaces it all with crude identity politics. There is not a lot of art and culture left in the subjects with those labels in the universities. But if they went back to their real job, the transmission of the great artistic traditions of Western Civilization, then, yes, that study would be extremely valuable.

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And to cheer us all up, here is the Wiener Cello Ensemble with Ravel's Bolero. Too bad they could only afford one cello!

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I can't find anything in this piece in The American Interest to disagree with--and isn't that reason enough for you to follow the link? Walter Russell Mead writes that:

We want to make the case for “classic opera” and convince readers that learning to appreciate opera is a vital part of a liberal education and an invaluable part of the good life. We also want to do what we can to encourage new work that holds promise, and see if our criticism in some small way can’t do what criticism really ought to be about: assisting and supporting the artists who seek to enrich human civilization with sublime new work that illuminates the human heart, rattles the cage of the human condition, and glimpses eternal truths and lasting values in the passions and struggles of both the great and the small in the lives of their times.

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I also pretty much agree with this piece about enjoying art free of political and ideological biases:

to fully appreciate art one must be able to set aside their political and ideological notions. When you think of art not as an expression of culture or an examination of human nature but as a means to an ideological end, you risk creating a cultural experience in which you have closed yourself off to a broad swathe of the human experience.

 On the other hand, you needn't neglect having aesthetic principles--it's art after all.

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There is a review in the Guardian of a complete recording of the Sibelius symphonies by Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic. It's a mixed review:

The Fifth, in particular, seems perfunctory and glib here, by turns too ponderous, too lightweight and superficial. The way in which the first movement transforms itself into a scherzo – one of the great moments in the history of the symphony – is alarmingly glossed over, and the finale never hits the majestic stride it should. There’s something unresolved about this account of the Sixth as well, the opening string paragraphs self-consciously moulded, but Rattle’s account of the Seventh (thankfully not elided with the Sixth as it was in the concert hall) is much more convincing, rugged, uncompromising and all of a piece musically.

I've never quite seen what the fuss about Rattle was all about, myself.

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Something we have all been wondering about, I'm sure, is who were the "12 Beautiful Women Who Had a Huge Influence on the Stones’ Music." One was Marsha Hunt who was supposedly the inspiration for the song "Brown Sugar":

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I suppose that gives us our envoi for the day, "Brown Sugar" by the Rolling Stones:

Oh heck, let's have a double. Here is the Symphony No. 5 by Sibelius because you can't have enough Sibelius. This is Lenny conducting the Vienna Phillies in the non-perfunctory version: