Friday Miscellanea

Let's start with a re-imagined 60s album cover:

And, as all Battlestar Galactica fans know, Bob Dylan is actually a cylon:

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The concept of what I have called "racinating" or re-connecting with the roots of art is not exclusive to me. The blog The Remodern Review takes a similar stance: "The Death of University Arts Programs, Part 1: Eric Fischl."

The current status quo of the art world is dysfunctional and unsustainable. Aspiring artists are indoctrinated into the belief that path for advancement lies through the minefield of dogma higher education has been reduced to.

The reality of the situation is that the assumptions and biases of the elitist academic approach probably did more to create and sustain the crisis of relevance the arts are undergoing than any other factor.

The end of the current system is inevitable. What will take its place will be determined by those who can see past the dreary conformity that inflicts the credentialed creative classes.

You can't actually "credential" creativity.

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 Here is a piece about appreciating classical music that manages to NOT be pretentious or condescending:

the trouble with being interested in classical music is that people look at you funny. You might be sitting with friends talking about pop music, or what you’ve read or seen on television, and everyone’s on the same page. And then you say “Yeah, it reminds me of that Shostakovich quartet, that chord at the end” and there’s a chill in the room, and the mood is killed. I thought if I seduced more people into the world of classical music I wouldn’t be as lonely and wretched.

That is tongue in cheek, by the way.

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This is how you attracted women in 1955: with Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 2:

I have the sinking feeling that nowadays you would need something more like this:

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Over at Alex Ross' site he points us to a new album by Alarm Will Sound that has me intrigued. They are doing an arrangement of the Beatles' foray into musique concrete, Revolution No. 9? Sign me up!

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This essay is worth reading just for the quotations of particularly risable academic prose: "Glaciers and Sex." Here is a nice bit:

Back in 1946, George Orwell observed that “In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.” Fast forward a few decades and you have the owlish gibberish of deconstruction, the inanities of postcolonial studies, and kindred exercises in polysyllabic grievance-mongering, not to mention the grimly risible productions from the repellent partisans of “gender studies.”

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The New Yorker has a complex article on "Race, Art, and Essentialism" that is certainly worth a look:

Moody’s point—there’s no other way to read it—is that race endows writers and critics with an extra dose of perceptual acumen. We hear James Brown with our ears, our heart, our imagination, our muscles, but also with the color of our skin, and there are essential qualities in James Brown’s music (Moody never says what they are) that a listener who is not black like Brown simply can’t pick up. 

Think of Moody’s proposition in reverse: Mozart can be fully appreciated only by people of European background. You can take the most sophisticated, gifted, industrious nonwhite critic—sorry, he or she is just going to miss some crucial things (“penetrating insights and varieties of context”) for not having been born into the racial lineage of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, with its cultural prerogatives, its particular refinements. No one would dare say such a thing; it’s unthinkable...

Read the whole thing as it is a considered examination of the argument that "race is destiny" and a well-founded critique of it.

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I have expressed a few times my view that the primary purpose of the study of the humanities is to acquaint each generation with the history of civilization, primarily Western, but not exclusively. Instead, since the 80s, this has been largely replaced by the deconstruction and critiquing of civilization, primarily Western, as being racist, oppressive, misogynist and so on. This week there was an attempt at Stanford University to reinstate the Western Civ. requirement. It failed 6 to 1. Well, yeah, they spent the last thirty years propagandizing how evil Western Civ. is, so no surprise. Here is the story.

The mere suggestion that Stanford require studying Western civilization had generated immense outrage among certain Stanford communities. A low-income advocacy group at the school suspended a member based on the suspicion that he wrote an anonymous piece supporting the proposal. A hostile column in The Stanford Daily warned that accepting the proposal would mean centering Stanford education on “upholding white supremacy, capitalism and colonialism, and all other oppressive systems that flow from Western civilizations.”

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Here at the Friday Miscellanea we look for those lighter items such as composer's hairstyles: "The Top Ten Worst Composer Hair of All Time [sic]" My favorite:

Johann Strauss II

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We need a heart-warming story, do we not? This week the Orchestre Métropolitain of Montréal donated a new violin to Montreal busker Mark Landry who had his stolen. There is a little clip at the link when they presented it to him. He asks, in French, "did they give me a bow too?"

Montreal is a  rather special place when it comes to culture. Where else would you find so many classical music buskers? I have heard everything from the Pachelbel Canon to a Britten cello suite performed on the streets.

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And for our envoi this week let's listen to the Symphony No. 39 in G minor by Joseph Haydn, the earliest minor-key symphony from his "Sturm und Drang" period, composed around 1765: