Blogging

I just don't get inspired to put up new blog posts as often as I used to, though I love the blogosphere as much as ever. I used to put up a lot of educational posts on how music works, but I don't do that as much either. If any of my readers has questions about music, feel free to put them in the comments, by the way. It would be my pleasure to take a stab at answering them. My main interest these days is composition and I have just started a new piece, for violin and guitar, a medium I have written for a lot lately. I don't want to talk about a piece while I am working on it, but I might when it is finished. It won't be a large piece. At the moment it seems to be a pièce d'occasion inspired in roughly equal parts by François Couperin and the burning of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris.

Speaking of Couperin, I am getting close to the end of Wilfrid Mellers' excellent monograph on the composer. I just finished a chapter that gave very insightful descriptions of the musical ensembles available to him as well as the concert venues they were found in. Good heavens, a high mass celebrated every day with chorus and orchestra! Two choirs alternating as one could not learn new music fast enough. Four organist/directors, each taking one quarter of the year. All sorts of chamber music concerts every week all with new compositions. What a golden age of music! Well, in some ways at least. There was a real hunger for new music among the whole of the upper classes, something we see little sign of today.

I was reading a piece in city-journal about Europe and barbarism:

Today, being civilized means knowing that we are potentially barbarian. Woe to the brutes who think they’re civilized and close themselves in the infernal tourniquet of their certitudes. It would be good to inject in others the poison that has long gnawed away at us: shame. A little guilty conscience in Teheran, Riyadh, Karachi, Moscow, Beijing, Havana, Caracas, Algiers, Harare, and Islamabad would do these governments and their peoples considerable good. The finest gift that Europe could give the world would be the spirit of critical examination that it discovered and that has saved it from many perils. It is the best remedy against arbitrary violence and the violation of human rights.

Well, yes! Incidentally, this attitude and practice goes back to Socrates who was really the first to argue strongly, in debate and by example, for critical self-examination. Speaking of debate, there was a pretty interesting one in Toronto on Good Friday between Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian post-modern philosopher and Jordan Peterson the Canadian psychologist. They sold out Toronto's biggest hall and ticket prices topped those for hockey games. That's rather encouraging, isn't it? Sadly, I found the debate itself nearly unwatchable due to the incessant interruptions by the audience:

There is a good summary of the debate also at city-journal:

In disposition and comportment, the contrast between the two approached caricature: Žižek, the aging Slovenian enfant terrible, slumped in his chair in a rumpled polo, sneering at being introduced as a “dazzling theorist”; Peterson, the upright Canadian in a three-piece suit, diligently taking notes on his laptop. But the two have similarities, for each has parlayed academic research—Peterson in social psychology, and Žižek in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and theology—into global stardom. Žižek’s fame derives from his interpretations of popular culture and film, documented in The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology and other works, while Peterson has built a legion of devoted followers based on Biblical commentary and self-help insights in his best-seller 12 Rules for Life. Both have also been lauded and despised in equal measure for their rejection of political correctness.

The big event upcoming this weekend will be the premiere of the latest installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Avengers: Endgame. On a friend's recommendation I set out to watch the whole series of films, most of which are available on Netflix. Ultimately I find them progressively more and more tiresome and bloated with preening superheroes strutting around in their costumes, hurling one another around in absurdly implausible action scenes and with almost no worthwhile content. Of course, I'm not in the right demographic. Still, I would much rather watch a few episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where, despite the tiny budgets, a lot more interesting stuff happens.

Let's end with some Couperin, shall we? Towards the end of his life, Couperin wrote two suites for viol and figured bass. They were printed in Paris in 1728 and are a splendid example of chamber music in the ancien regime. This performance is by Mikko Perkola (viola da gamba) and Aapo Häkkinen (harpsichord)