There is a tendency to underrate the intellectual work of our predecessors, particularly in the 19th century--at least in some areas. Karl Marx seems to be inexplicably popular, but if you look at the five-volume book Modern Painters by John Ruskin it rather makes more recent work in the field look truncated, dwarfish and perfunctory. The same is true of the three-volume (in English translation) Johann Sebastian Bach by Philipp Spitta which, again, renders trivial our recent one-volume treatments. Recent scholarship on great artists seems to assume that no-one has much time to read and, on top of that, is not very bright. Of course the exception, in music at least, is the work of Richard Taruskin which no-one could accuse of being superficial or condensed. Here is Julia James Davis talking about Ruskin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pt4Ev0R9e-c&t=291s
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Here's an interesting thought: freedom is much more important than democracy. Perhaps one of the underlying problems of Canada is simply that rather than adhering to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" our motto is "peace, order and good government." Nothing about freedom there! Why have philosophers always been skeptical of democracy? Perhaps because a large, democratic jury of Athenians condemned Socrates to death in 399 BC for, well, too many questions.
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Has there ever been a pianist with trills as fine as Grigory Sokolov?
2 comments:
I was reading the recently re-issued book by Swiss Reformed theologian Emil Brunner, Justice & the Social Order. He wrote it in the midst of WW2 and was considering the positivist turn in European jurisprudence, the idea that you only have rights as a human if and when the state gives them to you and, crucially, not before. Brunner looked at what was going on in the totalitarian states of his time and suggested that it would be vital to remember that the opposite of the totalitarian state has never been democracy but federalism. Democracy is something even totalitarian states claim to have. Which person in the one-party system will you vote for?
It may have been due to the ideological stakes of the Cold War but totalitarianism vs "democracy" seemed to transform the latter term into a shorthand for the will of the people that doesn't necessarily differ from the former. To put this in terms of racial violence, nothing is more formally democratic than a lynch mob or people deciding they want land where Native Americans are already living. The "democratic" move would be to just resort to expropriation and murder.
Brunner's other observation was that there were plenty of tyrants under whom life for ordinary citizens was okay. So whether it's a Queen Elizabeth or a King David enough people lived peaceful lives under a despot they didn't mind the despotism. Not that I think we need despots at this point, but "democracy" may have become a shorthand for "government I like" much as Orwell noted that fascism became "government I dislike" in the last 70 years.
Of course those despots didn't have First Amendments, either, as many tribal governments don't have right now. I've read of cases where Native Americans who complained about policies of their tribal governments got jailed because the tribal government has no 1st amendment protection of speech. There's nothing quite like having Native American family to discover Rousseau was a complete fool with his "noble savage" idea. :)
on Haydn-adjacent thoughts, I finally finished analyzing movement 2 from Matiegka's Op. 23, where he rewrote Haydn's B minor piano sonata into the basis of a new guitar sonata. It gave me a chance to do a comparative study of what Haydn did vs what Matiegka did. The Haydn is a lot more awesome, by far, but looking at how Matiegka attempted to get the idea of the B major menuet across on a single guitar was interesting, and it helped me realize that Matiegka could have easily done a more faithful transcription of Haydn. I float the idea that because Hadyn had died in 1809 and Matiegka's sonata dates from around 1811 he may have felt torn between the in memoriam nature of his sonata and having it actually done soon enough after Haydn's death to still have a "news peg".
https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2026/09/matiegkas-op-23-sonata-ii-comparing.html
I haven't read Ruskin, though Kyle Gann mentioned him a few times in his book on Ives' Concord Sonata, and I see Alan Jacobs has been blogging about Ruskin over at his website lately. I was interested in art in my childhood and teens but had a vision disaster hit me in my 20s that derailed things, and by that time I had shifted to music and journalism studies.
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