O Dowland, Here is Thy Sting
July 2, 2010
At first being somewhat put off by a review in the New York Times in which a classical-music reviewer gave primacy to the non-singing, non-playing performers, I soon had reason to be grateful that it steered me to Sting’s performances of songs by John Dowland. I think Sting’s performance of this song has almost everything the poem and the music require:
And here is a song in which a polyphonic version of the later verses comes from the one man singing a quartet with himself:
(And note, on the table, what looks like an authentic Renaissance part-book with the vocal parts printed to be read by people around a table.)
Remember Footnotes?
June 27, 2010
If it seems that there are more hit-and-run posts than usual this summer, and fewer longer expositions, it’s because there are. I’m deep in another medium — a book that needs to be finished by the end of August — and in many ways it’s refreshing to be back in the old mode, where revision and second-thoughts take place before publication. But you know what I really, really miss? Hyperlinks. Writing without the allusive immediacy that links give seems somehow artificial now. So thoroughly have I internalized the newer ways of communicating.
Words: to Inform or Mystify
June 25, 2010
How ironic — and touching — that a person with a disease that is gradually taking away his main skill can still advocate so effectively for the very ability he’s losing.
Ceiling of the Main Reading Room
June 23, 2010
There are a lot worse places to be spending a big chunk of the summer than in the New York Public Library.
The feast day of the boy saint Aloysius Gonzaga is a great time to single out juvenile virtue:
(The title of this post is a quote from Margaret Juntwait of the Metropolitan Opera — yes, that Margaret Junwait — who led me to this video.)
Spontaneous Music-Making in the East Village
June 19, 2010
Hitch, n. — a difficulty or obstacle
June 19, 2010
There has been a good deal of merited attention given lately to Christopher Hitchens’s new memoirs, Hitch 22 — deserved, that is, by the description within its many pages of a number of incidents that are amusing, and often in words that are entertaining. Different people approve and recoil from different parts of it, but it seems everybody is talking about it.
One of the things that “everybody” will have his or her own viewpoint on is the the rightness of his many attacks: how we feel about his savaging of Kissinger, Mother Theresa, Clinton, or God will depend entirely on how we feel about each of those entirely incommensurate subjects. Even some of us who are willing to let him rail against the Deity, however, will bridle at this, as flagged in a thoughtful review:
[Hitchens] also relishes Kingsley [Amis]’s insistence that the only critical tool anyone really needs is the word ‘good’ and its variants (running from ‘bloody good’ to ‘some good’ to ‘no good’ to ‘absolutely no bloody good at all’). So Jane Austen, both men agreed, is ‘not all that good’. The reason Kingsley gave, with which Hitchens concurs, is that she had an ‘inclination to take a long time over what is of minor importance and a short time over what is major’.
Could there possibly be a more egregious example of simple-minded criticism? Such a charge against a writer, if true, would seem to indicate the possession by that author of a literary virtuosity of the first rank. Hitchens all but boasts of his lack of musical taste or interest. Could any musician or lover of music mistake number of words for a hierarchy of values? Can anyone who dismisses Jane Austen’s artistic sorcery — which is perennially compared, and not entirely fatuously, with that of Mozart — based on a mere counting of words, be blamed for being wrong about anything else whatsoever? As my elderly Southern relatives would have said, casting their eyes down to the floor, “He just doesn’t know any better, bless his heart.”
Perhaps part of the point for Hitchens pertains to the issue of virility — one about which he is alternately defensive, defiant, and refreshingly enlightened in his memoir. But, if that is his hangup, let this commenter from a blog be the sufficient answer:
I’m a 64-year-old married male, a retired Navy pilot and Vietnam vet, who was first introduced to Jane Austen in high school and have reread all of her novels annually ever since. I always start with Mansfield Park, the work that continues to generate the most questions, and finish with Pride and Prejudice, the most enjoyable. Jane was a genius whose understanding of men was equal to her understanding of women. Her heroes were as manly as her heroines were womanly, and she treated the wimps, the hand-wringers, the cowards, and the effete with disdain. Any real man would love Jane Austen.
RogerEvansOnline.com 