“Why is the classical music tradition in difficulty, asks Charles Rosen? “At the time that listening to records was beginning to overtake going to concerts as the chief way of staying in contact with the classical tradition, the record companies consistently refused to make records freely or cheaply available to schools. Educating a future public would have meant planning in longer terms than the habits of thought of the modern business world are comfortable with. Nevertheless, this makes a coherent view of our cultural heritage in literature and music an awkward undertaking. Some educators have abandoned the idea as hopeless and even (sour grapes!) as unnecessary. Even the idea of a canon of great works of the past can inspire resentment today.”
Tag: 10.03
Critically Realist?
So post-modernism is dead. And what’s to succeed it? Perhaps a period of critical realism? “Clearly, critical realism is by now a diffuse and interdisciplinary movement, covering a wide spectrum of opinions. The question is: how broad a church can critical realism be if it is to remain both critical and realist?”
Orwellian… (In A Good Way?)
“Political reporters constantly employ the word ‘Orwellian.’ Though it stands for the kind of oppressive totalitarian regime he created in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is now used chiefly to mean political manipulation of language to deceive the public. But we need to reclaim the term’s positive meaning, to suggest the bravery and idealism, the stubborn effort to be honest, in Orwell’s life and art.”
How Technology Trumps Law-making
Technology always finds a way around obstacles, writes Clay Shirkey. Peer-to-peer file-sharing technologies will continue to adapt to the ways recording companies try to stop them. Social softwarefinds ways to connect people. “In hostile environments, organisms often adapt to become less energetic but harder to kill, and so it is now.”
Open Source, The Revolution Spreads
Open source is a big movement in software. But the idea is spreading beyond computers. “In 2003, the method is proving to be as broadly effective – and, yes, as revolutionary – a means of production as the assembly line was a century ago.But software is just the beginning. Open source has spread to other disciplines, from the hard sciences to the liberal arts. There is open source publishing: Prentice Hall is publishing a series of computer books open to any use, modification, or redistribution, with readers’ improvements considered for succeeding editions. There are library efforts like Project Gutenberg, which has already digitized more than 6,000 books, with hundreds of volunteers typing in, page by page, classics from Shakespeare to Stendhal; at the same time, a related project, Distributed Proofreading, deploys legions of copy editors to make sure the Gutenberg texts are correct. There are open source projects in law and religion. There’s even an open source cookbook.”
An Underground Musician With Tips For The Music Industry
The recording industry is at war with its consumers. But “the industry’s efforts are counterproductive. About 60 million people in the United States have already swapped copyrighted material over the Internet, and that number isn’t likely to shrink. The times are a changin’, and record companies should learn to how to profit in this new environment.” A musician who sells his music in the New York subways and makes a good living at it has some tips for the industry.
An Essay Defending Essays
“It is an article of the most unshakable faith that the personal, familiar, Montaignian – call it what you will – essay is minor stuff, a second-rate employment undertaken by bankrupt novelists and other failures. In literary rankings its place lay well below the novella and scarcely above the book review. Indeed, the personal essay’s most esteemed and acclaimed practitioners have to a man voiced misgivings about their trade.” And yet, is it true that “there are no second-rate genres, “only second-rate practitioners?”
Reconsidering Prokofiev
A new biography of Prokofiev suggests that a re-evaluation of his life and work is in order. “Even as the collapse of Communism has made it easier for us to understand Prokofiev’s life, so has the collapse of the postwar musical avant-garde removed any remaining obstacle to a full appreciation of his music. One need no longer apologize for enjoying such pieces as the First Violin Concerto or Romeo and Juliet, or pretend that they are anything other than modern masterpieces, great works of art that are “popular” in the best sense of that much-maligned word. That they were written by a man who succumbed to temptation—and paid the price for it—need not make us love them less.”
Remembering Kirk Varnedoe
Curator Kirk Varnedoe played a crucial role in the building of the Museum of Modern Art. He “came to the museum at a transforming moment in its evolution. Circumstances forced him to leave before that transition was complete, and after a long battle with cancer he died, on August 14, at the age of 57. But when MoMA celebrates its 75th anniversary next year with the opening of its new building on 53rd Street, his indelible mark will be upon it.”