A lot of breathing, technique, and multiphonics going on here. That can’t be easy. Smooth funk?
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From what I’m told, it’s really tough to get the fingering, and the feel, and the different voices of a Bach piece working together, but Ireland’s John Feeley does a really fine job:
The first stanza of The Dry Salvages, the third of The Four Quartets:
Section I
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities—ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,
In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,
In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,
And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.
***About that first quote, someone probably pulled it from a quotation site, and it’s provenance is disputed (thanks to twitter follower Leo Wong). Because I haven’t been able to track its source either, I’ll treat it as either invalid or false unless or until I hear otherwise.
I own this one, so, going forward, I’m only going to pull quotes from what I’m reading and with proper citation.
Thanks for the heads up, and apologies.
‘Political correctness does not legislate tolerance; it only organizes hatred.’
Thanks to a reader, more on Barzun here.
I read ‘From Dawn To Decadence‘ not long after it came out.
As posted, Barzun at The American Scholar-‘The Cradle Of Modernism‘:
‘For yet another cause of unhappiness was the encroachment of machine industry and its attendant uglification of town and country. The Romanticists had sung in an agrarian civilization; towns were for handiwork and commerce. Industry brought in not factories only, and railroads, but also the city — slums, crowds, a new type of filth, and shoddy goods, commonly known as “cheap and nasty.” And when free public schools were forced on the nation by the needs of industry, a further curse was added: the daily paper, also cheap.’
Via C-SPAN-The Historical Context Of Allan Bloom…From Humanities: Why Nabokov’s ‘Speak, Memory’ Still Speaks To Us
‘Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.’
From F.I.R.E-‘Free-Speech Zones: Then & Now‘
‘This year, we decided it was time to take a fresh look at that figure, since a lot has changed over the last few years. And as we announced in our just-released 2017 report on campus speech codes, the number of free speech zone policies is down: Today, roughly one in 10 of the schools we surveyed maintain a free speech zone policy.’
From Volokh-Techdirt gets more than $250,000 to better cover free-speech issues
As posted:
‘I keep hearing about a supposed “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment, or statements such as, “This isn’t free speech, it’s hate speech,” or “When does free speech stop and hate speech begin?” But there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. Hateful ideas (whatever exactly that might mean) are just as protected under the First Amendment as other ideas.‘
The folks at Charlie Hebdo didn’t find the PEN ‘activists’ much to think about.
Two older, but likely worthwhile links:
‘A true devotee of freedom of speech says, ‘Let everyone speak, because it is important that all sides are heard and that the public has the right to use their moral muscles and decide who they trust and who they don’t’. The new, partial campaigners for friends’ speech effectively say, ‘Let my friend speak. She is interesting. She will tell the public what they need to hear.’ These are profoundly different positions, the former built on liberty and humanism, the latter motored by a desire to protect oneself, and oneself alone, from censorship. The former is free speech; the latter ‘me speech’.
Back to Yale with Christopher Hitchens:
Old news I know, but it seems that the Yale Press was genuinely afraid that publishing this book could potentially lead to violence, and that they are responsible for the consequences of such potential violence.
Hitchens:
“…Yale had consulted a range of experts before making its decision and that “[a]ll confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence.”
See Also: If you thought the cartoons were bad, more on the Fitna movie here. From The NY Times: Review Of Christopher Caldwell’s Book “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West” Libertarians love this issue: Repost-A Canadian Libertarian Making Noise: Ezra Levant
I’ve wondered why Mike Oldfield (Tubular Bells, English guitarist and smart composer, New-Agey prog rock but deep…out there) seemed so popular in Spain.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an appeal to a sense of the deeply tragic going on, well-designed but emotionally intense songs; compositions with some classical influence and historical context, but still functioning as popular/bar songs.
He manages to work with excellent singers too.
Going For Baroque (get it?):
I imagine a bunch of little kids slowly waking-up in a loft, daylight breaking through shutters, the cobwebs of sleep still filling the room.
A simple wonder at the architecture of things: