Too busy for blogging, or even first-person pronouns, so for a couple of days you’ll have to settle for links to interesting material found elsewhere. Here’s a fascinating article about an utterly forgotten West Indian conductor, who was the first black guest conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, among other major ensembles. Ever heard of Rudolph Dunbar? Why haven’t we?
OK, I’m confused:
What, exactly, is The Who's rock opera Tommy really trying to tell us? The UA's Arizona Repertory Theatre is putting on a very good production of the show, but in the end, in trying to figure out what writer-composer Pete Townshend's social point may be, I feel as deaf, dumb and blind as the musical's title character.Read all about it here, in the latest Tucson Weekly.
Tommy is more mess than message, and no wonder. It started out in the late 1960s as a loose-knit concept album with a clearly anti-establishment finale. In the mid 1970s, Ken Russell turned it into one of his typical cinematic acid trips, and while the story got fleshed out, certain essential plot details were changed along the way. Finally, in the early 1990s, Townshend collaborated with stage director Des McAnuff on a Broadway version that thoroughly muddled whatever themes Tommy may have had in its earlier incarnations. …
In short, despite its ambiguous attitude toward narcissism and the cult of celebrity, Tommy now heartily embraces Reagan-Thatcher social ideals. Preserve the nuclear family; just say no to drugs.
An amazing journey, indeed.
Good audio is on the way out, because standards are being set by vast herds of consumers who can’t tell the difference between high fidelity and low, or who maybe can detect a little difference but just don’t care. This has compromised audiophile efforts for decades. Remember the RIAA curve, which made music sound better on low-fi equipment but worse on hi-fis and was applied to most commercial LPs? Remember the decapitation of the frequency range in the early CD specs? Now we’re stuck with iPods and iTunes, which provide quality comparable to what was available in 1928. Shouldn’t standards be set by people of taste and discernment so that they may be satisfied, and giving the less sensitive a chance to elevate their taste? What purpose can any of us have if, instead of aspiring to a higher level in all things, we are content to wallow in mediocrity?
Yesterday I started proofreading a 400-page self-published book of baseball statistics. I haven’t yet decided whether this counts as suicide or euthanasia. It’s one of those projects that has me screaming by page 2, because by then it’s already obvious that the author will commit some particular error many times on every single page. In this case, for 400 pages. The problem in this book is an absence of hyphens. Imagine the first sentence of this post stripped of the hyphens, multiply by at least six instances per page, then by 400 pages, and you’ll see why this project may turn out to be a human-rights violation.
At least the book isn’t littered with other basic errors that are alarmingly common among contributors to other publications I deal with; some of those errors even make it into print. Here are a few things that everybody who puts a sentence together ought to—but does not—know:
This week’s award of the annual Pulitzer Prize for music to avant-garde jazz musician Ornette Coleman will surely spur a lot of blather about how, for better and worse, the Pulitzer has finally broken its classical chains. But really, nothing has changed. There’s a long, though occasionally interrupted, tradition of the Pulitzer honoring music that very few people truly enjoy listening to, and in that regard Ornette Coleman is a traditional choice.
Lots of CDs left for me to catalog for the KUAT library today, so instead of distracting myself with fresh blogging I’ll simply point you to an article I wrote for the latest issue of Strings, on the very obscure subject of crossing from one string to another. If you’re not a beginning or intermediate string player, you’re better off sampling the other fine blogs listed on the right.
