Ever think about how Beethoven wrote nearly as many LATE String Quartets as he did symphonies, period (and then if you consider that the 9th is its own thing, the 1st doesn't count, and maybe neither entirely do the still somewhat "post-classical" 2nd, 4th, and [hush falls] EROICA)

Ok but I'm still right

I know this is Bluesky where Kamala did nothing wrong but you know even Democratic primary voters told you they don't care

That cathedral meme accidentally almost had a point, because the basic problem is we only know how to do a style as long as we DON'T entirely know how to do it - as soon as we really figure it out, and don't have to improvise workarounds all over the place, the magic is gone

You think those YA Jane Austen covers are the lowest we can sink, Wikipedia is already ahead of you, or: Do you still think directors are people? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lad...

Seeing an art nouveau facade in the middle of a Victorian block and being reminded that it was the Rainforest Café of its time

Not many nice liberal Americans cared passionately and persistently whether America brought Democracy to Iran . But they talked as if they did. Trump took them at their word . He made the Americans live up to their professions , or down to them

Now consider that the Democratic less intelligent version of Vance (one of them) is named Anthony Blinken and you'll start to see how deep in a hole we are

Gossec and Saint-Saëns are interesting because they seem to me almost BAD composers, EXCEPT their orchestration is so good that they also seem the links between Rameau-Mondonville-Philidor and Méhul, Berlioz and Debussy-Ravel

It is starting to look a bit like "Nice license to print money left over from when your power had a material basis that you have here, sure would be a shame if anything happened to it"

Everyone knows the lifeblood of Historically Informed Performance isn't scholarship - maybe less widely realized that what it IS is the pretense that we're still brainwashed by Late Romanticism and/or The Late 19th Century, and this is how we get free

Granting that the puriteens are (were?) strange, that's secondary to our historically very strange pornographic serious art - have to go back to those Indian temples for another example, made btw near the end of 1,000+ years of glory and beginning of 750 years of Muslim-Christian humiliation

Remember, everyone who says "I'm shocked that so many Americans are against America" is setting up the excuse in case we lose

Another example of how winning power has consequences, you all still trying to beat classical music with the Eurocentrism stick like it hasn't become Asian

Complaining there's no American fantasy is all wrong, for example for better or worse so much "European" fantasy is now classic Disney's "Europe," in other words America - it's like complaining the Tale Of The Heike starts in "India" - in other words you're all Meiji fascists

The subtle evolution of the no-longer-new atheism, from "religion is bad because it tells me what do to" (male, libertarian) in the Bush era, to "because it tells me to do wrong things (hate queer folk, women should be submissive)" after (female, progressive)

Of course curating the millennial canon is the work of the zoomers, like generation x did the baby boomers and so on - who needs artists your own age, you already KNOW what YOU'RE like - insofar as I try it's just so I won't be completely at sea when the zoomer artists take over

You might think history started in 1976, but in fact that was just a false beginning before the plastic Asian Century, like oil and art nouveau in the last few decades of British hegemony before America took over

He's not wrong as far as he goes, but the interesting part is the elephant in the room of the whole Biden-Trump bipartisan foreign policy consensus, that besieging Europe and stripping it for parts only works until the day Germany decides they've had enough of Polish independence

Dalbavie, Sciarrino, Jürg Frey - Latin highly developed technique, Teutonic elegant naïve intuition

Today marks the Harrowing, remember to be extra nice to your demon friends

Cohabiting and pulling hairs that may or may not be yours off the floor <<<< ceiling

Woke making sure everyone is having sufficient amounts of queer sex - or abstaining in the approved ace manner - like the Spanish Inquisition making sure everyone is eating pork after the centuries of Muslim prohibition

It's a bit exciting though that they JUST made the best record ever of this isn't it? www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFwV...

The fun thing about neoliberals' favorite state ever being the Hapsburg empire is that the same cosmopolitanism whether the people like it or not was achieved more recently in the same place by communism

The end of history

No you need to listen to economists they'll explain to you why trade deficits don't matter and are actually good

Almost half of US data centers planned for 2026 are expected to be delayed or canceled. One big reason is the shortage of electrical equipment, such as transformers, switchgear and batteries. US doesn't have manufacturing capacity, forcing it to rely on imports. 🎁🔗 www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

My father-in-law is a composer. We were at the symphony and I asked him what it would cost to do the spectral analysis today. I will never forget his answer… 'We can’t, we don’t know how to do it'

Neoliberalism proving that democratic peace theory is right by getting rid of democracy (it's so Inefficient! and not Expert!) and oh look what happened

Islam still looked impressive 500 years after Mohammed, the long term costs of repressing women (Except East Of India) not yet apparent - cf. the long term costs of Protestant inegalitarianism? (The predestined damned now known as chuds or gender goblins, depending on your party)

Incidentally one of many ways that we haven't necessarily gotten anywhere near rock bottom yet - if the alternative offered by the No Kings Democratic party is more war with Russia instead

"the founders wove into the national government elements of the kind of authoritarianism we now rightly fear. It's therefore taken a lot of work, over centuries, to begin to expel those elements [...] To the extent that historians [...] ignore the historical realities for political reasons[...]"

As usual, the precedent for this Deplorableness was the Biden administration's Ukraine policy - including the apparent hope that bankrupting our "allies" will at least make THEIR manufactures move here without us having to end the strong dollar that makes manufacturing here impossible

Part of the appeal of saying America works for Israel is that you avoid talking about American empire like an annoying Tankie - incidentally reducing the chances that you'll do anything about it - for moderates, obviously, and also for radlibs who sort of like global empire

The reason Shakespeare wrote in fetters when he wrote Portia and Bassanio, and at liberty when Shylock, is because he was a true Poet and of the Jew's party without knowing it

Ok I can PROVE Schoenberg is Schumann - musician of the future turned uneasy neoclassicist - because he had his own Brahms and it's Stefan Wolpe

#Boulez Third Piano Sonata and Fragments d'une ébauche (a VERY short harbinger of Incises) performed by Yumiko Segawa: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eq-V...

One interesting thing about the neoliberal "America did Herrenvolk until 1965 and then whiteness ended democracy" line is that it "proves" that in most states whiteness was fine with democracy, but not necessarily with making the effort to force the Jim Crow states to change

It's too bad that Tom Wolfe was probably incapable of comprehending that, when Bernstein composed his masterpiece about his ambivalent relationship with the radical counterculture, his Witty New York Magazine hit piece rated zero mention whatsoever

It's too bad that Tom Wolfe was probably incapable of comprehending that, when Bernstein composed his masterpiece about his ambivalent relationship with the radical counterculture, his Witty New York Magazine hit piece rated zero mention whatsoever www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ILx...

Bluesky failing to keep out the sex robots like it can afford to sacrifice advantages over The Other Place

When future generations evaluate how we did the Classics I guess they'll see us still very earnestly deep in libertarianism - Shakespeare whispered, very slowly ACTED, anything but declaimed (authoritarian!); orchestras that are too good for conductors - charming for them, maybe

There's different kinds of history ending - for example Hegel's was more in the nature of Adorno and McLuhan (socialist and fascist) agreeing that art was over after World War II than the Victoria's Diamond Jubilee-Fukuyama's thousand year empire of Reaganite liberty kind

History is an art, so when it ends, it happens in the center of culture, regardless of whether that's also the center of economic activity or a poor relation, so when history ended in 1748 the complacency was concentrated in Paris

So much value in this little outburst - 1. Basically true 2. Suggests Orff a sufficiently Formative Influence on Karlheinz to produce Anxiety 3. Suggests Karlheinz liked what Penderecki did enough to be jealous archive.org/details/stoc...

Life without music would be a mistake - but we're not without music!