The Fredösphere

I'm busy with composing today, so instead of sprinkling my scintillating wit about like some Disneyfied Tinkerbell, I'll send you to Mixolydian Mode, who found a fascinating article describing the influence of the Eucharist on the Japanese tea ceremony, and to Alex Ross' long post with insights (at the end) on advertising and the high-low cultural divide, but which begins with effusive praise for Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, which must be deserved:  judging from her photo, her goodness causes beams of otherworldly radiance to shoot from her armpits, and Daniel Wolf, [no, I'm not saying Daniel Wolf is also shooting from Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's armpits; this latest "and" connects Wolf to Mixolydian Mode and Alex Ross -- get it?] who warns against overuse of  the ol' "justify this note!" mentality in composition pedagogy, with an illustration from mystery fiction.

I'm wrapping up work on the project which I hinted about earlier, but prefer to keep secret.  I can say that I've enjoyed immensely these six weeks of concentrated work.  I am completely in love with the final product, and I am filled with optimism for its future.  Art and human nature being what they are, all this optimism is completely consistent with the scenario wherein the work is a complete pile of crappe.  Sigh.

Anyway, the deadline looms and I am scurrying to put the finishing touches on the manuscript.  Like expression markings.  And the text.  You know, low-priority stuff.  Naturally, this is the time my Finale program chose to loose its fonts.  I think I know how to fix this problem, but how the heck did the fonts disappear?  This is all very disturbing.

This afternoon I'll be singing in a memorial service for a dear old lady who lived well into her 80s and was a faithful choral enthusiast at my church for decades.  She went by the odd nickname of Dodo.  Sadly, Dodo never really got a chance to retire, because, right up to the end, she had to take care of ... her mother, who is well over 100, house-bound and stone deaf, but otherwise quite hale.  I suppose that would be one of the worst things about surviving to great old age:  watching your children turn into codgers.

The time was many years ago, after graduate school, but before I was married.  The place was the room I shared with another single guy.  For some reason, I woke up in the middle of the night.  From the bunk above, I suddenly heard my dreaming roommate (who will remain nameless) utter three words with a tone of relish and profound satisfaction:  Miss Marilyn Monroe.  He was another Norma Jeane worshiper.

Number me not among them.  The wifeösphere and I are working our way through Some Like It Hot, with Jack Lemon, Tony Curtis, and Miss Marilyn herself.  We were told we would find it hilarious, but come on.  Two men, on the run from the Chicago mob, head to Florida and hide out in an all-girl band, fooling everyone, improbably.  Marilyn Monroe is the band's singer and mandolinist.

The whole first half of the movie is a trackless desert of predictable cross-dressing gags.  Suddenly, things turn interesting when the two men adopt different strategies to woo Marilyn; one becomes her bosom (female) buddy, the other adopts the persona of a (male) millionaire.  The first strategy allows for a certain immediate intimacy, but is inherently self-limiting, while the other is complicated by the need for very rapid costume changes.  Bizarrely, the movie abandons this very fruitful plot direction after only about 10 minutes.  Lemon and Curtis are great, but better seen in other vehicles; I especially recommend Curtis with Burt Lancaster in The Sweet Smell of Success.

What is Marilyn's appeal?  She has feminine softness and vulnerability in spades, yes, but I suspect part of the charm is the dumb act.  Thus, many men find her existence flattering:  she is both the grateful recipient of one's masculine protection, and the easy prey of one's seduction.  You get the Madonna and the whore, in one convenient package!  This is not an edifying thing to contemplate.

On the other hand, I was dazzled by another of the film's ravishing beauties:  the Hotel del Coronado.

I have two small bon bons for you, since I'm sure you're hungry for sweets right now:  Message in a Bottle has a list of music that should never be arranged for marching band.  Barber's Adagio for Strings is just one example. Meanwhile, my unintended meme -- the Concise History of Western Music -- has been picked up by Lynn and M. Keiser and Robert Gable.

UPDATE: add AMK's Journal and Byzantium's Shores to the list.

We're having a gift grab bag among my extended family tomorrow, so I bought a copy of Millennium Actress as my contribution.  Have you seen it?  It's not perfect; the ending disappoints, and the comic relief is frequently neither, but I'm amazed and how many scenes have stuck with me.  It's a beautiful film.  Go rent it this weekend.

I'll link to this article not because you will be interested in Cole Porter's boyhood home in Peru, Indiana, although you might, but rather because of a smidgen of expertise I have on the subject.  As an undergraduate, I spent a few hours in Peru with some friends for reasons I don't recall (I think we were visiting someone's relative).  Thanks to this experience, I can inform you the locals pronounce it PEEE-ru.

Which brings me to one of my favorite topics.  Once I made reference to Louisville, Kentucky in a conversation with my dad.  I pronounced it Loo-ih-ville.  Dad corrected me:  "no, it's Lul-vll," with vowels minimized or absent entirely, and all the Ls swallowed.  Now, I love my dad, but he was dead wrong in this instance.  I hereby announce Fredösphere's First Law of Place Names:  locals are the least reliable authorities on the names of cities, states, or any geographical regions.  For example, I freely admit that I mispronounce the name of my hometown of Bronson, Michigan.  I call it "Brunsin," and that's wrong.  Locals find the laziest approximation of a place name and use it; that doesn't impose any burden on the rest of us to mispronounce it.  Thus, it's Bal-ti-more, not Bal-mer; New Or-leans, not Naw-lins; Mih-zer-uh and Cin-suh-nat-uh, not Mis-sou-ri and Cin-ci-nat-ti.  Can anyone add other anoying examples to the list?

The other bad tendency, prevalent in the Midwest, is to hickify names of non-English origin.  Thus, we have Peee-ru as I mentioned, and also Milan, Michigan, which gets called MY-lun, but that's not the problem I'm talking about, and it is more forgivable.  Don't let some lazy-butt local intimidate you.  They will say it the way they must; you keep pronouncing the names the right way.

Happy Thanksgiving.  No promises about regular blogging for the next few days.  They're predicting eight inches of snow tonight in someplace called Brawn-son, Michigan, but I've never heard of that place, so I'm not worried.

Sibelius #7.  Aaaaah, yes.  And God said, let Sibelius, that sad old drunk, spring forth upon the earth, to give man an glimpse of my pure, sweet beneficence.  And my holy unction.  And to distract man's attention away from that appalling Wagner character.

Patrick J. Smith reviews the Oxford History of Western Music here, but really, who has the time or money for those six dense volumes?  You've got everything you need right here, complements of the Fredösphere.  The following handy table rates every composer anyone would ever care about, giving only the details you really need.  It's free, and will take you but a minute to read.

Handel	Cool
Vivaldi	Sucks
Bach	Most cool
Johann Josef Fux	Fux Sux
Haydn	Way sucks
Mozart	The later stuff is cool.  The ending of the Overture to Figaro sucks
Beethoven	I'm not sure -- let's ask Advice Bunny
Schubert	Way cool
Mendelssohn	Way cool
Berlioz	Sucks
Schumann	Sucks
Brahms	Cool
Wagner	Cool, except the operas
Verdi	Cool, except the operas
Rachmaninoff	Cool
Sibelius	Way Cool
Stravinsky	Cool
Schönberg	Way sucks
Ravel	Cool
Poulenc	Cool
Havergal Brian	Sucks grade A, extra large ostrich eggs
Messiaen	The parts I understand are cool
Boulez	Sucks
A bunch of  living composers I'm too lazy to mention	Cool
Another bunch of living composers I'm too cowardly to mention	Suck
Any University of Michigan composer	Cool
Any Ohio State composer	Sucks

UPDATE:  this has turned into a memette.

Michael Kaulkin has worthwhile things to say about setting texts to music.

I recently adjudicated a composition competition where many of the submissions were vocal pieces, and it was a big surprise how few of those composers seemed to know, or even care, much about how to handle a text.

Oh, please let that be true!  There are, of course, two ways to win a competition:  (1) be great, or (2) have stupid weaklings for opponents.

I was particularly interested that he recommended Camile Paglia's Break, Blow, Burn for learning to analyze poetry, since that book is sitting on my shelf right now, waiting to be read.

Right now I'm listening to luscious vocal duets by Mendelssohn.  Once again, I grieve over the composer's premature death.  Too bad some 18th century medical experts did not devise an apparatus to transfuse blood from Hector Berlioz to the dying Mendelssohn to revive him with some of the Frenchman's élan vitale.  Even had the experiment utterly failed, it would have produced the unintended benefit of cutting short Berlioz' career.  The only downside I can see is if Mendelssohn afterwards found himself compelled to wear dresses and assassinate pianists.

(Speaking of Berlioz, can anyone prove to me definitively that he and Edgar Allan Poe are not the same person?  Please understand that "they lived on different continents" does not constitute definitive proof.)

I haven't updated my blog roll in a long time, and I suspect there are many omissions.  One new composing blogger (or blogging composer) is Daniel Felsenfeld.  He found this, and oddly enough, isn't embarrassed to admit it.  I regret its vulgarity, but must admit it is very educational.  It's by David Rakowski, who is my new hero until the inevitable disillusionment.

Der Drübermensch, still shy of his seventh birthday, asked for permission to play around with Finale, the music manuscripting software I use.  Naturally I jumped at the chance to let him compose, even though I suspected his interest was on the level of "one more way to have fun manipulating stuff on the computer screen," which is his most favorite activity.

I now present to you the result of this burst of creativity, which he entitled Drew's First Piece.  As you look through the score (click on the image for the whole thing in pdf) you will no doubt realize, as I did, that we are in the presence of a once-in-a-generation musical genius.

You might think that Der Drübermensch's artistic intent is focused on creating a musical score as its own, self-contained aesthetic artifact.  The dismayingly unplayable notes would lead you to think that.  It's an artistic choice that is not exactly unprecedented, yet this example is noteworthy for the courageous rigor of its application.  The difficultly goes well beyond the decision to give a high A to the tenor's first entrance in measure four; by measure seven, he calls for three tenors to sing a cluster on 64th notes at the extreme upper end of their tessitura.  I wonder if Der Drübermensch could find three tenors in the entire state of Michigan willing to take on these parts.

It gets worse; by measure eleven, the tubas are also playing impossible leaps, occurring on 64th notes, which are brutally difficult if we assume a moderato tempo.  (It would seem the 64th note is a signature of the young genius' emerging style.)  We haven't seen such boldness in writing for this instrument since Alex Ross' ground-breaking work.

Go back to the previous example:  notice the "useless" rests in the double bass part.  Can we be so sure they have no function?  Who is to say what subtle difference the counting of those rests would have on a live performance?  Indeed, this is where I begin to suspect my son is engaged in a game far subtler than we can imagine.  So what if we are decades or centuries away from producing virtuosos capable of playing this score?  If Der Drübermensch hears an ending of great dramatic power, he's going to write an ending of great dramatic power, and the tuba players can go suck eggs if they can't play it:

(Low brass players have a reputation for wussiness anyway, so we can discount their whining.)

I am ready to conclude that this score reveals to us the most uncompromising artistic visionary in the history of the world.  I am deeply humbled to have fathered and trained this young maestro.  It is clear he has nothing more to learn from me or anyone else.  I hereby release him to the world.  No need to thank me.

Labels: Composer, fun

Virginia Postrel is hyping the San Fransisco skyline, as realized by Liz Hickok in multicolored, backlit, mist-enshrouded casts of Jell-O.  I'm not sure the movies are exactly work the bandwidth; if you've seen one quiver, you've seen them all, in my opinion.  Others might disagree, however; I do admit the medium lends itself -- it's practically begging -- to be used to reenact the earthquakes for which the city is famous.

Meanwhile... this is what you stumble across on your way to finding information about the new Narnia movie.  It's a low-budget effort from New Zealand, but hey, it's only seven minutes of your time, and the ending provides a bit of genuine horror (until you stop to think practically about the situation; what about bathroom breaks?):  it's The Real Bodil.  And via The Corner, we find an analysis of Anti-Narnia:  the rich, but ultimately repellent, alternate realities of Philip Pullman.

UPDATE: Mixolydian Mode reports on Hollywood's newfound eagerness to pander to Christians, in light of the work of two dowdy Oxbridge Dons plus the world's first $300 million art film. "Hollywood: We've made a few ... changes."

Daniel Wolff at Renewable Music is the lucky winner of a coveted seconding linking in two days here at the Fredösphere.  (And no, Daniel, I did not pick up any snobbish attitude from you at all.  I am gradually coming to realize my distaste for complexity snobs is founded on a fear of my own tendency to show off.  That, and my use of complexity to dodge the hard work of evaluating my own work in terms of aesthetics, beauty, and emotional openness.  I have met the enemy, and he is me.  No, wait, not me, it's really Umie.  Umie made me do it!)

Umie the Umlaut says, "Bwa-ha-ha!"

Anyway, today's topic is Nicolas Nabokov.  Daniel asked if the mostly forgotten Nabokov needs (re-)evaluation.  I am unable either to remember or reevaluate Nabokov since I had never heard of the guy until I I got a copy of American Music Since 1910 by Virgil Thomson from the local library and noticed its introduction was written by some guy named Nabokov (and was relieved that it made no mention of underage girls).  The very next day, I noticed the name again at Renewable Music. 

Here's a bit from Nabokov's introduction:

One of our century's distinguishing features is fairly obvious -- the quickening pace of change, the extraordinary profusion of experimentation, and (what could have been foreseen since Wagner) the concomitant breakdown of so-called "academic" rules and traditions.  Rarely before in the short history of Western music has there been such an accélération de l'histoire to use the title of a famous essay by the French historian Daniel Halévy.

Another early discernible aspect of this century's musical production is its variety.  Dozens of different aesthetic and technical trends (often contradictory) coexist peacefully (or not) and fill the publishing houses and blue-printing presses, or gather dust on conductors' shelves and piano-tops.  Perhaps a more particular, sociological distinguishing mark of this century's music is its increasing urbanization.  Although rural elements, materials, and folkloristic memories still linger in it, they are purely reflective.  In one way or another all of twentieth-century music has served urban needs and reflected urban life and urban outlooks.  There has been little plein-air stuff produced by the composers of this century.  Our musical trouts do not hop around in brooks and mountain streams; they are flown in by airplane and served blue or sautéed in megalopolitan restaurants.  As for our present-day advanced music it is recorded and fractured on tape, seasoned and peppered by electronic sound, and salted by computers.  All of it addresses itself to city dwellers, not to rural folk.

I'd like to know what he means by the breakdown of academic rules, since, when he wrote this, serial technique was still influential.  And the (implied) regret at the lack of rural sensibility seems odd, although there's no doubt about the lack.  Today, 35 years after Nabokov wrote these words, I can think of only one current U.S. composer with an vibe rooted in a specific region:  John Luther Adams, with his white, silent Alaskan landscapes.  Are there others?

Renewable Music, an experimental composer, looks hard at contemporary experiments in unexperimentalism.  Well, I'm confusing things, so just follow the link.  He seems slightly doubtful that such retrograde efforts can be sincere, but he is otherwise open minded and curious.

Me, I'm not much pro-traditional as I am anti-emperor's-new-clothesism; I resent any suggestion that complexity and difficulty lead inevitably to aesthetic superiority.  On this topic, I am the classic evangelist, railing against the temptation I feel most strongly. 

My latest vanity project tends to want to settle into a conservative tonal language.  I'm continually adding dissonances to spice things up, but most of my experiments along those lines have been failures; they simply don't belong in this piece.  I am writing for an a cappella choir, and as I have complained before, most choral singers have special needs that limit a composer's adventurousness, but that's not the controlling legal authority in this case.  The text I've chosen calls for a neo-romantic treatment, and I simply cannot hear this poem sung without an effervescent joy with which dissonance would be not, uh, consonant.

This project is very hush hush, so I won't say more about it, except that I'm having a blast writing it, and the things I'm learning will more than justify the effort even if I don't get a performance out of it.  The deadline is supplying just the right amount of pressure, the technical problems are just difficult enough to be interesting, and I'm in love with the poetry.  (No, it's not Longfellow.  A thousand quatloos to the first person to guess the author!  And no, you'll never guess.)

Gravity Lens recommends this list of the top 20 geek novels.  A few comments/confessions:

I have read only nine of them.  Pathetic!  If I had not read Brave New World a month ago, it would be eight.

I suppose I really need to give Philip K. Dick a try.

Neal Stephenson is a true übergeek.  I can particularly recommend The Diamond Age, in which Stephenson places a heroine of unrelenting geekiness (that's good) who is also very human (I mean that in a good way) -- no mean feat.  Yes, she kills people with a samurai sword and uses logic to escape from the evil computer in the castle of the Duke of Turing (well, not really, but... oh, never mind) but believe me, the kid is adorable.  Honestly.  And you have to admire those neo-Victorians.

Here's a Friday bonus:  the glossary of sci-fi inventions.  I liked the skull gun and the chevaline, both from The Diamond Age.  Neo-Victorianism is the future, people!

My friend John marvels that someone paid $23.8 million for this "piece of junk."  A legitimate point of view, I'd say.

Down the road, in Hillsdale, Michigan, the newly elected mayor is getting a lot of attention.  He's eighteen years old.

A week before the election, the city's firefighters union threw Sessions its support. That didn't necessarily deliver many votes -- with only three members, it's tied for the distinction of being the state's smallest union. It wasn't a typical endorsement: Before they backed him, firefighters called Sessions' teachers to ask what they thought of him.

The Standing Room couldn't stay awake for Robert Ashley.  Monsieur Ashley has a strong Ann Arbor connection; I suppose he's the best known composer of Ann Arbor (he was born here) who never taught in the University of Michigan school of music (although he was an R.A. in Acoustics and also worked at the Speech Research Lab).  He's been on my list of people to research, since at least June.  But.  But, the local library doesn't have the 4 American Composers series M. C- mentioned, or even any CDs of his music (a shocking omission) and the bits of Ashley I've heard did not exactly envelop me in a warm, inviting embrace.  No, let me rephrase that:  the biiiiits of Aaaaaashley I've heard did not exaaaaaaaacly enveeeeelop me in warm, inviiiiiiiiting embraaaaaace. 

I mention him because I know some of you will go absolutely gaga over his schtick, a slippery combo of passionate intensity and trippy otherworldliness...do I detect a hint of Asperger's in his personality?*  Hey, I think I'm warming up to the guy now!  Anyway, if there's an Ashley fan who wants to leave a comment explaining why he is worth our time, please do.  I'm ready to be convinced.

*I'm a 32.

Vaticans, annulments:  looks like we've got a Catholic theme going today, folks.

Via Turnabout we have the Vatican Space Program.  Not to be confused with other, less controversial, space programs.

Meanwhile, from Partners, Brothers and Friends by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band:

The band says it can't stand my latest song
It's too personal,
But my first wife's second marriage blew up,
They had to get the dang thing annulled.
Well, if that ain't something to sing about,
you tell me what is!
And we'll give it a beat and put in on the street
and we just might have another hit.

That is so true.

I don't know what comes to your mind when you read the line about "the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" in the poem The Second Coming, but I think of Build a Bear.  Admittedly, a toy company is probably not what Yeats had in mind when he spoke of the "worst", but I am continually amazed at the incongruously disciplined energy that goes into making a manufacturer of mere teddy bears successful.  So I was surprised to see, among the Elf Teddies and the Snuggly Snowman Dimples Teddies a description of the Rough Beast Teddy: 

This cuddly cutie has a lion body and the head of a man, with a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, and makes the pawfect gift for a friend having a beary cool sleepover.  It even slouches towards Bethlehem (batteries not included).

Meanwhile ... if you are between 1 and 100, I offer you (via Well Sung) NYPR's report on Florence Foster Jenkins (another member of the passionate intensity club), complete with sound snippets.  If you are "hovering around 40," relive the psychedelic worlds of Sid and Marty Krofft, including Sigmund the Sea Monster.  Here's a guy who could use a sea monster right now.

In the CD player right now:  Les Béatitudes by César Franck (by Armin Jordan conducting the Nouvel Orchestre Philharmonique).  Franck is a composer like Russia, in that he is never as strong, or as weak, as he appears, and unlike Russia in that he does not sprawl across eleven time zones, although were he a polar explorer, he could have.  Okay, now I'm babbling.  Maybe what I'm trying to say is that Franck is lacking only a wee bit of subtlety to be completely satisfying.  I expected this piece to be dull because of its obscurity, but it's flows along rather nicely, really, with well-managed climaxes.  The soloists have that slightly tense French vibrato that, at its worst, can sound like the French-accented bleating of sheep ("bœu, bœu"), but fits perfectly with the romantic Franco-Catholic sound needed in this case.  The next time you have a choir, orchestra and eight soloists sitting idle and in danger of rioting, consider making them perform this thing.

Hey, here's something I didn't expect to find:  an album of the complete choral music of Elliott Carter.  It's a chance to approach from a new direction a composer I find unsympathetic.   Maybe I'll find something I can appreciate.  Let's see ... [puts CD in the 1990 vintage Discman ... listens for a while ... frowns] ... naw, I still hate 'im.

Either because this music was written before his severe style was developed, or because of concessions he made to the, uh, special needs of singers, the tonal instability is not paired with the oddball melodic intervals that we associate with atonality and, especially, serial music.  You hear plenty of perfect fifths on this album.

This peculiar kind of atonality stirs deep associations.  It takes me back to my childhood, to B&W television, monaural record players, and the kind of musical experimentation in the air at that time.  (Carter's music predates that time, proving he was in the vanguard.)  This music conveys a grayness; that's the best I can describe it.

Now, some people out there in internet land admire Elliott Carter.  Smart people.  People like Steven Hicken and Robert Gable of Aworks.  (Oh, wait:  Gable's enthusiasm is a bit nuanced.)   We can agree to disagree, can't we?  I'm certainly not going to argue that Carter's precision-tooled music is bad.  I suppose my reaction to this album is one of relief:  I found some Elliott Carter music that is relatively comprehensible, and I still dislike it.  I can't be accused of stupidity or laziness -- not in this case, anyway!  Yee-ha!

Thanks to Michael and Lynn for linking to my Longfellow post, but honestly, never before have I clicked the "publish" button with so much ambivalence.  I'll be glad if I provoked some reevaluation of the old guy, but really, I don't claim to know the subject or my own opinion of it.  I find myself agreeing with at least half of what the critics say, yet still, it seems a shame that such a towering poetic presence should simply disappear.

Lynn focused on my question, "could Longfellow get hired at Harvard today?"  I'm reminded of a very short story by Isaac Asimov wherein Shakespeare is brought, via time machine, to the present.  He proceeds to take a college course on Shakespeare...and flunks.

And now, drifting ever farther from the original topic, here's a discussion of the intersection of Shakespeare and sci-fi.  I didn't know about this story (written by George Alec Effinger, as it turns out):

There's a brilliant short story, "Opening Night" (can't find the author), where a group of humans stage Shakespeare's play JULIUS CAESAR -- for an audience of carnivorous, intelligent lizards.

The narration is by one of the lizards, and it quickly becomes clear that
A) the aliens have trouble understanding the meaning of theater;
B) they misinterpret the play from beginning to end, especially the murder plot;
C) they are itching to eat the actors.

I just listened to the Adagietto from Mahler's 5th.  Twice in a row.

Is that so wrong?

Let's talk about artistic rules, how they get made, and how tempting it is to abuse them.  They get abused when a critic beats an artist over the head with them.  They also get abused when a lazy artist applies them mechanically.

In a few days, I may share some musical examples (if I have time to transcribe them) from a recent improvisation session at the piano, which illustrates some rule-making.  It may even be of interest to one or two people in the world besides me.  Meanwhile, I'll let you nibble on this appetizer from the excellent, short book by John Summerson called The Classical Language of Architecture.  It has generally approving things to say about Le Corbusier, a man responsible (as much as an architect can be responsible) for a decent amount of the misery in the world today (and whose buildings look diseased), but in any event, this passage about Le Corbu's Modulor system has great insight generally and expresses, better than I could, something I firmly believe is true:

Le Corbusier threw away this framework [of traditional classicism] and let the industrial forms speak their own, often bizarre, language; but he exercised a more formidable and effective control than the token orders of Behrens and Perret could do by the application of what he has called 'tracés regulateurs' -- lines of control.  In doing this, Le Corbusier was re-assuming a kind of control which had never been entirely forgotten but which belongs essentially to the Renaissance and was fundamental to the work both of Alberti and of Palladio.

At the base of this kind of control is the conviction that harmonious relationships in architecture can only be secured if the shapes of rooms and the openings in walls and indeed all elements in a building are made to conform with certain ratios which are related continuously to all other ratios in the building.  To what extent rational systems of this kind do produce effects which eye and mind can consciously apprehend I am extremely doubtful.  I have a feeling that the real point of such systems is simply that their users (who are mostly their authors) need them; that there are types of extremely fertile, inventive mind which need the tough inexorable discipline of such systems to correct and at the same time stimulate invention.  And the fate of these systems seems, on the whole, to confirm this; they rarely survive their authors and users and the next man of fertile genius invents his own.  That, however, in no way diminishes their importance.

The rules are always created in response to artistic intuition.  Artists who follow in the footsteps of the originator must somehow internalize the rules and expand (or even "break") them to avoid becoming trapped in the role of pedant.  And nobody likes a pedant.

I am the world's foremost authority on Psalm chants!  And I'm numbers eight and nine on underpants zeppelins!

Frankly, I'm shocked at how much respect Google gives me.  This whole blogösphere thing is just one big joke, as far as I'm concerned, yet I seem to be getting a steady trickle of visitors to my Psalm Chant page, which is nice.  Who knows, maybe somebody will find them useful some day.

This new (relative) popularity is also an occasion for me to despair over the lousy job I've done with web page design, from a marketing point of view.  The Psalm page begins with a big block of text.  The Psalm files themselves are not laid out in some kind of neatly-organized table.  Well, at least there are no leftover pastrami sandwiches lying around.

Maybe I'm too hard on myself.  After all, web design is hard.  Maybe I need to remember we are all transforming, growing, and hopefully becoming more than we once were.

Is it time for a Longfellow boomlet?

I was complaining to the wifeösphere about the tendency among academics to fetishize good taste.  I was thinking of a tendency to be motivated more by a fear of being laughed at rather than a desire for clear, bold expression.  The fact is, in the creative process, there's a kind of cleaning up work one can do that involves a negative activity: the removal of that which offends.  That process can injure a work.  Some highly admired artists' entire oeuvre is characterized by perfect good taste on the micro level, and a complete lack of any compelling reason to pay attention on the macro level.  Among composers in this category allow me to nominate William Schumann.  (Schumann partisans are invited to prove me wrong.  I freely admit I may be wrong.)

(Of course, it's kind of ironic that this post is one of my duller ones.)

The wifeösphere didn't buy my full argument -- was good taste the supreme objective for Andy Warhol?  Still, I don't think I'm completely off base.  I don't like the way this tendency undermines middlebrow art.  I believe art needs a ladder, a gentle continuum from low brow to high, to assist each art consumer (dang, is there a better word than "consumer"?) to work his way up the ladder as high as he can go.  I don't like the power law implications of an attitude that makes the good an enemy of the perfect.

My nephew Daniel reports his professors don't consider Longfellow worthy of study.  Yes, the guy personifies the dreaded Victorian era, and his subjects tend to the melodramatic.  But shoot, the guy had poetry oozing out of his pores.  It's interesting to note he taught at Harvard.  Could Longfellow get hired at Harvard today?

Does anyone think Longfellow deserves more attention?  Here's one.  Here's another (a non-pdf transcription is also available).  Here's the opposition research (which displays admirable restraint; the name-calling is withheld until the second paragraph).