Daily Archives: May 18, 2006

2 posts

Keith Fullerton Whitman: Lisbon

In the last half of the 20th century, it took alot of nerve for composers in academic circles to write tonal, listenable music.

In the “serious” music world, if you wanted to be taken seriously, your work had to be an impenetrable, dissonant intellectual piece of unplayable wankery. I know; I was there. I spent countless hours poring over Carter’s byzantine (and IMO, pointless) complexity, all the while wondering if anyone actually enjoyed this stuff.

I was an outcast for writing stuff that actually had recognizable harmonic structure. I was also the only guy in the department who didn’t have a scraggly beard. I think those two things might have been related.

Guys like Walter Piston were writing tonal and emotional music, but were often viewed as reactionaries in their own time. Piston, of course, wrote one of the cornerstone textbooks on orchestration, and his work, though a bit on the spiky side to a newcomer, carried more imagination, wit and emotion than a conservatory of elitist serialists could ever hope to muster.

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Smells like Orwell

Bill from Ohio writes, “I am willing to give up many privacy issues to the president to stop terrorism. Let him do what he thinks he needs to do to keep me safe.”

Other responses to a recent FoxNews article contain similar cheerleading. This is the voice of America: I want to be safe, comfortable, and (preferably) entertained. I am willing to give up freedoms to this end, since I’ve never been troubled to think much about it anyway.

The general consensus is that a) there have been no follow-up attacks to 9/11, so b) the President must be doing a good job of dispatching those pesky terrorists. Everything else is to be ignored, including the utter idiocy of that logic.

I’ve got news, folks: there hasn’t been another terrorist attack because they just haven’t gotten around to it yet. As we learned from Israel’s attempt to hunt these people down in the 1970s, terrorist organizations are hydras: cut one head off, and two more sprout up to take its place, each more vicious than the last.

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