"'He was a very, very strange man'... With his piercing eyes and jutting forehead, he could make a rough first impression—like 'a proud Calabrian bandit'..."

"... 'withdrawn, unsociable, taciturn, skittish, susceptible, distant, shy.' He was said to be 'catlike and solitary.' He 'lived in a kind of haughty misanthropy, behind a rampart of irony.' He had a tendency toward mendacity in his professional and personal relationships. He was conscious enough of his limitations: 'Those around me persist in not understanding that I have never been able to live in a real world of people and things.'... When confronted with the fundamentals of harmony and form, he asked why any systems were needed... Familiar chords appeared in unfamiliar sequences. Melodies followed the contours of ancient or exotic scales. Forms dissolved into textures and moods. An academic evaluation accused him of indulging in Impressionism—a label that stuck.... ... Debussy took up a second career, as a music critic, delivering a stream of prickly, contrarian opinions that seemed almost designed to increase his isolation. Beethoven wrote badly for the piano, he proclaimed: 'With a few exceptions, his works should have been allowed to rest.' Wagner was a literary genius but no musician. Gluck was pompous and artificial. There was a method to this crankiness: Debussy was attacking the tendency to worship the past at the expense of the present. In a later interview, he said that he actually admired Beethoven and Wagner, but refused to 'admire them uncritically, just because people have told me that they are masters.'"

From "The Velvet Revolution of Claude Debussy/How a reclusive Frenchman created some of the most radical, beautiful music of the modern era" (The New Yorker).

"When vague desire is the fire in the eyes of chicks whose sickness is the games they play..."

"And when the morning of the warning's passed, the gassed and flaccid kids are flung across the stars."

Along Comes Mary... and then nothing more comes along.

“He used to tell me the music got better the longer he stayed awake,” said Thomas Bernath, a bass player who occasionally rehearsed with Mr. Almer and who is now cataloguing hundreds of tapes found in his apartment. “He didn’t feel like playing until he had been awake for two or three days.”

Mr. Almer often read books on science, and he began attending local meetings of Mensa — the high-IQ organization — in 1977. Several people said he had occasional long-term girlfriends, but he never married.

“He wasn’t shy at all,” Bernath said. “He was, unbelievably, a happy guy. There was never any complaining or gnashing of teeth about money. He was so sensitive — not in the way of having his feelings hurt. But I almost felt he could read my mind. I’ve never been around anybody who was that perceptive.”

Although he briefly drove a taxi and had a job building computer circuit boards, Mr. Almer lived almost entirely on intermittent royalty checks. 

Tandyn Almer died last month at the age of 70. Via Metafilter which also links here, where there are many interesting video clips related to Almer and "Along Comes Mary" and some nice detail about Leonard Bernstein's fascination with the song. ("Along Comes Mary, in the ancient and honorable Dorian mode — the same mode we just heard in Debussy and in the plain-chant. Now who’d have thunk it?")

(You can pre-order "Along Comes Tandyn.")

AND: You can buy a box set of Leonard Bernstein's "Young People's Concerts" — 9 DVDs, 1500 minutes, only $84. (This seems to be 25 of the 53 shows he did for TV.)

Coming to terms with The Newt.

I told you I went to a classical music concert last night. I'm not very good at listening to music, in the sense that I don't focus and notice all the details the right way or whatever real music connoisseurs do. I don't even respond emotionally most of the time. I do behave. I never cough. I don't get out my iPhone and read. If you were sitting next to me, you wouldn't notice that I'm a bad concertgoer, but I am.

So what I feel I have to do — and I know I should just stop it — is think about all sorts of things. For example, I contemplated various structures for tomorrow's first day of class in Federal Jurisdiction. Debussy was trying to tell me something about Spain, and I was thinking about something that happened "on a dark night" in Hughestown, Pennsylvania.

Inevitably, my thoughts drifted to Newt. Before going out on that dark night last night, I'd seen that he'd won the South Carolina primary. At intermission, I said to Meade: "I've come to terms with Newt." I didn't mean that I was prepared to vote for him. I still regard the idea of President Gingrich as bizarre. But I live in the moment. I embrace the now. It's fine the way things are. Newt has his role to play, and right now, I'm going to say it's a good one.

First, I especially adore the spectacular failure of The Attack of the Ex-Wife. ABC News somehow lured this uncomfortable little woman out of the shadows and into the spotlight. They interviewed her for God knows how long and extracted one seemingly lurid remark — her interpretation of what Newt said to her as a request for an "open marriage." The values-voters of The South were supposed to collapse in horror. He's unclean! But that's not the way they reacted. ABC didn't have that analyzed properly. I like this new culture of religious conservatism — if that's what it is — in which people who care about character don't recoil but reflect. They're not simpletons. They can get their mind around complexity. You can't just push their buttons. Or... at least... you can't push their buttons with big clumsy ABC fingers.

Second, it's good that the Tea Party and other sorts of conservative factions contribute to the political mix in America. Newt — along with Santorum — has established that the Establishment can't dictate who the candidate will be. Whoever ultimately becomes the candidate — and I assume it will be Mitt — he won't achieve his place through the nods of insiders bypassing the people who have imperatives of their own. It's strange that Gingrich embodies their wants, but that's the way this strange campaign has evolved, which leads me to....

Third, Gingrich has achieved his position through the sheer force of putting ideas into words, words that people heard. There's something quite beautiful about that, quite American. And it's beautiful without the man being beautiful. Back in 2008, many of us fell for Barack Obama, who — as Joe Biden put it so memorably was "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy... that's a storybook, man." Today, we question how articulate Obama really is and, with the distance of time, it's easy to see that the whole "storybook" gave us the impression that the speech was wonderful. That was an impressive effect in its time. But with Newt, there's no storybook. There's no newness, only Newtness, which isn't nice-looking or even clean. It's just words. Words! That's a storybook political treatise. A political treatise, man, and we're reading it. You'd think we'd be more influenced by the image of The Newt...



... but we're not. We're hearing the words, the speech, the ideas. I hear democracy maturing! Over The Newt! I think that's pretty cool.

There, now. There must be more that's going on. I'm still absorbing the Newtessence of it all. But that's all I'm going to say at the moment.

I read this out loud to proofread, and Meade said: "That's good. Just don't become a Newtist. In a Newtist colony."

Last night we went to a concert and heard music by Tchaicoughsky, Procoughiev, and Cough Debussy.

No, I'm kidding. Somehow the coughing didn't happen during the Prokofiev, when Augustin Hadelich joined the Madison Symphony Orchestra. Is Hadelich some kind of magic healer? Did paying closer attention keep people from coughing? Do they cough when they get bored? Please tell me. If they're capable of not coughing, which they demonstrated, it only intensifies the sense that there is an obligation not to cough. I was seated next to one of the main coughers, and she assured me, between numbers, that she was "not contagious." Not contagious!

Anyway... the crowd loved Hadelich, who's only 27. He played an encore, which was this Paganini...



ADDED: That Paganini piece is chosen for its difficulty so the musician can show off. "It's just like a Metallica concert... but you're forced to behave." I IM that to my son John, who immediately sends me to this metal version of Beethoven's 5th Symphony — supposedly Metallica (is it?) — and over there in the sidebar I see a metal guitar version of the very Paganini piece that Hadelich played last night.

"Who are the top 10 greatest classical composers?"

"That question has prompted over a thousand commenters in the New York Times to give their opinions..."

Jaltcoh has his response, with argument and YouTube clips to justify his choices. (He's beginning a countdown, so the linked post only has #10 and #9.)

Debussy started the ignition of the 20th century, but Stravinsky drove down most of its roads.

And then what happened to this metaphorical 20th century music-car?  Who drove it into the ditch? Who's standing by the side of the road drinking on a Slurpee or something? (Sorry... I'm more of a connoisseur of metaphor than music.)