Brained Rust

Simps is still going on and on about me reposting the photo of himself he posted yesterday while accusing me of being the idiot involved.   

Yeah, he's like that bratty 2-year-old who can't get enough attention, even when it's negative attention and he's in his 70s.  And his fellow rump Eschatots are buying it.  

Yet they wonder why the world doesn't do as they think best.

Update: I never expressed hatred of Leonard Bernstein, I just said he was a self-indulgent conductor who went for audience effect over what composers indicated as to how their music was to be played.  Something which Gunther Schuller amply testified to, both as a musician who had played under the early Bernstein and who minutely and carefully analyzed recordings of his performances following the score,  along with the performances of dozens of other adulated and less well known conductors.  

As I have noted before, in his great study of the problem,  Schuller said:

Bernstein, one of the most overrated and adulated conductors of recent times rarely practiced what he preached – a sad fact given his enormous basic natural talent, musical and conductorial/gestural.  In his Joy of Music, he wrote, for example, “perhaps the chief requirement of all is that [the conductor] be humble before the composer;  that he never interpose himself between the music and the audience;  that all his efforts, however strenuous or glamorous, be made in the service of the composer's meaning – the music itself, which, after all, is the whole reason for the conductor's existence” (The Joy of Music, New York, 1954, p. 156).  It is as perfect and beautiful a statement about the art and philosophy of music as can be found.  It is all the more saddening and perplexing that Bernstein rarely followed his own credo.


Gunther Schuller, The Compleat Conductor p. 89

And as a composer, Bernstein also squandered his enormous talent as he rarely  did anything more than produce pastiche, borrowing in a way different in quality, though not in kind from the kind that Andrew Lloyd Webber produces.  I will admit it tended to be a better grade of the stuff but still.  

I think Roger Sessions' comment that Bernstein chose "a life of fame and worldly success over [artistic] achievement" is spot on.  I can't imagine anyone who performs one of his pieces has ever had their life changed by it, their artistic life, that is.  Though several have used them as publicity stunts.  

I don't hate him, I just think it's absurd to over-rate him this long after his death, the same way they do Glenn Gould.  People say that when he talked to you at a party he really gave you his attention, he wasn't looking around to see if there was someone else more profitable to pay attention to.  That's a nice trait.