Monday, May 21, 2018

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.  

15 comments:

  1. LYNYRD BYRNSTYN.

    You didn’t get the joke, you hick nitwit.

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    1. I know you're hopelessly provincial in the way of people who live in what they believe is the greatest metropolitan region in the universe but, let me assure you, Lynyrd Skynyrd is known out here in the hinterlands. Considering they came from what you, no doubt, would consider a hick burg, it's pretty funny you figure that what passes as the cognoscenti in that most overrated of North American loci are the only ones who ever heard of them.

      I'm not surprised you think the numb shirt you displayed in all of your lumpiness and Roger Stone's idea of coolitude is a joke. I've heard better jokes on Hee Haw.

      I was going to make a joke about you looking like the Yellow Kid in his senectitude going to a funeral but I didn't think you'd know the reference.

      For the record, I've got really thick, silver colored hair, I'm not at all bald, baldness doesn't run in my family.

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  2. "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. "

    With all due respect to Sessions, who was a genius and a great composer, that comment -- that Bernstein chose "a life of fame and worldly success over [artistic] achievement"-- is one of the most hilariously moronic pieces of snobbery of all time. Bernstein failed at artistic achievement?

    HAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Seriously -- HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!!!!

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    1. For musical theater fans who love Leonard Bernstein's scores, it is odd that Bernstein thought of this work as ancillary to his "real" calling as a composer of classical music, and even odder that Bernstein died considering himself a failure in not having written more of the latter.

      John McWorter

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  3. Because artists are always the best judges of their own work.

    Good god, you're a putz, sparkles.
    :-)

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    1. So you figure you know better than Leonard Bernstein how to evaluate his own career. Of music critics the pop music ones are the stupidest and the greatest upholders of the common critical common received wisdom. Fame fucking kulcha-vulchas, all of you.

      I have more respect for Leonard Bernstein than you do. Imagine that. Let's add him to that long list of composers you've slammed here, Milton Babbitt, Arthur Berger, Stefan Wolpe, Gunther Schuller, . . . Oh, wait. Am I seeing a pattern?

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  4. You mean that they’re dishwater dull? Yeah, could be.😀

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    1. To the stupid, such as yourself, anything that requires an attention span is boring. That's why so many 12-year-olds of all ages, when confronted with anything requiring any attention whine, "But that's booooorrrrrring!" When I encountered students who said things like that I inevitably said that boredom was a sign of stupidity. I got paid for telling kids that, maybe I should send you a bill.

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  5. You love boring? So you’re a big fan of Minimalism then? Who knew?

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    1. I tend to like music that is substantial and not a repetition of the ordinary stuff that's been done over and over again in the way of patterned wall paper.

      It depends on what you mean by "minimalism". If you mean Phillip Glass or Terry Riley, wall paper, if you mean Steve Reich, its hardly minimal in content or even procedures. If you mean something like Kenneth Gaburo, it depends. The Flow of (u), I didn't need to hear it more than once. However, much of Gaburo's music is hardly minimal.

      So, you see, Simpleton, I know more about minimalism than you do or ever will.

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  6. Really? Without Googling, tell me the connection between the Velvet Underground and Terry Riley.. And then pretend you’ve ever heard anything by the original Dream Syndicate.

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    1. You really think that is an answer to my point? No, thought had nothing to do with your comment. Riley was boring enough, I never bothered with the celebrities on the fringes of the alleged arts of the period of that milieu. None of that stuff was interesting.

      You are a boob.

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  7. So you have no idea about the history of early minimalism. Why am I not surprised.😀

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    1. If I'd given you a twenty page history of the topic with footnotes a bibliography and discography you'd still say something as stupid. You don't have much choice, he only time you say something that isn't stupid it's because you're repeating your betters, there are lots of those to choose from so it's not a sure thing.

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  8. This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

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