17498. (Gustav Mahler) Das Klagende Lied [s. Shaguch, DeYoung, Moser, Leiferkus]
17499. (Illuminati) The Illuminati [with bonus bootlegs]
17500. (Alan Hovhaness) Symphony #24, Op.273 “Majnun”
17501. (Oscar Peterson) Oscar Peterson Plays Duke Ellington
17502. Otantic Azerbaycan Reksleri 2: Music of Azerbaijan
17503. (Frederick Delius) A Walk to the Paradise Garden
17504. On Marco Polo’s Road: The Musicians of Kunduz and Faizabad
17505. (Robert Volkmann) Konzertstück for Piano and Orchestra, Op.42
Read more »
Monthly Archives: August 2007
First-time listening for August, 2007
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 31, 2007
No comments
READING – AUGUST 2007
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 31, 2007
No comments
15137. (David Demchuk) Touch: A Play for Two [play]
15138. (H. Joseph Hebert) Tens of Thousands of U.S. Bridges Rated Deficient; Repair Costs
. . . . . Estimated in the Billions [article]
15139. (Norman F. Cantor) The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth
. . . . . of the Modern Era
15140. (Jonathan Steele) Good News from Baghdad at Last: the Oil Law has Stalled [article]
15141. (John Foot) The Rendition of Abu Omar [article]
15142. (Andy Griffith) The Day My Butt Went Psycho!
15143. (Robert A. Heinlein & Spider Robinson) Variable Star
Read more »
15176. (Norman F. Cantor) The Last Knight: The Twilight of the Middle Ages and the Birth of the Modern Era
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 23, 2007
No comments
This short and entertaining account of life in fourteenth century England and France uses the life of John of Gaunt to illustrate its themes. Cantor is opinionated. He likes to make analogies with today’s social institutions, popular literature, and movies. This makes the book feel “unscholarly”, but it comes closer to the actual conversations that historians are likely to hold while discussing John of Gaunt in a pub. It”s the sort of book that should be read by a few friends one evening, then discussed over beer the next.
There are two attitudes that one can hold about a distant time. One is that “the past is a foreign country” — that we can’t really put ourselves in the shoes of fourteenth century people, because their experience was fundamentally alien to our own. The other is that the past is comprehensible to us psychologically, if our interpretations are based on common sense, because human nature and character remain constants. Things in our own experience will present themselves as clarifying parallels. Cantor is inclined to this last attitude, and so am I. I was not very surprised to learn that Cantor is not the usual Oxford don, but the son of a Manitoba rancher. An earlier book of his, which I greatly enjoyed, examined the personal experiences and attitudes of several twentieth century historians who interpreted the Middle Ages (Inventing the Middle Ages, 1992).
Harry Somers’ Songs
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 21, 2007
No comments
Harry Somers (1925–1999) was probably the most respected composer in Toronto during his generation. The serialist John Weinzweig found him composing, self-taught, as a teenager, and encouraged him to train vigorously in both traditional harmony and in avant-garde twelve-tone techniques. He ended up training under the fairly conservative French composer, Darius Milhaud. In the end, he settled on an eclectic style. Up until now, all I’ve listened to closely was his justly popular Five Songs from Newfoundland Outports. But today, I listened to a collection of his songs, both secular and sacred, by the Elmer Isler Singers. I was surprised at their combination of sassy humour — “Spotted Snakes” is the best example of that — and lyrical beauty. The “Three Songs of New France” are really fine, quite as good as the famed Newfoundland set. The sacred pieces combine conventional reverence with some unconventional twists. I particularly like “God The Master of This Scene” and “Bless’d Is the Garden of the Lord”. There’s a touch of Messiaen in these, but in a clean-cut, wholesome Toronto boy way. Canadian composers, even when they see themselves as bad boys, tend to be polite and well-scrubbed behind the ears. It’s our kismet.
(Englund 1963) The Ugly American
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 19, 2007
No comments
This fascinating film, based on the best-selling 1958 novel by Eugene Burdick, and filmed in the traumatic year of 1963, contains one of Marlin Brando’s best performances. Brando was at the height of his powers, and instinctively knew how to act with his body, making every gesture, every slump of a shoulder or crease of a brow advance the story.
The film is also fascinating from a political point of view. Americans were just starting to experience a series of embarrassing setbacks in foreign policy. They were committed to an immoral and astonishingly stupid policy of supporting dictators and betraying underdogs. Every intelligent and humane person in the U.S. knew this. However, the analysis of the policy’s opponents suffered from some serious flaws. The orthodoxy among critics of American foreign policy was that people like Fidel Castro were merely patriotic national leaders who were being “driven into the arms” of the Soviet Union by the foolish hostility of the White House. This idea was pure nonsense. Castro, and other like him, were clients of the Soviet Union from the start, and tyrants from day one. Their adherence to the Soviet Empire was automatic, and driven by the fundamental evil of their natures. Clever foreign policy might have bought them off, or better yet, allowed their local victims to overthrow them. However, the U.S. State Department did not employ anyone with either brains or principles. Every infantile and corrupt “strategic” step they took, usually justified with smarmy platitudes about “realism”, merely played into the hands of the Soviets and entrenched the soviet clients in power.
In other words, both the proponents and the critics of U.S. foreign policy, at the time, didn”t know what the hell they were talking about. Not surprisingly, shortly after the release of this movie, America began its disastrous war in Vietnam.
THIRD MEDITATION ON DEMOCRACY (written Saturday, August 18, 2007)
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 18, 2007
No comments
Western Europe, and lands culturally derived from it, have made some relatively successful approximations of democracy and civil society, and combined them with noticeable prosperity. People both inside and outside this favoured zone wonder why, and they have often sought the answer in two particular areas: religious traditions, and the dramatic intellectual era called “the Enlightenment”. As someone who has written about the universal aspects of democracy, I’ve often felt some annoyance at what I consider parochial views of history, and dubious ideas of causality. I feel great sympathy for people outside the favoured zone, who are hopeful that they can have a democratic future, but are discomfited by the “second-banana” status that it seems to imply for their cultural heritage. This is especially true in the Islamic world, where past cultural glories and present embarrassments combine to make the search for democratic reform a touchy subject. I think that an excessively cartoonish view of the Enlightenment, and of the relationship between religion and democracy, is part of the problem.
I recently read two articles by Tassaduq Hussain Jillani, a supreme court justice in Pakistan. Though Pakistan has millennia of cultural achievement — it was one of the earliest centers of urban civilization — and it has a well educated population, it languishes under a crude military dictatorship. It has experienced much strife from conflicting religious factions. While its economy is a shambles, the military thugs who run the place take pride in their possession of nuclear weapons. Read more »
SECOND MEDITATION ON DEMOCRACY (written Monday, August 7, 2007)
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 7, 2007
No comments
“Civilization is the process in which one gradually increases the number of people included in the term ‘we’ or ‘us’ and at the same time decreases those labeled ‘you’ or ‘them’ until that category has no one left in it.” — Howard Winters, an American archaelogist who studied ancient settlement and trade patterns [quoted by Anne-Marie Cantwell in Howard Dalton Winters: In Memoriam]
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” — Hermann Wilhelm Göring, second in command to Adolf Hitler.
What most tellingly distinguishes democratic from non-democratic thought is its respect for human beings. By this, I don’t mean respect for some nebulous abstraction called “humanity” or “the people”, which is all too easily transformed into a mystical collectivism. It’s a respect for real-life individual human beings, who live, fall in love, have children, and struggle to find security and happiness. In democratic thought, the wellbeing of individual human beings is the purpose and measure of political choices. Wellbeing, to the democrat, is defined first in terms of what matters most to conscious beings — liberty, self-respect, dignity, control over their own lives. The physical necessities of life, such as food and shelter, are meaningless to human beings except within the context of those values. We are not cattle. Read more »
15143. (Robert A. Heinlein & Spider Robinson) Variable Star
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 6, 2007
No comments
At the 2003 World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto, it was revealed that an outline existed for a novel that Robert Heinlein had chosen not to write. The outline, prepared in 1955, was detailed. It cried out to be completed, and veteran science fiction writer Spider Robinson was assigned the task. Variable Star, is the result.
I think that science fiction is in the middle of a process of self-destruction. While the global reading population has been expanding, the science fiction shelves in the bookstores have been shrinking. It is now almost impossible for a new writer to break into the field, and editorial policies are increasingly conservative and formulaic. At the same time, there’s a pervasive recycling of old material. One of the most annoying activities is the publication of endless sequels to old works, sometimes written by others after the death of the author, or works “set in the universe of” an established classic. Baroque stylistic convolutions are preferred. We have entered a kind of Hellenistic Alexandria, where the dead outrank the living and cleverness consists of saying what has been said before, only in a more confusing and duller way. Read more »
Utopia Triumphans and Tallis’ Spem In Alium
Posted by Phil Paine
on August 2, 2007
No comments
The Huelgas Ensemble, under the direction of Paul Van Nevel, put together a collection of Renaissance polyphonic works for large choirs, which they called “Utopia Triumphans”. In fact, these works are for huge choirs. It starts with Thomas Tallis’ astonishing 40-part motet Spem in alium, and ends with Alessandro Striggio’s 40-part Ecce beatam lucem. Striggio’s piece was performed in England in 1567, and caused such a stir that it was taken as a challenge. It is said that Tallis was commissioned to compose an “answer”, and Spem in alium was the result (however some authorities doubt this story).
Motets on this scale are very difficult to mount. The manuscript kicked around for centuries, but no doubt those who looked at it shrugged their shoulders. Interesting, but too much work to put on, and Tallis had little selling power. His reputation was eclipsed by his pupil William Byrd, and if Ralph Vaughan Williams had not composed his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, few would have heard his name. But in 1965, the choir of King’s College Cambridge took a chance, and recorded it. Subsequently, there was a revival of interest in Tallis, and today I noticed a site listing it among the “top 10 essential choral pieces”. There have been many recordings of it, the most well known being that of the Tallis Scholars. Perhaps the most amazing tribute to the work is in the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa. Here, Maya 3D modeling software, laser scanning and photogrammetry were used to accurately recreate the interior of a beautiful convent chapel which, unfortunately, had to be demolished. Within this model (where even the “sunlight” in the stained glass is artificial), forty speakers set around the chapel each play the sound of a single voice of the forty-part choir, allowing for an especially intense, and variable experience of the piece. Read more »
