Ugh

Today's been a pretty crazy day here in Toronto.  We had an earthquake this morning, and then the Toronto Star broke a story about a video supposedly showing Rob Ford smoking crack and making racial slurs.

Except the Star didn't break the story.  I happened to be on Gawker last night when they put up the whole thing, read it, (you should too, it's kind of amazing) and then went to the Star to see their reaction.

Except there was nothing there.

Come today, it turns out the Star has been sitting on the story and the released it, and pretended as though it was theirs all along. As a result, there's some pretty funny (and nasty) stuff going on between the Star and Gawker on twitter, which is actually kind of sad, because although Gawker is completely right that the Star is being stupid in claiming this is their story, Gawker doesn't seem to know that the Star, as far as Canadian papers go, is maybe the last bastion of relatively decent journalism in the country and not a front for business interests like the Globe and Mail and National Post.  Instead they're playing the whole "Canadians are dumb boring people who don't really know much about things", except for the fact that they get all the same media as we Americans and watch it obsessively..."


That being said, it's comically cheeky of the Star to call their slightly differing account of the tape an "exclusive", and I can see why people at Gawker, like Tom Scocca, are so angry about it, or at least appear to be really angry about it on twitter.  And it's also annoying for the Star to get all self-righteous about Gawker getting pissed off, given how much of the paper lauds its own muckraking when no one else is doing it.

I'm actually really glad Gawker broke it, in part because Canadians usually only take something seriously when Americans are involved, and it also makes it a lot harder for the usual Ford crowd to merely blame the Star for this.

I guess I'm talking about this and not about the actual video in part because these are the only people to have seen it, and so this is actually the story right now, in which two rare outfits where decent journalism is still practiced are totally crapping over each other. 

That's actually the saddest part because Rob Ford has been a lost cause for so long now that's it's not actually even worth talking about him.

A Tale of Two Columnists

There are two columns worth reading in the Toronto Star today.  Royson James, who I don't always agree with, in part because he constantly plays devil's advocate, has a really nice piece on the issue of the Scarborough subway.  I can't help but wonder if the decision today by Toronto City Council to discuss transit taxes was fuelled in part by James' cogent analysis of the rank hypocrisy that surrounds the debate over whether or not Scarborough should get a subway extension or an LRT.

Although I live in downtown Toronto, and I guess I'm supposed to be at war with people in Scarborough and Etobicoke, my deeply held socialist beliefs force me to believe that if we taxed the hell out of everyone, we could have subways running down every major street in the entire city, whether we needed them or not.  That even includes people who live in Scarborough or Etobicoke or all those something-York areas north of Bloor and West or East of the downtown core are called..

Seriously though, James makes a good point about the actual politics going on, and how the absence of a Scarborough subway isn't necessarily just because we downtowners don't think they deserve one, but that their own representatives on Council are part of the problem.

***

Which brings me to the other column, by Martin Regg Cohn, which concerns the recent Ontario provincial budget.  Unlike James column, Cohn tells us all about the various statistics that show us we're in a slump, and accuses the current Finance minister, Charles Sousa, of ignoring the plight of the Ontario economy. 

The problem with this piece is that Cohn himself admits, at the very end, that there's very little Ontario can do to actually change its position in a national economy run by a federal government more concerned about extracting the remains of long-dead dinosaurs in Alberta than pretty much anything else. 

Instead, he trots out the usual centrist Canadian columnists' bromide about the Ontario government needing to instill "an entrepreneurial spirit in Ontario’s commercial classes" in order to "kick-start" Ontario's economy.  Maybe people aren't feeling so entrepreneurial because that magical market put Ontario into this predicament in the first place.  Does anyone remember the economic meltdown of 2008?  Rescuing the auto industry and such? No?

Perhaps Cohn was trying to be balanced after writing a number of pieces that were more supportive of the Liberals?  And his editor told him he needed some balance?  Maybe I'm just tired of hearing how Ontario's economic problems boil down to some regulatory fiddling and letting "the market" step in and magically figure everything out, and how pointless his column seems, except to allow the trolls who populate the Star website to talk about how if only government got out of the way (because it's always somehow in the way, I guess, building roads, cleaning water and taking away our garbage). 

That's not actually how markets work, ever, and generally, it's when we let the markets do their thing that all hell breaks loose.


 

Salome at the COC

So we went to see the Canadian Opera Company's revival of Salome Wednesday night.

It was awful. 

A long-standing tradition of mine, when I know I'm going to see an opera, is to avoid the reviews, in part because I don't really want to know what I'm seeing until I'm seeing it.  However, what both of them convey quite nicely is the insipidness of our critical culture here in Canada.


To be fair actually, the Toronto Star review, by John Terauds is OK.  I think he's trying to be diplomatic, but he is not nearly as hard on the staging as he should be.  And I think he, like many Canadian classical critics, is much more polite about the quality of the singing (and the musical direction) than he needs to be.

The Globe and Mail review, however, reads like copy from a Canadian Opera Company press release.  Who is J.D. Considine?  It turns out he's a rock critic, who also now does jazz reviews for the Globe and Mail, which makes him a perfect candidate to review an opera!

Am I being snotty here?  You bet!  It would be like asking me to review a rock concert!  Has he ever reviewed an opera before?  A quick Google search indicates that he reviewed Tannhäuser at some time, but that's it.

I don't really read the Globe and Mail anymore, in part because the quality of the writing and reportage has steadily declined over the years, but his review is more of a joke than Atom Egoyan's "controversial" staging of Salome.

Mr. Considine completely swallows Egoyan's premise, which is that somehow, Salome needs some kind of updating so that people would understand it better.  What's worse is that nearly every review of the opera online essentially concedes this premise.  You know, that opera is old, and difficult to understand, and so we need to have it explained to us by the director, who occupies the role of a benevolent storyteller father, like Stalin.

Except it doesn't.  Especially not this one.

Nearly everyone talks about how Egoyan successfully conveys "psychological depth" and "family issues" in this production.  However, my sense is that he did this mainly through his program notes, which everyone dutifully read and accepted as Egoyan somehow shining a light on an aspect of the opera that had, until now, been neglected.  In essence, he argues that his production seeks to move away from thinking of Salome as a femme fatale, and more as a product of her environment, that perhaps she has been sexually abused, and in the midst of damaged and violent environment, herself becomes an expression of this violence.

Except that the first lines that Salome sings in the entire opera are the following:

Ich will nicht bleiben.  Ich kann nicht bleiben.  Warum sieht mich der Tetrarch fortwährend so an, mit seinen Maulwurfsaugen unter den zuckenden Lidern?  Es ist seltsam, dass der Mann meiner Mutter mich so ansieht.

Translation:

I will not stay. I cannot stay. Why does the Tetrarch look at me all the while with his mole's eyes under his shaking eyelids ? It is strange that the husband of my mother looks at me like that.

So Egoyan's entire justification for his staging, the premise that he proceeds to beat you over the head with by deploying cliche after cliche, is something which Wilde and Strauss manage to convey in about a minute of music and dialogue.  We know that she is disturbed and bothered by Herod's sexual advances.  Showing us a girl on a swing, and then Salome getting (symbolically now, in a positive contrast to the 1997 production) gang-raped by the Jews(!) during the dance of the seven veils doesn't really do anything but serve to show that Egoyan is good at manipulating the bored narcissists who I suppose he (and many others), believe make up a good chunk of modern opera audiences.


Why do I seem really pissed off about this? In part, I actually spent a month in Vancouver back in the 90's watching this opera (this very Egoyan production in fact) get put together.  There were things that bothered me about the production, but I was never able to really express them, maybe because I was so much younger, and I, like most of the people reviewing this opera now, naively believed that there was some kind of productive relationship between "edgy" and "arty".

Now I'm a bit older, and a bit wiser, and I can't help but see just how terrible the whole thing is now.  I mean, Herod in this production is meant to be a drug lord or something (at least he was in 1997).  So why the hell does he have John the Baptist in his basement?  Was he some unlucky Jehovah's Witness, whose monthly door-knocking excursion went horribly, horribly wrong?

And I know that this is when well-intentioned people will step in and say, "No, no Andrew, it's art, and Egoyan is trying to convey the allegorical aspect of Salome here."  But what's the allegory in a drug dealer having a religious fanatic in his basement?  The entire crux of the story is that Jochanaan is a kind of political prisoner, held there but not to be killed.  His death has tremendous implications, but the way Egoyan stages it deprives the entire story of this tension.  Herod is just a pervert, and John the Baptist a disheveled nut.

I suppose this is what enrages me (yes I know, 1st world problems, blah, blah blah, don't care about art or the human condition when there are more important things to be worried about) is how so much of this is framed as "controversy".

It's the ultimate arts marketing dodge  - stage a bad production, but throw in a blowjob (no really, there's one in this staging!), some nudity and also a sense that Salome is really just an damaged child by showing us a film of it, and it comes out the other side as "controversial".

I think what it's really called is bullshit.

I've seen some really interesting modern stagings.  They don't always work, but they are often pretty good.  This wasn't.  This staging of Salome seems to rely on the viewer to trust Atom Egoyan to have some insight into the opera simply because he's Atom Egoyan, and in the auteur-starved country of Canada, I suppose that's enough.  And I say this having really enjoyed Egoyan's production of Wagner's Die Walküre a number of years ago at the COC, so I'm not saying he's incapable of it either.

Suffice to say that Egoyan performs a very nice bit of sleight of hand - he and the COC marketing department manage to fool most people into thinking that what is completely obvious in the libretto and music of the opera in fact emerges only thanks to his ingenious direction!

I could go on for a looooong time about the problems in this production, but I would actually also like to talk a little about the music, which was almost equally disappointing.

The production was, overall, not terribly well sung.  I mean, there were no stand out bad singers, and to be fair to Egoyan, I think he gets one character right (Herodias), who also happened to be the strongest and most compelling actor and singer in last night's performance.

The Salome was excellent, although she, like many of the singers, struggled to be heard over the orchestra, to the extent that the fault must lie with the conductor, either in his casting of the roles, or of his handling of the orchestra.

I have yet to be really amazed by our new music director's handling either the music, the singers or the orchestra, and I genuinely wonder why some of the singers were cast in this production when they fairly clearly were not entirely well suited to the roles. I mean, it's never bad, but I certainly don't understand why the COC orchestra is always singled out for praise, except that they are often the best part of a mediocre performance.

If you were planning on going, don't, unless you are OK with spending money to listen to the last 10 minutes of the opera, which not even this staging could ruin.  I don't want to say that it's worth it just for the end, but the opera succeeds despite what's gone on before, because not even Atom Egoyan could get in the way of Strauss' sublime music and sense of drama.  He tried, but at the end, Strauss managed to triumph over the intellectual and emotional desolation of this production.

***
Anyway, some of you might wonder why I never posted anything on the recent production of Tristan at the COC.  I saw it, but unfortunately I injured myself on the way to the opera, and didn't really feel like writing much up at the time, and now it seems a very long time ago!

That being said, I also saw Opera Atelier's recent production of Mozart's The Magic Flute with my son and girlfriend.  Unlike Salome, this production was straightforward and simple (read traditional), and yet incredibly engaging.  Opera Atelier advertised it as a great "first" opera for kids, and it was true.  But what made it great fun was that the production let the opera speak for itself, in all its sublime strangeness

I've said this before, but I am really tired of the idea that every opera going experience has to be sold as providing some added pseudo-pedagogical value.  First of all, most modern productions don't actually do this (see above) and secondly, I think it's time we stop insisting on the idea that classical music is somehow good for us as a way of justifying its existence in light of its high costs.


But I need to think about this more before I actually attempt to explain myself!  Some other time, then.

Some thoughts on why people are not enamoured of unions right now

Reading today that the recently privatized garbage collectors here in Toronto voted to reject unionization does not come as a surprise, but it is a pretty depressing result nevertheless.

As I have written before, I feel as though the way in which Torontonians think about our garbage collectors is a very clear example of the general state of incoherent mean-spiritedness in the city when it comes to the public sector.

This isn't terribly surprising, given that there has been a fairly long-term (and highly successful) assault on the idea of the public sector being anything more than a bunch of lazy unionized assholes who are literally stealing money from the honest taxpayer.  As a former civil servant, and now part of the broader public sector, I still get into arguments with people who. on the basis of having had to wait for an hour to get their driver's license renewed, conclude that the government "can't do anything right".

Beyond the fact that this is a no-win argument (if the renewal office was staffed to the gills, wouldn't that be more wasteful? or maybe it's 20 years of attrition to pay for those tax cuts that had some effect?), it points to a much plainer fact - nearly no one in Canada ever has to deal with any level of government.  This is why most people go to city hall to get their passport, or e-mail the province to ask about their local property taxes.

The reality is that most Canadians don't have a clue as to how their governments work.  And what's funny about this is that they don't really have to, because we live in a society where our governments, even if I really don't like them, still manage to make the quality of life here in Canada pretty good.  But the quality of our public service has now come back to bite the public sector in the ass, because it's actually done a pretty good job of uh, doing a good job.

Anyway, I say all this in part because when the garbage strikes happened here in Toronto, it shocked people into remembering that there was this whole public sector, and it did all kinds of stuff for them, like picked up their garbage, looked after their children, or provided cheap recreation for them. 

However, in a spirit remarkably consistent with the laughter and derision towards protestors during the G20, rather than thinking that outside workers might have as much dignity as say, someone who works at a bank, we as a city, very loudly and clearly, told them to shut up and get back to doing our dirty work, and how dare they think that they deserved what they negotiated over the years, like all those previous agreements that no one noticed, and where all these "benefits" accrued. 

"I mean what", the civic body thought to itself, "do the outside workers think union negotiations are some kind of good faith contract between two parties?"

So it does not surprise me that the workers at GFL did not unionize.  I don't think it helped the union's cause when their initial strategy was to argue that GFL would do a bad job, going so far as to set up a hotline for people to call to complain.  Not a great idea, given that the GFL garbage collectors might actually think the union is accusing them of doing a bad job (which is kind of was...).

But when you think about it, I suspect most of those who work for GFL were here for the last strike, and that the last thing they wanted to do was to rock the boat right now.  I doubt that GFL even really had to press them that hard - it was ordinary Joe Toronto who scared them into rejecting the union.  I mean, right now they are the worse-off heroes of the city!   Way to take one for the team, ladies and gentlemen of GFL!

That being said, I'm sure things are probably pretty good for them right now - as is common with capitalism, there is always the opening gambit, when the company is flush with cash and able to show its workers that they can offer similar benefits without union protection  (Remember the early days of the National Post?).  But it will get worse, and GFL will ask (and likely receive) more money from the uh, taxpayer, to increase its profits while keeping wages "competitive" and costs low.

This is the perversity of our civic culture right now, and I can't help but be reminded of Michel Foucault's preface to Anti-Oedipus, when he reminds us of "the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us." (And no, I'm not saying GFL or the workers are fascists like Hitler of Mussolini!!!!!  His comment is about why we enjoy hurting ourselves to assume a particular kind of power)

I am certain, as we all are, that the garbage collectors who voted again unionization all sincerely believe that they will be better off, in the long run, without collective bargaining, because right now, they all probably feel as though they have the power, the power to be on the city's good side, and that the union would take away that power. 

However, just as one of my tyrannical former bosses believed that governments could do away with unions because "they weren't relevant anymore", by simply saying what he said, he unwittingly demonstrated their necessity.

Better luck next time, CUPE 416!

La Clemenza di Tito

I was the Canadian Opera Company's production of Mozart's last opera last night.  I don't actually have much more to say about it than the Toronto Star or the Globe and Mail.  I completely agree with this reviewer that it was really well sung, maybe the best sung Mozart opera I've seen at the COC, and that the substitute for Michael Schade, Owen McCausland, really shone in the title role (especially in the 2nd part).  However, it was marred by one of the most incoherent productions the COC has ever staged. 

Now I have complained about COC strangeness before, like when they tried to set Beethoven's Fidelio in a Kafkaesque (HA!) bureaucracy, or completely ruined the ending of Don Giovanni (for laughs?), but the problem with this one went deeper, in part because the notes the director, Christopher Alden, wrote for the playbill were quite intriguing.  He argues that Titus, who is characterized by his clemency (hence the title!), actually tyrannizes his populace with kindness. 

I have to admit, this sounded like a really interesting take, and I looked forward to seeing that.  Unfortunately, what happened on stage failed to resemble even the director's argument for the production!  Instead, it came off as farce, which, in light of the libretto and Mozart's music, simply made no sense.  It resulted in people laughing at points of high seriousness, and reducing certain characters, like Annio and Vitellia, to wildly inappropriate caricatures. Basically all the humour that was set up in the first part led to the audience seeing certain characters as funny, and so when they got serious, like when Vitellia completely changes her position on Tito, it comes off as though she's not serious, or perhaps insane. 

It was the same with the setting - I enjoyed the idea of a kind of late-late Modernist building, and the fact that it looked like every 1960's arts centre lobby in Canada, from Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Theatre to the Confederation Centre in PEI.  But again, there was no payoff.

So unlike some of the previous productions I've seen, which were obviously thought through, but the concept itself was poorly conceived, this one struck me as intriguingly conceived, but terribly articulated in its execution. 

Nevertheless, I would highly recommend seeing it for the singing, and it's a shame that the house was the emptiest I've seen it in a long while last night given the quality of the musical performances. 

Just try not to think too much about what's going on on stage.

Which Language does the Word "Panacea" Come From?

There has been much talk of late about online courses and how they will revolutionize the University Experience. (Yes, I meant to put every word in that sentence exactly in that way)

I say much because, I am notoriously self-selecting when it comes to what I read online.  There was a time when I would read right-wing political blogs (and maybe troll a little..) but I stopped doing so mainly because I stopped browsing the Internet when I set up my RSS feed, which I now update about once a year with a new blog or two.

Anyway, to my feed came a whole bunch of posts critical of MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses).  They basically all seem to be in response to this blog post by Clay Shirky.  These responses have been building steam, and over the past few weeks everything has kind of boiled over.  (By the way, I'm explaining this out loud in part because I have no idea who reads my blog anymore, and because you aren't me, I assume that you have not read the same bunch of pieces I have. The links in the previous sentence will get you much more up to speed than my explanation anyway.)

In light of all this, a comment on an another blog, Leiter Reports, struck me.  It's the first comment after the post, and what caught my attention, unsurprisingly, was the comment about how language schools like Berlitz eating into language teaching at Universities was likely a good thing. 

As a language instructor in a university, it's not surprising that this rubbed me the wrong way!  But it got me thinking -  What would be the effect of MOOCs on language courses?  How would something like that work?

I ask this because I can totally see university administrators thinking that language learning might be a great place to try this kind of approach, especially for first year students.  There are already tons of online resources, and it would "solve" the problem of low student/teacher ratios in language courses relative to other disciplines through the magic of.....technology!  You just turn university language learning into Rosetta Stone and voila! 

It's true that many people think that the way languages are taught in universities is flawed, geared too much toward evaluating grammar and not enough about learning the language as a living means of communication.  In fact,  I think this is what the commenter was getting at.  At the same time, university language courses are still a pretty inexpensive and effective way to start learning a language, and to gauge whether or not one wants to continue learning the language or not.

Anyway, it seems obvious to me that a MOOC-style model for language instruction would be terrible, and it would be terrible in part because in order for it to not be just as (if not more) labour intensive than current language courses, it would essentially have to roll back the past 50 years of science and pedagogy on language learning and focus even more exclusively on grammar and vocab memorization than we already do now.

Why?  Well, it seems to me that if these courses are to be meaningful in the sense that they give someone a grade or a sense that they've learned something, if they're to be more than a list of youtube videos, they're going to have to test them. And the cheapest and easiest way to test people is going to be by designing tests that really entirely on right/wrong answers, like asking about the genders of nouns, or filling in the mission preposition or pronoun.

I mean, this is why math and computer science are seen as great models for online learning - the answers are usually just right/wrong. But you get outside of this incredibly narrow band of topics, and it seems impossible to imagine doing anything even remotely like this with respect to most things that we teach at a university.

In my experience, when it comes to language learning, the Internet is quite good at a few things.  It's pretty easy to find good learning resources (Deutsche Welle springs to mind) for self-study.  It's also easy to find things like anki or memrise, which are basically flashcard programs.  But very, very few people are going to learn a language from flash cards or games. 

However, it has also made things a lot worse when it comes to language instruction.  Google Translate, for example, is the bane of my existence.  Suddenly everyone thinks that the translation problem has been solved because you can simply type whole pages into Google and it will "translate" it for you.  The problem is that these translations are terrible, and it is also really easy to spot fakes from students who think that Google Translate will hide the fact that they didn't want to do the hard work of writing in the language they are learning.

How would an online course address this kind of stuff, beyond eliminating all writing and talking from evaluation, which are basically all the things that make learning a language possible?

Unlike math or computer science, which are taught in a language, language learning is about the medium of thought itself.   They require a kind of intense concentration and discipline that something like an online course simply cannot provide without a huge amount of labour.  And if all that labour is going into supporting an online course, why not make it much easier for everyone and just teach it in a room?

I know that a lot of the arguments for MOOCs have to do also with the idea of having access to the best professors at the best university, but again, I cannot really imagine that anyone taking German at some community college somehow believes that they would be better off learning German via video lectures from an Ive League professor.

Maybe there are world class instructors of German, but they are probably world class because of how they interact with students on a personal basis, and not simply that the words they use or the explanations they give magically have teaching power.  And a lot of their work is probably the constant cajoling and convincing an instructor has to give students in order to keep them from getting discouraged when it dawns on them that learning a language is actually one of the hardest things to do in university, and not a bird course you take to fulfill a breadth requirement,.

In fact, the more I think about it, the more this kind of argument seems to make absolutely no sense to me.  Yes, of course, there are terrible teachers out there, but the reality is that even a terrible teacher is going to provide more of a positive feedback loop to a student than the fill-in the blanks testing that a MOOC would have to depend on in order to justify itself from an economic perspective, and it would only wind up producing people who are even less knowledgeable about communicating in a foreign language than what is currently the norm in higher education!

That being said, if the long-term goal is to just eliminate languages from universities entirely, and leave it up to the private sector, then MOOCs are probably the way to go, because after a few years of teaching them, they can evaluate how well people did and declare that it was the languages themselves that were at fault, and not the technology.  We simply will not be able to afford to teach languages anymore because we have made everything around them so efficient that they look even more old-fashioned than now.

A depressing thought, but not at all inconsistent with the way people who are actually listened to ( as in, not me!) would argue this case.

The Nutcracker

Merry Christmas!

NPR in the States has a nice article on the ETA Hoffmann's creation of the Nutcracker story and its, transformation into the ubiquitous ballet.  It's a nicely researched piece, and even quotes a German professor!

Enjoy!

Charles Rosen

has died.  So I know that it does look like this blog is becoming an obit page for classical artists, but I had just started rereading The Classical Style a few weeks ago, and was looking to actually get through his books on sonatas and romantic music.  Moreover, his book on the Beethoven piano sonatas has been my main source of interpretive commentary for years when it comes to actually playing them, and I'm not sure if we will ever see someone like him again.

I guess this is maybe my point in highlighting these deaths, because it seems to me that, far more than when Karajan, or Solti, or Bernstein passed on, these deaths are signalling the end of an era.

I find it almost ironic that the New Inquiry, in a recent issue of their magazine on Music and failure, failed to contain even a mention of classical (or whatever you wish to call 1000+ years of a certain kind of) music.  I am sure that this is kind of a generational thing, by which I mean that while people of my age (around 40) still vaguely recall classical music meaning something culturally.  Rather, they can cite Adorno and Horkheimer pissing on pop music, and fail to note the fact that Adorno spent far more time discussing and dissecting Schoenberg and Webern than he ever did hating jazz.

Does anyone even read Adorno's work on music anymore?  No, and it's mainly because no one really listens to the composers he spent so much time dealing with.  To paraphrase Boulez, Adorno is Dead. 

And you know what, just to be perfectly clear?  I'm not saying that popular music sucks or any of the "gotcha" crap myself, and most classical musicians, have had to endure for years because the culture industry is built around a false dichotomy of high vs. low.  That's not my point.  My point is that the high is not even taken intellectually seriously by ostensibly intellectually serious people. 

It's especially poignant when you see that while everyone still cites Adorno, no one speaks about Henze or Nono, who were very much part of the same cultural space and who actually wrote music that engaged in the very aesthetic debates Adorno was engaging in. 

I'm not really slagging the writers of that journal either. I'm just pointing out that, no one there thought for a moment that a high theory journal, when producing an issue about music, should deal with anything other than popular music.  One can be ridiculously well read in philosophy, theory, literature and art, and know nothing about Schoenberg.  I think that sucks but that is most definitely The Way Things Are. They are a product of their time as much as Rosen is a product of his.

To sum up, Charles Rosen occupied a cultural space where this music, which I (perhaps quixotically) believe is still relevant, was, in fact, culturally relevant.  Beyond all this, his books are really great - rigourous and opinionated introductions to some very important moments in western musical history, and I hope they remain relevant (or at least available) for a long time after his death.

Elliott Carter

has died.  No, this blog has not become an obituary site for 20th Century composers, but between the loss of Henze and Carter, the last threads of a generation that did not seem so old to me have been snipped into eternity.

Hans Werner Henze

died today.  Very sad news, although at 86, it is safe to say he lived a full and wonderful life.  His autobiography Bohemian Fifths is one of the best musical biographies of the 20th Century, and very much worth reading.  The Internet is full of his music, and listening to some of it would be a wonderful way to commemorate a man with an unbridled talent and great political convictions.