“Any number of classical music lovers will tell you with glee of the bad pieces they love to hate. But people who will tell you about pieces they hate to love, but love anyway, are somewhat more rare. Saying you’ve got a thing for Brahms’ Hungarian Dances Nos. 4 and 5, for instance, especially if you’ve ever gone anywhere near a music school, is particularly dangerous – but only if you mean it sincerely. Irony does exist in classical music, but it’s mostly in the ears of cynical (younger) beholders.” – Philadelphia Inquirer
Author: Douglas McLennan
BETTER THAN BLEEPING?
It’s common practice today for record labels to create “clean versions” of albums with explicit lyrics, and some companies even ask artists to re-record versions without profanity. “”It’s getting like we almost have a McCarthyism in the business, but the censorship isn’t new; what’s new is the fear and the compliance going on to this extent. And I think a lot of artists go along with it because they’re afraid of being lost in the corporate shuffle and falling out of favor with their labels.” – New York Times
UNFAIR HEARING
Turns out those infrared enhanced-hearing headsets provided by theatres for hearing-impaired patrons are the perfect bootleggers tool. “Bootleggers can simply request an ALD headset, which provides a high-quality feed of a live show via a low-level FM frequency broadcast inside a facility. The music pirates then steal the headset feed, giving them concert performances devoid of the usual bootleg problems such as random crowd noise or distortion.” – Seattle Times (AP)
WOMEN’S WORK
This weekend’s British premiere of composer Judith Weir’s newest work, “woman.life.song,” is an unusual event in the world of classical music – the piece was conceived and written by women, and is based entirely on women’s life issues. The song-cycle is a collaborative effort among Weir, soprano Jessye Norman, the writers Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, and Jungian psychoanalyst and mythologist Clarissa Pinkola Estes. – The Guardian
INDEPENDENT BOOKS
The American Booksellers Association rolled out its new site to sell books from independent bookstores. “The ABA’s ‘save the indies’ plan (nearly half of such stores have disappeared since 1994 due to the rise of chain stores and online booksellers, the organization estimates) has found some adherents while others remain skeptical.” – Inside.com
WILLIAM MAXWELL DIED —
— at age 91 on Monday. Accomplished novelist and revered editor at the “New Yorker” for 40 years, Maxwell honed the prose of some of this century’s finest American writers, J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, and Harold Brodkey among them. – CNN
INFOBERG
- Writers are upset about Contentville, which went online July 5. The site offers “books, articles, TV transcripts and old speeches, for sale starting at $2.95 each,” but “some publishers are shocked at Contentville’s chutzpa. The Village Voice says it licensed EBSCO to use content for educational and research purposes. ‘It’s outrageously unethical. Nobody ever dreamed of this. It’s just gross.'” – Feed
AN INTERVIEW WITH STANLEY KUNITZ, —
- — the new U.S. poet laureate. First published more than 70 years ago, Kunitz, now 95, has won almost every poetry award (including the Nobel in 1959 to the National Book Award in 1995), although he’s only published a handful of books. “I write poems only when I cannot escape them, when it is so urgent I will sacrifice everything else to do it.” A new Kunitz collection is due out next year. – NPR [Real audio file]
THE “CAT” GOES LATIN
Two years ago a husband/wife team published a version of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” in Latin. It was an unexpected hit. Now they’re back with “The Cat in the Hat.” “Of course, unless you’re fluent in the language of Cicero and Nero, it’s hard to judge the playfulness of such lines as: ‘At tunc quies est erepta!/ Tota domus est correpta/ Tum tumultu, tum fragore!’ In the original English version, those same lines, about the first appearance of the Cat, go this way: ‘And then something went bump!/ How that bump made us jump!/ We looked!’ ” – Chicago Tribune
KNOW YOUR CLIENT
In the late 19th Century one of the greatest forgers of antiquities set up shop in Jerusalem. “The late 19th century was the beginning of modern tourism, following the invention of steamships, and it was also the beginning of archaeology. Wilhelm Moses Shapira was the first to recognize that archaeology could be a profitable business.” His career was derailed when he attempted to sell the British Museum what he claimed to be ancient Torah scrolls, and was exposed as a fraud. He killed himself soon after. – The Jerusalem Report