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Why We Need A New Age Of Romanticism

In our new era of Enlightenment, we need Romanticism again. In his speech ‘Politics and Conscience’ (1984), the Czech dissident Václav Havel, discussing factories and smokestacks on the horizon, explained just why: ‘People thought they could explain and conquer nature – yet … they destroyed it and disinherited themselves from it.’ Havel was not against industry, he was just for labour relations and protection of the environment. The issues persist.

It’s Now Impossible To Make A Living As A Freelance Writer

“Based on my reporting, my own experience, and interviews with more than a dozen writers, the current median price for a freelancer’s work is between 25 and 50 cents per word (though, to be clear, most places no longer pay per word; they pay lump sums that work out to about $500 for a 1,000- to 2,000-word article). Speaking to Black Enterprise, Ben Carruthers, vice president of the Society of American Travel Writers, suggested that a similar $500 rate was standard…in 1977.”

Classical Music’s Insecurity Problem

It’s sad but true that many people denigrate and distrust their own reactions to classical music out of fear that they don’t “know enough,” and that other, more sophisticated folks know more. When people leave the movie theater they rarely hesitate to give their opinion of the movie, and it never occurs to them that they don’t have a right to that opinion. And yet after most classical music concerts you can swing your program around from any spot in the lobby and hit a dozen perfectly capable and intelligent people issuing apologetic disclaimers: “Boy, I really loved that — but I’m no expert” or “It sounded pretty awful to me, but I don’t really know anything, so I guess I just didn’t get it.”

Philosophically, Music Of Our Time Has Lost Its Way

“Few people play instruments, and music at home emerges from digital machines, controlled by buttons that require no musical culture to be pressed. For many people, the young especially, music is a form of solitary enjoyment, to be absorbed without judgment and stored without effort in the brain. The circumstances of music-making have therefore changed radically, and this is reflected not only in the banal melodic and harmonic content of popular music, but also in the radical avoidance of melody and harmony in the ‘modern classical’ repertoire. Released from its old institutional and social foundations our music has either floated into the modernist stratosphere, where only ideas can breathe, or remained attached to the earth by the repetitious mechanisms of pop.”

Tom Lehrer At 90

A fond look at the life and career of the mathematician-turned-satirical-songwriter-turned-mathematician of whom The New York Times wrote, “Mr. Lehrer’s muse [is] not fettered by such inhibiting factors as taste.” He’s released no new songs in more than 40 years; as he said in 2002, “Things I once thought were funny are scary now. I often feel like a resident of Pompeii who has been asked for some humorous comments on lava.”

The Most Ambitious TV Program Ever About Art

“Civilizations,” like “Ways of Seeing,” is an attempt to update Clark’s series. But it’s also an unprecedented undertaking in the annals of television. Unlike “Civilisation,” which was focused on Western art from the so-called Dark Ages until the 20th century, the scope of “Civilizations” is global and reaches right back to cave painting.

The Legend Of Tulipmania In 17th-Century Holland Is Way Overblown

“Stories have been circulating for nearly 400 years about the apparently strange compulsion that led otherwise sensible merchants, nobles and artisan weavers to spend all they had and more on tulips, only to land in bankruptcy and ruin” – and pulling the entire country’s economy down with them – “when the bottom fell out of the market in February 1637.” Historian Anne Goldgar argues that this narrative is a moralistic Victorian invention and that primary documents from the late 1630s tell a somewhat different story.

‘The Yellow Shark’, Frank Zappa’s Astoundingly Difficult Suite For Orchestra

One of the reasons the 17-movement work is so rarely performed, despite Zappa’s celebrity, is the fiendishly tricky rhythm in some spots. (You know how triplets are three-notes-in-two? One spot has 23-notes-in-18.) And then there are the movement titles, which range from “Outrage at Valdez” (about the Exxon oil-tanker spill) and “Food Gathering in Post-Industrial America 1992” to “Dog Breath Variations” and “The Girl in the Magnesium Dress.”