Once, with a class of fifty students, all relatively unprepared and some quite innocent of contact with contemporary music, I tried the experiment of familiarizing them, at the beginning of the course, with Schoenberg’s Fourth Quartet, one of the composer’s most “difficult” works. My whole effort was to bring them into contact with the music, and I deferred speaking of the problem of tonality, or the twelve-tone system, until the students knew the music thoroughly. By that time—believe it or not—one could hear the opening theme of the quartet, or other passages, being whistled by students on the campus. At the end of several weeks I spoke only briefly about the technical questions involved and they fell, it seemed to me, in their proper place. My students had learned to know—some to love—the music; their ears had been conquered.
Tag: 05.18
Total Entertainment And Real Perpetual War Have Melded Into One
It’s a cliché of aristocratic military lore that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton—but like many clichés, it contains more than a kernel of truth. In our frenetically digitized mass society, meanwhile, we casually understand that combat presented as harmless fun in the guise of sports, video games, and television probably goes a long way in softening the military’s image.
The End Of Theory?
In the United States, theory has become a utopian experiment and experience: it exists alongside increasingly historicist literary studies as a site of mixture and reprieve; it promises, for example, to help literary scholars moonlight as media theorists and art historians, while reminding them to consider the horrors of colonialism and the errors of the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, it makes the rounds online, on social media, in popular music, in art world press releases, and in the New York Times, decontextualized and meme-like, sometimes the stuff of conspiracy and outrage and at others the balm of empathy.
How DIY Opera Is Changing Opera
American opera is still primarily placing safe bets on its well-worn canon, but composers like Missy Mazzoli and David Little see a changing landscape that gives cause for optimism: institutions that think more flexibly, provide more opportunities and embrace a DIY, upstart spirit to find ways to make it work. But most importantly, they see peers writing timely works for responsive audiences.
Margaret Atwood: How I Came To Write “Handmaid’s Tale”
“Stories about the future always have a what if premise, and The Handmaid’s Tale has several. For instance: if you wanted to seize power in the United States, abolish liberal democracy, and set up a dictatorship, how would you go about it? What would be your cover story? It would not resemble any form of communism or socialism: those would be too unpopular. It might use the name of democracy as an excuse for abolishing liberal democracy: that’s not out of the question, though I didn’t consider it possible in 1985.”
Appreciating Poetry Requires Acts Of Archaeology
The critic must reconcile history and poetry. A poem is a product of its time just as much—if the poem’s any good—as a triumph over its time. Many poems are so familiar we have forgotten how to read them. We see the words but we paper over the cracks in our understanding. Criticism should try to see poems from the inside, to get down into the muck of the poem’s invention—and of course into the muck of its language.
So You Want To Be A Public Intellectual…
What should you do in order to become the kind of person an intellectual is? What kind of life permits doing what intellectuals do? How can you begin to have such a life? This is what you ask, and these are good, if grandiose, questions.
Video Can Now Be Convincingly Faked. Seeing Is No Longer Believing (Now What?)
Manipulated video will ultimately destroy faith in our strongest remaining tether to the idea of common reality. As Ian Goodfellow, a scientist at Google, told MIT Technology Review, “It’s been a little bit of a fluke, historically, that we’re able to rely on videos as evidence that something really happened.”