Education is suffering at America’s elite universities. “Many seniors graduate without being able to write well enough to satisfy their employers. Many cannot reason clearly or perform competently in analyzing complex, non-technical problems, even though faculties rank critical thinking as the primary goal of a college education. Few undergraduates receiving a degree are able to speak or read a foreign language. Most have never taken a course in quantitative reasoning or acquired the knowledge needed to be a reasonably informed citizen in a democracy. And those are only some of the problems.”
Tag: 09.06
The Mystery Of Michelangelo
“What is it, in this age of hype and empty celebrity, that makes the name of Michelangelo so magnetic? One can perhaps understand the draw when Van Gogh or the Impressionists take over a museum. These are the prophets of a modern sensibility: lyrical, colorful, yet with an edge of experimentation and a tinge of revolt. Michelangelo, by contrast, is remote, often deliberately unapproachable, cerebral, scathingly hard on himself (and all around him), and devoted to values, both aesthetic and spiritual, that are now long gone.”
Gottschalk Gone
Louis Moreau Gottschalk was America’s first great composer, writes Terry Teachout. “The near-complete failure of Gottschalk’s music to be taken up by American pianists is all the more inexplicable in light of the fact that so much of it incorporates elements of the folk and popular music of the Americas.”
Why Techonology Is Perfect For Chamber Music
“Although we might first think of rigidity and mechanization when we discuss technology, its real power comes from its very openness and flexibility. Technology gives us the ability to dream, to imagine new forms of music and performance, and to invent ideal relationships between composer and performer, performer and listener, composer and listener. In careful and creative hands, technology can expand the expressive power of virtuosi, build gorgeous hybrids of natural and artificial sounds, and allow amateurs to again fully participate, helping to re-establish a much healthier ‘creative ecology’ than now exists.”