The organ

[AdamSmith]

But my real heart of hearts of course lies with...

 

http://www.iann.net/

 

 

 

http://theredlist.com/media/database/films/tv-series/fantasy-and-sci-fi/1960/the-time-tunnel/013-the-time-tunnel-theredlist.jpg

[AdamSmith]

and all his mention of Goethe and Bach just a smokescreen.

P.S. Goethe is almost as tedious to me as Wagner!

 

I know I would agree with Bloom's assessment if I could just bring myself to re-read Goethe a couple more times...

 

Goethe admitted Shakespeare's superiority. Bloom tells us that it was lucky for Goethe that Shakespeare was English, because he could "absorb and imitate Shakespeare without crippling anxieties." (Shakespeare did provoke crippling anxieties in other authors). Bloom alludes to "the extraordinary strangeness that makes Faust the most grotesque masterpiece of Western poetry" and then circles that strange drama repeatedly, casually demonstrating how adept he is at winkling pearls out of unpromising shells, spurring us to reread those classics whose true opulence he has spread out before us.

 

[That from this excellent essay on Bloom's The Western Canon: http://www.hermes-press.com/bloom1.htm]

 

...but I just can't bear wading through Faust again!

 

To say nothing of that tissue of Romantic twilight The Sorrows of Young Werther! Egads! Fling open the windows and call in the carpet dryers!

 

http://usaprocleanerstx.com/images/body-carpet-cleaning.gif

[AdamSmith]

This ought by rights to go in the Stevens thread but today we're here, so here it goes.

 

http://www.hermes-press.com/bloom1.gif

Harold Bloom's Live Canon

By Michelle Mairesse

 

The European Enlightenment was the matrix of the American Revolution and of our national character, but not all European intellectual imports have been as felicitous. In this century, two expiring philosophical ideas from France, existentialism and deconstructionism, got a second wind in America. Now, college students are lapping up deconstructionism as avidly as their credulous parents swallowed existentialism. Combining incompatible Marxian and French republican ideals with the grandiose yet solipsistic ideas of French deconstructionists, multiculturalists on American college campuses are demanding that we jettison the literary canon and substitute for it a more politically correct one.

 

But today's politically correct celebrities may be tomorrow's artistic nonentities. If you doubt it, compare the banal poster pieces of Third Reich artists with those of any condemned "decadent" painter or writer who fled Germany. Compare the boy-meets-tractor epics mass-produced by politically correct Soviet artists and writers with the astonishing compositions of such persecuted underground Russian poets as Anna Akhmatova or Osip Mandelshtam. Before we substitute politically correct instant masterpieces for the Western Canon, whether in the name of moral rectitude or in the name of political correctness, let's listen to wise counselors like Harold Bloom.

 

In The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, Bloom says, "We are destroying all intellectual and aesthetic standards in the humanities and social sciences, in the name of social justice. Our institutions show bad faith in this: no quotas are imposed on brain surgeons or mathematicians. What has been devaluated is learning as such, as though erudition were irrelevant in the realms of judgment and misjudgment."

 

He is not concerned with "the current debate between the right-wing defenders of the Canon, who wish to preserve it for its supposed (and nonexistent) moral values, and the academic-journalistic network I have dubbed the School of Resentment, who wish to overthrow the Canon in order to advance their supposed (and nonexistent) programs for social change."

 

Artists' backgrounds and outlooks neither qualify nor disqualify them for inclusion in the Canon. What does qualify them, then? Aesthetic excellence, says the learned, impassioned defender of the Western Canon. Bloom seeks the sources of this excellence, illuminating his selections with deep and sometimes startling insights.

 

From internal evidence, he speculates that Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers were written by a woman at King Solomon's court, the author whom nineteenth century scholars dubbed the Yahwist. This author, possibly Bathsheba, mother of Solomon, represents the Hebrew god of her story as all too human--eating, drinking, walking in the shade of the evening, having temper tantrums, mischief-making. What surely must be one of the strangest portraits of a god in history (even when softened by subsequent redactors), a jealous, vindictive, often demented deity, no longer seems strange to devotees of three great world religions. We are made to realize that ambivalence between the divine and the human is one of the author's "grand inventions, another mark of an originality so perpetual that we can scarcely recognize it, because the stories Bathsheba told have absorbed us."

 

Strangeness, irony. Bloom returns to these qualities again and again.

 

After declaring ironic storytelling about storytelling to be largely Boccaccio's invention, Bloom shows us how Chaucer, the comic ironist, transformed the design.

 

"It may be that Chaucer's true literary parent was the Yahwist and his true child, Jane Austen. All three writers make their ironies their principal instruments for discovery or invention, by compelling readers to discover themselves precisely what it is that they have invented."

 

The position of honor in the Canon belongs to Shakespeare. "If we could conceive of a universal canon, multicultural and multivalent, its one essential book would not be a scripture, whether Bible, Koran, or Eastern text, but rather Shakespeare, who is acted and read everywhere, in every language and circumstance."

 

Shakespeare casts a very long shadow in Western literature. One way or another, all his successors in the Canon are his progeny. His magnitude and influence are unique. “Without Shakespeare, no canon, because without Shakespeare, no recognizable selves in us, whoever we are. We owe to Shakespeare not only our representation of cognition but much of our capacity for cognition.�

 

Goethe admitted Shakespeare's superiority. Bloom tells us that it was lucky for Goethe that Shakespeare was English, because he could "absorb and imitate Shakespeare without crippling anxieties." (Shakespeare did provoke crippling anxieties in other authors). Bloom alludes to "the extraordinary strangeness that makes Faust the most grotesque masterpiece of Western poetry" and then circles that strange drama repeatedly, casually demonstrating how adept he is at winkling pearls out of unpromising shells, spurring us to reread those classics whose true opulence he has spread out before us.

 

He reveals the keen intelligence that underlies Emily Dickinson's most audacious metaphors, the split between being and consciousness that is Kafka's theme, the debt of Freud to Shakespeare. He communicates his zest each time he holds up one of his twenty-six candidates for literary canonization. He encourages us to believe that the numinous awaits us, that insights, discoveries, and epiphanies are ours for the asking.

 

We are not shocked when he asserts that the great writers of the Western Canon are subversive of all values, for Bloom believes in and demonstrates the singular virtue of great literature.

 

The Canon exists so that we can encounter "authentic aesthetic power" and "aesthetic dignity." "The reception of aesthetic power enables us to learn how to talk to ourselves and how to endure ourselves. The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality."

 

The rest is silence.

 

http://www.hermes-press.com/bloom1.htm

[AdamSmith]

P.S. Goethe is almost as tedious to me as Wagner!

 

I know I would agree with Bloom's assessment if I could just bring myself to re-read Goethe a couple more times...

 

Goethe admitted Shakespeare's superiority. Bloom tells us that it was lucky for Goethe that Shakespeare was English, because he could "absorb and imitate Shakespeare without crippling anxieties." (Shakespeare did provoke crippling anxieties in other authors). Bloom alludes to "the extraordinary strangeness that makes Faust the most grotesque masterpiece of Western poetry" and then circles that strange drama repeatedly, casually demonstrating how adept he is at winkling pearls out of unpromising shells, spurring us to reread those classics whose true opulence he has spread out before us.

 

[That from this excellent essay on Bloom's The Western Canon: http://www.hermes-press.com/bloom1.htm]

 

...but I just can't bear wading through Faust again!

 

To say nothing of that tissue of Romantic twilight The Sorrows of Young Werther! Egads! Fling open the windows and call in the carpet dryers!

 

http://usaprocleanerstx.com/images/body-carpet-cleaning.gif

Come to think, the late 19th century and I are not a mutual admiration society!

[whipped guy]

P.S. Goethe is almost as tedious to me as Wagner!

 

I know I would agree with Bloom's assessment if I could just bring myself to re-read Goethe a couple more times...

 

Goethe admitted Shakespeare's superiority. Bloom tells us that it was lucky for Goethe that Shakespeare was English, because he could "absorb and imitate Shakespeare without crippling anxieties." (Shakespeare did provoke crippling anxieties in other authors). Bloom alludes to "the extraordinary strangeness that makes Faust the most grotesque masterpiece of Western poetry" and then circles that strange drama repeatedly, casually demonstrating how adept he is at winkling pearls out of unpromising shells, spurring us to reread those classics whose true opulence he has spread out before us.

 

[That from this excellent essay on Bloom's The Western Canon: http://www.hermes-press.com/bloom1.htm]

 

...but I just can't bear wading through Faust again!

 

To say nothing of that tissue of Romantic twilight The Sorrows of Young Werther! Egads! Fling open the windows and call in the carpet dryers!

 

http://usaprocleanerstx.com/images/body-carpet-cleaning.gif

But Goethe did provide fodder for few operatic endeavors... even though the Germans often thought that such efforts were a travesty of the originals!

 

And speaking of The Sorrows of the Young Werther... try this on for size!

 

 

Plus Faust! Not exactly idiomatically French, but I like any excuse to hear the guilty pleasure that is Franco Corelli not to mention La Stupenda!

 

 

 

 

[AdamSmith]

I must say Mann too seems to droop and dwindle with time.

 

[AdamSmith]

And about Herman Hesse we will not give in to sarcasm and mean memes.

 

[whipped guy]

I must say Mann too seems to droop and dwindle with time.

 

Sto ridendo a crepapelle!!!!! Why did that just make me literally burst into laughter!!!!

[whipped guy]

And about Herman Hesse we will not give in to sarcasm and mean memes.

 

Enough Mr. Smith your KILLING ME!!!! :p:p

[AdamSmith]

Enough Mr. Smith your KILLING ME!!!! :p:p

Now, The Magic Mushroom Mountain I could get excited about.

 

[whipped guy]

Now, The Magic Mushroom Mountain I could get excited about.

 

That explains it! Those magical mushrooms will do it every time...

 

Of course speaking of magical mountains....

 

http://www.sgpa.org/history/giant.jpg

[AdamSmith]

It begins to become clear why it eventually needed medicine as strong and stiff as Kafka, Schoenberg, et al. to at last flare off those late-nineteenth-century swamp gases that had emanated into, and clouded up the start of, the twentieth.

[AdamSmith]

Of course speaking of magical mountains....

 

http://www.sgpa.org/history/giant.jpg

LOL! Of course!

 

And in my day we found it endlessly amusing that there was a hilariously placed radio tower sticking directly up out of his "crotch"!

[whipped guy]

LOL! Of course!

 

And in my day we found it endlessly amusing that there was a hilariously placed radio tower sticking directly up out of his "crotch"!

Of course even better... and especially for the view in the early morning hours...

 

[AdamSmith]

Of course even better... and especially for the view in the early morning hours...

 

LMR*O!!

*rocks

 

[whipped guy]

LMR*O!!

*rocks

 

Well I'm tempted, but I won't post any more rocks be they from Plymouth or even from points further West.

[AdamSmith]

Well I'm tempted, but I won't post any more rocks be they from Plymouth or even from points further West.

That rocks too!

 

http://www.billboard.com/files/media/chuck-berry_0.jpg

 

[whipped guy]

That rocks too!

 

http://www.billboard.com/files/media/chuck-berry_0.jpg

 

Touchy... I mean touché.

[AdamSmith]

That explains it! Those magical mushrooms will do it every time...

Sparking the memory that the first time I took them, it was a beautiful spring day in New Haven, and the three of us went over to the exquisite Farnham Gardens behind the Divinity School. A beyond-lovely setting for our magical trip.

 

 

And LOL! Over to one side of the rolling grassy lawn where we were sitting was the communal vegetable garden pictured here. With many gardeners assiduously chopping and hoeing and raking and hammering tall stakes for trailing plants into the ground with big rocks...

 

As we sat there in the grass, getting higher and higher as the substances began to kick in, all this frenzy of earnest, committed, politically oh-so-correct activity began -- slowly, gradually, eventually building to an uncontrollable crescendo of mirth -- to strike us as perhaps the funniest, silliest, most pointless hurry-scurry we had ever witnessed!

 

And one of the wonderful things about mushrooms in particular that those ridiculous-seeming gardeners helped us discover is that the drug can create great empathy and insight, shared accurately with no need of words, among the three of us.

 

Indeed words themselves, as we got ever higher, came to seem quite silly and superfluous. For some long stretch, all we could do was consider a cloud of mites swarming in the air just over our heads, and laugh at the marvelous risk of: What if all those mights were to descend?!

[AdamSmith]

[AdamSmith]

Occurs that the Carter Family's voice intonance meldings, in particular the brilliant but slight bit vocally challenged Pa Carter, veer in the direction of what LvB demanded of his quartet performers.

[AdamSmith]

Occurs we have planted & cultivated our own little Farnham Gardens right here, in the form of our Arts forum.

[whipped guy]

Occurs that the Carter Family's voice intonance meldings, in particular the brilliant but slight bit vocally challenged Pa Carter, veer in the direction of what LvB demanded of his quartet performers.

Of course Mr. Smith edited this since I wrote my response...as he seems to be a bit confused about what he is attempting to say (mushrooms anyone?!?) but I'm going to reply anyway....

 

"Carter Family's voice intonance meldings come close to what hat LvB demanded of his quartet performers"

 

This was how I read it in the weee hours of the morning during my battle with insomnia and decided to attempt to "sleep on it" before responding.

 

Here was my response to that!

 

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "intonance" as I have never really heard of that term. However, if you are referencing the intonation in the sense of the lack of a pronounced vibrato then you might be on to something as singers most likely did not overly use vibrato into the early years of the 19th Century. It was probably used as a "decoration" to color certain phrases or words. Based on the development of operatic styles I sense a larger more vibrato laden sound beginning around 1825 when the seeds of Grand Opera were being sown. What is interesting is that this was the same period where there were changes in the nature of many instruments and vocal styles needed to compete with a larger instrumental sound. Of course we are used to large Wagnerian voices in Fidelio, but I doubt that was the case in 1814.

 

If you are referencing intonation in the sense of tuning you also might be on to something. However, given that all the recordings are of 78 rpm vintage that is probably a bit difficult to ascertain. Still, given the limitations of the recordings I hear a very colorful sound that might imply a type of tuning other than the equal temperament that we are used to hearing. Could it be something possibly unique to their local terrain?

 

Incidentally, it is a total fallacy that Bach referenced "equal temperament" with the term "well tempered" in his two volume WTC. There were many different types of turning in those days (and by those days meaning well into the 19th Century) that usually made thirds and triads more pleasant to the ear at the expense of others harmonies. That added different colorations to the sound and made something like fifths sound a bit stranger than they would with equal temperament. That is probably why something like using consecutive fifths was considered to be something to avoid. Of course some composers deliberately used them precisely for that very reason. Obviously LvB was one of them!

 

At any rate, I hear a lot of colorations in the work of the Carters that are foreign to the often prevailing homogenized harmonies of much country music. Quite possibly a lack of vibrato and tuning might be the "culprits".

 

Now I'm assuming that you are referencing a vocal quartet and not a string quartet. However, different string quartet groups play with different levels of vibrato, tuning, and intonation as well. Of course if a quartet is string or vocal or whatever each performers intonation needs to jive with what the others are doing.... bottom line it can get complicated and the results can be every shade from bland to vibrant depending on the mix.

 

Of course if by "entonance" you meant something completely different then to quote Emily Litella, "Never mind!"

 

[whipped guy]

Occurs we have planted & cultivated our own little Farnham Gardens right here, in the form of our Arts forum.

I personally was thinking more Vauxhall Gardens...

[AdamSmith]

Of course Mr. Smith edited this since I wrote my response...as he seems to be a bit confused about what he is attempting to say (mushrooms anyone?!?) but I'm going to reply anyway....

 

"Carter Family's voice intonance meldings come close to what hat LvB demanded of his quartet performers"

 

This was how I read it in the weee hours of the morning during my battle with insomnia and decided to attempt to "sleep on it" before responding.

 

Here was my response to that!

 

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "intonance" as I have never really heard of that term. However, if you are referencing the intonation in the sense of the lack of a pronounced vibrato then you might be on to something as singers most likely did not overly use vibrato into the early years of the 19th Century. It was probably used as a "decoration" to color certain phrases or words. Based on the development of operatic styles I sense a larger more vibrato laden sound beginning around 1825 when the seeds of Grand Opera were being sown. What is interesting is that this was the same period where there were changes in the nature of many instruments and vocal styles needed to compete with a larger instrumental sound. Of course we are used to large Wagnerian voices in Fidelio, but I doubt that was the case in 1814.

 

If you are referencing intonation in the sense of tuning you also might be on to something. However, given that all the recordings are of 78 rpm vintage that is probably a bit difficult to ascertain. Still, given the limitations of the recordings I hear a very colorful sound that might imply a type of tuning other than the equal temperament that we are used to hearing. Could it be something possibly unique to their local terrain?

 

Incidentally, it is a total fallacy that Bach referenced "equal temperament" with the term "well tempered" in his two volume WTC. There were many different types of turning in those days (and by those days meaning well into the 19th Century) that usually made thirds and triads more pleasant to the ear at the expense of others harmonies. That added different colorations to the sound and made something like fifths sound a bit stranger than they would with equal temperament. That is probably why something like using consecutive fifths was considered to be something to avoid. Of course some composers deliberately used them precisely for that very reason. Obviously LvB was one of them!

 

At any rate, I hear a lot of colorations in the work of the Carters that are foreign to the often prevailing homogenized harmonies of much country music. Quite possibly a lack of vibrato and tuning might be the "culprits".

 

Now I'm assuming that you are referencing a vocal quartet and not a string quartet. However, different string quartet groups play with different levels of vibrato, tuning, and intonation as well. Of course if a quartet is string or vocal or whatever each performers intonation needs to jive with what the others are doing.... bottom line it can get complicated and the results can be every shade from bland to vibrant depending on the mix.

 

Of course if by "entonance" you meant something completely different then to quote Emily Litella, "Never mind!"

 

"Intonance"! LOL! I posted that in the last moments of my nightly hour-long or so easing off into slumberland, when the grasp of vocabulary and indeed most everything has grown wispy.

 

Anyway! I was thinking about this bit from the Shuppanzigh Wiki...

 

Beethoven's quartets introduced many new technical difficulties that cannot be completely overcome without dedicated rehearsal. These difficulties include synchronized complex runs played by two or more instruments together, cross-rhythms and hemiolas, and difficult harmonies that require special attention to intonation.

 

...and the thought occurred that, in somewhat like manner, one of several to my ear greatly beautiful things about the Carters' performances is the odd-sounding yet gorgeous harmony that their three, all very different, voices achieve together. Most particularly Pa, whose voice is much the weakest technically, but he manages and applies it with high artistry and intelligence.

 

That bio I referenced above tells how, once their first two or three recordings had caught fire and their commercial career took off, he realized they would soon churn through all the material they knew. So he and a friend, a black man also deeply versed in Appalachian folk music, set out traveling and exploring throughout the region to discover and document all the songs they could -- for performance, and also for the express sake of preserving a slice of culture whose both artistic and historic value the three Carters, and their black friend (can't recall his name right now), were quite consciously aware of and alive to.