The composer would probably object to this since though we own multiple copies of his anthem, he didn’t provide a bulletin insert so this is technically a copyright violation.

My opinion of Hurd was lowered after an email exchange in which I politely asked him if I could adapt one of his chorale preludes to my instrument’s limited range. He declined and suggested I do a different piece.

I did so but with a bad taste in my mouth. Fuck these guys.

Yesterday I was choosing music for this Sunday. I thought it might be cool to do some Hurd organ music. I had purchased some before the email exchange.

I looked at all the stuff I owned but decided I had already performed the good stuff. The remaining works seem pretentious to me now, but that might be a subjective reaction.

Probably not.

Instead I chose to schedule a postlude by another now deceased Episcopalian Alec Wyton based on “Crown Him with Many Crowns” and a rousing Capriccio by George Böhm which I have never performed.

I especially like the closing section which begins like this.

And goes to an exciting (IMO) fugal like climax.

I came home in the afternoon and put on several recordings of it to treadmill to.

Most of them were on harpsichord but I did find one on organ.

I have changed about listening to recordings of pieces I am working on. I now do almost all of my listening for pleasure.This includes when I am studying. So I put on the recordings because I like the pieces and enjoy hearing them as much as observing other people’s interp.

The idea that I would ape recordings (which used to be my objection to listening to pieces I was learning) is diluted also by the fact that I usually listen to several different recordings. Thus I don’t consciously or unconsciously begin to think of one of them as a definitive interp I should emulate.

Or so I tell myself.

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Valerie Eliot, Wife and Editor of T.S. Eliot, Dies at 86 – NYTimes.com

I have been reading Eliot’s work in the morning. So when his second wife died last Friday and her obit appeared in the NYT I was very interested in learning about him and her.

A lot of the obit was drawn from this linked interview of her.

I have just arrived at The Waste Land in my reading.

I have been slightly annoyed at how many allusions literary and otherwise he puts into his poetry. At this stage of my life, I feel a strong impulse to run them down on the internet.

Fortunately where The Waste Land is concerned I found two sites with hyperlinked notes.

The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot with Annotations

and

http://eliotswasteland.tripod.com/

very cool.

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Kafka in Beijing – By John Garnaut and Sanghee Liu | Foreign Policy

Kafka indeed. A young privileged woman claims to have been raped and runs into the same brick walls all Chinese do.

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Pressing the Pentagon – NYTimes.com

Very few Americans are held publicly responsible these days. Except of course they get caught fucking the wrong person. This editorial quotes Paul Yingling, a recently retired Army colonel, who “noted during some of the darkest days of the Iraq war, a private who loses his rifle is punished more than a general who loses his part of a war.” What a country.

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Mr. Hamilton’s Growth Strategy – NYTimes.com

Another history lesson.

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America’s Addled Puritanism | Via Meadia

America is simultaneously a licentious society as well as an uptight one. If you doubt this just think about the transmission of STDs which I believe remain at record numbers. Someone has to be fucking around, right?

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It seems to be a literary journal critical and anti-market. Just up my alley.

Here are some fun quotes.

Bill Hicks on the military.

“You never see my attitude in the press,” Hicks once observed. “For instance, gays in the military. . . . Gays who want to be in the military. Here’s how I feel about it, alright? Anyone dumb enough to want to be in the military should be allowed in. End of fucking story. That should be the only requirement. I don’t care how many pushups you can do. Put on a helmet, go wait in that foxhole, we’ll tell you when we need you to kill somebody. . . . I watched these fucking congressional hearings and all these military guys and the pundits, ‘Seriously, aww, the esprit de corps will be affected, and we are such a moral’—excuse me! Aren’t y’all fucking hired killers? Shut up! You are thugs and when we need you to go blow the fuck out of a nation of little brown people, we’ll let you know. . . . I don’t want any gay people hanging around me while I’m killing kids! ”

Hicks’ quote and the following passage were the quotes that I decided were too inflammatory for some of my “friends” on Facebook on Veteran’s day.

” It’s this quality of avoiding danger, of seeking the safety of consensus, that characterizes the aesthetic of Stewart and Colbert. They’re adept at savaging the safe targets—vacuous talking heads and craven senators. But you will never hear them referring to our soldiers as “uniformed assassins,” as Twain did in describing an American attack on a tribal group in the Philippines.

George Carlin on education.

“There’s a reason education sucks, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever, be fixed,” Carlin once said, though not on The Daily Show. “The owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the real owners now. The real owners, the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t.”

These all come from Steve Almond’s savaging of Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert: The Joke’s on You

I like how the writers in this magazine elucidate the hypocrisies of contemporary life. I also find it instructive when they critique intelligently.

Although I do enjoy listening to This American Life, I found myself agreeing with Eugenia Williamson’s analysis in “O the pathos.”

Most of the time, in fact, the stories on This American Life fall under Milan Kundera’s definition of kitsch: “the translation of the stupidity of received ideas into the language of beauty and feeling [that] moves us to tears of compassion for ourselves, for the banality of what we think and feel.”

In “Cash and Carry Aesthetics,” Jed Peel blew me away with his description of his response to the contemporary art scene. (Unfortunately this article is not online)

[L]aissez-faire aesthetics mimics the reach of popular culture, although without the democratic idealism that gives the best of pop culture its essential power. It is the very essence of popular culture that the intense feelings a song or a movie kicks off in one person are also experienced by many other people, almost simultaneously. When somebody refers to “the summer we fell in love and everybody was playing our song,” they are describing one of the essential pop experiences—the sense that the individual is connected with the group.

When people find something lacking in even the best contemporary painting and sculpture, they may actually be saddling this work with an unwarranted assumption, widespread today, that all major works of art are going to have the pervasive effect that we know from some of our great experiences with popular art—with movies and rock music. The result is a flattening of all artistic experience.

Jed Peel also shed some light on Matthew Barney’s weird series of movies that I was curious about and managed to see.

The nurse at the pain clinic asked me what I was reading when I started laughing after reading this:

the Cremaster cycle, a series of five phony-baloney mythopoetic movies, accompanied by dumpster loads of junk from some godforsaken gymnasium of the imagination.