Archives for July 25, 2017

From 2007:

I still find it all but impossible to sit down and write a full-length letter by hand, in part because I’m left-handed and so have always found penmanship (as they used to call it once upon a time) awkward and ungratifying. I started using a typewriter at the age of ten and learned how to touch-type six years later, and since then I’ve mostly restricted my handwritten communication with the outside world to postcards and very brief notes. Despite my advancing age and old-fashioned inclinations, e-mail and blogging somehow seem to suit me better. I guess I’m just a post-postmodern man in a hurry…

Read the whole thing here.

“It seems to be much easier to make an audience cry than it is to make them laugh. There are many music-lovers who won’t even admit that humour has a place in what we call classical music. These are people who have no difficulty recognising sadness, tragedy, grief, majesty and grandeur—because these are serious attributes, and they want their beloved music to be ‘serious.’ For them jokes are made of cheap, vulgar and inferior matter that cannot be tolerated on the altar of High Art.”

András Schiff, “Did You Hear the One About…” (Guardian, May 28, 2009)