About Last Night

“‘That’s an old attitude.'”

“‘It may be old, but I am currently holding it.'”

Jon Hassler, Staggerford

I’m still tied to the tracks. For now:

– Courtesy of Symphony X, a fascinating samizdata.net posting by Brian Mickelthwait on Dmitri Shostakovich, the greatest Russian composer of the twentieth century:

Shostakovich was almost certainly a better composer after Stalin had given him his philistine going-over following the first performances of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, than he would have been if Stalin had left him alone. Although both are very fine, I prefer Symphony Number 5 (“A Soviet Artist’s Reply to Just Criticism”) to Symphony Number 4.

Had Shostakovich continued unmolested along the musical path he was travelling before Stalin’s denunciation of him, I don’t think he would merely have become just another boring sub-Schoenbergian modernist. He was too interesting a composer for that already. But I do not think his subsequent music would have stirred the heart in the way his actual subsequent music actually does stir mine, and I do not think I am the only one who feels this way.

Thanks to Stalin, if that is an excusable phrase, Shostakovich was forced to write what is now called ‘crossover’ music, that is, music which is just about entitled to remain in the classical racks in the shops, but which also gives the bourgeoisie, such as me, something to sing along to and get excited about. Shostakovich had always written film music as well as the serious stuff. What Stalin and his attack dogs did was force him to combine the two styles. He might well have ended up doing this anyway, but who can be sure?

What Stalin also did for Shostakovich was to make his music matter more. Thanks to Stalin (that phrase again!) every note composed by Shostakovich became a matter of life and death

Courtesy of Mixolydian Mode, this hair-raising quote from John Tavener, the “holy minimalist” composer:

I have always been drawn more to the archetypal levels of human experience and human types, which is why I think I was drawn to Stravinsky and revolted by Schoenberg. Schoenberg was for me the filthy, rotten ‘dirt dump’ of the twentieth century. I personally could not stand the angst-ridden sound of decay in his music, the vile post-Freudian world. Basically, I do not respond to the so-called ‘Germanic Tradition,’ whose by now rotting corpse — the hideous sound world of its fabricated complexity — smothers archetypal experience that I have always sought.

For more of the same, go here.

The Jazz Museum in Harlem is gradually taking shape. Nat Hentoff has a piece about it in this morning’s Wall Street Journal:

When Charlie Parker died in 1955, drummer and leader Art Blakey–a persistent proselytizer for jazz–said forlornly, “I doubt if many black kids knew who Charlie Parker was.” Soon, there will be a vivid source of immersion in jazz past and future. And since the music has long been an international language, tourists from around the world will be coming to Harlem in ever greater numbers. They won’t see a statue of Charlie Parker, but they’ll be in his presence, along with that of his progenitors….

Take a look.

As of this moment, we’re being read in thirteen time zones.

And now I really am going to bed….

Some time this morning, “About Last Night” will rack up its 250,000th page view since opening for business last July.

To all of you from both of us, our heartfelt thanks.

“‘This cat came out,’ said future country singer Bob Luman, still a seventeen-year-old high school student in Kilgore, Texas, ‘in red pants and a green coat and a pink shirt and socks, and he had this sneer on his face and he stood behind the mike for five minutes, I’ll bet, before he made a move. Then he hit his guitar a lick, and he broke two strings. Hell, I’d been playing ten years, and I hadn’t broken a total of two strings. So there he was, these two strings dangling, and he hadn’t done anything except break the strings yet, and these high school girls were screaming and fainting and running up to the stage, and then he started to move his hips real slow like he had a thing for his guitar….For the next nine days he played one-nighters around Kilgore, and after school every day me and my girl would get in the car and go wherever he was playing that night. That’s the last time I tried to sing like Webb Pierce or Lefty Frizzell.'”

Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley

Today’s New York Observer has a profile of Sam Tanenhaus:

“I’m very moderate by nature,” Sam Tanenhaus said by telephone from his home in Westchester, two days after The New York Times announced that he would be the next editor of its Book Review. “People with extreme views interest me, dramatically and narratively.”

The author of a very well-received 1997 biography of the journalist and eventual anti-communist Whittaker Chambers, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Mr. Tanenhaus has spent the past five years as a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, largely chronicling conservatives and neoconservatives in the orbit of the Bush administration. And so liberals seem to think–or, perhaps, to fear–that the man taking over one of the country’s premier literary institutions is a conservative, while conservatives find him, as he said, more middle-of-the-road.

Affable, energetic but easygoing, well-respected by a broad swath of the intellectual community, possessing a healthy understanding of the ideological debates of the day but with no apparent dog in the race, Mr. Tanenhaus appears to fit The Times’ bill perfectly as a successor to Charles (Chip) McGrath, who has been itching to return to writing after nearly a decade in one of New York’s most prestigious–and thankless–jobs. Mr. Tanenhaus also happens to come equipped with an M.A. in English literature from Yale and a background in book publishing….

“Sam is neither conservative nor neoconservative,” summed up his friend Terry Teachout, the critic and blogger, who contributes to The Times Book Review. “He is an old-fashioned anti-communist Jewish liberal intellectual who still gets excited about Saul Bellow.”

Read the whole thing here.