sweeet

(rss enabled, seth tells me) (maybe)

yo, seth, you should turn on your rss feed!

I’m more bothered by the auto-conversion of the emoticon :p

I came across this after our talk in the pub (funny I wasn’t even looking for anything T-related), a critique of Taruskin’s five volume ‘Oxford History’. From my POV I learnt something new on every page, others could find it tiresome but long footnotes come on (the author is a “New Complexity” cellist-composer, the kind that Taruskin detests)!! That’s how I came across him, i.e. very negatively, until you talked about his work on medieval music (which Cox finds some praise for but it seems v fleeting to superficially maintain a ‘balanced’ perspective it probbaly does not have, he has other battles and is fighting them) and Strav in a positive light.

Meltzer not mentioned though.

The TNR piece was hard to take; Panglossian in the face of what is still after all the cultural product of capitalism. Not every Jeremiad is written by a fascist. And in the end the critic is left as the intellectual celebrating and thus elevating the products of lesser minds. Not only only others have ideologies. I have the same problem with rock critics who celebrate pop songs by people they would never treat as intellectual equals; it’s the flaneur’s celebration of plebs as idiot savants. And again here a fixation on pop and nothing on Jazz. The whole thing vulgar especially compared to Charles Rosen.

And on a general note pop music criticism seems less music criticism as such than performance criticism. Taruskin himself is a stickler for the distinction between composition and performance but I think it’s central to “pop” music since the heyday of Italian opera, which is about singers more than songs.
For my money the best template for pop criticism in English at least is still T.S. Eliot on Marie LLoyd in 1922. Check TJ Clark in The Painting of Modern Life for the older history in french. But then and with Eliot as well, we’re back to the origin of the flaneur, with aristocratic and conservative irony right up front, not hidden behind a false defense of democracy. “Fuck the bourgeoisie!” and “Revolution now!” are not synonymous. The former without the later is either conservative, in the sense of monarchist, or anti-political, often to to the point of nihilism. That’s the 19th century origins of Punk.
And Taruskin with all his talk about German romanticism forgot that L’art pour l’art is French!

I think when he mentions Shostakovich towards the end the TNR piece, he’s establishing that he no longer believes what he was saying in the Prokoviev review — if not quite claiming he never said it, but was only misread. (The fact the piece has disappeared suggests he wasn’t misread, of course — but that he now realises he badly miswrote.)

His discussion of the response to the Beatles isn’t actually terribly deep or interesting — I think I’ll pop an addendum in the post to say that, beyond being pleased that Meltzer was cited as someone important (which I genuinely think he is), I was a bit sad he was just flourished as a kind of symptom.

There’s no preview of the chapter which reproduces or expands on the piece in the Times, but I remember being as shocked as Simon was. It was literally an argument for no longer playing Prokofiev because the Soviets lost.

It’s interesting that the original is gone. I’m sure he requested it. I’ll have to go out and get the book.

Still reading the TNR piece but he’s wrong about change beginning with the Beatles. It began with theatrically intellectually sophisticated operettas and with the recognition of Jazz as an art music. Ellington, Strayhorn et al rescued Russian late romanticism from kitsch.
And before then it was Golliwogg’s Cakewalk