The neglect of Alexander Tcherepnin in critical discussion of post-1913 Western music has long puzzled me.
His solo piano music is magnificent — consult Bennett Lerner’s great recordings.
His first symphony is a truly impressive effort, with a second movement for untuned percussion, a first in the history of Western fine art music. His fourth and last symphony is a marvel of concision and vigor, a masterwork that I place alongside great work by Paul Hindemith, Serge Prokofieff, Roy Harris, William Schuman, Bohuslav Martinu, and Walter Piston.
Recent recordings have unearthed some great lost works, such as the Symphonic Prayer and the Magna Mater.
A few works that have lingered in collective memory, such as his work for solo cello and the lovely Rhapsodie Georgienne for cello and orchestra, only intensify the mystery of his eclipse.
But, no matter the great value of Tcherepnin’s diverse output, the crown of his compositional efforts seem to be his five piano concerti. Recordings of all five are now available (even, I think, on iTunes), and it is worth thinking carefully about their quality.
Alas, we do not have duplicate performances and alternative interpretations of all of them, at present. This saddles the critical emprise. So the opinions that follow are often intuited from the performances and imputed to the scores — which I have not seen — to determine a makeshift evaluation.
The first two piano concerti strike me as youthful works . . . and I do not mean that as anything like a criticism. He was only 20 when he started the first, and 23 when he finished the second concerto. Both are exuberant as well as daringly novel concert pieces for soloist and orchestra.
Both are presented as concerts in single uninterrupted movements. The second is one of those rarities, a monothematic composition elaborating one melody. It’s a great little melody, and the composer surely puts it through its paces.
The first begins in a simple manner, a gonzo cross between Philip Glass and Bedrich Smetana, by way of post-Rimskyian Russia. The composer adds Romantic touches as well as neoclassical and modernist flourishes throughout. Had I heard this as a teenager, it would have become my favorite example of the genre, I believe. It very much appeals to the taste of a young person, and the gaucherie of some of the juxtaposed styles feeds that.
Listening to it now, as an “old man,” I prefer to leave aside any developed reaction to youthful over-enthusiasm and declare, instead, the work to be a hoot, a holler, a scream. The fact that the piano mostly gets relegated to something like a florid obligato role, rather than domineering concertante role, well, that is fine with me.
Unfortunately, in the only recording I have heard of this, the soloist doesn’t quite do justice to the few moments where the piano takes true center stage. Now, listening to it 2:50 seconds in, the piano takes the second theme solo fairly well. After a minute more instruments come in, and then the romanticism really turns on full blast. And the pianist plays all the runs and arpeggios one could want. The return to the opening ostinati at the end is a great example of circularity in form. The fugue starting at the five minute mark, first in solo piano and then amongst the orchestra and piano mix, is something completely unexpected . . . but there’s a lot of “the unexpected” in this music. In a sense, the whole thing is unexpected. Others will surely fault it for “not being a concerto, really” or “being jerry-rigged”; to me, it’s too much fun to slander in such ways.
The second concerto suffers from no lapse in taste. It is a perfect work (I believe the performance I heard is of Tcherepnin’s late-in-life orchestration, so I’ve no knowledge of its first incarnation, for what that is worth). The theme, stated first in the trumpet, is more than adequate to bear the full weight of a complete concerto (if in a single movement — thought the change in tempi implies a tripartite construction). The finale is exciting, excellent.
After listening to these concerti more times, I might be able to write more carefully about them. But, as it is, I can declare my enthusiasm with confidence. And no, I do not know why Tcherepnin’s work should remain so little known.
Sphere: Related ContentFrom my friend Jim Monteith:
Farrah Fawcett goes to heaven. God enthuses, saying how much he loved Charlie’s Angels and The Burning Bed. “Is there anything I can do, further, in appreciation?”
Farrah says, “Well, You could protect all the little children.”
And so God strikes down Michael Jackson.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: Farrah Fawcett, God
Grabbing an insect from the air is great sport. Surely, we have all tried. Some of us occasionally succeed. But to do so while recording an interview?
My first thought that the Coen brothers lent Obama their animatronic fly from Blood Simple . . .
It turns out that PETA complained. This was predictable. Thankfully, most people (like John Stossel) have more sense than PETA folk.
But then, again, PETA folk are pretty silly most of the time. They recently made a stink about throwing fish.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: Barack Obama, Blood Simple commentary, Coen Brothers, John Stossel, movie magic, PETA
George Soros walks through the world like a god. His political comrades worship him as the Messiah, and his pronouncement in support of their positions fall from his mouth as if manna from heaven. They are that parched. They need his succor so much.
So, when a super-successful investor like Soros says that we need deeper financial regulation, he is often quoted. But as Ilya Somin argues, there are deep flaws in Soros’s case Read the rest of this entry »
Sphere: Related ContentTags: Ilya Somin, Ponzi, Soros
There has been a lot of Twitter twatter, recently. About whether the online messaging service is a force for liberation, news, what-have-you.
For my money (and remember, time is money, and it is time I have invested upon Twitter), Twitter is a singularly efficient link forwarding mechanism. I have cut down on emails to friends “about this” or “about that,” relating URLs and pointing to articles or websites I find to be of interest. Most of this has gone to Twitter.
Twitter is not great for debate. It is a great focused way to convey packets of information.
As such it replaces, for me, certain types of emails and certain types of blogging.
It also allows me to find pleasantly concise ways of conveying a few thoughts, some of them comic. After all, brevity is the soul of wit, and brevity is, also, the soul of Twitter.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: Twitter
The Count Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy was a fascinating philosopher and economist of the Napoleonic era. He devised a system of thought, which he called “ideology,” that encompassed epistemology and politics. He was Thomas Jefferson’s favorite economist, and Napoleon’s least. I have written about him before. Now, there’s no excuse not to join me in the collegial ranks of the Destutt de Tracy Readership: His treatise on economics is available from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, for $19.00. Destutt de Tracy
went further than any of his French contemporaries in the defense of trade, property, hard money, commerce, and his attacks on the state. This led to the banishment of his works in France, and an attempt by Napolean to blunt his influence. Whereas Tracy coined the term “ideology” to refer to the science of the formation of ideals, Napolean dismissed him and all those he influenced as “ideologues.” This is how the term enters into modern usage.
In this passage, Tracy sums up his view of society: “Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges. It is never anything else, in any epoch of its duration, from its commencement the most unformed, to its greatest perfection. And this is the greatest eulogy we can give to it, for exchange is an admirable transaction, in which the two contracting parties always both gain; consequently society is an uninterrupted succession of advantages, unceasingly renewed for all its members.”
The explanation on the Mises Institute site errs, I think, in stating that Tracy was clear about value, and that his is a subjectivist understanding of value. Alas, Tracy seems clear only in pointing to labor as tied closely to value. Indeed, this is the book’s greatest lapse. Otherwise, as Professor Timothy Terrell writes in the preface, “it is clear that his ‘deductive methodology, his subjectivism, his catallactics, and his opposition to governmental monetary fraud and regulation have been carried through to the modern-day Austrian school in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard.’”
I would go further. The biggest link to Austrian economics is that de Tracy insisted that political economy (economics) be considered a praxeological science, or, as he put it, a science of “The Will and Its Effects.” The Count offers a simple view of causality and teleology in the social sphere, and, though simple, it is basically correct. His promotion of Say’s Identity as the fundamental truth of catallactic interaction (exchanges in markets are fundamentally advantageous to both parties, ex ante) is a simple truth that needs to be stated every time a person endeavors to criticize a market order. It became the key concept of the French Liberal economists, such as Bastiat and Molinari.
I found reading this wonderful (if deeply flawed) book in tandem with reading Menger a perfect way to begin to make sense of economics.
I would be interested in reading the rest of Count Tracy’s magnum opus, The Elements of Ideology (this book is the last in a series). Alas, the other sections have not been translated into English.
Sphere: Related ContentTags: Destutt de Tracy, Thomas Jefferson
Apple has brought some sanity to the company’s product line nomenclature. The MacBook was not too long ago re-launched as a series of aluminum unibody laptops, in addition to the white-plastic model at the bottom of the line. This seemed to fuzzy the Macbook into the MacBook Pro line. What was the difference between the unibodies? A bit of speed? Differences in screens?
Now, the plastic $999 starter laptop remains the sole MacBook. All the unibodies are Pros. This makes sense.
It doesn’t answer my question of which to buy, but it makes the decision a little easier.
Upgrading the white-plastic MacBook with maxed memory and hard drive space, the price goes up to $1299, leaving you with these specs:
2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB 800MHz DDR2 SDRAM - 2×2GB
500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
Keyboard (English) / User’s Guide
SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
For $100 less you can take the low-end MacBook Pro. It’s a tiny bit faster but has half the memory.
The 13-inch 2.53GHz MacBook Pro is the most tempting, for $1499, but add a few hundred for a decent solid-state drive (I have trouble buying a 5400 rpm drive, for any device), and the price of a sudden gets prohibitive. For me. Right now.
Well, I’ll keep thinking on this. I am thinking that the unibody design would take the kind of abuse I am apt to give it (sticking it in a Virago sidepack) and the solid state drive would be faster and less prone to trouble.
But I’ll have to think longer. At present, I do my work entirely at my office. Becoming mobile seems like a good idea.
Sphere: Related ContentI visited with my neighbor Krist Novoselic this week, helping him move some Grange bingo equipment into his truck. He was giving the ancient setup to the Wahkiakum County Fair, now a non-profit organization rather than a county activity as such (though you cannot tell this from the website).
And we talked about his most recent political activities.
So, when I heard the story of his recent political candidacy covered on the local news, I was mildly disappointed. KOMO-4 News didn’t really get to the point. It just offered up an oddity. The newsreader intoned how the former bassist for the grunge group Nirvana (no mention of Krist’s recent stint with Flipper) was running for the county clerk position in tiny Wahkiakum County. I think he mentioned that Krist was running as “Grange Party preferred.” But no mention of why.
The main implication of the report was that Krist was “getting into politics.” Of course, Krist has been involved in politics for quite some time, as anyone who has read his great little book Of Grunge and Government knows.
Thankfully there is the Web. TV news is glib to the point of madness. On the Web, there is plenty of space to tell something like the whole story. Consider this, from the KOMO-4 website:
CATHLAMET, Wash. (AP) - Former Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic is running for clerk of Wahkiakum County, to protest the state’s method of letting candidates pick their own party affiliation.
Novoselic, who lives in the small town of Naselle, is active in local politics. He’s chairman of the county Democratic Party, and head of his local chapter of the Grange, a civic organization.
Novoselic’s election paperwork declares that he’s running under the “Grange Party” banner, even though the Grange isn’t a political party.
Novoselic tells The Daily World newspaper that he’s protesting the state’s system, which lets candidates pick their own party when they run for office. He thinks that intrudes on the Grange’s right to pick its own members.
Not all the facts — even the interesting facts — are present. But still, this is much better than the evening news version.
It interests me that not only isn’t the Grange a political party, the local Grange did not nominate Krist for any political position. Ever. (The Grange does support this candidate and that.) The Grange members I talked to were at least mildly upset by Krist’s move . . . until I explained why he was doing it. (I bet the next Grange meeting will be more interesting than usual.)
But the main thing to take away from the story is that Novoselic’s candidacy is a protest, a fine example of performative propaganda.
In Washington State, alas, anyone can run under any party, and the parties have no control over the candidates. None whatsoever.
Why? Because the previous open primary system was ruled unconstitutional, since it (get this) abridged the private association rights of the parties! A new system was put in its place, and this new system strikes me as worse than the earlier one, with greater abridgment of association rights.
The new system came in the form of an initiative concocted by then-Governor Gary Locke, and supported by (get this) the state Grange association. By running under the Grange rubric, but not getting any permission or nomination to do so, Krist hopes to stir interest in revising, yet again, the state’s party system.
Krist favors private “firehouse primaries” as an alternative, making the parties relevant again. In a firehouse primary, or “unassembled caucus,” the caucus is a day-long event to which people may attend, sign in, cast a ballot, and leave, much like a general election. No need to gather at one place at one time. Just report in on one day to one designated place, and select your preference. It need not (should not) be supported by taxes. The Supreme Court says political parties are private organization. So they should pay for their own nominating conventions.
The Daily World’s article covers the story best. But the contrast in paucity of information given on KOMO’s evening news with the comparative wealth of information on KOMO’s website makes me wonder: Is this the future of journalism? The real journalism takes place on TV News websites, and the superficial stuff gets aired on TV.
As Master of the local Grange, Krist has done some interesting work, by the way. The Grange sponsors a farmer’s market in the area, and collects no fees. It offers a kind of scrip, though, to the poor, which farmers in the market may honor to receive cash from the Grange. It seems like a good program. I hear there are amazing deals on veggies. I will go when it starts up again for the summer, starting next Tuesday, I believe.
Krist’s own discussion of his candidacy is very, very interesting. His conclusion? “[I]t’s so simple — let parties nominate. They have the freedom to try and should have the freedom to fail without state interference.”
When I talked with Krist, he talked about withdrawing his candidacy this Friday (today), because he had understood that his candidacy would require a primary. Apparently, it does not. So now he says that he will resign if elected! You can read about this, and cucumbers, in a great article in The Daily News, of Longview, Washington: “Krist Novoselic’s running for public office, but winning isn’t his point” by Tony Lystra, June 5, 2009, front page.
Tags: Grange, Krist Novoselic, open primary
