When Facebook Becomes Blogging

I'm reading Hillbillly Elegy and am very shaken by it. These are stories of raw, raw stuff. There are tens of millions of stories in America exactly like it, white and black, right and left, native and immigrant. It makes me think very hard and sadly about how close I might have come in my life to a story like these, even while hailing from one of the most secure towns in America. The wounds of the past never heal easily, maybe they're never meant to heal at all, but the ability to see extraordinary kinship in people who seem different, no matter what their stupendous glaring flaws, no matter how different their cultural or political orientation differs from ours, is the only way we might have some salvation. One day, our society will either have somehow forgiven each other and just decide the grievances are not worth the steep price of redressing them, or we're going to stay angry and do far far worse things to each other, until the only way we can stay alive is to forgive much, much worse sins than any which have been perpetrated so far. 

...The world is terrible.

Tales From the Old New Land - New Notes

1982: Rank and file Israeli soldiers try to square their orders in Sabra and Shatilla with their consciences. 

1983: Holocaust survivors react with betrayal at the revelation that the US shielded Klaus Barbie. 

1984: Jewish CIA spook involved in Iran-Contra as it happens. Does best to make mental gymnastics it takes to justify his actions. 

1985: The story of the Achille Lauro

1986: The story of Jonathan Pollard

1987: A Jewish mother struggles with her daughter's abortion as the Bork confirmation plays in the background. 

1988: Jewish parents have a child aboard the Lockerbie plane. 

1989: A Jewish Frankfurt School graduate struggles with the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

1990: Jewish party member struggles in the dissolved USSR as his children clearly begin to thrive. 

1991: Jewish Arabist forced to lie to the Kurds and tell them that the US will back their rebellion knowing full well the US won't. 

1992: Jewish family caught in the middle of the Rodney King riots. 

1993: Liberal brother finally gets spiteful victory against conservative brother with the Oslo accords. 

1994: Holocaust survivors argue about Rwanda and Bosnia. 

1995: Orthodox Rabbi struggles to reconcile his violent rhetoric with Rabin's assassination. 

1996: Jewish Harvard classmate remembers Ted Kaczynski

1997: German-American Jewish family of survivors tours Switzerland, gets payments from Swiss banks. 

1998: The story of Monica Lewinsky

1999: Jewish family in idyllic Colorado during Columbine. 

2000: Sharon at Temple Mount/Bush v Gore: Liberal brother taken advantage of by conservative brother as the right grows ever more strident. 

2001: 9/11 - Cantor-Fitzgerald

2002: A well-meaning elderly Jew's switch from unimpeachable liberalism to things he would never sanction. 

2003: A wealthy conservative father struggles to justify his low-level hatred of his rebellious hippy child during the Iraq War. (son or daughter?)

2004: Military family's faith in itself undone by Abu Ghraib.

2005: Gaza settler betrayed by Ariel Sharon. 

2006: Liberal idealist's faith in democracy undone by the Gaza election. 

2007: Jewish Washington insiders rally around Scooter Libby. 

2008: Middle aged Hillary supporting woman feels displaced by the Obama supporting next generation. 

2009: Jewish bankers on Wall Street mull the ethics of getting rich off subprime housing loans as the Bernie Madoff trial plays out. 

2010: Poor grandparents rail against Obamacare while benefiting from it. 

2011: Arab Spring - Jewish and Islamic pen pals meet.

2012: Dysfunctional New York family is mystified by well-adjusted gay son, must survive Hurricane Sandy together - preechoes of Global Warming eventualities.
2013: Settler family in the Golan worries about Syrian violence spilling over.  

2014: ISIS takeover, Jewish diplomat powerless to help retribution against Iraqi friends who assisted the Americans.  

2015:  A Jewish mother worries about her half-black son in the wake of Michael Brown her black husband is more stoic. 

2016: Grandparents supports Trump. Parents support Clinton. Kids support Bernie. 

2017: A Jewish harasser's actions catch up with him.  

2018: Michael Cohen gets yelled at by his parents. 

The Museum of Uncommon Composers #3 - Josef Suk - Some More

This podcast is about the composers who slipped through history's cracks; composers so distant from the wellspring of cultural history that few were there to listen to them, and therefore few to tell others they're worth hearing; composers of such forward vision that there was no place for them in the world of their present, and the future has yet to catch up with them.

Suk Serenade for Strings Opening  (fade out at 0:55 until 1:00)

Janacek Veruju.  (gradually bring up until 20:00, hard cut at 21:15)

Obviously it's a bit of a straw man to hear these two passages, but if a person with no musical sense told you that the composer of the former was born twenty years after the latter, you'd rightly tell that person to shut up because they had no idea what they were talking about. And yet it's absolutely true. The piece we heard at the beginning was composed in 1892, when Brahms and Tchaikovsky were still alive and Suk was still only a  seventeen year old prodigy capable of writing a string serenade that at least in my opinion, outdoes even Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and Elgar. 

From Pohadka, A Fairy Tale 

Brilliant as the Serenade for Strings is, it's still brilliant juvenilia by a violinist who knows how to write for strings but nothing else yet. The fully formed personality of Suk has yet to emerge, that has to wait for Pohadka - A Fairy Tale. Is Pohadka a masterpiece? Well, no. It's a beautiful piece of music by a brilliant young musician who so idolizes his teacher that he can't help but write his teacher's music. Sure, there's plenty of Suk here, but the teacher was Antonin Dvorak, and you can hear Dvorak's fingerprints all over this piece - the percolating nature effects, the aching woodwind melodies, the alternately gruff and swooning string writing, the overwhelming brass chorales. When somebody says that a piece of music sounds like Dvorak, virtually every classical music lover can picture a Dvorak piece in their head. 

But this is also perhaps the first glimpse of the real Josef Suk, at least the Suk of the large canvas, that too few of us outside the Czech Republic know and love. Of course it's luxuriantly orchestrated , but more importantly: it's introspective to a fault. There's one movement that seems to have the bonhomie of Dvorak's Slavonic Dances, but that kind of over the top rollicking nearly disappears from later pieces as far more original ideas take Dvorak's place in Suk's creativity. Yes, there's no question, Suk is a romantic, not a modernist. He's a romantic of a temperament so yearning that it's almost no longer romantic, it borders on the expressionist. 

Praha (turn down to background at 5:36)

When people ask whom Suk sounds like, most Suk lovers say the exact same thing. If you love Mahler, you'll love Suk. But to be honest, at least in my opinion, Mahler and Suk are nothing alike. Mahler is himself, like Janacek and Dvorak only still moreso, an unrepeatable musical event. No other composer else has the diversity of expressive modes to ever be mistaken for him. Even the composers most influenced by him sound nothing like him. No, the composer closest in spirit to Suk is quite a bit more surprising. 

One could almost say that Suk bears the same relationship to Dvorak as no less a figure than his exact contemporary, Arnold Schoenberg, does to Dvorak's closest musical friend, Johannes Brahms. Suk is the next logical step from Dvorak, but after Dvorak's death in 1904, Suk puts Dvorak's musical language through so drastic a musical refraction that one might almost call it Schoenbergian. 

Not the Schoenberg, mind you, of the atonal and serial periods. Rather a composer who carried the language of Schoenberg of the early 1900s right up to the end of his compositional career around 1930. Like many great composers, if not quite the singularly highest level of musical genius, Suk spent his whole mature career mining the same basic musical language, and that musical language was a close cousin to the music of the young Arnold Schoenberg: the Schoenberg of the Gurrelieder and Verklärte Nacht and Pelleas und Melisande and the First Chamber Symphony, the Schoenberg of the period before he discovered atonality. Or of the Anton von Webern of Im Sommerwind and the Passacaglia. In other words, romanticism frozen in time at the moment of the absolute maximum expression music has ever been able to withstand before becoming so expressively fraught that it cannot be held together by traditional harmony, rhythm, and texture. 

Tell me, is this Suk? (quick fade to nothing at 12:36)

Or is this early Schoenberg? (hard cut at 43:56)

(...talk about similarities of the harrowing events in their families that led Schoenberg and Suk to their giant harmonic leaps into the unknown)

-----
Josef Suk was a composer of the 1900s, not the century but the decade, a composer of the alternate twentieth century that never came of age because it grew organically out of the nineteenth. At the peak of Suk's creativity, he was still barely thirty years old and he properly belongs to a generation of composers ten years older than him like Strauss, Elgar, Sibelius, Mahler... What we then heard was the Glagolitic Mass of Leos Janacek, written at the age of 73 in 1927, the year before Janacek's death. Janacek was born in 1854, but he is truly a composer of the 1920s, and he belongs to a generation of musicians thirty or forty years younger than he: Bartok, Berg, Webern, Prokofiev, Hindemith - if anything, Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Ives can be considered a generation older than Janacek! For forty years, Janacek was just another competent Czech composer,  occasionally inspired, but much too rebellious for his creativity to come unleashed within the strictures of the nineteenth century. But while a whole generation of potential great artists lay strewn on the battlefields of the Somme and Tannenberg and Verdun and all the multi-fielded offensives, the longevity of this composer as old as Brahms's First Piano Trio let him live until a much more rebellious era could accommodate his defiant spirit. 

Life is what happens when you're making other plans, but had the past century proceeded as planned, the arts would have changed much more slowly. And just as classical music may never have been supplanted by what we therefore call more 'popular' genres, and classical music lovers, who would probably be much more numerous, would probably listen to Josef Suk rather than Janacek, Nikolai Medtner or Myaskovsky rather than Stravinsky, Zoltan Kodaly rather than Bartok... All of these supposedly second-rank composers wrote excellent music. Is it cosmic music of the type you get from titans like Beethoven and Wagner? Well, is Brahms's? Is Faure's? Is Dvorak's? Composers like Suk and Kodaly were trained in the much more bourgeois late 19th century, where the rules of what constituted great art were much much stricter. and by the standards of their predecessors, they weren't even particularly conservative. Compare the Nikolais Myaskovsky and Medtner to real conservatives of their generation like Rachmaninov or Glazunov - the Nikolais are clearly much more daring; harmonically, melodically, coloristically... And let's not even get started on Nikolai Roslavets... more on him in another podcast... 

By the standards of their predecessors, all these would-be-20th century masters did things their forebearers wouldn't dare. All they lacked was the desire to turn all the rules upside down. Perhaps they lacked that bold rebelliousness of spirit you get from Stravinsky and Janacek, but on the other hand, the love which so-called classical music engendered among the public never recovered from that radical break. Are we composers and music historians and journalists, the musical 'elite' so we fancy ourselves, so sure that Janacek and Stravinsky are objectively better than Suk and Myaskovsky? Or have our values, our ideology, our contempt for the musically lazy, pulled the wool over our eyes? We had the love of millions, and little by little, we allowed the disconnect between composers and audience tastes to grow larger with every passing decade of the 20th century. We're now one-fifth through the twenty-first, and the audiences of the new generations don't even remember we're here. Is it possible that perhaps we've waged an artistic war for a century that was never won because it was in the service of a bad cause? 

Burlesque for Violin and Piano op. 17 no. 4 (whole thing)

By the standards of anybody today but certain octogenarians, even Stravinsky and Bartok are not particularly radical music, even Schoenberg seems relatively accessible next to Xenakis and Elliott Carter. That is not the point. The point is that by insisting upon by making an aesthetic religion out of modernity, probably at least as much in visual art as in music and nearly as much in literature, we gradually exiled an enormous segment of the audience for classical music, and the result is that the boldest musical spirits of this generation: our Bartok's and Stravinsky's, can, comparatively speaking, barely get a hearing. In the long run, this elevation of the revolutionary over the reformative did not even benefit the revolutionaries!

What we just heard was the Burlesque for Violin and Piano, op. 17 no. 4. The violinist is Josef Suk's grandson,... Josef Suk. No, it's not Bartok, but it's not even Prokofiev, but the writing is daring, even... innovative! When music has this much character, and even this much rebelliousness of spirit, must a piece of music change the face of music forever in order to earn lots of performances? 


-----

The story of Josef Suk is the story of the aesthetic moderate, who has no champion because he fits no neat agenda, and adjusted himself like a magpie to the various musical influences of his era. Is he fully the equal of Dvorak or Janacek? Well... no. Dvorak and Janacek were unrepeatable musical events, stars who burned at the brightest possible flame who reinvented themselves time after time to fit the requirements of their eras, their commissions, and their performers. But if Edward Elgar and Jean Sibelius, so particular to the ethos of their times and places, can be considered among the great composers of all time - and deservedly, so can Josef Suk. If the unique musical language of Carl Nielsen can be understood beyond the boundaries of border and language, so can Josef Suk. And if musical conservatives like Brahms and Tchaikovsky and even Bach and can force us to reconsider what's conservative and what's progressive, so can Josef Suk. In nearly any other small nation, the quality of Suk's music would make him stand tall as their greatest composer. He had the good and bad luck of being born in a country and an era with so many great composers that you had to be careful not to step on them. He embodied his era's contradictions, a 19th century gentleman forced prematurely to confront the century of death. It spurred him prematurely into a new era, and caused him no end of nostalgia for the world to which he could not go back. Suk received a very dark glimpse of the future, so dark he simply laid down his pen - exactly as Elgar and Sibelius did, who found the truths of this new era just too terrible to keep telling them....

The Museum of Uncommon Composers #3 - Josef Suk - Beginning and End

This podcast is about the composers who slipped through history's cracks; composers so distant from the wellspring of cultural history that few were there to listen to them, and therefore few to tell others they're worth hearing; composers of such forward vision that there was no place for them in the world of their present, and the future has yet to catch up with them.

Suk Serenade for Strings Opening  (fade out at 0:55 until 1:00)

Janacek Veruju.  (gradually bring up until 20:00, hard cut at 21:15)

Obviously it's a bit of a straw man to hear these two passages, but if a person with no musical sense told you that the composer of the former was born twenty years after the latter, you'd rightly tell that person to shut up because they had no idea what they were talking about. And yet it's absolutely true. The piece we heard at the beginning was composed in 1892, when Brahms and Tchaikovsky were still alive and Suk was still only a brilliant seventeen year old capable of writing a string serenade that at least in my opinion, outdoes even Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and Elgar. 

Josef Suk was a composer of the 1900s, not the century but the decade, a composer of the alternate twentieth century that never came of age because it grew organically out of the nineteenth. At the peak of Suk's creativity, he was still barely thirty years old and he properly belongs to a generation of composers ten years older than him like Strauss, Elgar, Sibelius, Mahler... What we then heard was the Glagolitic Mass of Leos Janacek, written at the age of 73 in 1927, the year before Janacek's death. Janacek was born in 1854, but he is truly a composer of the 1920s, and he belongs to a generation of musicians thirty or forty years younger than he: Bartok, Berg, Webern, Prokofiev, Hindemith - if anything, Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Ives can be considered a generation older than Janacek! For forty years, Janacek was just another competent Czech composer,  occasionally inspired, but much too rebellious for his creativity to come unleashed within the strictures of the nineteenth century. But while a whole generation of potential great artists lay strewn on the battlefields of the Somme and Tannenberg and Verdun and all the multi-fielded offensives, the longevity of this composer as old as Brahms's First Piano Trio let him live until a much more rebellious era could accommodate his defiant spirit. 

Life is what happens when you're making other plans, but had the past century proceeded as planned, the arts would have changed much more slowly. And just as classical music may never have been supplanted by what we therefore call more 'popular' genres, and classical music lovers, who would probably be much more numerous, would probably listen to Josef Suk rather than Janacek, Nikolai Medtner or Myaskovsky rather than Stravinsky, Zoltan Kodaly rather than Bartok... All of these supposedly second-rank composers wrote excellent music. Is it cosmic music of the type you get from titans like Beethoven and Wagner? Well, is Brahms's? Is Faure's? Is Dvorak's? Composers like Suk and Kodaly were trained in the much more bourgeois late 19th century, where the rules of what constituted great art were much much stricter. and by the standards of their predecessors, they weren't even particularly conservative. Compare the Nikolais Myaskovsky and Medtner to real conservatives of their generation like Rachmaninov or Glazunov - the Nikolais are clearly much more daring; harmonically, melodically, coloristically... And let's not even get started on Nikolai Roslavets... more on him in another podcast... 

By the standards of their predecessors, all these would-be-20th century masters did things their forebearers wouldn't dare. All they lacked was the desire to turn all the rules upside down. Perhaps they lacked that bold rebelliousness of spirit you get from Stravinsky and Janacek, but on the other hand, the love which so-called classical music engendered among the public never recovered from that radical break. Are we composers and music historians and journalists, the musical 'elite' so we fancy ourselves, so sure that Janacek and Stravinsky are objectively better than Suk and Myaskovsky? Or have our values, our ideology, our contempt for the musically lazy, pulled the wool over our eyes? We had the love of millions, and little by little, we allowed the disconnect between composers and audience tastes to grow larger with every passing decade of the 20th century. We're now one-fifth through the twenty-first, and the audiences of the new generations don't even remember we're here. Is it possible that perhaps we've waged an artistic war for a century that was never won because it was in the service of a bad cause? 

Burlesque for Violin and Piano op. 17 no. 4

By the standards of anybody today but certain octogenarians, even Stravinsky and Bartok are not particularly radical music, even Schoenberg seems relatively accessible next to Xenakis and Elliott Carter. That is not the point. The point is that by insisting upon by making an aesthetic religion out of modernity, probably at least as much in visual art as in music and nearly as much in literature, we gradually exiled an enormous segment of the audience for classical music, and the result is that the boldest musical spirits of this generation: our Bartok's and Stravinsky's, can, comparatively speaking, barely get a hearing. In the long run, this elevation of the revolutionary over the reformative did not even benefit the revolutionaries!

What we just heard was the Burlesque for Violin and Piano, op. 17 no. 4. The violinist is Josef Suk's grandson,... Josef Suk. No, it's not Bartok, but it's not even Prokofiev, but the writing is daring, even... innovative! When music has this much character, and even this much rebelliousness of spirit, must a piece of music change the face of music forever in order to earn lots of performances? 



-----

The story of Josef Suk is the story of the aesthetic moderate, who has no champion because he fits no neat agenda, and adjusted himself like a magpie to the various musical influences of his era. Is he fully the equal of Dvorak or Janacek? Well... no. Dvorak and Janacek were unrepeatable musical events, stars who burned at the brightest possible flame who reinvented themselves time after time to fit the requirements of their eras, their commissions, and their performers. But if Edward Elgar and Jean Sibelius, so particular to the ethos of their times and places, can be considered among the great composers of all time - and deservedly, so can Josef Suk. If the unique musical language of Carl Nielsen can be understood beyond the boundaries of border and language, so can Josef Suk. And if musical conservatives like Brahms and Tchaikovsky and even Bach and can force us to reconsider what's conservative and what's progressive, so can Josef Suk. In nearly any other small nation, the quality of Suk's music would make him stand tall as their greatest composer. He had the good and bad luck of being born in a country and an era with so many great composers that you had to be careful not to step on them. He embodied his era's contradictions, a 19th century gentleman forced prematurely to confront the century of death. It spurred him prematurely into a new era, and caused him no end of nostalgia for the world to which he could not go back. Suk received a very dark glimpse of the future, so dark he simply laid down his pen - exactly as Elgar and Sibelius did, who found the truths of this new era just too terrible to keep telling them....

The Museum of Uncommon Composers #3: Josef Suk - Part of the Final Paragraph

The story of Josef Suk is the story of the aesthetic moderate, who has no champion because he fits no neat agenda, and adjusted himself like a magpie to the various musical influences of his era. Is he fully the equal of Dvorak or Janacek? Well... no. Dvorak and Janacek were unrepeatable musical events, stars who burned at the brightest possible flame who reinvented themselves time after time to fit the requirements of their eras, their commissions, and their performers. But if Edward Elgar and Jean Sibelius, so particular to the ethos of their times and places, can be considered among the great composers of all time - and deservedly, so can Josef Suk. If the unique musical language of Carl Nielsen can be understood beyond the boundaries of border and language, so can Josef Suk. And if musical conservatives like Brahms and Tchaikovsky and even Bach and can force us to reconsider what's conservative and what's progressive, so can Josef Suk. In nearly any other small nation, the quality of Suk's music would make him stand tall as their greatest composer. He had the good and bad luck of being born in a country and an era with so many great composers that you had to be careful not to step on them. He embodied his era's contradictions, a 19th century gentleman forced prematurely to confront the century of death. It spurred him prematurely into a new era, and caused him no end of nostalgia for the world to which he could not go back. Suk received a very dark glimpse of the future, so dark he simply laid down his pen - exactly as Elgar and Sibelius did, who found the truths of this new era just too terrible to keep telling them....

The Runners Up: My Top Pieces of Classical Music 11 through 25

11. Carnaval by Robert Schumann

12. Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky (original piano version)

13. Mikrokosmos by Bela Bartok
14. Symphony no. 7 by Jean Sibelius

15. Dumky Trio by Antonin Dvorak

16. Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach  

17. Midsummer Night's Dream Music by Felix Mendelssohn 

18. Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel by Johannes Brahms 

19. An Alpine Symphony by Richard Strauss 

20. . L'Enfant et les sortilèges by Maurice Ravel 

21. Rejoice in the Lamb by Benjamin Britten
22. Preludes Book I by Claude Debussy
23. Symphony no. 2 'London' by Ralph Vaughan Williams
24. Symphony no. 4 'Inextinguishable' by Carl Nielsen
25. Etudes op. 10 by Frederic Chopin

My Top 10 Pieces of Classical Music

My Top 10 Pieces of Classical Music:

1. Symphony no. 3 by Gustav Mahler 

2. The Cunning Little Vixen by Leos Janacek 

3. The Creation by Joseph Haydn

4. Les Noces by Igor Stravinsky

5. The Marriage of Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

6. Symphony no. 9 "Choral" by Ludwig van Beethoven

7. Symphony no. 4 by Charles Ives

8. Turangalila Symphony by Olivier Messiaen

9. Madrigals of War and Love by Claudio Monteverdi

10. Einsamkeit by Franz Schubert

Honorable Mention Under Protest: The Ring of the Nibelung by Richard Wagner