writing
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Resonant Thoughts: Paul Morley’s “A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love with Classical Music (and Decided to Rewrite Its Entire History)” (2020)
“Do we lose that sense of the greater purpose of music – once it is set inside the flat, if relentless and very helpful, music services – as this other language, this alien presence taking on the unknown, defending us against all kinds of threats, danger and tension? Will this near-monstrous availability of music, the… Continue reading
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Music Without A Body
In Times Square the guys hawking their hip hop CDs and the guys hawking their fake Buddhist bracelets are of a piece, both unaware that art, as a commodity, has no value. But the hawkers know something about symbolic value and that the way of imbuing their wares with magic is through their person. The… Continue reading
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Music’s Complex Problem
Édouard Vuillard, Morning Concert (1937-38) Why do we turn to music when there are so many other artistic, physical, social, trivial, and spiritual pursuits claiming our attention? One reason is that music is a multimodal experience that is already meaningfully integrated into our lives. Music is everywhere as a tacit shared language, a perpetual underscore… Continue reading
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Same Walk, Different Music
Tom Thomson, Hot Summer Moonlight (1915) Debussy, Images, Livre II, Et la lune descends sur la temple qui fut (1907). In the early 1990s I spent the evenings of one summer typing up book notes for my mom, who had returned to graduate school to pursue a PhD in English literature. (Her dissertation used psychoanalytic… Continue reading
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