Glad to see others are just getting to Bernard Holland, too. But I have to take exception with this guy - I think this is the sort of response that Holland was trying to provoke. I take one small but representative quotation:
“You want to cater to the masses. We have that in pop concerts everywhere, but does that advance the cause of art? Of course, that is not their concern, but should it not be yours?”
I’m not even going to get into the drawn dichotomy between “pop” and “art” - why bother… but… Am I really supposed to be “advanc[ing] the cause of art” when I write a piece of music? (more…)
I’ve been meaning to put this up for a while, it’s from Adam Gopnik’s article on abridging classic novels in the Sept. 22 New Yorker. I truly do not work at the speed of blog. Anyway, here it is, first on Moby Dick:
“The subtraction does not turn good work into hackwork; it turns a hysterical, half-mad masterpiece into a sound sane book.”
And in conclusion:
“The real lesson of the compact editions is not that vandals shouldn’t be let loose on masterpieces but that masterpieces are inherently a little loony. They run on the engine of their own accumulated habits and weirdnesses [is weirdnesses a legitimate-enough word for the New Yorker? really? awesome!] and self-indulgent excesses. They have to, since originality is, necessarily, something still strange to us, rather than something that we already know about and approve. What makes writing matter is not a story, clearly told, but a voice, however odd or ordinary, and a point of view, however strange or sentimental. Books can be snipped at, and made less melodically muddled, but they lose their overtones, their bass notes, their chesty resonance — the same thing that happens, come to think of it, to human castrati.”
I’ve left in the weird analogy to castrati at the end, because I think it’s part of his point - a creative artist has to be fearless enough to make really really weird, rather unpleasant analogies. (more…)