I’m glad that other bloggers have also been a bit uninspired recently. Myself, I’ve been to plenty of things that should have stimulated me to write something - Rossini (go Mr. Continuo Player for the inspired Pink Panther Theme when Basilio enters), student concerts, mostly excellent piano music at the Bouffes du Nord, Pascal Dusapin’s attractive new opera (though it was more of a staged monologue), Medea, Pascal Dusapin’s not-quite-right sound installation with Richard Serra’s sort of overwhelming sculpture at the Grand Palais (why do neither Serra nor Dusapin have websites???), but nothing was quite worth writing about. I even went to see J Mascis playing drums for some band called Witch, but, well, they were terrible. You get what you pay for at the Fleche d’or, which is to say, nothing, right?* (more…)

More fallout from my lecture at Stony Brook.

One of the students responded to the music I played them - 2 of the Preludes for Harpsichord, for Baroque Trio by comparing the sound of the harpsichord to horror movie music, or even better, to the music in the haunted houses or the especially the castle worlds in Super Mario Bros. This took me totally off-guard, but as soon as I heard it, it was pretty obvious. The harpsichord at the beginning of the first movement - high dissonant chords in funny rhythms kind of like screaming - does everything it should to fit the part.

The fact that I didn’t think of the harpsichord’s connotation in the popular imagination as a spooky instrument beforehand makes me nervous. I thought about The Doors, even though I sort of hate them, and of course I know the classical literature from the Baroque to Ligeti etc. But how did I miss the most basic contemporary cultural allusion that the instrument implies? (more…)