why is Russian for 13 in Cyrillic but Japanese for 13 is in Latin characters?
well, for whatever reason, it’s a reasonable excuse to advertise that I will be in Japan for the next few weeks.
In the mean time, does anyone else feel like there’s something creepy about the following quotation, like that it’s trying to tell us to forget about the past, and for that matter, anything ugly about the present, too?
“There is still only a short list of “safe choice” composers, most of whom grew up in the shadow of WWII, which has left a dark spot in music for the last 50 years. No question a lot of this music will never speak to audiences of any kind. I basically started Magnum Opus to find out why, and if there was anything to be done about it! And what I have found out is that there is something to be done, but it takes money and effort and the ability to introduce new ideas into the system. My positive revelation from the last few years is that there is actually a little bit of great new music being written. Most of that music is being written outside the academic circles, it seems, and much of it by younger composers—not because they are young, but because they did not grow up with teachers who grew up in the dark musical shadow of the World Wars. For a lot of reasons the spiritual and physical dislocations of those wars destroyed art music for a long time. I think we’re over it—that’s the good news for me!—but we need to rebuild our ability to discover and perform new music of merit. I’m optimistic, but we have a lot of recent history to overcome.”
(That’s Kathryn Gould in an interview with Molly Sheridan at newmusicbox.)