Piano Concerto (1960). Samuel Barber /linkage #2/

• mAdness / coLd-water / fLats.  From Richard Robert Leston's Cage Mesostic. aworks via one of those feed re-publishers.

OK, I apparently conflated Robert Leston with movie director Richard Lester. As an excuse, I associate  the chaotic but lively energy of the 1960s with both Lester and Cage. And while we really enjoy the director's 1966 film A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, I have apparently also conflated his sixties Beatles' movies: A Hard's Day Night and Help!. I've seen one but not the other but I can't remember which.

• Alex:  Your website's freaky, dad. Via Robert Leston.

I'm guessing the millennial kids won't like the music of John Cage either, even if he is from their generational archetype.

• We find almost nothing in classical composition after 1950 to be interested in even though we've heard lots, and we want to like it. Cheryl Mendelson via Steven Hicken's post on BOP.

Tim Rutherford-Johnson would presumably beg to differ, modulo the decade of the fifties.

• The most recent melody I can think of that I've heard someone out in public randomly humming is the slow movement of Barber's Piano Concerto, composed in 1960. Marcus Maroney.

• Morality in modern music?  Argggghhhhh... I just can't decide!  It drives me insane. ktwhit.

• And of course regarding the "my music is the best thing since..." guy, who needs peer pressure when anyone else can just go back in to the entry and hack out the offending bits? ("One, two, three, four, I declare a fact war!") ;-). Steve Layton on a Sequenza21 wiki talk page.

• Instead, by insisting once again on retroactively justifying the invasion as nothing more than an immediate response to 9/11, the president squandered the chance to broaden support for the struggle ahead, and indirectly strengthened the hand of those who use the same logic to reach the opposite conclusion: that if the invasion was a mistake, then it's a mistake to do anything other than withdraw as quickly as possible. ndol.org.

• And would the paper please, in an article tomorrow, explain what the President's "catastrophic mistakes" were in executing the war in Iraq? Joe's Dartblog.

We share almost no political views but I find Joe Malchow's blog interesting, nonetheless.

• Apparently, 50% of the corpus of music written by "Great American Composers" (according to iTunes, at least) has been written by the Minimalists. Mr. Rambles.

  He goes on to doubt this observation but it sounds right to these ears.

• I am not a music scholar, but it strikes me that in this concerto grosso where Bartók pits the orchestra against itself, he has managed to use modern dissonances, harmonies, and structure without sounding like Charles Ives. Nic.

  Since I practice musical polytheism, I may be fortunate in enjoying both Ives and Barkok's Concerto for Orchestra.