aworks links etc :: february 23, 2009 /it's an idiosyncratic world/

Image via CrunchBase

Clusterstock links to what is supposedly economist Paul Krugmans' Amazon wish list. I agree it's a bit on the "wussy new age" side of the musical spectrum. But hey, even mine is idiosyncratic (and reminds me I still want to buy the punk rock version of West Side Story.

Composer David Schiff comments about The Rest Is Noise: Instead of examining how Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton and Duke Ellington, among others, cultivated the new form to an astonishing early maturity, he focuses on the trans-atlantic imitations of Satie, Stravinsky, Milhaud, Poulenc, Hindemith and Weill. 

I've decided to catalog every link I find related to American classical music (as well as standout tracks from lala). More or less. Until I get bored with delicious again. Still, it seems like a better idea than trying to compensate for my underdeveloped sense of identity.

Renegade photographers run amok at Alice Tully Hall. Me, I still don't know what to make of the guy behind me at Music in Twelve Parts who described how he was appalled when some kid wore a white t-shirt.

Comments

[Lisa Hirsch]

I don't believe for a second that the Amazon wishlist belongs to Paul Krugman, Ph.D., Nobel laureate.

And I'm so happy someone other than Elaine Fine mentioned Alex Ross's neglect of women composers in The Rest is Noise.

[Daniel Wolf]

I don't have a problem with the particular absences or over-emphases in Ross's book, but I do have a serious objection to the marketing and reviews which treat it as an authoritative history. It is one of countless possible narratives and Ross himself never advertises it as anything but a personal narrative. The same could, and ought, to be said about the two 20th century volumes in Taruskin's Oxford History, which is also a book with a strong narrative and a clear, if often parochial, viewpoint.